Marta Kellgate had been awake since the fourth bell.
This was normal. Farmers didn't negotiate with dawn — they lost to it, every morning, and had been losing to it since before the kingdom existed and would continue losing to it long after the last king was buried. The sun rose. The farmer was already working. That was the arrangement.
Her farm sat twelve kilometers outside Ashenveil's western wall, in the strip of agricultural land between the city and the Green Basin's swampland border. Forty-eight hectares. Wheat, barley, and the knotgrass that the alchemists in the Scholar's Ward bought for reagent production. A farmstead: stone house, barn, tool shed, animal pen with six goats and two oxen. A well with a pump that the Ministry of Stone's engineers had installed three years ago and that still worked perfectly because ministry engineering didn't break.
