Our Daily Bread

By Chelsea Gaither

The Duskin Lords have been overturned, and the slaves of the Gray Isles set free. But it seems that freedom is merely the right to starve.

Leythorne, exiled knight trapped in his enemy’s body, must find a way to lead. With the aid of Faerie and mortal alike, he saved the life of every man, woman and child on those islands...and now it is time to define how those lives ought to be lived. But when the hands he raises and the mind he uses both belonged to the greatest evil he ever knew, how can he trust any choice he makes?

And then dark sails appear on the horizon. The Gray Isles are running out of time...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chelsea Gaither
• Release date: Nov 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311176059

Chelsea Gaither

Chelsea Gaither grew up in her parents' foster home for teenaged boys. She got over it. These days she lives in South Texas. She reads, writes, spins (yarn, not bikes) and knits really obscure lacy things. She also really hates this part of the book info.

Book preview

Our Daily Bread

Tales of the Gray Prince, Vol. 2

By Chelsea Gaither

Smashwords Edition Copyright 2013 Chelsea Gaither

Please respect my hard work. Don’t steal my books. If you didn’t get this copy from Smashwords or its affiliate retailers, please go there and get it legit.

Thanks. You rock.

Discover other books by Chelsea!

Exiles

Silver Bullet (book one)

Blue Ghosts(book two)

Gray Fox (book three)

Black Hounds (book four)

Silver Bullet, Black Hounds (omnibus)

Iron Bars, Silver Stars (forthcoming)

Tales of the Gray Prince

This Found Thing (book one)

Our Daily Bread (book two)

The Perilous Choice (book three, forthcoming)

A Sign of Eagles (Omnibus, forthcoming)

Starbleached:

Starbleached (book one)

 Planet Bob (book two)

Overseer’s Own (book three)

Valkyrie (book four)

Starbleached (omnibus)

Liberty (forthcoming)

Dragonbreath:

Part One: Pawns

Part Two: Knights

Part Three: Queens

Table of Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Our Daily Bread

Chapter One

Dawn’s blue light rippled through skeletal evergreens. Accin, Leythorne thought, and good for eating. He needed to remember these things. Snow still lay here and there, clinging to ground already ripe with spring. The first spring greens were already starting to grow. The fern-like tendrils of yan root, the spikey tiered growth of pescal. Neither of these were ready for eating yet, or so Leythorne’s new woodsman had explained. Gerswir Wirhanson, Gerswir Hunter. The Freeholders clung to their job titles more than they did their family’s names.

It is because the Isles only ever had one Miller. One Huntsman. One Boatswain. One slave-keeper. And the rest were either heirs in apprenticeship, or slaves born and bred. This was quite an unhappy Lordship he had inherited. And it would likely become even more unhappy if he could not find a way to give it up safely.

And to hear Gerswir speak, we could have chosen a worse time to rebel, but there weren’t many other choices.

The Keep had chosen Leythorne as his lord. His first act as Lord of the Gray Isles—and naively, he had assumed it would also be his last—had been to set the slaves free. He had assumed that once freed, they would desire nothing more than to govern themselves, and he could find some nice, quiet part of the island and brood for a while. That they would understand how and when to farm, and plant crops, and mine ore, and do the thousands of other jobs needed to thrive.

As you ought to have magically understood your own power, the nature of your new blood. Because being granted great power means you are also granted the knowledge of how to use it. Have they given out awards for nativity before?

It had been less than two weeks since he had awakened in a body not his own. He had been born mortal, and had been a Knight of the Faerie King before the accident that switched his mind with that of his enemy’s. These shabby bones belonged to Jennal Faer, Sidhe-Lord, would be king, patricide and murderer, and Haron would have rather burned himself alive than reside in them another minute…but no one was offering him a choice.

They needed him.

Oh, things had gone well, at first. The Keep had been purified during those last, desperate hours. The dungeons were not pleasant, but they were now clean and in better repair. They had taken the doors off, removed the chains, put bedding on the pallets and called them the common rooms. It was a sheltered place to sleep, more than most of the Isles’ citizenry had ever claimed before. The food had held out for a week. Slowly, people began to understand. The slave pens were gone. There would be no more beatings. No more families broken to satiate the master’s cruelty.

But there would be hunger and want aplenty, if Leythorne did not come up with a solution fast.

I’m a soldier, first and always. I wasn’t made to figure provisioning…and even that came from farms already grown. How do you build a city, no, a civilization, from scratch?

