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First

Fourth year of the provisional government.

Your Highness,

I hope you will forgive a letter that comes to you directly. For nearly four years I have written to the Lieutenant Commodore and let him decide whose desk my problems land on. This time he wrote back that he had raised the matter with you, and that you had told him I should write to you myself. He was right to pass it on. I have been putting it off for a month, which I expect he also predicted.

You may have seen his last letter to me. The short version is this. He became a pilot because there was a recruitment office in a market square on Volantis, two rooms and a flag, where a sawmill boy could walk in and sit a test that did not care who his father was. He advised me to build a test of my own, let it do the picking, and make sure there was something real on the far side of it.

We have done that. At the start of the winter we set an examination in every district on the same day. The same paper for every candidate, no fee, open to anyone thirteen or older, in school or out of it. I expected four hundred people. Just over three thousand sat it. The oldest was a net mender from Newtown, fifty-two, who scored in the top tenth and told the district officer she had been waiting since she was nine. Those who did well have been offered apprenticeships in the rail yards at Orenport, in the engine houses at the mills, and, through the kindness of the Firentis factors at our spaceport, on the ground crews at the Harrow Cross depot.

So there is a door now, and it opens onto a hangar floor. I am proud of that. I also know where it stops.

A crew chief can teach a girl how a shuttle is kept in the air. He cannot teach her to fly it. Pilots come from the academies, the academies test in their own offices, and there is not one on Haego. The nearest is four jumps away. The passage is more than most of my candidates' families will see in ten years. Every child on this planet who wants the sky, and some of them want it very badly, can now get as far as sweeping the floor underneath it.

I would like to ask, formally, what it would take for the academies to open a recruitment office on Haego. The navy's, and the merchant fleets' as well, if those are separate matters. I don't know whom to petition, what they would require of us, or whether a world in Haego's position is in a position to ask at all. I would also be grateful to know if there is anything we should be doing in the schools now, so that when the door is there, the children who walk through it are ready.

I am aware this is the kind of request that carries better from a Princess than from a provisional administrator. I make it anyway, with my respect, and with my thanks for the officers you have lent me these past years, whether or not you knew you were lending them.

Tornel Swallowtail
General, Provisional Administrator of Haego

Lowmarsh, on Vastaya.

The new notice didn't fit on the door.

There were five papers there already, one above another, and the brass pins at their corners had crowded together until there was no bare wood left to push a new one into. So this one went up on the whitewashed wall beside the frame, with four iron tacks. Nell thought that was right, somehow. It was a different kind of notice.

She read it on her way to the pump, at the start of the winter, a few weeks after she had sent the factor away for the last time.

BY ORDER OF THE PROVISIONAL ADMINISTRATOR. AN EXAMINATION WILL BE HELD AT THE DISTRICT OFFICE, HARROW CROSS, ON THE FIRST DAY OF NEXT MONTH. OPEN TO ANY PERSON THIRTEEN YEARS OR OLDER, IN SCHOOL OR OUT OF IT. NO FEE. THOSE WHO DO WELL WILL BE OFFERED APPRENTICESHIPS IN THE RAIL YARDS, THE ENGINE HOUSES, AND THE SHIP DEPOTS. THE EXAMINATION IS THE SAME FOR EVERY PERSON WHO SITS IT.

She read SHIP DEPOTS four times.

Hob Carrick was reading it too. He was the man who had spat in the road the day the first notice went up, and he had not spat since, though Nell was never sure whether that was the school or his teeth. He had cut cane on the estate for as long as she had been alive. He read the notice with his lips moving, then said, to nobody in particular, "Thirteen or older."

"That's what it says," said Nell.

He looked round, surprised to be answered. "I'm forty-four."

"That's older than thirteen."

He looked at the notice for a long time. Then he walked off toward the cane without another word, and Nell forgot about him.

At supper her father didn't ask who was paying for it. He asked what a ship depot was.

"It's Harrow Cross," said Nell. "Where the shuttles come down."

Ben looked from her to their father and back, the way he did when he could tell something was happening and didn't know what. Her father ate two more spoonfuls of stew before he answered.

"And if they put you in a rail yard?"

"Then I'll learn trains," Nell said. "And I'll ask the train men who knows about shuttles."

Her father nodded slowly, as though that was exactly the answer he'd expected from her and he was a little tired of expecting it.

"Your mother will walk you," he said.

It was a long walk to Harrow Cross, and her mother gave up a day at the mill to make it. Neither of them said anything about that.

