Sigrid's Order

New Estra, Two Hundred and Ninety Years Before

A road had been carved into the trees, though road was a generous term for it. Truthfully it was where the ground cover had been trampled away underfoot by cattle being driven into the trees, and two lines worn into that by the passage of wagons. Trees had been chopped down to make way for the road, and the side was littered with the debris.

“Most colonists head into the trees,” Harry told Thaelen conversationally. “The grass plains are a tough place to live. There are only a few places with ground water that the farmers can access, and in the dry season, with the lightning storms, that grass goes up like gunpowder, so the farmers need to clear a large around their homesteads fast and be able to pump that water from their wells quickly enough to create a firebreak. Even that’s not enough sometimes. Two families were burnt away the season before I arrived, and that’s put a lot of people off settling there.”

“So, most take to the trees, fol