In his hall, the knight or lord eats three meals, that which breaks his night's fast, a nooning to fill him up for the day, and a supper when his day is over. This last meal, though often light, is perhaps his favorite meal, for here he sits with his family to talk of the day's doings and look forward to the next. This is the case among elves and humans alike. It is also the case among the dwarves of Thorbardin and Thoradin and Garnet.

Once the high folk have dined, their servants are free to enjoy what their masters have not finished, and it is not unknown for the cook of the household to prepare meals with that notion in mind, making certain that she and her fellows won't have to dine exclusively on crusts and rinds. This expedient her master might not approve, but in the marketplace the sellers of meat and poultry and fish, of grain and fruit, offer no objection.

Though servants, even the most lowly, do well in the halls of the high, the crofters on the lord's lands, peasants and the free farmers, have little time for such niceties as noonings. They have been hours laboring in the fields and byres by then, eating what little pasties or pie their wives have sent out to them even as they look over the rest of the day's work, hoping to finish all before dark. Neither do they look to supper as anything other than food given in the weary time between work and sleep. While it is true that a farmer may dine on joints of venison or rabbit pies, if his son has had good luck hunting, his family's fare will not consist of puddings and fruits and fantasies of bakery from a cook's well-stocked kitchen. His is plain fare: porridge, meat stews and pies, a dark loaf from the oven, and milk and cheese. Unless he has a berry patch on his land and a wife skilled at making what the finer folk call "peasant's wine" from those, in summer or in winter, he has no wine to chill or mull, and unless he has the great good luck to live near a brewer, he will quench his thirst with cold water from his well.

Yet, as unlike as our eating habits are, rich man or poor, lord and lady in the hall or laborer in the field, scholar at his books or far-roaming hero with sword belted on, with but one exception we are each of us subject to the rule of the seasons. No matter our station, our ambition, the state of our hearts or conscience, no one of us can escape that seasonal bond, and that is for one simple reason—we must eat. Our food must be grown in field and garden and orchard, hunted in wood, captured from the sea. The only exception to this rule is made not for the sake of a race of folk who do not eat—who among us can fail to nourish himself?—but with the understanding that in these days we now name the Fifth Age of Krynn, the dwarves of Thorbardin have again closed their great gates against the world and returned to their ancient tradition of strict self-reliance. How, then do they fare, deep within their mountain city where sun never shines? Very well, by all accounts, and the discussion of that will follow other discussions in its turn. For now, we speak of the folk who feel the sun and the wind and the rain on their faces, the milkmaid gone to call her cows to the byre, the farmer behind his plow, the reapers in the field. We speak of the fishers who take their nets far out to sea, the shepherd on his hillside, elven hunters in the wood and their human neighbors whose tasks and skills are no different, each from the other.

In the days of the Dragon Purge, many unfortunate folk turned their eyes to the heavens and cried out for gods to come and help them, storming the bastions of the skies with prayers, weeping and pleading and, finally, cursing as, once again, the face of their homelands changed. In the Ergoths verdant lands and teeming forests became icelands. In the northern parts of Solamnia a dire wasteland came to be not desert but worse—a wilderness of emptiness into which few mortals or animals dared venture. Upon the stone of those lands nothing would grow; no insect lived. This was the Footprint of Chaos, the mark of a terrible god's passage, and still the sign of the world's pain. Like to this dire place is the Desolation in Malys's realm. Here it is impossible to find food, impossible to grow it. One cannot live there, for no grain grows in the burned land, no water provides home for fishes, and birds do not sail the skies.

In the lands now held by Onysablet the Black, only swamp is found, reeking waters, poisonous insects, and snakes whose venom kills in the instant of the first bite. What folk still live there fare poorly on the roots and leaves of common swamp reeds, on pale fish, snails, and vegetation that barely nourishes. These are not salt marshes where a man may hope to graze pigs. They are noisome swamps that will provide no nourishing food. What food the folk who live near the swamp have they steal from merchant caravans passing round the edges of their benighted land on the way to or from Beryl's lands and the Tarsis trade route. This stolen fare is hardly enough to count on. No one ventures into that realm to count, but rumor says the populations of humans and ogres who are not in the service of the dragon have dwindled past the point where they can be expected to survive. The wise have fled; the unlucky are dead. On the other hand, those who do homage to the dragon, and the bakali and draconians who are part of her troops, fare well because the wyrm sees to it that they are nourished and strong.