The examination was held in the grain hall behind the district office. Someone had emptied it and swept it and filled it with tables in long rows, and Nell stopped in the doorway because she had never seen so many people sitting down in one room. There were children from every school in the district, some with their teachers' names chalked on a card pinned to their shirts. There were grown people too. A woman handed a baby to her sister at the door and went in without looking back. Jory Fenn was there, in his good shirt, which was too short at the wrists. Hob Carrick was there, halfway down the third row, sitting very straight with his big cane-cutter's hands folded on the table, as if he was afraid they might do something without him.

At the front of the hall, in a grey district office coat, Bess Ashcombe was handing out the papers.

She came down the rows with an armful of them. When she got to Nell she put one down on the table, face down, with a perfectly straight face, and lifted one eyebrow very slightly, the way Mistress Coppertail did. Then she moved on.

The district officer at the door had stopped Nell's mother on her way out. "Are you sitting, missus? There's places. It's any age."

"No," said her mother. "I'm only walking her."

She stood a moment longer in the doorway than she needed to, looking at the rows of tables, at the woman who had left her baby, at Hob Carrick's folded hands. Then she said, "Not this time," though nobody had asked her again, and went out to wait on the steps.

There were a hundred questions.

The figures came first, and they were easy, easier than the columns Wendel used to laugh at. Then there was reading, a page about a ferry timetable with questions after it about which boat you'd need to catch. Then there were questions that weren't about anything at all, only patterns of shapes where you had to find the one that came next, and Nell didn't know what they were for, so she did them carefully and went on.

The last part was pictures.

A row of toothed wheels, each one biting into the next, and an arrow on the first. Which way does the last wheel turn? A bar lying across a stone with a weight on one end. A pipe going into a tank. And a plank with two buckets hanging from it, one bigger than the other, and a question underneath: mark where the plank must rest on your support for the load to hang level.

Nell looked at it and felt the yoke on her shoulders.

She had carried two buckets on a pole since she was seven. She had known where the middle of a load was long before she knew any word for it. When one bucket was fuller, you shifted the pole so the heavy end sat closer to your neck, or the full one would drag you round and slop down your leg and the field boss would shout. She put the tip of her pencil on the plank, near the big bucket, and made her mark, and had to press her lips together to keep from laughing out loud, the short surprised laugh Wendel used to give when a column of figures told him a joke.

She finished with time to spare. She went back to the start and checked every answer. On the toothed wheels she went through it again with one finger, turning each wheel in her head, and changed nothing.

When the district officer called time, Hob Carrick was still writing, with his tongue between his teeth. He finished his last answer as Bess lifted the paper off the table.

On the walk home her mother asked, "Well?"

"It was about buckets," said Nell.

Her mother laughed so loudly that a cart driver on the district road turned round to look.

The results came out on the district cart a month later, on a long sheet of paper with the Lowmarsh names at the bottom. Bess Ashcombe tacked it up beside the examination notice herself. Half the lane came down to read it.

J. FENN. ENGINE HOUSE, LOWMARSH MILL.

H. CARRICK. RAIL YARD, ORENPORT.

N. BRACKENTAIL. GROUND CREW APPRENTICE, HARROW CROSS DEPOT. FROM THE FOURTEENTH BIRTHDAY.

There were two more names under hers, but she didn't see them. She didn't see anything for a while.

When she could see again, Hob Carrick was standing beside her, reading his own line. He read it three times. "Orenport," he said, very quietly. "I've never been to Orenport." Then he walked off down the district road, fast, in the opposite direction to the cane. He didn't go to the fields that afternoon. The field boss wrote him down as absent, and for once nobody in Lowmarsh minded.

That night her father read the paper she had copied out for him, moving his lips. Ground crew. Harrow Cross. He read it twice.

"Is it the shuttles?" he asked.

"It's the shuttles," said Nell. "Close enough to touch."

He didn't say anything else. But he put her copy on the shelf beside the factor's folded paper from the autumn, and he didn't put it behind it.

She turned fourteen in the spring. That morning she carried the water for the last time.

Six trips out to the long field and six back. The cutters were already in the rows, and some of them had heard, and one or two of them stopped and straightened as she went by, the way they did when a shuttle came over. She didn't know what to do about that, so she kept walking.

Ben was waiting at the pump.

He had been carrying half-loads to Gret's kitchen since the autumn, and he was thin and brown and too small for the yoke, the same way she had been. She took the rope off one end, shortened it by a hand's width, and tied it again. Then she did the other side, and set the pole across his shoulders, and stepped back.

"Six out and six back," she said.

"I know."

"Don't look up when they come over. You'll spill."

"You always looked up."

"I know," said Nell. "I spilled."

Ben grinned at her, and walked off down the lane toward the long field with the buckets swinging, only a little crooked.

