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Not an hour from the overlook, the pine forest gives way to the sprawling fields of wheat and barley that surround Baileport on all sides. Planting long since passed and the grain grows fat upon the stalk as the season approaches harvest. Soon the air will chill, and the serfs and yeomen who work the fields will busy themselves with reaping and threshing the bounty of the land. But with the summer's toil at an end and the fall's work yet to begin, the menfolk and women take a rest well earned to work on their hobbies and hone their handicrafts.
Children run about in the fields playing some game of dungeon delvers, the one screaming the loudest and chasing the others no doubt playing the part of some monster the others will defeat - or get defeated by, from the look of how their wrestling goes. The menfolk retreat to their sheds to build furniture or repair their tools, when they're not on their porches with their wives, working on some small thing or another while their spouse stitches up a blanket or a sweater for the coming winter. The more prosperous yeomen might even have a book in hand, to polish up their <span class="mu-i">rútaí</span> before the merchants come around to cash in their futures with the village's mayor and buy up crops.
It's a nostalgic scene for you.
Until your twelfth birthday, you expected that by the time you hit twenty five, you would be much like one of the women you see in the cottages along the road. Performing your wifely duties, with two or three little ones scampering about while you relaxed with some knitting. Probably with Bran or one of the other village boys, in a section of woods Lord Péitsáth had them clear to expand the village and its production of peaches. You grew up helping with the peach harvest and playing games not so different than the ones the children in these grain fields play. It is hardly a bad life to live, upon lands as prosperous as those of your hometown, where a very precious crop always found itself in high demand.
Your family has lived that way for generations beyond counting. Your mother, your mother's mother, her mother's mother, and on and on until you reached the first people to settle that particular valley, all of them lived that simple, pleasant, and fulfilling life. Keeping the home, working the land, and building a cozy place to keep their family happy and healthy. You honestly cannot blame your parents for rejecting your offer to see them elevated to at least the Yeomanry. If they did, they'd have to leave their home on Lord Péitsáth's orchards and live among men and women that may as well have been strangers. Oh, they could still work there, but it was against the law for a Lord to keep yeomen in housing that was meant to shelter his serfs.
You got into several arguments with Connor Péitsáth about that. Arguments that usually ended with Master Cullen conjuring a bucket's full of cold water over your head and reminding you that foolish as it may sound to you, the king's law is the king's law.