These are the Fortunate Lands. Perhaps they would not think so, but the least afflicted by the ravages of the overlord are those elves and ogres and few humans who live in Northern and Southern Ergoth, for if they cannot grow the grains and fruits and herbs they used to produce to sustain themselves, at least they can grow enough to trade along with the whale meat and seal meat they hunt in their icy bays. Such game will clothe and feed them warmly. In these days, this is good luck and great bounty.

Says the farmer to his wife, they two standing in the dooryard of their sturdy stone house outside of Hopeful, that city on the Tarsian trade route: "Woman, I do hate the dragon, that miserable green beast, that Beryl named for a jewel and whose beauty is hard for me to see!" Says the wife to her man, "Husband, look around you and see how much better we fare now than your father did. Then tell me again if you hate the dragon."

He does look around, and he tells her again that he hates the dragon, but he speaks with a confused kind of wonderment in his voice, for the land he owns is under plow, sown with oats and barley and hay, with wheat and corn and in the stony patch where the hill rises behind his outbuildings, with potatoes. His fields stretch out as far as the dark line of the distant forest, and he cannot help but admit that this farm, inherited from his father, was once no more than stonelands where only scrub would grow and—with great efforts worthy of any hero's impossible task!—the smallest patch of garden beyond which rolled bitter rocky fields that did no one good but goats.

One dragon spread ice, another desolation, in Solamnia a god went walking by and left death behind him, but the green dragon Beryl had a liking for forests and decided that the stony lands stretching down from the Qualinesti Forest would not suit her pleasure. With her magic, she changed all the rough scrub lands into forest and, in a matter of years, deer came to live there, and boars and quail and wolves and foxes and owls and hares… in a matter of but a few years the world around what was once a hardscrabble farm became lush and filled with food.

The farmer's sons are strong and hale, his daughters fair and healthy. Though the minions of the green dragon never fail to take their toll of taxes and goods, the farmer is not destitute. From his fields he harvests a generous crop, enough oats and barley and wheat to store in his barns against even the worst of winters, enough to send down to Tarsis by way of the merchant caravans that stop in Hopeful. His sons hunt the forest and fish the streams, and there are—perhaps in memory of all the fathers gone before him—goats in the upland for meat and milk.

In a dragon's realm, some don't fare as badly as others, and they contribute to the supply of food that keeps the most of Krynn nourished.

"Out from the earth springs all that we need." So says the old proverb, that wisdom known to human farmers and hunters and the nomadic tribes. Say the elves, "Around the wheel of the seasons are found all that we need." If, in desolate lands, this ancient truth is being proved a lie, most of Krynn's people still live by it.

One winter day as I was walking in Palanthas, I stopped in at a baker's shop to purchase a loaf for my supper, and to enjoy the yeasty, steamy warmth of the place. I asked the mistress of the shop, as one does to be polite, how her business fared.

Laughing, she said to me, "No baker fares ill in winter! When the rain falls and the snow piles up, when the winds blow off the cruel sea, people cannot pass by a baker's shop without stopping in to buy something." She thought about this a little, as though wishing to expound, but ended only by shrugging her shoulders and saying, "People like bread. It's like water. You like to drink wine and you like to drink ale and beer, but when you are truly thirsty, you want only water. So it is, with bread. You like to eat meat, you like to pick over the tender flesh of fish, but when you are hungry, really hungry, you want only bread. It fills the belly and warms the heart…"

Her words failed again, and she offered me a cut from a loaf just come steaming out of the oven as though to say, see for yourself!

