Flashback – Departure
Pre-dawn on the farm. Cymur’s light is barely tinging the horizon, and Balor has yet to extend its influence at all. The animals begin to stir and rouse for another day, but there’s a strange discontent to their clucking and shuffling. It’s a feeling that has permeated the whole farm for days, though nobody can say why. A carriage rolls down the beaten road to the old farmhouse, which groans from the strain of standing.
Cordelia has already awoken and takes note of the approaching carriage from her glassless window, concerned. She pulls on her peasant’s smock and descends the stairs.
“There’s a carriage coming, papa,” she announces to the kitchen, where her mother is frying eggs in a pan. A full woman, and her adult height, Cordelia dwarfs both of her parents.
“It’s just new hired help,” says her father. “Me an’ Rusper can’t handle all this land on our own. We’re pulling in some new farmhands–”
“How can we afford that?” Cordelia interrupts. “Don’t you think–”
Her father presses on, raising his voice. “We think it would be a good idea to send you off somewhere, away from all these unattached men. To a big city, maybe.”
Cordelia falters and folds her arms. This was the last thing she was expecting. “I know I’m your little girl, but I’m not a delicate flower. I can handle catcalls, and if any of them try anything I’ll just flatten them and then tell the dogs to teach them a lesson. There won’t be any problems.”
Her mother kept her back levelly to Cordelia, who suddenly notices the older woman’s posture. She is moving tensely and rigidly, and it suddenly occurs to Cordelia that she is not getting the whole picture.
“Oh, gods,” she murmurs, thinking of her father’s massive debts, “You sold the farm to Dirket, didn’t you.”
Her father’s leathery face creases with a sorrowful frown. He says to her, “We didn’t want you to find out. And… and things will be easier, as sharecroppers. We won’t have to sow and reap this whole property on our own.”
Cordelia sits, faint, in her chair– a sturdy thing her father put together out of leftover wood from the barn, the only chair in the house tall enough for her to sit at properly.
“And now we have enough coin to send you somewhere. Anywhere–”
“I already know we’re basically serfs, now, and not even proper farmers,” she sullenly interjects, “That was the point of sending me away, right? To keep me from finding out?”
“No,” her father says, starting to get angry. “The point of sending you away is that there’s nothing for you, here. Except to marry one of the farmhands and continue on as a sharecropper. And… my darling, you’ve always been too smart to be out here tilling the Earth. You can read! You can write! So get out of this rotten old house and figure out why the gods gave you the talents they did!”
She argues as best she can, on the necessity of her staying. There are too many chores that need doing, she says. Who will clean the coup and muck the stables and mop the floors after too many dirty boots have tromped across the house?
But her parents are adamant. She’s going, obligations or none. And over the course of the argument, she begins to accept the idea. Dreams of travel and trade and the mountains and the sea which had long been forgotten emerge from her soul, and before long, they aren’t discuss whether she will go but where.
