Nessa Harwick had never met a Lizardman until she was fourteen.
This was not unusual. Nessa grew up in the Shimmerfields — the kingdom's agricultural heartland, population 145,000, eighty-three percent Human. The Shimmerfields' population was Human because the Shimmerfields' climate was temperate, the Shimmerfields' agriculture was grain-based, and grain farming was a skill that Human settlers had brought from their predecessor civilizations and refined over two centuries of continuous cultivation. Lizardmen didn't farm grain. Lizardmen absorbed heat through their scales and preferred swampland and high humidity and the particular ecology of the Green Basin that Humans found uncomfortable and Lizardmen found optimal.
