Godric was born with no land to inherit, no family fortune, and no trade that promised anything beyond another season of work. He was a peasant of the old sort, the kind found everywhere across Britannia but remembered almost nowhere. In spring he turned soil. In summer he pulled weeds and carried water. In autumn he harvested whatever the earth had been generous enough to provide, and in winter he waited for the work to begin again.

The community gardens near his town were divided into narrow plots, each worked by families who had little more than the vegetables they could coax from the soil. Godric grew onions, carrots, cabbage, and wheat. None of it was remarkable. Most seasons, after feeding himself and setting aside enough seed for the following year, there was scarcely anything left to sell.

Then, one autumn afternoon, Godric walked farther from town than usual.

Near the entrance to Dungeon Destard, half hidden among rocks and dead brush, he discovered a weathered wooden crate. The iron bindings were rusted, one corner had split open, and there was no cart, merchant, or traveller anywhere nearby who might claim it.

Godric knew the reputation of Destard well enough not to linger.

Inside the crate were hundreds of seeds.

They were unlike anything he had seen before. Some were large and pale, others dark and hard, with strange markings running across their shells. There was no label, no crest, and no indication of what they might become.

To another traveller, the crate would have been worthless.

To Godric, it was a mystery.

He carried as much as he could back to the community gardens and planted the seeds when spring arrived.

Nothing grew.

The following season he tried again. He planted them deeper. Again, nothing.

The year after that he planted them in richer earth and watered them more heavily. A few shoots appeared, yellowed, and died.

Godric began experimenting. He changed the spacing between rows. He tried shaded ground and open sun. He mixed manure into the soil. He planted earlier in the season, then later. He watered some plots heavily and others scarcely at all. Each failure consumed more of the mysterious seeds.

Other farmers began to laugh when they saw him tending empty rows.

Some told him the seeds were dead. Others insisted they belonged to some foreign climate and would never grow in Britannia. One old farmer suggested they might not be seeds at all.

Godric continued.

Years passed.

The crate grew lighter.

Then, one spring morning, a single green shoot appeared.

Godric almost pulled it from the ground, mistaking it for a weed.

Instead, he waited.

The plant grew slowly at first, then rapidly as the weather warmed. Its leaves were unlike anything cultivated in the garden. By midsummer it had grown taller and stronger than the surrounding crops, and by harvest season it produced a strange fruit none of the farmers could name.

Godric opened one carefully.

Inside were dozens of new seeds.

For the first time, the contents of the crate were no longer disappearing.

They were multiplying.

Another farmer noticed the fruit and asked Godric what it was.

Godric admitted that he did not know.

The farmer turned it over in his hands, smelled it, and offered him one gold coin.

Godric stared at the coin.

One gold piece for a single fruit was an extraordinary price. The common crops growing around them were worth only fractions of that once the cost of seed and labour were considered. Godric could sell the fruit immediately and earn more from one plant than he might otherwise make from days of ordinary harvest.

But he now understood how the crop grew.

And inside that fruit were enough seeds to grow many more.

Godric faced the first important decision of his life as a farmer: take the certain profit before him, or sacrifice that profit in the hope of producing something larger later.

He refused the coin.

He planted the seeds.

The following season, one successful plant became dozens.

Godric watched his narrow section of the community garden transform. Where there had once been a single strange crop surrounded by ordinary vegetables, rows now stood heavy with unfamiliar fruit.

This time he did not wait for buyers to find him.

When the harvest was complete, Godric packed the fruit into crates and travelled.

He sold some in Britain for two gold pieces each. In Minoc, where nobody had seen the crop before, a merchant paid three. In Trinsic he found buyers willing to purchase several at once. Even after paying for food, lodging, and transportation, Godric returned home with more money than he had earned in years of ordinary farming.

More importantly, he returned with seeds.

Travelling through Britannia had shown him something he had never understood while working the same soil each season. Every region possessed plants that were ordinary to the people who lived there and exotic everywhere else.

Farmers near one city cultivated crops unknown in another. Merchants carried fruits across oceans because wealthy buyers would pay several times their local value. Some plants required different soil. Others demanded more water, less water, longer seasons, or careful fertilization.

Godric began trading not only fruit, but knowledge.

He returned home with unfamiliar seeds gathered from farmers, merchants, and roadside markets. Some failed completely in his garden. Others survived only after several seasons of experimentation.

But Godric had learned patience.

Soon his community plot contained crops from across Britannia.

Every year he planted something new.

Every autumn he harvested something rare.

Every winter he travelled.

The farmers who had once laughed at his empty rows now watched closely when he worked. Some asked questions. Others offered to buy his seeds. A few attempted to grow the crops themselves.

Godric welcomed the competition.

There always seemed to be another plant somewhere beyond the horizon.

Within several seasons, however, Godric encountered a problem that no amount of experimentation could solve.

He had run out of land.

The community garden had given him his beginning, but its plots were small and intended to serve many families. Godric could no longer expand without taking soil that others depended upon.

Fruit trees presented an even greater difficulty. Annual crops could be rearranged every season, but orchards demanded permanent space. Trees represented years of production, but also years of commitment.

If Godric wanted to grow beyond a handful of valuable crops, he would need something he had never possessed.

Land of his own.

He approached a private lender.

The agreement was simple enough to understand and frightening enough to sign. Godric would borrow the gold necessary to secure a private farm plot, prepare the soil, establish irrigation, and plant a mixture of annual crops and young fruit trees. The debt would be repaid over three harvest seasons.

If the farm prospered, Godric would own a productive estate.

If the harvests failed, the debt would remain.

Godric signed.

For the first time in his life, he worked soil that belonged to him.

He expanded cautiously at first, planting the crops whose markets he already understood. Between them he experimented with new varieties. Along the boundaries of the property he planted young fruit trees whose branches would not bear meaningful harvests for several seasons.

Yet Godric had learned another lesson during his travels: dependence upon a single field was dangerous.

A drought could ruin one region while another prospered.

So he returned to a place that had caught his attention years earlier.

New Magincia.

The island possessed fertile soil, open land, and relatively few farmers competing for space. Its community gardens were smaller and quieter than those surrounding the great cities, but the earth was healthy and transportation by sea offered easy access to distant markets.

Godric established additional crops there.

Now his operation stretched across Britannia.

Seeds travelled outward from his farm. Fruit travelled back toward cities. Gold returned in the opposite direction. Every successful harvest funded another experiment, another field, another tree.

The first season of his loan passed successfully.

Then the second.

By the beginning of the third season, Godric calculated that one strong harvest would repay the remainder of his debt completely.

His private fields were full.

The gardens in New Magincia were flourishing.

The first trees he had planted were beginning to bear fruit.

And locked inside a wooden chest in his farmhouse sat a collection of seeds unlike any he had possessed before.

Seeds gathered from distant islands.

Seeds purchased from wandering merchants.

Seeds traded quietly by farmers unwilling to say where they had found them.

And, at the bottom of the chest, beneath everything else, remained a small leather pouch containing the last untouched seeds from the crate outside Dungeon Destard.

Godric had never planted them.

He had always assumed they were identical to the crop that had made his fortune.

Now, after years of learning to recognize seeds by sight, he knew they were not.

On the evening before the planting season began, Godric opened the pouch again.

He poured the remaining seeds onto the table.

And for the first time since the day he found the crate, he wondered whether the crop that had changed his life had ever been the crate's true treasure at all.