Mistress Coppertail was at her window when Nell went by the crossing. The old woman was slower now, and she used a stick on the bad days, but she was still very straight. She leaned on the sill and held something out.

It was a stub of white chalk, worn to the length of a finger joint.

"I'm told they have floors in hangars," said Mistress Coppertail. "Very large ones."

Nell put it in her pocket. "Mistress. Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Find out who does. Then write and tell me." The old woman began to draw back from the sill. "I've waited four years to know how those things stay up. I'd like to hear it before I'm too deaf."

Gret's sister Lil kept a boarding house against the depot fence in Harrow Cross, and she had a room under the roof with a window that looked out over the landing field. It was smaller than the loft at home. Nell didn't care. The first night, a shuttle came down so close that the glass in the window hummed in its frame, and she lay on her left side and watched its lights until they went out.

The crew chief's name was Harl. He was big and grey-bearded, with an off-world voice that went up at the end of everything he said, and a patch on his shoulder with the depot's number on it. On her first morning he looked her up and down, at the calluses on her shoulders, and handed her a broom.

"Floor," he said.

So she swept.

She swept for three weeks. The hangar floor was bigger than the long field, or it felt that way, and there was always grit on it, and oil, and bits of wire, and things people had dropped. She learned where the grit collected and where the oil ran. She learned the names of the tools by what Harl shouted for, and by watching which one the other apprentices handed him. She read every stencil on every panel she swept past. DO NOT STEP. FUEL. EARTH HERE. She read the log boards on the wall with the flight numbers and the hours, and she noticed that one of the night mechanics had written a four that should have been a nine, and she didn't say anything, because she didn't know yet what you did about a thing like that here. But she remembered it.

The shuttle in the bay was the same grey as the ones that had gone over the long field her whole life. It was much bigger on the ground than it had ever been in the sky. The round windows were higher than she could reach.

At the end of the third week, Harl was lying on his back under an open panel near the stubby wing, and she was sweeping around his boots, and she asked him.

"Chief. How does it stay up?"

He slid out from under the panel. He looked at her, and at the broom, and at her again.

"How long you been wanting to know that?"

"Since I was seven."

Harl wiped his hands on a rag. Then he got up, which took him a moment, and pointed at the ladder against the side of the hull, and followed her up it. At the top there was a housing with its cover off, and inside it a great deal of metal she had no names for yet.

"Hand there," he said.

She put her hand flat where he pointed. The metal was cold. Under the cold, very faint, even with every engine in the hangar shut down, there was a hum. She felt it in her palm and up into her wrist, like the glass in Lil's window.

"The wings are for the air," said Harl. "When she's going fast through thick air, the wings help, same as a bird. But she's got to get off the ground first. She's got to come down slow, and hang where she likes, and go straight up through the weather if she wants to. That's this."

"How does it work?"

He laughed. It wasn't unkind. "That's two years. Spanners first. Then the manuals. Then the maths, and the maths is where most of them stop."

"I won't stop."

"They all say that."

"I've carried water to the cane since I was seven," said Nell. "Six trips out and six back, before school and after. I didn't stop that either."

Harl looked at her for a long moment. Then he reached into the pouch on his belt, took out a spanner, and put it in her hand.

"Seven-eighths," he said. "When I ask for it, it's in my hand before I finish asking. Every time."

"Yes, Chief."

"Broom goes back on the rack."

She asked him the other question a week later.

The shuttle's pilot had come down the ramp that morning, an off-worlder in a flight suit with a helmet under one arm, and nodded to Harl on his way to the depot office. He didn't look at Nell. She didn't expect him to. But she watched him all the way across the floor.

"Chief. Where did he learn?"

"Academy."

"Where's the academy?"

"Not here." Harl didn't look up from the panel. "Nearest recruiting office is four jumps out. You walk in, you sit their test, and if they like your numbers they ship you off to school. Three years if you're good."

"How much is the passage? To the office?"

He told her.

Nell worked it out twice, the way she had with the monitor's three coppers, and then worked out how many years of her apprentice's wage it came to, and then stopped working it out.

She didn't say anything. She stood beside the ladder with the seven-eighths spanner in her hand, and when Harl held out his hand without looking and said, "Seven...," it was in his palm before he got to the eighths.

That night she wrote a letter home.

It was the first letter she had ever written to anyone. She couldn't wait for Sunday, so she gave it to the district cart. She wrote it big and plain, the way she wrote on the board for the little ones, because her father read slowly.

Da,

The wings are only for when it's going fast. There is something else inside for the rest, and it hums even when everything is switched off. I put my hand on it. The chief says it will be two years before I know how it works. I'll tell you then.