I cannot dispute the wisdom of the baker. People like bread, and bread is the staple of all folk in all lands, that staff of life whose beginnings are often thought by city folk to be in a baker's oven, but whose true generation begins a long time before ever the baker begins to mix her dough.

Many of the peoples of Krynn celebrate the seasons in the names of the months. In winter you will hear elves speak of Winter Come, Winter Night, Winter Deep. Those same months in the language of the Plainsfolk of Abanasinia are, Frost Eve, Ice Glaze, Snow Deep. The people of Solamnia—that is, Solamnia that was—all say Frostkolt, Newkolt, Deepkolt. These are the agrarian people, the forest folk, the shepherds and nomads who depend upon the rounds of the seasons in order to supply themselves and the rest of Krynn with food.

There are little romances in the cities, tales and stories and songs, that speak of the silences of winter, the dark days, the long nights when the farmer rests from his work. Such pretty tales to pass the time among the folk who harvest their food from the market! The truth, as any farmer will tell you, is far different. In winter seasons the farmer has no more rest than in any other season. This is not to say that he does not dine upon the same weary fare of winter just as any of us do, salted meat, what fish or bird he can take from the streams and the forest, and very few vegetables if his store of dried pease and parsnips is a meager one. His cheeses he hoards as any dragon hoards his gold, but they never last the winter months through. And so the work he does, he does on lean fare. He mucks out his barns and hauls the manure and hay out to his fields to feed the soil, if he lives in those climes where the winters are not harsh, he will find himself with days in which he can tend to the thatching of his roof. He sets out snares for hares and quail and partridges; if he is near a frozen lake, he will drop fishing lines through the ice in hope of making for himself and his family a meal that is not salted or dried or smoked.

He plows the frost-cracked soil and sows oats in those fields of his that have been long growing other, more strenuous crops. These fields will do no more duty than to host that gentle crop that will feed his family, pay his taxe, and be stored for market and sold for the making of gruels and porridge and bread. He will cut wood for his fires and for springtime building; he will mend his hedgerows and his stone fences, always keeping his bow and full quiver near to hand in case Fate sends him the luck to see a thin and winter-weary stag venturing into his fields from the forest. He checks his flocks to see if the lambing has begun, counting the days from when he turned the rams into the enclosure with the ewes, for when the first lamb drops he will know that the lean season is past. Spring dawns in the moment the first lamb staggers up on wobbly legs to nuzzle his mother for milk.

A man of the earth, the farmer has no dewy-eyed notions of the sweetness of lambs beyond how tender the flesh is of those few he is already singling out for his supper. The time has come to eat well again and to begin the work of plowing his rested fields.

In spring the farmer sows barley. If his soil is sandy, as it is along the eastern parts of Coastlund, he will sow in the early part of the season. If his farm has clay in the soil, he will sow later. In this way, the barley for beer and stews and porridge will be found in the markets of small towns and large cities as soon as the second month of spring. After his barley, the farmer sows pease and oats and rye, then wheat. His hay he sows later, and harvests last, but he will, if late spring is warm and only reasonably wet, sow a fall series of crop again for harvest in early autumn.

His grains harvested, the rye and the wheat and barley corn, the farmer threshes and flails, separating grain from the chaff, and he and his family fill up the grain sacks and take them to the miller. One of those will be found in every region where grain is grown, be it a small quern, a grinding wheel turned by the power of men and women pushing against the spokes, or a water mill run by the strength of the element. Some of the finest millstones are the most ancient, imported from the lands around the dwarven kingdoms in days long gone.

At several mills I visited in Abanasinia I was told that the stones have tasted the grist of harvests from right after the First Cataclysm until last year, for they are well made and worth whatever the millers' ancestors paid for them. Perhaps, or perhaps that's family legend. It cannot be denied that some of the runes carved into the oldest stones still in use are made in a style long gone from use. Be his millstone old or new, in the hands of a good miller, grain can be ground fine or rough, and the wise miller knows what is best liked in the markets around. He takes a percentage of the grind for himself, to use in his household, to sell to merchants, and leaves the rest for the farmer to sell. It is still known around Haven today that the finest bread flour comes from farms in Haven's Vale, for there the farmers know how to tend their fields, and the millers treat their profession as though it were an art.

