Chapter 826: Conference of Agriculture Mobilization Movement
The Months of Demons that year ran nearly five months. When the murky clouds finally broke over the Western Region and warm sun came through, it was late spring.
Roland faced an urgent problem.
Spring plowing.
The campaign in the Southernmost Region — fought during the months when every other power lay dormant — had bought him a great deal of time and made the unification effort possible. But it had also consumed an enormous quantity of food. Between the shortage of incoming supplies and the population that kept growing, the Border Area’s granaries had, for the first time, run dry. Roland was quietly grateful that he had entrusted Leaf’s Golden Ones seeds to Petrov and ordered their promotion throughout Longsong Stronghold after its capture; without that harvest, the Months of Demons would not have passed so peacefully.
The concrete boats running between the border and Longsong had been the lifeline of the First Army all winter — carrying coarse-grain pancakes to soldiers at the front. That line had held. Now he needed it to hold in the opposite direction.
The spring plowing conference convened the morning after Victory Day’s celebration.
Not just the Ministry of Agriculture — the entire City Hall had been summoned to the Neverwinter castle, including secondary officials from Longsong, the district governor, Petrov, and Countess Spear Passi, governor of Fallen Dragon Ridge. Spear had arrived by Maggie, arriving pale and shaken and complaining at length about the quality of the flight before she collected herself and bowed.
Duke Calvin Kant of the Northern Region sent his daughter Edith and his second son Cole in his place. Roland couldn’t be certain it wasn’t his imagination, but Edith seemed somehow more luminous since her return from the Great Snow Mountain — and beside her, Cole appeared increasingly diminished. Roland also found himself wondering whether Cole’s attire was perhaps a little… androgynous. He let the thought go.
In any case: the gathering represented all of Graycastle except the Eastern Region, whose lord had not yet pledged fealty, and the Central Region, where a functional City Hall had yet to be established. Without those two, this was as close to a National Congress as he had yet convened.
Roland surveyed the room with some satisfaction. Then he tapped the desk.
Every conversation stopped. Eyes turned toward the king.
“You’re probably wondering why I had the word ‘operation’ written on the banner.” Roland gestured to the red banner behind him. “Because that is exactly what this is. It will determine whether we can carry out our strategic plan this year — and whether we are doing right by the people of Neverwinter.” He paused. “When I took in the refugees, I made them a promise: work hard, and you will never go hungry. In three years, I have kept that promise. My domain has grown from an underdeveloped border town to more than half the territory of Graycastle. I see no reason we cannot build on that this year.”
He looked along the table. “A kingdom is only stable when its subjects are not worried about food. I need every one of you to take spring plowing seriously. Each of you will meet the production targets set by the Ministry of Agriculture. And starting this year, there will be formal assessments of agricultural progress in every jurisdiction — how much virgin land has been cultivated, how many farmers are working the soil, what the total production reaches. These factors will be part of the criteria for what it means to be a competent governor.”
He could see the confusion moving through the room. “You don’t need to understand the details now. Sirius, the Minister of Agriculture, will spend a full day walking you through the evaluation criteria. The short version is this: if you fail to meet the standard, I will take it as evidence that you are not the right person to govern that region.”
No one spoke. But the tension in the room was exactly what he’d intended.
The abolition of the feudal system was not only the removal of old rights — it was also the removal of the assumption that those rights were hereditary. He allowed these officials their government salaries and their position. What he would not tolerate was any delay to the plan he was building.
The agriculture assessment was a beginning, not an end.
Roland pulled back the curtain behind him, revealing a large number on the wall in red. “For most criteria, I’m setting manageable targets for the first year. But for agricultural production, I want this.” He tapped the number.
“2,500,000 kilograms?” The question came from more than one person.
He wasn’t surprised. The average output for a mid-sized city in this era was around 500,000 kilograms; a large city might reach 750,000. The first Golden Ones harvest in Border Town — celebrated as an extraordinary achievement at the time — had been just over 350,000. The number on the wall was more than three times what most of them had ever seen from a single city.
Of course, actual output depended heavily on farmland area and the number of farmers working it. Large cities had historically relied on surrounding villages and hundreds of farming families to reach their figures. That was why he’d included those factors in the evaluation.
The fewer farmers there were, the more workers the factory had.
He raised a hand to quiet the room. “When you see the Golden Twos testing field, this target will look more reasonable. After extensive testing by Leaf, Golden Twos produces more than twice the yield per unit of Golden Ones — the stalks are bowed under the ears of wheat.” He nodded toward Leaf, standing to one side. “I’ll let her explain the details.”
Petrov leaned forward. “Your Majesty — is it truly twice the yield?”
Of everyone outside Neverwinter, Petrov was the only official who had seen Golden Ones perform. During the winter campaign, the Longsong Area had provided more than half the First Army’s total supplies on the strength of that crop alone. Normal wheat couldn’t have fed one city.
“That’s correct,” Roland said. “But Golden Twos is not without its limitations. Miss Leaf will cover those as well.” He stepped back. “The floor is yours.”