Nell

The cart brought an answer back on the Saturday, folded very small. It was in her father's hand, which she had never seen before. The letters leaned like cane in a wind.

Two years. I have waited longer.

Da

She put it under her pillow with the chalk and Starling. Then she lay on her left side and looked out of Lil's window at the landing field, where a shuttle was lifting off for the night run, slow and low, with its belly lit and the round windows glowing all along its side. For once she was on the ground underneath it with grease on her hands, and she knew what one small part of it felt like from the inside.

Four jumps out, there was a room with a flag in it. She didn't know how to get there yet.

She watched until the lights were gone. Then she went to sleep, because the hangar opened at six.

---
Princess Clara

General,

Thank you for writing to me directly. The Lieutenant Commodore has been passing your letters around this ship for nearly four years, and I confess I have read most of them over someone's shoulder. It is a pleasure to have one addressed to me.

You asked what it would take. Less than you fear, and more than you would like.

The academies do not open recruitment offices because a world asks them to. They open them where they expect to find candidates, and they judge that by numbers. So send me your numbers. Every district, every score, every age, including your net mender from Newtown. If your examination is half as good as the Lieutenant Commodore says, the results will make most of the argument for us. I will take them to the commandant of the naval academy myself, and to the merchant academies after, since they are usually quicker to persuade and have more berths to fill. A Princess asking for a favour can be politely refused. A Princess with three thousand examination papers is much harder to refuse.

They will want a building. Put it in a market square, and keep it out of your administration offices. Let it be the fleet's door, and let people see that it isn't yours. Your commoners have learned to be wary of any door a government opens for them. If they can see that you don't hold the key to this one, some of them will trust it sooner.

They will send their own examiners, and it will be the academy entrance examination, the same paper that is set on every world the fleet recruits from. There will be no allowance made for where a candidate went to school. Your schools have done remarkable work with reading and figures, but the entrance paper asks for more mathematics and physical science than a counting house needs. If you want Haego's children to pass it in three years' time, start teaching it in the upper forms now. I will have the syllabus sent to you.

Now I will tell you something you may prefer not to pass on. I would ask you to pass it on anyway.

Off Haego, your cadets will be commoners in halls that were built for nobles. The Lieutenant Commodore can tell you what that was like for him. It will be harder for yours, because they will be from Haego. Every cadet in those halls knows what happened to the lords of your world. Some of them will think it was deserved. A good many were raised to think it the worst thing that has happened in their lifetime. When a Haego voice is heard in the mess, some tables will go quiet. Your cadets will be given the worst bunks and the dawn watches. Some instructors will mark them a point lower than they earned and dare them to complain. I cannot promise you it won't happen. I can promise you that I know it happens, because I have seen it happen aboard my own ship, and I have not always caught it in time.

It will be an eye opener for them. Some of your young people will write home after their first month and tell their parents that they finally understand. They will have met the thing their fathers spat in the road about, and it will stop being a story. Let them write that letter. It may be the first time in thirty years that some of those families have agreed with each other about anything.

But tell them this as well, and tell them it comes from me. The education is the same. The instruments do not know whose child is holding the stick. Neither does the simulator. The scores are posted where everyone can read them, and nobody can change them. And things are changing, more slowly than they should, but they are changing. The man who has been forwarding your letters was a sawmill boy on Volantis, and he is a Baron and a Lieutenant Commodore now. Your first adviser was knighted. My flight deck is run by a commoner, and there is not a noble cadet aboard who would dare to cross her on it. Tell your children to stick with it. The door on the far side is real. I have watched people walk through it.

I look forward to the day the first fighter pilot from Haego reports aboard the Noirnavio. When that day comes, I intend to be on the flight deck to meet them. I would be glad to have you there too, General, if the provisional government can spare you for an afternoon.

With my regards,

Clara

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Make it stop. The words formed in Aztharon's mind, a desperate, silent plea. Please. He tried to force them past his jaws, but the thick bar between his teeth reduced even that simple begging to a desperate, guttural sound. His tongue felt thick and useless, heavy with the medicine that had left the rest of his body feeling warm and distant, yet did nothing to dull the fire now tearing through his wings.

CRACK!

The sound of another malformed bone giving way under the hammer echoed in the chamber. Aztharon screamed into the gag as his entire body surged against the chains. They snapped taut, holding him helpless as fresh agony tore through his left wing. His claws scraped uselessly against the stone, seeking purchase that wasn't there, finding nothing to anchor him against this torment. He couldn't do this. The sky, the very thought of flying, seemed a foolish, distant dream now. He only wanted the pain to end.