After his various harvests, the farmer sends his chickens and ducks and geese into the fields to fatten them on the hulls and grain fallen from the gathering and to let their droppings add nutrients to the weary soil. He tends to his hives and makes his bees welcome; he sends his sons out to hunt and sets his daughters to making butter and cheese from the milk of cow and goat. All around him the season bids fair for a good year, and he turns his thoughts toward the highways of Krynn, wondering how well they fared in the winter, how easy or difficult it will be to get his springtime harvests to market where he can sells them to townsmen or to traders passing by.

And so you see that your bread is born not in the baker's oven but out of the dark womb of the soil of winter, oats and rye and wheat planted and the first of it harvested when you imagine the farmer and all the world is sleeping.

For as long as they can remember, the Plainsfolk of Abanasinia have made wallets of sturdy hide, deep enough to hold a half dozen grass-hens and a fat brace of rabbits. Decorated with quills and stitchery, hung with a broad smooth strap of leather, this wallet fits comfortably over the hunter's shoulder. He can carry his catch for hours without feeling the strain. Among the Plainsfolk, to say a thing comes "out of the hunter's wallet" is another way of saying it comes from gods, for they still remember when gods walked the face of Krynn; they remember who they were and what bounty they could bestow. No like expression exists in the cities where men and women go forth and back to shops and market fairs. Though the array of food to be found in a market fair can be dazzling, no one says bounty comes out of the stalls of the sellers.

They are different, city folk and country folk, in their expressions and their understandings. For those who live in towns and cities, it is easy to think that the country man is hard pressed to find such fare as his town-dwelling cousin. Ah, but that's the city man's idea! He sees market stalls filled with wares, dried fish, and herbs hung in bunches, chickens and ducks and geese dangling in the poulterer's window, vegetables in their seasons, now and then a rope of figs and dates, garlic hung on strings… well, he says, it's a good life. However, the country man wanders these fairs and wonders how anyone would want to eat only smoked meat or salted, how the wife endures having to use dried herbs from which so much of the essential oil is long gone. How, he asks himself, can they stand to eat food that is covered in spices, not for flavor but to disguise the smell of rotting! He thinks he is the richer man, and perhaps he is.

The country man's meat is fresh from the bone, venison from the woods, rabbit from his meadows, and geese or hens from his own door yard. The eggs his wife scrambles are taken right from his own coop, the milk warm from his cows and goats. His mutton needs no spices to disguise a foul odor, his lamb is fed on the milk of his cows and tender as a pansy's petal. It might well be—nay, it is—that the farmer in Abanasinia or the Vingaard River Valley will never taste whale meat or stews made from the oily meat of seals, but neither will he find himself obliged to do more than salt his meat in autumn in order to enjoy it in winter. If there is little that is fancy or fine on his table, unless he is a witling, there is none that must have its unfortunate age hidden with exotic spices.

Taken from the sea in nets, lifted from the lakes and speared in icy mountain streams, gathered in still pools at the ocean's edge, the fishes of Krynn are part of our everyday fare. The well-to-do love to skin eels and boil them in stews, to steam clams and mussels, and to eat oysters right from the shell. Folks less fine are fond of trout stuffed with lemon grass or onion grass, pike dressed with mint or basil or thyme, and salmon dried on racks or baked in ovens or on flat rocks. The wealthy man, and the less wealthy when he can, will purchase fish packed in kegs and barrels, preserved in brine or the roughly ground salt taken from the shores of Sea Reach. Thus cured, these fish will keep through most of winter. People purchase racks of them dried to golden on the very ships that caught them up from the deeps. In cities and port towns, we are happy to go down to the docks and eat fish stews in the alehouses. We eat shark, and some folk in the cold climes eat whale meat, the tails being the kind of delicacy that will feast a whole village of Icewall folk. It is said that the people of the Ergoths, made newly cold by the changes wrought by the white dragon Gellidus, are learning how to like that rich fatty meat, for it is the best thing to keep them warm. Ogres, perhaps more accustomed to trusting instinct, took to whale meat at once, but report tells us that the elves, who imagine themselves to have more refined tastes, are not quick students, even all these years later. Humans and dwarves and ogres and members of other races than those will eat the meat of dolphins and porpoises, but you'll never find one of the elvenkind dining thus. They regard these creatures of the sea as too much like their shape-changing cousins the Dimernesti, and the likeness turns an elf’s appetite sour.

