When Kre looked up from his reverie, Syonette was gone. He expected that though, so it was no real shock, although he had hoped to at least get a hug out of it. “Time to face the music,” he muttered to himself, feeling less confident than he sounded.
With his hand on the door knob of the Lodge, he tried to imagine what his own parents would be telling him right now.
“Make sure you tend the horses yourself,” his father would say. “It’s a long trip to the Citadel and you won’t want to be walking, so take care of the horses and they’ll take care of you.” He served as one of the grooms for Fort Cowl’s stables and always had a mind for ensuring the mounts were properly cared for. His work was the reason he had been sent up to the Jayde Line. A shipload of new horses had been delivered there and they needed training, fast.
“Mind your manners, don’t do anything else to embarrass our family, and make sure you eat. But don’t eat too much. You’ve been getting fat.” That voice in his head belonged to his mother. It wasn’t that she was hyper critical of him, it’s just that she tended to babble when nervous and this kind of situation, watching her son leave on a trip to determine his guilt or innocence for murder, would make her very nervous.
Kre’s mother was actually very well liked among the community. She managed to grow the spiciest peppers through years of cross-breeding various species and she had some remarkable dishes that used them to full effect. Most of the town looked to her to help for their own gardens and farms because of her natural green thumb. That was one of the two reasons why the military had requested that she, a civilian, travel to the Jayde Line as well. They desperately needed help ensure the survival of the crops that a growing settlement would need to sustain themselves.
The second reason was that they were discovering new plant life and needed assistance in determining the edibility and potential uses. The military had no botanical expertise in their ranks inherently, so they had a need to outsource for that particular talent. They hated to leave Kre at home alone, but he was nearly a grown man and they needed to turn him loose eventually to run his own life.
The ranch itself wasn’t hard to manage, especially with all of the help from his friends. Most of the farms and ranches around the town were engaged in communal rotational farming. That basically meant that each farm grew a different crop every year, ensuring that the soil stayed fertile and rich through the years. The crops are then sold to the town at a standard rate per are yield. That ensured equality among the farmers and made it so that no one was disadvantaged for having to grow a generally less profitable crop.
Some farmers, especially those new to Mintas and the frontier life, tried to go out on their own and market their own crops with no regard to the overall community. It never went well. It wasn’t that the townsfolk acted against them in any way, but it was hard for an individual farmer to compete with a town block in the major markets. Most saw the light after a couple of years but a rare few moved away after threatening the townsfolk for their maliciousness.
The plants that grew on the Nevynar ranch were of a hardy variety, thanks to his mother’s tending, and required very little effort to maintain. The Nevynar sheep, for which Syonette loved to mock Kre about, were a relatively new addition. There were only thirty-two sheep in their flock, and they were also pretty easy to care for.
Whoever took over the Nevynar ranch after Kre left would have a pretty easy job of it until they established themselves on their own land.