“Hello there, Lord Dias,” Lady Darrell said, walking up to me. “I assume the mine and border station are going well?”
“Yeah, no problems to speak of. Were you giving an etiquette lesson just now? I’ve seen you teaching the kids before, but you teach adults too, huh?”
“I do indeed,” she replied with a smile. “With Lady Alna and the twins absent, I’ve more free time. I thought perhaps I could help with the winter preparations, but it would seem we’ve more than enough hands already. Fortunately, the Wives’ Club asked me to teach them etiquette, so I’m holding classes for them.”
“I see. No harm in learning manners, and it might be a good thing for the kids to learn with them too. I’m surprised though—they sure look to have gotten a hold of things real quick. You’re one heck of a teacher, Lady Darrell.”
It was an honest compliment, but Lady Darrell responded with a slightly troubled look.
“To be honest, I’m just as surprised as you are,” she admitted. “The ladies told me to go slow with them because they’re not as quick as their children, but they needn’t have said any such thing—they’re fast learners, all of them. They’re naturally quite obedient, and everything is going swimmingly. It’s so strange... I’d heard that things were much harder for them when they lived in Mahati... I can’t help but wonder if perhaps all the dogkin needed was the right environment or conditions to truly make the most of their natural potential...”
“Yeah, I’ve felt the same way since they got here,” I said. “There’s gotta be something. Aymer gives the kids lessons for their education, and she’s been surprised by how bright they all are. I wonder if maybe it’s a matter of them setting their hearts on something? Maybe that’s what sets them on the path to really knuckling down.”
“One of many potential reasons...which is simply to say that a clear answer is difficult to determine. I suppose Aymer came from similar circumstances. Her people made a home of the desert and lived by hunting their food. The hopping mousekin are known for their astounding leaps and their hunting prowess, but Aymer herself says she is not skilled in either. Instead, she has a memory that easily matches any scholar in the capital, and the intelligence to match. In that way she reminds me of the small-ilk dogkin. Perhaps it is a special skill of the smaller beastkin? Something innate, even...?”
“If that’s the case, they could all be mighty helpful in a whole range of different areas.”
“I feel the same way. There’s no need to rush, of course, but when we have some more time and resources we might want to make Aymer’s lesson plan more official and build this section into a respectable classroom in its own right. We can invite scholars to share their teachings and pay them accordingly to support their research. Naturally, it won’t be as simple as just asking scholars to teach us their ways, but some may be enticed by the offer of research grants. Those of our citizens who want to learn from said scholars can be encouraged to do so, making for a path to nurturing talents among our own.”
“Back at the border station, Mont was talking about building an orphanage. It’d be nice to have a classroom and dedicated learning facilities to go with it. If orphans can study and learn, they’ll be provided the tools they need to live on their own when they grow into adulthood.”
Lady Darrell was surprised and delighted. “What a wonderful idea,” she said.
And so it was with great gusto that her lesson recommenced. I think all the kids and everyone in the Wives’ Club must have really appreciated the break, because they threw themselves into things with just as much energy. I watched them for a bit, then decided to head back to Balers and head home, but...Balers was gone.
I wandered around the area looking for my horse, and that’s when I found a patch of white grass where some baars were munching away and eating their fill. Balers was right there too, watching over them. He wasn’t eating though—instead, Balers had his ears peeled and his eyes on the horizon, like he was their bodyguard. The baars already had a group of masti dogkin looking out for them, but all the same Balers stayed vigilant.
As I walked closer I saw that the herd of baars was mostly made up of Ethelbald’s wives, and some of them were pregnant. Balers must’ve wanted to be doubly sure the expecting mothers were safe. Unlike Francoise the year before, these pregnant baars could still go outside and mostly live like they always did. It reminded me that Francoise having six baby baars at once sure was a pretty amazing feat.
I mean, Ethelbald’s wives still had a bit of trouble walking and things were certainly tougher than usual for them, so it wasn’t all rainbows, but at least they were all being taken care of. I was pondering on the baars and their lives when one of the young masti dogkin ran up to me with a brush, which he passed to me with a big smile. It was pretty obvious what the message was, so I nodded and started brushing the baars who were done eating.
I took my time, neatly brushing the baars while I listened to the class Lady Darrell was holding nearby. The baars seemed to feed off the energy from Lady Darrell and the dogkin practicing their etiquette, and they started to sing. Soon after, the dogkin were dancing in time with it.
It was all so natural I had to imagine it was something that happened pretty often. I wondered if it was just something they did after meals. In any case, I kept brushing, and after a time Uncle Ben spotted me and came out with a brush of his own. The two of us brushed away quietly while the baars sang, but eventually I felt like I should say something, so I brought up the topic of a dedicated classroom at the temple.
“I see,” said Uncle Ben thoughtfully, thinking over everything I’d said. “The flow of life here is changing. Until now we’ve been building what we needed, but now that we’ve got all the basic facilities covered, we’re moving on to renovations—making what we have even better than it was. I guess with more timber on the horizon, it’s only natural that we turn our attention to improvements.”
“I don’t think we’re doing all that bad with what we’ve got,” I commented.
Uncle Ben just smiled and shook his head.
“Maybe that’s how you see it, but for the others it could well be a different story. If Alna learns that we can make the kitchen range even more useful and convenient, she’s going to be over the moon. Same if we improve the laundry space. And with the stables and goose pen filling out, it’s worth improving them wherever we can. Same applies to the pub, the classroom, our fields, and even our border stations.”
Uncle Ben seemed to think that at some point we’d want to upgrade our guest houses to more than just yurts. It all made me realize that we really had our work cut out for us here.
“You’ve got to shift your mindset,” Uncle Ben continued. “It’s time to turn your attention to the matter of how to make the village better and how to improve the lives of your subjects. None of that will happen overnight, of course, but we’ll want to be working towards it all come spring or summer. By then we’ll have iron coming in from the mines and wood via the ocean, so in the meantime you’ll want to talk to the folks here and at the stations to get a feel for what they want out of life.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said, dropping into thought.
I thought and I brushed, and I thought and I brushed, and as my brush moved my mind was on the puzzle of what lay in Baarbadal’s future.
I returned to Iluk, where Alna updated me on the state of the forest, and finally, the next day, I could head out there myself. I rode Balers to the border station so they could look after him, then set out with the twins, Alna, and Aymer. They’d done a lot of work and the place had changed a whole lot. It reminded me a lot of Uncle Ben’s talk the other day about renovating and improving.
A lot of trees had been cut down since I last came to the forest, which meant more sunlight and more wind through the trees still standing. All sorts of different plant life had grown, and the tree branches had stretched out and become burdened with fruit. Some were loaded to the point that their branches were bending over. I thought they might even break from all the extra weight.
I know they put in a lot of work over time, but I never imagined the forest could change so much from that...
All the extra fruit, grass, and whatnot meant more animals too. What this meant for us at Baarbadal was that we could really throw ourselves into hunting and gathering in a way we simply couldn’t the year before. We could fill the baskets on our backs, hunt the wildlife, and then call upon the dogkin to take everything back to the border station while we started all over again.
“So this is what you girls were talking about last year, when you told me you wanted to improve things here...” I murmured, tossing some fruit in the basket on my back.
“And it’s even better deeper in the forest!” Senai proudly proclaimed.
“There’s so many mushrooms!” Ayhan declared.
“I can’t wait to see it all,” I said.
The girls were all smiles as they started climbing a nearby tree. They scrambled up it real quick, and with a lot of confidence. I watched them as they plucked the fruit up there and let it drop to the ground, and I realized this must have been what they’d done the other day too.