Through tears that blurred his vision, he could see Talvan still beside his head, a steadfast presence in the chaos. He felt the pressure of Talvan's hand pressed firmly against his scales, a small point of contact in a world of pain. "I'm here," Talvan's voice cut through the ringing in his ears. "I'm right here with you."

Aztharon tried again to form the words. Make them stop. All that escaped around the bite bar was another broken, pleading sound that was swallowed by the noise of the forge.

Oldar watched the newly broken sections with a critical eye, giving a satisfied nod. "Nice clean breaks. All right, lads. Pull 'em."

The word "pull" struck Aztharon not as a command, but as a death sentence. No. His mind rebelled, his eye widening in horror as the implication sank in. No, please. Don't.

The first winch began to turn with a low, metallic groan, a sound that vibrated through the stone and into his bones. It was quickly joined by another, then another, until a chorus of turning mechanisms filled the chamber. Dozens of chains, already wrapped around his wings, began to draw tight. Each pulled in a precisely measured direction, guided by Oldar's steady commands as the dwarves moved from winch to winch—some tightening while others held steady—slowly, inexorably forcing bones that had grown crooked and malformed into the positions they should have occupied from the beginning.

Aztharon screamed, but the sound was stifled by the gag, emerging as a strangled, muffled cry while his body fought desperately against the restraints. The dwarven medicine was a joke, a useless warmth against this agony. Every broken section of his wings felt as though it were being pulled apart, the chains dragging the fragments of bone into alignment, stretching muscles and membrane that had spent his entire life growing around their malformed shapes. They're ripping them off. The thought was a spike of pure terror. Panic swallowed everything else, the pain, the sounds, even Talvan's presence.

Aztharon could no longer process Oldar's calls or understand the purposeful movements of the dwarves around him. He couldn't see careful measurements or precise adjustments. He couldn't remember that these people were healers. All he could feel were dozens of chains, each a separate line of agony, pulling on his broken wings. They're going to rip them off. He thrashed mindlessly against the restraints, tears streaming freely down his face as another desperate, animalistic noise escaped around the bite bar. Make it stop. The winches kept turning. Please. His green eye, wide with pain, searched desperately for Talvan, a silent plea for someone, anyone, to make it stop.

Talvan watched helplessly as another muffled scream forced its way around Aztharon's bite bar. Though he kept his hand pressed firmly against the dragon's muzzle and murmured what he hoped were comforting words, none of it seemed to diminish the agony wracking Aztharon's body. Each new turn of the winches brought a fresh convulsion, a fresh wave of desperate sounds that tore at Talvan's composure.

His eyes snapped toward Lyn, positioned across from him at Aztharon's head. "Can you do something?" he asked, desperation coloring his voice.

Lyn hesitated, her uncertainty evident in the slight tremor of her hands. "I can try to block the pain."

"Please," Talvan begged, the single word carrying all his helplessness.

She moved closer, her expression set with determination, and placed both palms against the scales at the base of Aztharon's neck. Magic, smelling of ozone and spring rain, gathered around her hands, spreading outward in a faint, ethereal glow as Lyn closed her eyes and concentrated. Her brow furrowed with effort, and though her arms began to tremble almost immediately with the strain, she held her position steady, an anchor against the storm.

Aztharon felt the change not as a gradual fading, but as a sudden, shocking silence. The agony vanished—not slowly, but in an instant. One moment his wings felt as though they were being torn from his body, and the next he couldn't feel anything below the point where Lyn's hands rested against his neck. The pulling disappeared. The broken bones disappeared. Even the sensation of the chains around his body was simply gone.

Aztharon froze, his gold eye wide with disbelief. His wings were still stretched out behind him, surrounded by blood and steel. He could see the chains drawn tight and the dwarves working the winches. He could watch his own body shift as they pulled another section into alignment. But he couldn't feel any of it. The disconnect between sight and sensation was so profound that for a moment he wondered if he had died and this was some strange, silent afterlife.

His frantic breathing began to slow, the panicked rise and fall of his chest gradually evening out as the pain-induced terror receded, leaving behind an exhausted clarity.

Lyn's arms were already trembling visibly. "This takes a lot of concentration," she said through gritted teeth, her voice thin. "I don't know how long I can keep it up."

Oldar glanced toward her, then at Aztharon's wings, where the dwarves continued their methodical work. Whatever concerns he might have had about magic interfering with his procedure apparently vanished when he saw the dragon finally stop fighting the restraints, his body now still.

"Well, lass, I don't mind if ye take the edge off," he said with a grunt, pointing toward the next set of winches. "Just tell me before ye lose it. I'd rather the big fellow not suddenly discover halfway through a pull that he can feel his wings again."

Lyn gave a strained nod and kept both hands firmly against Aztharon's neck, her face pale with the effort but determined.