They were running out of food. The people needed clothes. They needed a better place to sleep than a cold marble dungeon. People wanted to know what they should do next. And again and again, the question Leythorne felt least qualified to answer: What do we pay those who wish to work? And what about those who don’t?

And where is work, if it is wanted?

Gerswir lead the gathering party, though Leythorne followed close behind. Alys and Pardal Norestrain were nearer still. The Freeholders traced their lineage, and carried their titles in their names; the former slaves kept a heritage far older. Leythorne had spent these last few weeks speaking with them. Norestrain was no family name. It was the name of a city in a kingdom long gone. Devoured by the Mistlord, its people delivered over to the Duskin Lords in chains, it was nothing but ash and an old family name, and a story passed from generation to generation of white towers, and the song of bells, and fields of ripe red wheat trampled under invading feet.

Footsteps crunched through silent snow. Leythorne’s gathering teams had grown in the weeks following the Isle’s liberation. Now they were nearly two hundred strong, and where once they all had gathered and hunted, lain traps and dug roots, now they were divided by job. Having the extra hands was an incredible luxury. A clump of ripe wintergrain sat beneath the branches of a sleeping arhat tree. Three days ago Leythorne would have gathered it himself. Now he left it for the next team, and followed the footsteps of a hawl-hind.

We cannot kill this one, he thought, as he moved quietly through the brush. Gerswir had tested them all on their woodsmanship before choosing who would be allowed to hunt. Leythorne and Pardal had been selected after much debate; Alys had been in from the start. The golden huntress moved like a feather on the wind.

They needed the hawl-hind for more than meat. They needed them to plow in a few weeks’ time. They needed the coarse wool along their backs, the soft down on their bellies. They needed them for breeding. But even Leythorne felt slightly cheated, thinking of all that fine meat on the hoof, and he’d been allowed some of the salted meat, rather than the smoked fish everyone else had to endure. There were four thousand freed slaves and over five hundred Freeholders sheltered by the Keep’s walls. They had eaten their way through the Keep’s store of real meat in less than one day.

Gerswir made a sharp fist, the signal to stop.

They had nets for catching game, and bows. Leythorne had yet to get the hang of catching game with a net. He’d be more useful setting snares and herding prey towards it. Alys, though, had caught two hares that he’d seen. A flick of wrist, a swirl of knotted twine, and another bird would be hampered.

Their main game today, though, were hares and hawl. The massive deer had obvious uses, but Leythorne had always believed the hares were rodents. Perhaps good for eating, but cultivation of the damned things seemed wrong. Gerswir had simply held up one of the captured bucks by the neck ruff. Short ears, puffy cheeks, coats soft as down and whiter than snow. It’s the hair, master Leythorne. It’ll come out in puffs all year round. A skilled spinner won’t even need to card it. Hawl-hair has better strength, but nothing is ever this soft. It’ll be good for trade…should we get that far.

Now they tracked a hawl-herd across the snow. The hoof-tracks were peculiar, three toed. Leythorne had caught a few glimpses of long legs and longer neck through the brush. With no direct sunlight, this unworldly light gave the creatures a celestial aura. They were like deer, Leythorne decided, only deer the size of horses.

He almost stumbled over the deepening brush. The hunt was, sadly, the last thing on his mind. How can I protect these islands? We haven’t any soldiers. We haven’t the supplies to resist a protracted siege. We have one ship, and that is Harian’s prototype. If we are attacked by the Duskin—and I cannot imagine any letting us exist free for long; they will come soon—then we will have no option but to cut the ropes leading to the docks.

The Gray Isles floated like great mountains high above the churning Mistland waters. It was said that the Sidhe scholars who had once lived here had raised the island when the Mist arrived…only to perish, one by one, when the Mist turned its attention from the Deep to the sky. The Keep, in this version of history, had once been a great center of learning. If this was true, the Duskin had remade it to suit themselves. A network of rope bridges and floating docks connected the islands to the waters below. And those waters were quickly becoming their key source of food. There did not seem to be enough game on this island to feed them all.

Which meant the isles were vulnerable.

We shall have to cut the ropes leading to the docks below. That will buy us some time, but only some. And I was counting on the sea to get us through spring.

Ah, the never-ending list of problems. There were four thousand battered souls struggling to find some semblance of normal, something most of them didn’t even know. They needed to work. He needed to motivate them to work. But they’re used to the whip. They’re only just now learning to meet each other’s eyes. What motivation can I use that won’t eventually lead back to the