The second raid on Outer Light more than doubled Haven’s population. The first raid had more than tripled it, but it was a difference of scale. Not to mention that over the last few years, the population had already nearly doubled with all the soldiers freed from Wasolan.

Tengu was very happy to give credit to Jules. It wasn’t anything like simple good luck that Jules had been so successful at integrating all of the new soldiers into Haven’s society, even if they did spend the majority of their time out of the city fighting.

What Jules had managed with the freed soldiers was a self-regulating system. Those soldiers who took better to the ideas and organisation of Haven played a strong role in pushing their fellows further into line. Though there had been some problems, especially among the small number of defected soldiers, none had needed more intervention than a stern conversation or two.

The newly freed slaves, and most of the wives, from Outer Light constituted only a logistical problem. There was nowhere near enough housing for an additional fifteen hundred people.

While the siege had been ongoing at Lookout, Haven itself had been busy. The couple of hundred people there had finally decided it was worth clearing and levelling the land around the town on a hill into farmland. The intent had been to replace the farmland lost by Lookout, so that food would be ready when the siege was ended.

Haven had thought they had had an absolutely massive surplus of preserved food. Given that if fed about four times the number of people they had expected for about a month, they had been right.

Only a portion of the first and second wives who had left Outer Light with Haven posed an ideological problem. Though they considered themselves willing to learn and adapt, and had sought the change and freedom here, they struggled with it more than the rest.

In the hierarchy of a man’s wives in the Lord’s House, once he has more than two, the first two are in charge of the house. In cases like that of Esera and Ilbira, where a man had only two wives, it didn’t typically work in the same way. Any more wives after that were either slaves or spare servants who otherwise weren’t attractive marriage offers. They were the equivalent of domestic slaves in the Lord’s House.

So first and second wives, who had had their domestic slaves, were vaguely outraged at being expected to work. Even when they got past that, they often had absolutely no idea how to work.

It was a lack of education that constituted the biggest problem among the whole cohort freed from Outer Light. Many of the slaves freed from the pit volunteered to move to the quarry near Lookout, so that they could be immediately useful to their new home. Many of the wives took to cleaning the bunkhouses that everyone got stuck in.

There had not been any kind of formal schooling in Haven before. When people wanted to learn things, they could easily find someone who already knew and just tag along. Now, there were far too many new people for that to be feasible.

A strategy that thankfully remained effective enough was gathering a big group at one of the many gardens inside Haven, or at the fields outside when the gardens needed to shrink to fit more houses, and shouting loud enough. Everyone in Haven knew how to farm, there were enough people to supervise and ensure that everyone knew what they were doing.

What they were doing, in as much of a hurry as they could, was expanding the fields outside of Haven. It was not a surprise that the food ran out as quickly as it did, it was a surprise that it didn’t run out sooner.

With the rest of their time, they could get lessons in smaller numbers about other things. Tengu helped develop some notes to teach classes on how things worked in Haven, but was very rarely around to actually teach on the subject.

Beln and Tengu, who would probably have been quite good as teachers, spent much more of their time in Lookout, talking to the prisoners there. Ato and Emen, who would probably not have been as good as teachers, were mostly at Outpost, helping the war effort in Wasolan.

It was very strange for Ora, who was in Haven, to be consistently away from both Tengu and Ato. She’d barely been separated from Tengu in the last seven years, and barely been away from Ato in the last two and a bit.

What exactly Tengu and Beln, and some others, were hoping to achieve with the prisoners was unclear. It seemed to be an experiment, more than anything else. Any of the prisoners who escaped from Lookout, or were allowed to leave, would be welcomed back into the Lord’s House. But on the other hand, they had been abandoned by their comrades and leaders.

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Esera’s observations were validated when classes on learning to read and write were dominated by first and second wives. A majority of slaves in the Lord’s House knew how to read, having learned by the time they were enslaved, or been sold by Wasolan or Ovek, where slaves could learn to read.

Esera, upon discussion with some of the other ex-midwives who had ended up in Haven, decided to start up a sex education class. They were not surprised by just how difficult it was to get anyone from the Lord’s House to attend. They were surprised by how many men from Wasolan turned up. Almost all of them made the joke at some point that they thought they’d be learning to be better at sex. They all stayed for the classes anyway.

