The Starfield Farming Sovereign (Elizabeth Schofield) novel Chapter 357

Chapter 357 The Walk

“Of course,” Elmer said.

+5 Pearls:

Elizabeth kicked down the stand on her motorbike and gestured for him to lead. Then she walked toward the formation at an unhurried pace.

The weight of it settled over her as she drew closer. She could feel the attention, hundreds of pairs of tracking her approach, carrying different things in different measures. Curiosity. Hope. Anxiety. And underneath some of it, carefully contained, something that looked a lot like fear.

eyes

To these people, who’d fought for the kingdom and come back with injuries and dependents and nowhere obvious to go, the young woman walking toward them held something that mattered enormously.

Elizabeth moved slowly, her gaze moving steadily from face to face.

She passed a middle-aged man who’d lost his left arm below the shoulder. He still stood like a post, spine straight, jaw set, the kind of posture that doesn’t leave a person even when everything else does. He pulled his shoulders back slightly as she approached.

Beside him, a woman held his remaining arm in both of hers, eyes a little red, smiling at him with the particular brightness of someone working hard to hold it together. In front of them both, a girl of about seven clutched her mother’s sleeve and looked up at Elizabeth with wide, uncertain eyes.

Elizabeth stopped. She crouched down to the girl’s eye level and softened her voice. “What’s your name?”

The girl flinched slightly and looked up at her father. He gave her a small nod, and she turned back, voice barely above a whisper. “Niki.”

“Hi, Niki.” Elizabeth extended her hand and shook it with complete seriousness. “Do you like it here so far?”

The girl looked up at her, and the wariness in her eyes shifted. Something curious and quietly pleased came through instead. She nodded, more firmly than expected. “It smells nice here. Better than where we used to live.”

Children noticed things first, and most honestly.

Elizabeth smiled, touched the top of her head gently, straightened up, gave the parents a nod, and kept walking.

Further down the line she came to an elderly man in a handmade wheelchair, legs covered with a blanket, face worn and mapped with years, eyes still clear and sharp.

A slender young woman stood beside him, her build slight but her expression steady. A daughter, or a daughter-in-law.

Elizabeth stopped and leaned in. “You’ve had a long journey. How are you holding up?”

The old man was startled and tried to push himself upright. Elizabeth pur a hand gently on his shoulder before he could manage it.

9:09 am P p pp.

Chapter 357 The Walk

+5 Peads

“Please don’t! I-It wasn’t bad, it wasn’t bad at all,” he said quickly, voice rough at the edges. “Ms. Schofield, all any of us need is a decent place to land and the chance to earn our keep. My legs are done, but my hands still work, and my eyes are fine. I won’t be dead weight.”

The

young woman beside him nodded before he’d finished speaking, her expression open and earnest.

Elizabeth listened without interrupting, then nodded once and moved on.

She passed a young mother with an infant against her chest, exhausted but upright.

A cluster of teenage boys doing their best to copy the posture of the veterans beside them, eyes carrying the particular unsettled look of people who don’t quite know what comes next.

A white-haired gentleman with glasses and the quiet bearing of someone who’d spent his life working with his mind.

To anyone watching, she was simply making her way down the line, pausing occasionally, exchanging a few words. But as she walked, her wood-affinity spiritual power moved with her, spreading outward without sound or form, light as a change in weather, passing over each person she went by.

Wood affinity ran close to the root of living things. It wasn’t built for force. It was built for sensing, for reading the subtle current that runs through every living creature, the particular frequency of a person’s essential nature, the texture of their spirit underneath everything circumstance had done to it.

What she found, moving through over a thousand people, was a consistency that surprised her. Their physical states varied widely, strong and injured, whole and broken. But underneath, the quality of who they were ran in the same direction. Resilience. Loyalty. The kind of gratitude that comes from people who know what it means to need something and receive it.

A basic, unadorned hope for the future, without cunning or bitterness, without the sourness that hardship sometimes breeds in people when it goes on long enough.

It felt like a field that had burned. Scorched on the surface, but alive underneath, waiting. A little water and light, and it would come back fast and green.

The Hewitts had done this carefully. These thousand people hadn’t been gathered at random. Someone had looked hard at each of them, and not just at what they could do, but at who they were.

Elmer walked half a step behind her throughout, quiet. He watched her crouch for the child, lean in for the old man, move through the line with something that managed to be both methodical and genuinely human. He saw the respect that passed briefly through her eyes each time she looked at someone, there and gone before most people would have caught it.

When she finally reached the end of the formation and turned back toward the front, Elmer stepped up beside her and lowered his voice. “Ms. Schofield, when you’re ready to make selections, we’ve been treating each family as a single unit, so when it comes to choosing.”

“Lieutenant.” She cut him off, and turned to face the formation. Over a thousand people looked back at her in complete silence. Elizabeth’s expression settled into something clear and decided, and she smiled.

9:09 am PPPP.

The Farming Saint in the Starry Wasteland