Paladin of the Peaceful Lady

Chapter Two the Happy Farm

Very quickly the entry to the small stone wall around the farm became visible as Daisy trod ponderously towards it.

"Can I go play Da?" Mathew asked, seeing his older sister and younger brother on the swing on a large oak tree just outside the protective barrier.

"Go on with you then" as the boy jumped down from the still rolling cart Drake turned to Greenie. The little goblin was already looking at him, "off with you too, keep an eye on them" with a toothy grin the little goblin hopped off the back, missed his footing and went into an ungraceful roll and came up already trotting towards the children. He took his job as babysitter more seriously than that of rear guard, and truth be told he loved the children as if they were his own.

As the cart trundled through the opening Drake pulled Daisy up, stopping alongside a small shrine made of some small flat river rock, creating a small interior room, maybe big enough for the barn cat, although no animals dared enter the space. Two stones close together made a small opening to the interior, only large enough for Drake to fit one of his closed fists into. The little shrine he had made on a whim, keeping only the smoothest stones that would join perfectly and hold themselves in place without the use of a mortar. He had started leaving offerings, to which God he knew not, the first fruit of the season, a particularly perfect eagle feather, a sparkling stone from the road and other simple pretty things. For a while he didn't expect anything other than the occasional rat or mouse to take them, and he had once caught and chased out a raccoon and a badger from the shelter. Then one day he noticed the things he had left were arranged inside as if by some sort of intelligence. Animals no longer dared enter it, and he had watched a barn mouse go inside only to be thrown through the air out of the opening again as if by an unseen force. After that day when he knelt outside of the little temple, he felt something inside of it watching him, and when he bent down to look, he sometimes caught a flicker here, or a tremor of motion there. He noticed too that the things he left were being moved around the small space. When it started to get crowded, he had prayed to the temple to get permission and then carefully removed the roof of the small abode to add a couple of small shelves, the next day he had noticed several items placed on them, and he got a feeling of contentment and gratitude off the structure. That's when he noticed his prayers being answered in small ways, nothing major, but he supposed whichever being inhabited the small space probably did not have a great deal of power or else it would inhabit a large temple in a city somewhere and not this meager thing in the middle of nowhere inside a small farmer's yard. But once his oldest Daria had gotten sick with a fever and cough, he had prayed for her to get better from the shrine, and although the illness persisted for a while her cough did markedly improve, and her fever vanished overnight. Another time the spring rains were slow in coming and when he prayed for rain, a small cloud hardly deserving the title dumped a deluge of water on his fields for about five minutes before disappearing into nothing again, his crops where the first to be harvested that year. After his daughter's sickness he made a habit of stopping at the spot whenever he passed in or out of the stone wall and just giving a small prayer or offering to whatever being seemed to bring him the small blessings.

Today as he knelt, he noticed the wild turnips he had left inside were pushed outside the small entry. "Not a fan of turnips huh? Point taken, I'll see if I can find some spring honeyberries when I next go into the woods. You don't seem to ever leave those long when I leave them. The back potato fields are looking good so far, the front field of corn is coming in nicely, and the cabbages are starting to pop in good too. Rabbits are getting at the lettuce and carrot tops; suppose I'll have to set a few traps there to see em off. But that's all I have to report today." He stood up and, grabbing the turnips, took the reins and walked Daisy towards the small barn she shared with a few goats, both for dairy and meat. He unharnessed the mare and turned her out into a small pasture off the protective wall that had a small wood gate that could be shut at night. After putting the tools away, he finally headed towards the small house. Maybe not so small now, what had started as a two-room single level home he had needed to add onto twice as his family grew so that now it was two stories with a large kitchen and dining room, with his and his wife's room off it and three rooms upstairs for Daria, Mathew and his brother Jack in one, and the baby Jocelyn in the third.