twojebook Chapter 146: The End of Her Work
Chapter 146: The End of Her Work
Seren’s work in Percvale was technically finished.
That was the fact of it. She had come from Gonnb, not by choice, and the arrangement had been simple: restore the farmland, get paid and leave.
That was the deal Darion had offered her outside a burning village and she had accepted it because her alternatives had been limited and the work was the kind of work she did anyway.
She would fix the farmland, receive payment, then continue with her life afterward.
The farmland was restored. Every section done.
Which meant the arrangement was complete.
Darion had been aware of this for the last few days without saying anything about it.
He had watched her finish the last sections and thought about it while the farmers were getting their first week in.
It had sat at the back of everything else as a question he hadn’t addressed yet.
He noticed she was quieter since today.
Not distracted exactly, but thoughtful in a way she hadn’t been before. Earlier on, every conversation with her had centered around work. The condition of the soil. How long restoration would take. What sections needed priority.
Or the archery program, how well were archers doing and something like that.
Now that the work was over, that certainty was gone.
And Darion suspected both of them had realized the same thing. Percvale had started relying on her presence. Not just her magic but her.
Because without Seren, the farmland would’ve remained dead. The rebuilding plans would’ve slowed drastically. Food production would’ve become another long-term problem added to Percvale’s endless list of problems.
Instead, because of her, things were moving forward far faster than they should have.
The farmers already had land to work on.
The carpenters would soon begin constructing livestock pens.
The rebuilding had momentum now.
And somehow Seren had become tied into all of that without anyone intentionally planning for it.
Without the farmlands being restored he wouldn’t even have thought of planting.
He thought she might be thinking about leaving.
They were still standing at the farmland edge when he said:
"Two hundred gold coins," he said.
Seren turned and looked at him.
He had been working through the number for days now. Her mother had received a thousand silver, which at the exchange rate he had observed since arriving in this world: roughly twenty silver to one gold, meant her mother had been paid fifty gold coins. That had been for some days work and a box of compounds.
Seren had spent weeks here. She had restored an entire barony’s farmland from dead soil to something that farmers were already calling extraordinary.
She had trained ten archers from nothing to the level where they had taken thirteen of
Valdenmoor’s knights in a defensive engagement and then helped burn their farmland in the attack. She had traveled to Ghlk and back and navigated the conversation with her mother and sat at his table through the planning and the aftermath and the rebuilding.
She was even the reason they won the battle against Percvale.
Two hundred gold!
When they first met her mother had accepted one thousand silver coins for the work arrangement and even that had seemed like an absurd amount at the time.
Back then Darion himself hadn’t fully understood the value scale of money in this world.
Now he did.
A large healthy cow cost around twenty silver coins from what Garren had explained earlier. A proper riding horse cost more. Skilled workers earned several silver weekly if paid well.
From the prices he had seen so far, Darion had roughly figured out the ratio naturally.
One gold coin was probably worth around twenty silver.
Which meant two hundred gold coins was a massive amount of money.
Life-changing money.
The kind of money that turned someone wealthy overnight in a territory like Percvale.
Seren clearly understood that too judging from the look on her face.
She stared at him.
"That’s too much," she said.
"Will you reject it then?"
She didn’t answer that.
"You also helped during the Valdenmoor attack," Darion continued. "Leading the archers, helping defend the farmland... I’m not paying you for that specifically. "That wasn’t part of the original arrangement. But the farmland work covers this entire area — " he gestured at the expanse of dark soil behind her "— done across weeks, coming back after it was destroyed and doing it again, going deeper the second time. If things go the way they’re going to go with those farmers on that soil, Percvale will be producing real surplus within a season." He looked at her. "It would be dishonest to pay you less."
She was quiet.
"Thank you," she said, eventually, meaning it.
"You’ll get it when we’re back at the castle," Darion said.
They stood for a moment. The farmland was behind her, the light going warm as afternoon moved toward evening.
Darion looked at it and thought about the question that had been sitting underneath the payment conversation.
What came next for her.
She had no obligations here anymore. The work was done, the payment was coming, the arrangement was complete. She was free to go, actually free this time, not because her only option would be a burning village.
She had coins that would buy her genuine options. She could go back to wherever she had been before Gonnb took her. She could go somewhere entirely new.
Percvale had started relying on her in ways that had nothing to do with the soil work. The archers had been shaped by her. The castle routine had her in it. She had been present through the planning for Valdenmoor and the aftermath and the rebuilding conversations. He had gotten used to her being there.
That wasn’t a good enough reason to ask her to stay. People who were valuable eventually left if there was nothing holding them. That was just true.
He turned to her.
"I suppose it’s time," he said. "Thank you. For everything you did here."
Seren looked at the farmland.
She was quiet for a long moment. Long enough that he thought she might just nod and that would be the end of it and they would walk back to the castle and he would count out two hundred gold and she would pack her leather pack and her tool bundle and be on the road by morning.
Then she said: "I’m not leaving."