jhefarm

Jhetarya
Snapping blue eyes, narrowed in suspicion so that their incongruous cornflower hue barely shows, startle from a face the deep reddish brown of brick. Nose is heavily Roman, while lips are thin and drawn. Her chin matches the jut of her nose, giving her the look of an old-fashioned nutcracker, and her starkly pointed cheekbones do her no favors beneath the caterpillar-lines of her brows. The thick braid of hair that tumbles down her back is black, and fully as stubborn as she, tendrils escaping with ease from their severe confinement. Tall at 5’9, Jhetarya is no beauty—rather, she is strength, a hand of iron that could, for all its power, carry a new-hatched chick on a weyrling flight unscathed.

Aljheran
The same blue eyes characterize Aljheran, but his are wide and innocent, sparkling with zest for life. The features that are so unattractive in his cousin—roman-nose, a strong chin, and heavy brows—in him are refined into a picture which, while not ideal, is definitely alluring. His thick, curly dark hair goes to his broad shoulders, confined in a ribbon. His gaiety and joie de vivre do not interfere with his Terpsichorean grace. Stunning, charming, always in motion, Aljheran is a far cry from his cousin cum sibling’s saturnine personality.

Jhetarya stared at her cousin as if he’d sprouted another head. “Aljheran, you’re crazy. Lord Halaian hasn’t even been buried yet, nor Lady Aschiane Confirmed, and you’re asking her to /marry/ you? You’ve no bloodline, you’ve no qualifications, you’ve no /sense/!”
Aljheran grinned, undaunted. “She’s prettier’n you, Jheta—“
“That’s not saying much.”
“She’s got lots of money—“
“And you haven’t a thirty-second on you.”
“And I think she smiled at me this morning.”
“Faranth!” bellowed the well-muscled, long-nosed holdswoman. “We’ve barely managed to send our harvest in, we still owe the Smiths so much I could cry, and you’ve gone and proposed to a notoriously mercurial and occasionally vindictive young woman who has just lost her father and who is very probably about to kick all the laws we ever knew *between*! Should I go find a pair of proddy golds and bring them together above our house? It surely would make more sense than you!”
“She said she’d consider it, Jhe.”
Jhetarya glared. “Oh, wonderful. The woman who inspired Lord Halaian to run a /Harper/ out because she found a teaching song offensive is considering my cousin as prospective marriage bait. Why don’t you just go boat down Black Rock River? It’d be less lethal, I’m sure.”
He kissed her on the cheek, cheerfully. “Aschiane’s a lovely woman, Jhetarya. Bloody-mindedness doesn’t bother me—just look where I’m living. Now, are you going to make peach cordial, or not?”
Jhetarya threw up her hands in disgust. “I’ll make your wherrybrained cordial, all right? Go pick the sharding cabbage, Aljheran. I need three for dinner.”
He wrinkled his nose. “Not tubers and cabbage /again/, Jhe!”
Aljheran fled as Jhetarya flung a boot at him.

“Shards,” panted Aljheran, half-collapsed over the plow’s handles. “No wonder nobody else wanted this land. Lord Halaian must have thought us mad. Jheta, there’s another big rock here.”
“Plough around it, crazy man. Lord Consort Gherol is coming down to inspect the cotholds this week, and we’re already the lower-yielding field in the bunch,” replied Jhetarya, wiping her dirty hands on her breeches and wincing as blisters made themselves known. “You have the easy job. Just Madallah and you, breakin’ up the ground. I’ve got to break up the lumps you leave behind.”
“I still think,” said Aljheran with enormous dignity, “that Lady Aschiane could have done better than that scheming Bitran trader.” He grunted as he hefted the iron plow blade out of the earth, and flicked the reins against the phlegmatic little donkey’s haunches. Madallah squealed irritably, and began her stumbling walk over the rough fields of Folly Cothold.
“Treason!” huffed Jhetarya, finding yet another small rock to put in her wheelbarrow. “You know Aschiane won’t hear a word against him. And he’s got a good head for business, Jhery boy. Mind the rows, they’re getting crooked.”
Aljheran snorted louder than Madallah. “That’s because every time I start, I hit a rock. My arms are /killing/ me, Jhetarya.”
“Better you than me,” she told him cheerfully. “I’ve still got to card wool today, Jhery. My hands will be mincemeat.”
He coughed. “My, and you get to stick your hands in all that nice, soft, lanolinny wool. How sad. /Faranth/!” and the ploughblade skipped right out of the thin, pale earth with a horrible sound.
“Aljheran!” Jhetarya cried, and dropped the barrow, scattering rocks as she sprinted toward him.
Her cousin did not answer her.

The Healer frowned, deepening the lines around his mouth. “Concussion. Possibly a cracked skull. You’re to keep him in bed, Cotholder Jhetarya, for a couple of fortnights.”
She stared at him, numbly. “Here,” he said, irritated, snatching at his beltpouch. “I’ll write down instructions for his care. Goodness knows, he should be taken to the Hold, but there’s no way to get him down without jarring him, and our Infirmary is full up because that meat from Southern was spoiled and the cook didn’t know it. I’ll be back in a sevenday to check on him. This is Aljheran, right?”
At Jhetarya’s nod, Healer Lanrade scribbled with a charcoal stick in a small, bound book, with leaves that appeared to be the increasingly popular paper, tore off a sheet—definitely paper—and handed it to her. “Good luck, Cotholder,” he told her with a sympathetic smile, and touched his hat before closing the door gently behind him.
The ploughblade was bent so badly it would take a Mastersmith to figure out what it had once been. There was no sign of Madallah, whose traces had snapped with the force of the impact. Five fields still lay unbroken, and there were spring fruits that demanded canning or candying before they fell from the tree and were lost. There was a great pile of coarse wool from the small herd of sheep, and a bag full from their pair of goats, waiting to be turned into mohair. The small pouch hidden by the fireplace had only a mark and a sixteenth in its dull leather confines—not enough to feed them in this cold, stormy clime and hire on a man as well.
Jhetarya’s already prominent jaw jutted out firmly, and she squared her shoulders, lips thin with resolve. “We didn’t come to this Hold all the way from Telgar to let it go to any scheming Bitran trader, Aljheran, and we’re not going to.”