37. The Farm
T he Crown has been hiding something from everyone. The Farms aren’t what you think. I don’t know what you remember, but whatever it is, it isn’t the truth.
Viola scratched the base of her spine where the talisman lay beneath her skin as the airship glided through the skies, trying to make sense of Nico’s words. She wanted not to trust them. She wanted to believe that he was the liar, and not the Crown. This was all part of some elaborate plan of his. Perhaps the talisman wasn’t protection at all. Perhaps it was an explosive set to detonate the minute she crossed over the threshold of the Farm. All of this was a lie.
Except, deep in her bones, she knew that Nico cared about her, and she didn’t want that to be the lie. It was just easier to believe that one person was lying to her rather than—
Than the Crown. Than her country. Easier to believe a person was a liar than her entire life.
No, not easier. Less painful.
It can’t be true, she told herself. It can’t.
She listened to the sounds of the other knights around her, many of them talking about their destination, the wide green fields, the scent of honeysuckle, the open space. Viola should have noticed something was amiss before.
Because honeysuckle didn’t grow all year round.
It was an implanted memory .
Which meant Viola was missing two whole months of her life. What had she been doing all of that time?
What was she going to see now?
Nicodemus had been vague on that part. It’s possible he might have explained, but Viola had been too shocked to hear anything else that he had to say. She couldn’t breathe.
The breathlessness returned now. She got up from her seat and went onto the top deck, hoping the breeze would help her relax. A blanket of fields and meadows swam beneath them, great cities rendered little more than clusters on the landscape. The northern mountains loomed in the distance, surrounded by a cape of cloud that stretched into the white skies.
For once, Viola didn’t even have to remind herself not to seek out her home town of Griffin’s Roost, to force her gaze over the fields that had once been hers.
Her eyes didn’t go there. Not today. They went instead to the Farm nestled at the base of the mountains, the stretches of immaculate crops. Viola should have known something didn’t make sense the first time she’d seen it. The Farm was expansive, to be sure.
But it was not enough to feed a country.
Coldness prickled at her bones, wriggling under her skin.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
Freya appeared at her side. Viola had noticed her earlier boarding the ship, but hadn’t given her much notice. How could she, giving everything else that was going through her mind?
“I suppose so,” she murmured, knowing she had to say something.
“Have we passed over your hometown yet?”
“I don’t know.”
“You haven’t looked for it?”
“I never do.”
She was too afraid of witnessing the past, or worse, of acknowledging the present—of seeing the black stain on the land that was once her home. Perhaps she wouldn’t even see it, because in the grand scheme of things, one farmhouse meant so little.
So little to anyone but her.
Freya could never understand any of that. It wasn’t her fault, but she couldn’t.
She thought that Nico might, Nico who clung to an ancient temple where his mother died, who used the name of a forgotten god and built his home in a mountain named for shadows. He knew loss. He knew how one avoided and revelled in it, how it built them and destroyed them.
That wasn’t a lie. That couldn’t be .
“How are you doing?” she asked Freya. “I wouldn’t have thought—it’s so soon after—”
“The Captain thought the Farm might be good for me,” Freya told her. “Not like that place ever gets attacked.”
Then why do we guard it? Viola wondered. Why have I never wondered before why so many of us are sent to guard a place where nothing ever happens?
“Right.”
Freya stood in stony silence beside her as they drew closer to the mountains, the fog thickening around them. It soon blocked out the view below. A bell sounded, summoning them below deck.
Freya paused at the steps. “Are we going higher?”
Viola stilled too. Her ears strained against the altitude, stomach churning in protest. It certainly felt that way, but that couldn’t be right—surely?
“Whiterain, Windbright,” said Ser Skyborn, the knight in charge. He was an older, boney man, with a permanently pinched expression and sour grey eyes. “Down below, if you please.”
Viola didn’t argue. She hurried down the steps and slid herself onto a bench. A few other knights seemed to have noticed the change, too, their faces pressed against the porthole windows, peering out. Ser Skyborn coughed, summoning their attention.
“Nothing to worry about, knights,” he assured them, as they ascended further. “Just trying to avoid some harsh winds and get out of this cloud.”
This seemed to appease most people’s suspicions, but not Viola’s. Not after what Nico had told her.
A healer came round, offering them drinks of something bright and frothy. “A draught of nostalgia nectar,” Skyborn explained. “Best way to start a mission!”
Everyone hurried to grab their tankard. Nostalgia nectar was a rarity: a potion that tasted differently to everyone—some forgotten taste they had left behind in childhood, the best pastry they had eaten only once, a memory only half-remembered brought back to full colour. Viola avoided it whenever it was offered. It made her think of ripe strawberries in summer and Seb’s body next to hers in the grass.
But she knew she had to drink it here. Skyborn’s eyes were glossing over the knights, making sure they drank, encouraging them to drink up.