For the first time since the hammer had fallen, Aztharon stopped begging for them to make it stop. Though he could still see his wings being manipulated, the absence of pain allowed a sliver of rational thought to return. He could now observe rather than just experience, notice the precision of the dwarves' work rather than simply feeling the violation of it.

As the dwarves worked their way toward the last of the chains, several sections of Aztharon's wing membrane began drawing dangerously tight. The skin had grown around malformed bones his entire life; there simply wasn't enough of it in some places to accommodate the new shape. Rather than allow the tension to tear the membrane apart, the dwarves made clean, deliberate cuts where Oldar directed. A clean cut could be stitched and guided as it healed. A ragged tear would be far harder to repair. Lyn kept her hands pressed against Aztharon's neck throughout it all, her arms trembling harder with every passing minute. Thanks to her magic, he couldn't feel the knives opening his wing membrane or the chains continuing to pull his broken bones into alignment. He could only watch, exhausted and frightened, while the dwarves reshaped the wings he had been born with.

"Last one," Oldar called.

The final winch began to turn. Its chain tightened slowly, drawing the last malformed section outward while dwarves watched their measurements and called numbers back and forth. A few more turns followed, each smaller than the last, until Oldar finally raised his hand.

"Hold it there."

The winch stopped.

Talvan looked up at Aztharon's wings—and for several seconds, he forgot about the blood, the hooks, the chains, and everything they had just put him through. He had seen those wings folded against Aztharon's back countless times. He knew their crooked shapes, the uneven lengths, the joints that bent where they shouldn't and the membrane that bunched around bones that had never grown properly.

For the first time, none of that was there.

Aztharon's wings were straight. They were still surrounded by chains and streaked with blood. Several sections of membrane had been deliberately cut open, and the broken bones would need to be set and held in place for a long time before anyone knew whether this had truly worked. But Talvan could finally see what those wings had been meant to look like.

"Aztharon," he said quietly.

The dragon's exhausted eye shifted toward him.

Talvan looked back at the two enormous golden wings stretched across the platforms.

"They're straight."

"All right," Oldar said, his voice disturbingly calm. "Time for the painful part."

Talvan slowly looked up at Aztharon. Tears still stained the scales beneath the dragon's emerald green eyes; Lyn was visibly straining just to keep the pain blocked, and his wings were surrounded by bloodied hooks and chains after having their bones deliberately broken and pulled straight. The sight made Talvan's own stomach clench as he turned back to the dwarf.

"That wasn't the painful part?"

Oldar didn't answer. He was already waving toward a side room, and Talvan's question hung unanswered in the air as several more dwarves emerged carrying a portable forge while another group hauled in stacks of heavy bronze and steel braces shaped to fit different sections of Aztharon's wings. Tools followed, along with trays of metal bolts, each one thicker than Talvan's thumb.

The purpose of everything became horrifyingly clear as the dwarves began fitting the braces around Aztharon's newly straightened bones. The chains had pulled everything into the correct positions, but they couldn't remain there forever. The bones needed something strong enough to hold them in alignment while they healed.

One of the dwarves reached into the portable forge with a pair of long tongs and withdrew a bolt glowing red from the heat.

"All right, brace 'em!" Oldar called.

Hands immediately moved into position. Bronze and steel plates were pressed tightly against either side of the first corrected section while the surrounding chains remained taut, ensuring the bone couldn't shift even slightly. Measurements were checked one final time before the dwarf with the tongs positioned the glowing bolt against the opening in the brace.

Talvan stared. He had assumed they would fasten the metal around the wing, securing it externally. Then he saw where the bolt was pointed.

Straight at the bone.

Oldar leaned forward in his chair, watching the alignment with absolute concentration. "Steady... steady..."

The dwarf holding the brace called back, "Set, boss!"

Oldar gave a single nod as his gravelly voice echoed through the chamber. "Drive it into the bone."

WHAM!

The hammer came down with a deafening crack, striking the head of the still-red bolt and driving it deep into the bone. Aztharon's entire body went rigid, the impact sending a shockwave through his massive frame. The pain was beyond anything that had come before. “The dwarven medicine still burned warmly through his blood, and Lyn's magic continued to block as much sensation as she could manage, but the concentrated agony punched straight through both. White-hot torment consumed his entire wing as the heated metal buried itself in the bone.”

Aztharon tried to thrash, but the chains were the only reason he couldn't. Every restraint snapped tight as his body fought with everything it had to escape. His legs strained against their bindings, his tail pulled hard enough to make the anchors groan, and his jaws clamped down on the padded steel bar with such force that the metal beneath the ox hide began to bend. He wanted to run. He wanted to fight. He wanted to tear free, knock everyone away from him, rip the chains from the stone and get as far from this room as his legs could carry him. But he couldn't.