From the orchards of dragon-held Qualinesti and the lands on the arable side of Southern Ergoth come pears and apples and plums. From there, too, come such nuts as walnuts and pecans. On the sunny slopes of Hylo the kender grow three different kinds of apples, grapes for wine and for table, cherries and sloe, and a hard green pear that never looks ripe but, if eaten from the branch at just the right time, tastes sweeter than all the pears of Krynn.

They also grow mulberries for wine and make silk from the cocoons and webs of the silkworms who feed on the fruit. Thus they have orchards for each kind of harvest, being sure to keep the worms far from the trees from which they intend to gather fruit. They have lately learned to grow almond trees and export those for the milk and the meat.

Out of Mohrlex's realm come a local fruit unknown in any other regions, good for making liqueurs but for little else. This is the food of the wealthy or the farmer who has the sense to keep an apple tree in his dooryard, for few other than rich men can afford fresh fruit for their tables. It must be packed and shipped and taken often through dangerous lands. To get it to market in fair time without spoilage requires speed and luck and often the hiring of several strong mercenaries to defend the caravan. By the time the fruit comes to market, the man who wants to treat his wife to a sweet fresh apple will have to think about cracking open his coffers.

Dried fruit is somewhat less expensive, and fruit cooked and preserved in honey as a compote is, while not unaffordable, something the working man must save to have. It is seen most often on the tables of the laborer or shopkeeper in times of celebration, during seasonal festivals or marriage feasts. It is also true—almost axiomatic—that the servants in a rich man's hall, while dining on his leftover venison and goose and leek pies, won't be able to taste what is left of a sauce of plums and apples unless he's of a mind to run his finger along the edges of the empty plate. For the poor man, the berries that grow at the edges of the wood, gooseberries and elderberries and raspberries, are the only fruit he will see, and if he is fortunate, his wife will know how to do more than make pies of them. She will know how to make wine!

Every housewife grows her own vegetable, city dweller or farmer. In the castles and cottages, they grow pease and beans and carrots. They grow gourds in spring to eat in autumn and parsnips in winter. They plant turnips in early spring and then again after the first tufts are seen above ground. The ladies in their castles order their servants to grow artichokes and cucumbers, to sow cress with the lettuce and mustard beside those. Dandelion is grown for salad, spinach for steaming, and in all lands but the jungles of Nordmaar and the icy wastes of parts of the Ergoths and Icewall, onions grow from spring to winter.

In the ice lands, folk fare poorly for vegetables. It's said that the gnomes of Mt. Nevermind are trying to invent a process by which fresh vegetables are dried and need only be reconstituted. However not much more than piles of green and orange dust has resulted so far. To balance their diets, the icebound depend on meals made of beans and grains. The thanoi and the Icewall barbarians hardly care about that, never missing what they don't know, but the elves of Silvamori and Qualimori do still sigh for what they used to have.

Outside the icy lands, folk high and low like to have a house that smells clean, and so they make room in their gardens for strewing herbs, that is costmary and fennel and lavender and winter savory to mix in among the among the floor rushes. These hide, to some degree, the clinging odor of old meals and the wet dogs that he beside the fire on rainy nights.

