Jonathan didn't see the road as he drove home. His horse knew he way, after all the years it had walked it, and brought him to his own gate, where he sat for a long time, blinking back tears. Life goes on, he told himself, and drove the cart into the yard. Life goes on.

And life did. The work was harder, having just the two sets of hands again. His mother was in good enough health, but wasn't as strong as Ariana had been. But he'd managed before she came, and he somehow managed after she had gone. She never came back to the farm at all. He'd gone up to her attic room just once, to see her sword and mail shirt still sitting there. He'd left them, and hadn't looked into the room again since.

Summer turned towards autumn, and then the winter's snows fell. He didn't go, this year, to any of the parties or socials. He would remember her too strongly, and somebody else might ask after her. So he didn't know that during the last weeks of winter somebody had bought the Oldson farm.

The Oldsons had been his neighbors, when he'd been a child. But they had both died, taken sick of a fever in the winter, and hadn't had the strength to keep their fire going. They had been old, and they had no children. There was a cousin, somewhere, who ended up inheriting, but he was a city man, from Queensford, and never even came to look at it. It was a very small farm, not the sort that somebody would buy to make money from, it had never really produced cash crops, only just enough to keep the Oldsons fed, with a tiny bit in good years to sell and buy what little they didn't make or grow themselves.

He did see the new owner arrive, however. He was out in front one late winter afternoon, when the snow was already more than half melted, taking a moment of rest in the yard between tasks, when he saw the cart pass along the muddy road. It wasn't a particularly large or nice cart, the word best applied to it would probably be "rickety." It was pulled, however, by a truly magnificent chestnut draft horse, with brilliant white feathering on its feet and a long flowing mane and tail. Behind the cart trailed a string of goats, and driving it was a figure too muffled in winter clothes to be clearly made out at a distance, but as the cart drew nearer, he could see that it was a woman. Brown hair and brown eyes, and little else visible under her coat. He gave her a nod as she passed his farm. She nodded back genially. The cart continued on down the road a half mile or so, and then to his surprise it turned in at the next gate.

He kept an eye on the farm next door after that, curious. He saw the woman, the girl, really, going about the process of getting the farm ready for spring planting. She had a heroic task ahead of her, because it had been left to run wild for years. But her horse was more than equal to plowing under the hard soil, it seemed, and she was obviously no stranger to hard work. Every day he saw something new. The farm house was cleaned out, the smaller of the two barns made habitable for the goats, the larger left for now. The garden plot was dug up, and though she didn't get all the fields plowed and ready for planting, she got a fair amount of them done. Spring was well underway now, and he was soon too busy with his own planting to pay that much attention to his neighbor, but he noticed, whenever he was in the fields near the fence that separated them, that the little farm was looking less and less like a derelict, and the fields were greening with growing things.