He’d been here the first time she came to the Farm. Someone else had overseen the second time, she couldn’t remember who. But she had a feeling the number of overseers was small. She barely saw Skyborn at the barracks. The Farm was clearly his main assignment.
She took a sip of the nectar, and then another. The taste of strawberries blossomed on her tongue, but no memory followed. All too quickly, the taste vanished, replaced by a cloying feeling in her mouth. She glanced at the rest of her comrades. All of them were still clasped in the throes of memory, their eyes glazed and glassy. Grins spread across their faces.
Viola frowned. Nostalgia nectar wasn’t supposed to be this potent. Even Freya looked half asleep, like she’d let a spear skewer her if it came to close.
Skyborn stood in front of her. “You all right, Windbright?”
No one else was speaking. Silence had settled over the vessel, save for the quiet thrum of the engine and wind filling the sails.
Viola suspected she was not supposed to speak.
She forced herself to smile, and let her head lull.
Skyborn moved away.
The airship moved further into the clouds. Viola angled her face towards one of the windows, praying for a glimpse of wherever they were going.
And spotted a leaf.
A leaf, peering through the clouds, big and round, like the type that used to grow on the bean plants back home.
Only this leaf was huge, large enough to shelter under.
Had she been drugged after all? Had Nico’s talisman only lessened the effects of whatever everyone else was under? Plants didn’t grow that large, and not in the sky.
But the leaf was followed by another, and another, and soon a huge column of green shot through the clouds. A great, bright light streamed from above, illuminating the plant in all its glory.
It was a giant beanstalk.
Not one of the other knights moved a single muscle, or said a single word, even when the airship reached to the very top of the beanstalk and was swallowed up by light. They emerged above the clouds, and below them was another world—another world of green fields and azure skies, but as the airship made its descent, gliding down towards a series of farm buildings, the grass grew taller, each blade the width of a knife. Wheat towered above them like forests. Huge carriages rumbled past carrying parsnips as tall as Viola was, strawberries the size of human faces, blueberries as fat and round as chickens .
The Farm wasn’t at the base of the mountains at all. The Farm was in another world, a world where food was plentiful because it was giant. There was no magic seed King Jax had secured on his quest to rid the world of the famine—just a door to another world.
But why not tell us that? Why all the secrecy?
The airship docked in a nearby pond. Ramps clattered down. A sharp whistle sounded from the base. The whistle struck something inside her, making her squirm when the others snapped towards it. The enchantment rustled under her skin.
“Knights—attention!” Skyborn hollered.
Everyone stood, Viola quick to follow.
“We’ve now arrived at the Farm as scheduled. Please proceed to the sleeping quarters.”
Everyone seemed to remember where that was. Viola hopped to attention, sliding into formation. They’d marched like this a thousand times before. Knights knew how to follow orders. It was easy to pretend, to follow the rest.
It was harder not to look around, to keep her face firmly fixed ahead.
Especially when a thunderous scream ripped through the air. It was awfully, unmistakably human.
Just a hundred times louder.
Viola forced herself not to look, not to stumble, to place one foot in front of the other and march towards the sleeping quarters—a long wooden cabin at the edge of the compound. Even the wood looked different here, the walls composed of a single enormous plank, a foot between each line in the grain.
The group marched into the room. Two dozen beds were neatly spaced out in the room, a trunk at the foot of each. Viola had some dim memory of the living accommodations being basic, but not this sparse. She’d seen prison cells with more warmth.
The whistle sounded again. “Strip,” Skyborn instructed.
Everyone began to remove their clothes. Again, such orders had been issued before. Viola had no qualms with being naked surrounded by others, but there was something different about this.
Of course there was, she realised. She didn’t feel like she could refuse.
Methodically, though, she removed each piece of her clothing, folding it neatly as knights were trained to do. Other guards came round and inspected them, rifling through the clothes and then commanding that naked knights turn and bend and show them any runes. A mage checked over all of them. Viola shivered as hands passed over her, but no one gave any notice to the slight scar at the base of her spine where Nico’s talisman lay. Of course they didn’t. Scars were ordinary on knights .
“Dress.”
Everyone pulled their clothes back on. Once dressed, they were marched back out into the courtyard. The same guards from earlier came to hand out their equipment. Swords, naturally, lights, flares, powders to cause paralysis… and a long, thick whip for each of them.
“You’ll shortly be allocated with your duties for today,” Skyborn explained. “Your role here is very simple: assist the mages and mancers in controlling the prisoners. Subdue anyone that resists. Do not kill unless you are given no other choice; these creatures are valuable, but so are you. Most of them won’t give you any trouble. They know better by now.”
Viola’s eyes at last drifted out over the fields, just in time to see a massive creature lift its head over the field of colossal wheat. Another appeared behind it, and another, and another. Each disturbingly human in appearance, some pale, some dark, some with black hair or blonde or red or brown. Even their eyes spanned every shade, visible even at a distance.
The only thing they had in common were the collars around their necks… and their enormous height.
Auro’s famous farm was built with the enslavement of giants.