Leaf gave a slight nod and came forward with a bag of grown wheat in her hand, showing it around the table. Her voice had steadied considerably since the early days; she had learned to address a room.
“Golden Twos differs from any wheat you’ve grown before in one important way: it can only be grown once. You cannot keep the seeds — you will need to return to Neverwinter each year to obtain new ones. I’ve strengthened the root system so the plant draws nutrients from deeper in the soil. This also means it requires substantial fertilizer, or else you’ll need to adopt a rotation system, dividing your fields into thirds and letting one rest at a time. Also—”
Roland stood back and watched her work. The origin of Golden Twos was genuinely difficult to explain — it would require a lesson in genetic mutation and the mechanism of inheritance, concepts Leaf herself had not been taught and had only experienced intuitively through years of practice. What she’d done with Golden Ones, and then with Golden Twos, was not so different from what farmers had always done: select the strongest plants, eliminate the weakest, repeat over many generations. She had simply compressed the time. A process that would ordinarily have required centuries of cultivation had taken her two years.
Roland had once seen what an original watermelon had looked like: a fist-sized fruit with a hard shell and a few pieces of pale yellow flesh — like a mandarin, essentially. By the seventeenth century, selective breeding had produced the large, red-fleshed fruit he’d known. The same was true of dogs, which were simply wolves that had been shaped by generations of human selection into something entirely different. The so-called natural food was itself a product of human filtering — the true original would likely have been nearly inedible.
What mattered here was that Golden Twos was safe. He knew this. The trick was making them believe it.
He had his answer ready before Edith could finish forming the question.
“Your Majesty,” the Pearl of the Northern Region said, “is it safe for ordinary people to consume wheat that has been… magically altered?”
Several others leaned forward slightly. Petrov, Spear — they all wanted the same answer.
Roland smiled. “Two points. First, there is no meaningful difference between Golden Ones and Golden Twos in terms of how they were developed — both were created by Leaf through the same process. The only difference is that Golden Twos yields more food. Second, although the plant’s roots were enhanced by magic, the plant itself doesn’t carry magic power, so there’s no risk to people who consume it. And for what it’s worth: the oatmeal and pancakes I ate a few days ago were made from Golden Twos from the testing field.”
The room’s skepticism visibly softened. In this era, a king who ate the same food he was asking his people to grow was a king to be trusted.
He proceeded. “In addition — as is already the practice in Neverwinter — all food trading in your cities is to be supervised and controlled through the secondary City Hall. Private food sales are prohibited. Barov, the Governor-in-Chief, will walk you through the implementation details.”
Countess Spear raised an eyebrow. “Your Majesty, if Golden Twos yields as much as described, there will be a large surplus after the population is fed. City Hall purchasing all that surplus would impose a significant financial burden. My population in Fallen Dragon Ridge is barely over ten thousand — do we truly need to produce at this scale?”
“Yes.” Roland said it plainly. “Because we will not be consuming the surplus. We will be stockpiling it.”
“Stockpiling?”
“For the Battle of Divine Will.”
The phrase settled the room into a different kind of quiet. Those who knew what it meant did not ask further questions.
The worst scenario Roland had prepared for in his own mind: population reduced by thirty percent, every able-bodied person committed to the war effort, women and children supplying the factories that supplied the front, farmland going fallow. In that scenario, the only thing that stood between his people and starvation was reserves deep enough to last two or three years. He had discussed this with Karl Van Bate, the Minister of Construction, who estimated that a well-built and well-maintained granary could preserve grain for up to five years. Stale grain didn’t taste good. No one thought about taste during a siege.
It was worth noting that wheat was not the only thing Leaf had been working on. After two years of experimenting in the testing fields, she had enhanced sugar cane, corn, and potatoes as well, producing high-yield breeds of each. Corn and potatoes, in particular, could naturally outproduce wheat. The reasons Roland had chosen to promote Golden Twos over those alternatives were practical: corn and potatoes could reproduce from their own seeds, which made a food monopoly impossible to maintain; and their storage life was shorter than grain. Wheat solved both problems.
Of course, agriculture was a complex industry that extended well beyond the human food supply. Poultry relied on fodder beans. Livestock required their own calculations. He had no time to plan that carefully at the moment — the wartime food problem was already a project large enough to occupy him.
At the end of the conference, Roland turned to Scroll. “I’d like agriculture added to the secondary education curriculum as its own subject. We need people who specialize in growing specific plants and crops.” The education level in other cities lagged far behind Neverwinter’s, and he had largely given up on the idea of democratizing learning across all of Graycastle in a single generation. The more practical approach was to train specialists here and dispatch them to supervise other cities’ agricultural operations — a precedent that could be extended to chemistry, architecture, and medicine as that capacity grew. He didn’t need his subjects to conduct research or construct new theories. He needed them to apply what they were taught.
Wendy found him after the conference.
The witches who had been exploring the Western Region’s snow mountain had docked at Neverwinter.
When Roland arrived at the wharf, someone ran at him and threw herself into his arms without slowing down. Blond hair against his cheek. A familiar warmth and a scent he would have recognized anywhere.
“I’m back,” Nightingale whispered, laughing softly into his shoulder.