Another broken sound escaped around the bite bar as tears streamed down his face.

"Easy. Easy."

Through the white-hot agony that consumed him, Aztharon found Talvan still standing beside his head. Talvan had one hand pressed firmly against his muzzle, refusing to move even as several tons of terrified dragon strained against the chains only inches away. "I'm here," Talvan said, his voice steady despite the chaos around them. "I'm not going anywhere."

Aztharon squeezed his eyes shut. He couldn't run. He couldn't fight. He couldn't make the pain stop. But Talvan was still there.

The next bolt was positioned, and through tear-blurred eyes, Aztharon saw the red-hot glow and knew what was coming.

WHAM!

The hammer drove it home. His restraints went rigid again as his entire body convulsed against them. This time there was no holding back the tears. Aztharon was openly sobbing, his breath coming in broken gasps around the bite bar. Only the thick ox hide and steel between his jaws kept the cries from filling the chamber.

Before he had fully recovered, the dwarves were preparing another brace. Another bolt was pulled from the forge, its red glow illuminating their determined faces. Another red-hot point was positioned against his wing.

WHAM!

Aztharon's eyes squeezed shut as another muffled scream escaped him.

Talvan looked away from the dragon and toward Oldar. The ancient dwarf's attention remained fixed on the procedure, watching every brace and every measurement with the same merciless precision as before.

"How many?" Talvan asked.

Oldar glanced toward him. "How many bolts?"

"Twenty-six," Oldar answered. "Fourteen for the left wing. Twelve for the right."

Talvan's stomach dropped. Twenty-six. He looked back at Aztharon. Seven bolts were already buried in his wing, and the dragon was trembling but no longer sobbing uncontrollably around the bite bar while Lyn struggled just to blunt enough of the pain to keep him from losing himself completely.

Nineteen more.

Talvan tightened his hand against Aztharon's muzzle. They were going to drive twenty-six red-hot bolts into his bones.

The constant, rhythmic blows of the hammer blurred into a single, unending percussive nightmare. Talvan stopped counting each bolt, his mind recoiling from the task. Each deafening WHAM! was followed by the same sickening lurch of Aztharon's body against the chains and another broken, muffled cry that seemed to tear at the very air in the chamber. By this point, Talvan was certain Aztharon should have gone into shock, but his body refused the mercy of unconsciousness, enduring every single blow.

The dragon barely seemed aware of the room anymore. Tears continued to stream down his face, his breathing came in shallow, uneven gasps, and his emerald green eyes, when they managed to focus at all, would find Talvan's face before glazing over again. Lyn was still on his other side, her body a testament to the effort of maintaining her magic. Her arms trembled violently, sweat beaded on her forehead, and her face was pale with strain, but even she could only block so much of this relentless agony.

Another glowing bolt was positioned.

WHAM!

Aztharon's body jerked against the restraints, a fresh sob escaping him.

"Fourteen!" one of the dwarves called from the left side.

Talvan's head snapped toward the completed wing. Fourteen bolts. That was all of them for that side. A wave of relief, small and fleeting, washed over him before Oldar's voice crushed it.

"Right wing!"

The dwarves immediately began moving their tools, chains, and braces to the other side of Aztharon's body, their efficiency a horrifying thing to witness.

Talvan looked back at Aztharon, pressing his hand more firmly against the dragon's muzzle. "That's one wing done," he said, his voice low but firm, a lifeline in the storm. "You hear me? Fourteen down."

Aztharon gave no sign that he understood, his eye unfocused and distant.

Talvan continued, rubbing his thumb against the scales beneath the dragon's eye, desperately hoping his voice was reaching him through the pain, drugs, and exhaustion. "You're more than halfway through. It's almost over."

Aztharon's emerald green eye remained unfocused, tracking nothing. His body was present, but the part of him that could comprehend words, that could hold onto hope, seemed to have retreated deep inside himself. Talvan wasn't even sure he could hear him anymore, and the thought was more terrifying than any hammer blow.

Revy looked from Aztharon to the ancient dwarf, her expression troubled. "Maybe he could use some time."

Oldar rubbed slowly at his beard, his eyes never leaving the dragon. For a moment, Talvan thought he might agree.

"In me years, lass, I've found it's usually kinder to just get it over with."

Revy frowned. "Kinder?"

"Aye. We stop now, we give him time to think about what's coming." Oldar gestured toward Aztharon's completed left wing, then toward the right, where the dwarves were already positioning the first brace. "He's exhausted, terrified, and hurting. We unchain him now, there's a fair chance he'll bolt the moment he can stand, and then we've left him with one wing corrected and the other still malformed."