On a hot summer's night in Palanthas, one that might make the elders of the city recall the terrible season the dwarves in the city named the Anvil Summer, the people of the city like to pour themselves tall pitchers of water and stuff handfuls of mint into the container. There is no ice to cool the drink, but if they are wise, the thirsty prepare this with a clay pitcher and water right out of the well. Soon they have a simple concoction of minted water that, if no cooler in temperature, certainly tastes deliciously refreshing on the tongue.

We grow our mint in as many varieties as we can, some tasting like peppermint or spearmint, some with the sweetness of apple or orange or lemon. We cook with them, drink infusions of them, flavor our water with them and, yes, strew the fragrant leaves and stems in the floor rushes so that every step releases the tangy perfume. Herbs are harvested and bundled to dry so they may be sent abroad in export. In Silvamori they will pay as much as one steel for a thick bunch of mint or basil or sage. Offer one of those poor chilly fellows a wreath woven of bay leaves and decorated with cinnamon sticks and he might consider reviewing the history of your family with an eye toward considering you his friend.

For decoration and flavor, herbs have always been well regarded. However, there are other uses for these plants of the woods and hillsides and gardens. There are those—I am one!—who recall the days when herbs and spices had a mystical air to them, for they were the stuff of mage-work. A bit of lavender oil, some dried rose petals, a pinch of orange mint, three seeds of the star anise plant, and a scant handful of the bark of the sandalwood tree, all gathered at the full of the three old moons and left in a stone bowl to dry until the dark… these, with the proper words and appropriate gestures, could get you sent halfway across the world on a spell of transportation. In these after days, though, all those things combined will get you a charming potpourri to perfume your bed linen. Yet no matter what land they dwell in, from what race they obtain, the lady in her hall, the farm wife in her kitchen, the apothecary in his shop, all understand that there is still a kind of magic in herbs, that which obtained before ever the Three Magical Children undertook to teach mortals the ways of high sorcery.

With the vanishing of gods went not only magic-craft but healer-craft, and the last is perhaps more sorely missed than the first. No more the closing of a wound or the cooling of a fever for the cost of a heartfelt prayer. Women die more frequently in childbed for lack of healers, children perish of fevers, and the infection of even a minor wound will take their fathers from them. Early in the Fifth Age, folk began to try to learn the new magic known as mysticism. It is true that those rightly taught can heal themselves and others, though the effort is not always rewarded with success. Thus the people of Krynn, in all lands, are turning again to the old ways of healing with herbs. With varying results, they have taught themselves how to cool a fever with powdered aspen bark, how to soothe an irritated stomach with infusions of chamomile and mint. They know that the bark of the slippery elm can soothe a sore throat, but they do not know what to do when the throat closes up, fevers rise too high, and the flesh falls from the sufferer until it seems there are not but bones beneath the piled-on blankets.

Here, then is a little table of the most useful of herbs, all of them grown in Qualinesti or Hylo, for those are the regions where such things fare best. Each is noted for both medicinal and culinary purposes.

Such herbs and diverse plants as are here listed should not he used by those who are not a long time trained in the craft of healing, though even the youngest and most inexperienced cook will have success with her meal if she uses these in the ways her mother did, or sparingly until she has learned her own way.

Bay: For medicinal purposes, the oil from the leaves of the bay plant, or sweet laurel, as the elves name it, is used in the bath to relieve aches and pains. In the kitchen, the leaves make a wonderfully spicy flavoring for soups and stews, or when rubbed on meat before roasting with salt and pepper.

Beech: The leaves of the lovely beech tree make an excellent poultice that reduces swelling due to sprains and strains, and an excellent treatment for skin diseases. The sap of the tree is often tapped and fermented for wine.

Beet, white or red: The juice of the white beet soothes headaches. The juice of the red is helpful in curing yellow jaundice. The roots of each, white and red, are rich in sugar and nutrients, and often boiled to serve with roasts.

Blackthorn: Known among kenders as sloe, the flowers of the blackthorn make excellent tonics, the plant's leaves freshen breath, and the bark, boiled and chewed, reduces fever. The fruit, or sloes, are excellent to eat fresh or to use in jellies, syrups, and wine.

