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Show WORTHING FARM/3 Elijah. To boil over the fire for a few minutes, then to drink as soup or tea or stew when Alana found good roots in the forest and Elijah killed a hare. From the farm they had nothing. But this was Worthing Farm, and Elijah belonged to it. "This Worthing Farm," his old Grannam had said over and over until the ritual inhabited his dreams, "is the most important place in the world. It was for this piece of land that Jason brought the Ice People to life. It is our glory and power that we are the keepers of Worthing Farm. If you leave it the world will die to no purpose, and you will die the deep death that no one wakes from." Grannam said it and stared down at Elijah with her blue eyes, the pure bright blue that stared without breaking. Elijah stared back with eyes just as blue, and he didn't break, either. He never broke. Not during the winter when the fields stayed frozen and brown with no snow, and Alana began to murmur that the corn would never sprout. Not in the springtime when the ground was plowed and black but the rains didn't come to wet the soil. They had tried for a while to bring water from the river. Weeks of ten trips back and forth every day, gently dribbling the water down the rows: at last the young green shoots struggled to the surface. But no one noticed for two days as Elijah and the boys nursed Alana back to health. Elijah had come out the morning that Alana*s fever broke and looked at his field with the thin layer of green over the soil and knew that he would have to let it die. They couldn't carry a rainstorm on their backs, not forever. Elijah picked up the full buckets and walked on through the |