The strange country is very strange, though maybe Taldor would've seemed just as strange. It's hot, and rain never falls from the sky but pours sometimes out of the ground, in great arcs that water all the crops. The buildings sometimes have see-through walls and there are a lot of bizarre varieties of dog.

There's a trailer park out behind the crop fields, occupied half the year when there are seasonal workers in town, and a McDonalds, and a 7Eleven, and a laundromat.

No one pays her particular mind, at first, except to watch her suspiciously if she enters any of the stores. 

Probably they think she is a thief, because strange poor children without parents are usually thieves. It's also a pretty fair guess, because if she doesn't find another way to feed herself soon she'll have to start stealing before hunger makes her weaker and more likely to get caught.

It doesn't take her very long to realize that even more urgent than finding a way to earn or steal food is finding a well. If she can't do that, she'll need to see if she can get water from the field-watering-magic, but probably if she tries that someone will get angry so she's not trying it first.

The city  - at least this part of it - appears to be totally devoid of wells, and even of animals which would require a water trough; there are some constructs occasionally lumbering by at impressive speeds, and lots more still ones about, and they seem to have replaced horses entirely. 

The people working in the fields seem to carry their own water, in big colorful canteens, which are sold in the stores.

Yes, but where do they fill the canteens.

- flexible snake-like water pipe extending from that there building, when they take a lunch break.

...this is very suspicious. Does it move on its own?

Nope. It is a very docile water-snake when not spitting water to fill all their canteens.

Sure it is. She'll creep up and poke it with a stick, and when that doesn't elicit a response grab it just behind the head while she tries to figure out how to make it spit.

Little wheel over by the place where it enters the building. 

Someone sees her fiddling with it and asks a question, not obviously hostile, in the language she doesn't understand.

She'll say that she doesn't understand what he's saying, but she's trying to make the snake make water because she's very thirsty. Just in case he can understand her. She'll also try pantomiming it in case he can't.

- he doesn't seem to recognize the language at all, but he does not begrudge her the snakewater. 

It is clean and delicious and hot at first but cool after a minute.

She drinks her fill and thanks him for the water, and thanks the snake also. Does it look like he is the lord of this estate or one of the workers?

One of the workers; he is drenched in sweat from the hot summer day, and his clothes are brightly dyed and strangely made but have visible wear-from-years-of-labor, and when she is observably not badgering the snake too much he gets back to picking the fruits they are picking.

She should leave, then, so he won't get in trouble for letting her take water from the snake.

The next thing she needs to do is get food. She could help the farmers and maybe share their food, but many clans do not follow the laws of hospitality. Maybe she would get no food until she married one of the men. Or maybe the lord would see her and make her a slave - some tribes do take slaves, she knows that. But her only other option is to steal, and if she gets caught they will kill her and she will be gnawed by locusts forever. It is better to be a slave or a wife than to be gnawed by locusts forever, she thinks.

Alfirin watches the farmers for a few minutes to see what they are doing, then starts picking fruits and putting them in another worker's basket.

"I want to help and share food with you." She doesn't try pantomiming it because she doesn't know how to without risking saying that she wants to eat the fruits they are picking, which the lord would obviously not allow.

- yeah he looks kind of alarmed at the prospect that she'll eat the fruits and tries to swat her hand away. 

...then relents, if she'll just put them in the basket. Points across the field at - the overseer, must be, on a big construct-mount, and gestures to the effect that he will look and see and be angry. She can work if she can not be seen, got it?

Yeah, she gets it, if the overseer catches her she will be made a slave too. She is small, she can work and not be seen. It's not going to work forever, she'll be caught eventually, but she can do it today and come up with another plan later.

When the basket is full the man takes it to be weighed on a great metal balancing scale and exchanged for - paper? He handles it like money, tucking it away in a pouch inside his shirt, but it's paper - and gets another basket. When the day is done they weigh what they have and head over to the trailers. 

A couple people ask her questions in an unfamiliar language. They mostly ignore her when she proves not to speak it. 

The man she's been working with sits down at a camp stove, where someone's frying tortillas and adding beans, the expensive beans with bacon bits mixed in, and has some kind of apparently very entertaining conversation about her. It doesn't seem hostile, exactly, and he's made no wife-related moves. When the tortillas are done he hands her one. "Okay? We even?"

"I still don't understand you but I am very grateful!"

More (probably friendly) laughter. Incomprehensible conversation from there. They have lights, here, even though these people otherwise seem like ordinary laborers; they turn them on when the sun goes down all the way, and stay up talking a little longer. 

One man offers her a place to sleep but probably not in an entirely friendly way.

No, she has not tried enough other plans to marry one of these men yet. She will find somewhere else to sleep. (Somewhere else might be the ground).

His friends laugh. He seems mildly annoyed, but not all the way to angry. She can sleep on the ground. It's not that cold, and the ground is nice and dry. 

She sleeps curled up with her two possessions (the spellbook that got her here and a bone knife) inside the front of her shirt where they'll probably be harder to steal.

In the morning is she joining them for work again? They start at dawn, in the next field over. Same fruit - it's some kind of berry.

They eat porridge before work; no one objects to her taking some. One man is also frying bacon; that he is not sharing.

Sure, she will join them today; it means food and snakewater and time to learn the language and a place to sleep where she won't be attacked by wild beasts (even if it is just the ground).

If she's joining at the start of the day she can get her own basket and exchange it for her own paper when it's full. (The farmworkers, mostly men, are stronger and faster than her, and their baskets fill faster, but she can still get some paper by the midday break.)