Borage: The elves name this herb star flower, and all folk know that taken as a tea it will reduce fever and help heal lung infections. The oil is good to rub on arthritic joints, and the leaves, made into a poultice, help heal inflammations and bruises.

Bracken: This herb is brake to the elves of Qualinesti but has always been known as bracken to the rest of the world. Its roots are boiled and made into an ointment for healing wounds. Housewives have been serving the young, uncoiled fronds as a vegetable since the time of the First Cataclysm, and in Silvanesti they used to brew a kind of beer from them. Perhaps they still do.

Bramble: As well known by its other name, black-berry, the bramble's leaves are boiled as a tonic and used to help with dysentery. As a poultice they are excellent for burns and swellings and open sores. Those who gather the berries know that bleeding caused by the thorns is stemmed by rubbing fresh leaves on the cuts. The fruit of the bramble is eaten fresh or cooked and used to make wine.

Briar: Known as dog rose among dwarves, the hips of the flower are used to make tea for a gentle tonic. Rose water is soothing to sensitive skin. The petals are sprinkled over salads and, with the hips, used to make jam.

Clove-Pink: kender and some humans know this herb as the gilly-flower. It makes a fine tincture to use in easing faintness and headaches and malignant fevers. The petals flavor soups, sauces, jams, and wines.

Colewort: Among humans living in Tarsis, this herb is known as kale, and all folk know that the twiceboiled leaves taken with broth are cures for pains of liver and spleen and stones in the kidneys. Taken with honey, the juice will ease a hoarse voice. Made into an ointment, colewort eases muscle aches and painful skin rashes. Colewort is also tasty as a vegetable, boiled and pureed.

Marjoram: This is an excellent herb for easing indigestion and earache, and for use in the treatment of dropsy. Teas made of marjoram relieve wind and have been known to help cure colds. In the kitchen, marjoram is used to flavor soups and stews and meats.

Palsy-Wort: Also known as cowslip, the leaves of this herb make a good salve for healing wounds, a tea for headaches, and the kender say the roots will heal arthritis. The leaves and flowers are good for salads, the flowers for wine, vinegar, and mead.

Parsley: Dwarves have long used parsley to cure gout and asthma. Render use it for coughs. All folk know to chew it raw to freshen the breath and to use the leaves in a poultice for sprains and insect bites. In the kitchen the leaves are added to sauces and soups, and the roots are boiled as a vegetable.

Primrose: Known to elves of both Qualinesti and Silvanesti as first rose, the primrose is often used as a blood purifier and for coughs and sore throats. The flower and young leaves have been used by elven cooks as additions to salads, and the mature leaves are sometimes boiled as a vegetable.

Rose: A favorite in gardens everywhere they will grow, roses yield an oil that is wonderful for soothing chapped skin. Their petals are added to salads, and rosewater flavors confections and sweet dishes.

Rue: The people of Solamnia know sow-thistle as herb of grace and use infusions to help quiet headaches and ease strained eyes, colic in babies, and wind. In the kitchen, the leaves are sprinkled over salads.

Self-Heal: This is a wound herb, good for healing cuts. The young leaves are often cooked as a vegetable, but older leaves are bitter and unpleasant to taste.

Sow-Thistle: The kender call this hare's lettuce, and they use if for fevers, deafness, and stomach pains. In Tarsis, people eat the leaves raw in salads or add it to soups and stews for flavoring.

Violet: White flowered or purple, the violet is found all over Krynn, in every land hut the Northern Wastes and the New Swamp and those unfortunate places dragon-blasted by flame or ice. The leaves ease coughs and colds and soothe headaches. As a poultice, they heal skin rashes. The petals of the violet are sprinkled over salads and clear soups and are used to make wine.

Willowherb: Rosebay among the Plainsfolk of Abanasinia, willowherb eases migraine headaches and soothes stomach disorders. The shoots can be boiled and eaten, the leaves infused for tea.