Andros gave classes on cooking and fermenting vegetables. Weir and Osmond gave classes on electronics. Mu and Hobbs didn’t stay in Haven long, but while they were there they gave classes on material science.

There wasn’t much of a set schedule at the school, only a couple of people came to give classes at regular times. People who knew things, or even just wanted to talk about a subject they were interested, came and gave classes whenever they wanted. Though a requirement was added that people give notice, so that interested parties would know when the classes were happening.

When kids started coming to give classes on games they liked to play, the school was considered a success. If there was something you were interested in talking about, there was a good chance there would be someone who wanted to hear you talk about it.

The militia training grounds went back to work teaching people how to fight with spears and bows and, what with all the steel Altok had given them, even fencing with swords and axes and hammers. It was slightly more formal than the school, with some requirement of demonstrated skill, but only slightly.

Ora wasn’t the only person behind organising a group for religious discussion, though it was possible she was the first to think of it. Though the freed slaves and wives shared the honour of being specifically hated by their holy book, there was an inevitable degree of belief among them.

Haven was only technically a secular nation because it had vanishingly few established laws. The majority of the populous shared some degree of belief about the Lord of Light and Mistress of Shadows, even if they could see clearly that following those beliefs would only harm them.

Ora was surprised when more people were interested than horrified when she said she did sometimes pray to the Mistress. She figured that somethings were Her domain, in particular acting against the Lord’s House. It sparked lively discussion.

No doubt everyone who attended had different reasons to be interested in the group, but Ora’s biggest motivation was the isolation she’d felt through that first year in Haven, not really have anyone who understood where she was coming from. She worried that if fifteen hundred new people felt isolated from Haven, it would cause bigger problems than two weeks of rationing food before the expanded farms started to produce enough.

Over the first three months after the end of the siege, quite a few buildings within Haven ended up being torn down. The ancient suburb by the western gate remained, with most of the newer houses built up around it. But most of the houses were shifted, and deeper foundations were dug to build up some of the apartment buildings even higher.

More future-proofing was done, this time. Not just bunkhouses for people to stay in while a new house was built. Extra houses and taller apartment blocks, more gardens and the first few parks. It was a bit slapdash at first, but the development of plumbing followed very closely behind the raising of these big blocks of apartments.

After three months of living in bunkhouses, the new people from Outer Light could start moving into apartments. The apartments continued to be disrupted for another couple of months while the plumbing was set up, and then re-set up after some more development of the concept.

Close to a hundred of the prisoners from Lookout had decided, over the last three months. About half of them had changed their minds, but had not returned to the Lord’s House. There were a hundred or so left in Lookout, who had too firmly embraced the concept of sin, and the rest had been allowed to leave back to the Lord’s House.

After six months, Haven could house up to five thousand people, if the need arose. It couldn’t yet feed them all on short notice, by they were working on that. Outpost and Lookout followed suit. Lookout shifted entirely to apartment blocks to compress the housing, and expanded the walls to fit a good chunk of farmland inside, along with the fields outside. Outpost took a similar design, but lacked the motivation to build up the wall.

Seventy of the prisoners from the Lord’s House had decided to stay in Haven. They struggled more than anyone else to integrate, but they seemed to be doing their best.

The only settlement to barely change was the Sand Crawlers’ base, which was starting to feel similar to what Lookout had been before the first visit from the Lord’s House.

It wasn’t all good news, unfortunately. The Lord’s House was fairing much better than expected in the renewed war with Oszrath. All the effort put into developing portable defences and reinforced siege weapons had given them a drastic advantage against a nation who had done none of the corresponding development of portable siege engines and traps.

Though Kzara had pushed Wasolan quite a good distance east from the old western edge of the lines, some conveniently defensible geography had brought that war back to a stalemate. It was still going much better than it had been before the siege on Altok.

While Altok was lending a hand to Kzara, they couldn’t get nearly as much done against the properly garrisoned cities. They had destroyed Rhatal again and rescued the slaves from there, again. This time, Rhatal was staying destroyed.