The last good week of autumn came in bright and cold, with thin sunlight that felt more like a memory of warmth than the real thing.
Jacob stood at the edge of his little grid and looked over the four beds he had claimed from the dead field. The grasses he had planted there had done their best, which turned out to be very little. The control bed struggled the most, a thin fuzz of green that barely covered the soil and already showed yellow along the tips. The enchanted beds looked better at first glance, thicker patches and slightly deeper color, but only when he compared them to the control did they seem worth mentioning.
Better than almost nothing still counted as almost nothing.
He walked the length of the beds with his arms wrapped around himself against the wind. The growth enchantment bed came first. The plants there reached a little higher, their leaves broader by half a finger, and the stand somewhat denser. The endurance bed showed shorter grass with tougher stalks that bent less under his touch. The water-focused bed had the deepest color, but only in scattered clumps, as if the enchantment could not hold the whole patch together.
When he stepped back and looked at them as a group, the difference between them felt more like a footnote than a breakthrough.
He pulled his notebook from his pocket, stared at the last recorded height measurements, and added a final line for the season. Numbers did not care about how hard he had worked or how much magic he had shoved into the stakes. They simply told him that everything here had failed to reach even the poorest stands on the west side fields.
The week before, he had refused to accept that answer.
With Arthur's reluctant approval, he had enchanted the big wagon that usually hauled sacks and loose hay. He had crawled under the frame and worked the etching tool along the axles and wheel rims, pushing a stronger version of the lightness and reinforcement patterns into the wood and metal. Four careful passes later, the empty wagon pulled like a much smaller cart, and even when full, it rolled smoother over rough ground than it ever had before.
They hitched the old donkey, Bramble, to the tongue, and Jacob spent long hours marching from the stream at the lower end of the property back up to the dead field. He filled barrels until his arms shook, then watched them slosh while the enchanted wheels seemingly floated over the ruts, asking less of the tired animal than usual.
Day after day, he soaked the four beds until the soil shone dark under the afternoon sun and his boots squelched with every step. He kept a careful count, gave the control bed its share, and made sure the others received equal amounts. If water had been the missing piece, then those grasses should have surged.
They did not.
A little more growth. A little more color. Then nothing. The blades stayed thin, the roots shallow, and the soil cracked again as soon as the top dried.
Now, standing in the chill, he could see that the field had taken everything he had given it and simply refused to change in any way that mattered.
He knelt beside the water-focused bed and clawed a small trench with his fingers until he reached a deeper layer. The soil beneath still held a trace of moisture, but even there the roots ran short. They ended in little knots, twisted and browned in a way that did not look like simple dryness.
On impulse, he scooped a pinch of soil into his palm and brought it to his nose. It smelled wrong. Not rotten, not sour, but flat, like something used up and tired.
He hesitated only a moment before he pressed a bit to his tongue.
It did not taste earthy at all. No rich, loamy flavor like the good plots near the house. Instead, a sharp edge hit the sides of his tongue, followed by a dull bitterness. It tasted faintly salty, not like fresh tears, but like a pot that had boiled dry with too much mineral in it.
He spat into the furrow and wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve, then gathered another pinch from a different bed to check again. The control bed tasted the same. The growth bed tasted the same. The endurance bed and the water bed all carried the same strange, flat, mineral sting.
The field was not just tired. It was salted, in some fashion, and the plants had been fighting more than shallow roots or missing rain.
He sat back on his heels while the wind pushed cold fingers down the neck of his shirt. The situation finally started to make a different kind of sense. Years of overworking during dry seasons, water pulled from poor sources, maybe floods that had left something behind, and every cycle concentrating whatever the land could not use near the surface.
No wonder the grasses had barely tried.
His enchantments had helped a little. They had coaxed the plants to push harder and live slightly longer, which only meant the grasses had struggled more bravely before losing anyway. Magic could not convince roots to drink poison and call it progress.
Jacob rose slowly, brushed his hands off on his trousers, and looked over the field one last time. The stakes still hummed with weakened power, but there was nothing more for them to do here until the season changed.
A gust of wind rolled down from the north, sharp enough to sting his ears and nose. It carried the smell of distant frost and the promise that winter would not ask the field what it wanted.
He pulled his coat tighter and closed the notebook with a firm snap.
"All right," he said, speaking to the beds, the stakes, and whatever watched from beyond the fence. "You do not want to grow for me yet. That is fine. I will figure out how to fix salt, and I will come back."
The next steps would not happen in this field. They would happen in the barn by lamplight, in the house with Arthur's old stories, and in his mind while he turned the problem over and over like a nonflat rune that refused to settle.
For now, the land would sleep under whatever snow and frost it received, and his experiments would have to wait.
He turned his back on the dead field as another blast of icy wind shoved at his shoulders. The stakes and thin grasses faded behind him while he walked toward the warmth of the house and the long winter ahead, with the bitter taste of the soil still lingering on his tongue and a new question burning hotter than any success he had managed so far.