We have, now, spoken of the rule of the seasons, of sowing and tending and harvest and the way the world turns from spring to summer to fall and winter. And we have, earlier in this treatise, mentioned those folk of Krynn who do not depend on the seasons for their harvest. These are the mountain dwarves of Thorbardin, for at the time of the Dragon Purge they shut their great gates against the danger, and against the world. Dwelling in their magnificent underground city, they are, of all races in Krynn, the most capable of utter self-sufficiency. These are the farsighted of Krynn, at least when it comes to their own well-being, and so when the gates of Thorbardin swing shut, they do so upon folk who are confident that they will eat well, live well, and in the comfort of their homes and halls and taverns, be free to speculate upon the madness of the world as they call for another tankard of ale.

How do they manage this, living beneath the mountains and away from the seasons, even the very turn of day into night? Why, they manage very well, for their long fathers in ancient days instituted a system of farming warrens to feed the people when the outside world could not be counted upon to behave well or sanely. It's true the dwarves miss some of the finer things they had become used to enjoying from trade with other races and nations, but if they sometimes wish for a sip of elven wine, for a jam of sloe out of Hylo, or a meal made from some of the more exotic fishes available from the Dimernesti elves, they dine well off cattle they raise in the East Warrens, beasts grazed on the fields made long ago, in the time before the First Cataclysm. Those fields, as level as a tabletop, produce grasses and hay; they are watered by a cunning system of irrigation that brings water right in from the Urkhan Sea.

Where is the light? In that underground kingdom, how do they find the sunlight, so necessary to the good health of crops? A kender once asked about this, a long time ago, speculating that perhaps the dwarves brought the light into their city in buckets. (Well, we are talking about a kender here, not a sage.) He reckoned the buckets would have to be tightly lidded, perhaps even lined with lead so the light wouldn't leak out before it got to where it needed to be. And he thought that maybe it would be a long and arduous task ("Harduous," he said to himself, "very, very harduous!") to drag in all that light.

Arduous? Rather, say, impossible. However, the dwarves of Thorbardin, by the great good grace of the gods, don't think like kender. They think as engineers do, and so they located veins of clear crystal and widened them into shafts through which the sunlight could shine down. There beneath the tumbling light, they build their farming warrens. Warmed and nourished by the sunlight, the fields beneath the mountain are as fine and green as any you will see in Abanasinia or the Vingaard River Valley.

This system of in-drawn light and irrigation also keeps the Farming Warrens in productive good health. In some fields are the cattle we mentioned, for meat and for milk with which to make cream and curds and a variety of cheeses. In other fields, the dwarves grow oats and barley and wheat and rye, just like top-siders. From these they make breads of all kinds, and with those grains they name "the drinking grains," barley and hops, they brew beer and ale. With corn they feed their cattle and themselves, being sure to plant enough for use in distilling that clear and wondrous drink known as Dwarf Spirit. The delight of any dwarfs heart, this fiery concoction is the bane of all outsiders—even minotaurs!—who are, with rare exception, constitutionally incapable of taking more than two swallows without finding themselves face-down on the floor.

Beyond the fields, orchards grow, and bees are kept to pollinate all crops and provide the city with honey. Here are apple trees and peach trees, though the more delicate fruits such as blackberries and plums refuse to grow. In gardens, near the warrens and within the city itself, the dwarves grow herbs and vegetables. In their own section of the warrens, chickens and geese are kept carefully quartered and tended, so no dwarfs table is in danger of missing a good roast chicken, and their quilts and pillows lack no down.

This, then, is how one lives unbound from the seasons. It suits dwarves well enough. By all accounts, they seem to thrive. One cannot imagine—or one who is not a mountain dwarf cannot—how it would be, though, not to feel the wind on the face, the touch of rain, the bite of winter. We are bound to the seasons, we who are human and elf and kender and minotaur, we who are centaur and dryad. I daresay even the Neidar dwarves are, for it has been many long centuries since they knew the inside of the mountain. Bound and held, but gently in thrall, for this is the way of our world.