The Vale Harvest

The farm belt that feeds the lower world — tilled fields, corrals and farmsteads ringing the green-country towns, with Valenfeld's flat river basin as its heart. Everyone eats off it, and everyone knows the Lean Years are eating at it.

Coin comes and goes, silver drowns, relics dry up — but the Vale still has to eat, and what it eats grows in the farm belt: the tilled fields, hen-yards and cattle corrals ringing every green-country town. Valenfeld sits at the heart of it, its flat basin and cold river making it the breadbasket of the whole lower world; Highbridge's terraces eat Valenfeld grain, and even the dry towns pay for it in whatever they still have. That is exactly what makes the belt the front line of the Lean Years: a failed season, a wolf pack in the hen-yards, raiders burning a barn, monsters moving into an abandoned furrow — each one is the collapse arriving somewhere ordinary, and each one fixed is the collapse pushed back a season. Farmers know this without being told. They are the first to hire a blade when something comes out of the tree-line, and the first to starve when no one does.