The Dread Wyrm

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Across the north of the Nova Terra and the Antica Terra, spring came. It came, too, in Galle and Etrusca, in Arelat Arelat, where men had begun to learn to fear the night again, and in Iberia, where it came early. But it came first in the fields of Occitan, where husbandmen and goodwives got down to the serious work of manuring and planting fields as soon as the ice in the old furrows was thawed and the ground began to soften. Depending on the wealth of the farmer, from yeomen with stone houses and two ploughs’ worth of oxen or big horse teams, to tiny huts on the edge of the debatable lands, where a young couple would harness themselves-together-to a homemade plough and the biggest child would drive it, furrows were cut in the cold ground, and every day those furrows crept north, from Occitan’s early sun to the borders, and in some cases fire-blackened fields of Jarsay, and then north again to the Albin and the Brogat, where there were fewer peasants and more yeomen, but also more farm labourers with no land at all; where big iron ploughs cut the earth deeper to make up for the later sun.

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