Grismere

Flat country in the middle of the Old World, fought over so often and for so long that the fields are levelled by it. There are no hedges left in Grismere. There is very little timber. Two generations of requisition took the woods, and what stands in their place is scrub and the occasional avenue of trees somebody planted as a memorial and nobody has been paid to maintain.

The soil is not bad. It is tired, which is a different thing and a harder one to fix. Yields have fallen every decade within living memory and Lyaud has responded each time by taxing the shortfall, on the reasoning that a smaller harvest still has to feed the same army.

The capital itself is a city of enormous public buildings the treasury cannot heat, standing on ground that was a battlefield twice before anyone thought to build on it. Ploughmen still turn up iron. There is an office for it, staffed, unpaid for two quarters, and open every morning at the proper hour.