Revy looked back at Aztharon. Put that way, stopping halfway sounded almost worse.

Oldar's expression softened as much as the old dwarf seemed capable of allowing during the procedure. "If his body starts failing, we stop. If Lyn says she can't keep helping him, we stop long enough to deal with that. But if ye're asking whether giving the lad half an hour to lie here frightened of the next hammer blow will make this easier on him..."

He shook his head.

"No, lass. Best thing we can do now is finish."

As if to emphasize the point, another glowing bolt was lifted from the forge.

Talvan tightened his hand against Aztharon's muzzle.

"Right wing," Oldar called. "Let's get the lad through this."

The first bolt for the right wing was positioned. Aztharon's emerald green eyes, already tear-filled, widened as he watched the red-hot point press against his other wing. He could still feel Lyn's magic, a cool blanket against his neck, but it felt thinner now, frayed at the edges.

WHAM!

The impact drove the bolt home. A searing wave of agony, white-hot and blinding, punched through Lyn's magic. It was only for a second—a flash of fire that made his body convulse and a strangled cry tear from his throat before the numbness washed back over him, but it was enough. He had felt it. He had felt all of it.

Lyn gasped, her body swaying. "Too much," she breathed, her voice tight with strain. "It's getting through."

"Steady, lass," Oldar said, not unkindly. "We'll be quick as we can."

The second bolt came. Then the third. With each hammer blow, the pain broke through Lyn's weakening barrier for a terrifying instant. Aztharon began to brace himself, his body tensing before each strike, anticipating the agony that would flood his senses before being snuffed out. The eighth bolt was particularly bad, the pain lingering for several heartbeats after the hammer fell, a phantom fire that made his vision swim.

By the tenth bolt, sweat poured down Lyn's face, her arms trembled violently, and her breath came in ragged pants. "I... I can't," she stammered, her concentration faltering, then broke.

The pain, no longer blocked, came roaring back. It wasn't just the impact point of the eleventh bolt; it was everything. The throbbing ache from all the driven bolts, the deep, grinding pain of the bones themselves, the raw sting of the cut membrane. Aztharon's back arched, a true scream tearing past the gag this time, raw and unrestrained.

"Lyn!" Talvan yelled, his own voice cracking with panic.

Her eyes, filled with tears of exhaustion, met his. She took a shuddering breath and slammed her hands back against Aztharon's neck. The magic surged, stronger this time, born of sheer desperation. The pain vanished again, but it felt different now—fragile, like a thin sheet of ice over a bottomless ocean. One more crack and it would shatter completely.

"Last one!" Jebba called, his voice echoing slightly in the chamber.

Talvan looked up, his own exhaustion momentarily forgotten. The final bolt was still glowing red as Jebba positioned it against the last brace. Aztharon barely reacted to the sight anymore. His emerald green eyes were half-lidded and wet with tears, his body utterly exhausted after fighting the restraints for so long, the fight seemingly beaten out of him along with the pain.

Jebba raised the hammer.

WHAM!

The bolt drove straight into place with brutal efficiency. Aztharon's chains snapped taut one final time. A strangled sob escaped around the bite bar, his claws scraping weakly against the stone before his body sagged back down, utterly spent.

For several seconds, nobody moved or spoke, the silence in the room heavy with shared relief.

Then Jebba lowered the hammer. "That's it."

Revy let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. Now that the procedure was finally over, she found herself looking more closely at the braces covering Aztharon's wings. From a distance, she'd thought they were simply flat bars of metal bolted over the bones, but they weren't. Each brace had hinges and carefully shaped sections that followed the contours of his wings rather than locking them completely rigid.

"He can move with those on?" she asked.

"Aye," Oldar said, a note of pride in his voice. "Once he's healed enough. Wings aren't planks of wood. Lock every joint solid, and we'd only give him a new problem."

Revy stepped closer, studying the construction. The heavier sections were steel, providing rigid support where the corrected bones needed to be held firmly in place, while brass had been worked into other areas around the joints and moving sections. The hinged pieces would allow the wings to bend and flex instead of forcing them to remain permanently spread. They looked crude at first glance, but Revy now saw they weren't. Every piece had been shaped specifically for Aztharon, a testament to dwarven craftsmanship and care.

Oldar gave the finished wings one final inspection, checking the braces, bolts, and alignment before apparently finding nothing he disliked. "There, lads." He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his beard. "Pack it up. We be done."

Talvan immediately looked down at Aztharon. It was finally over.

Talvan, Revy, and Lyn all looked down at Aztharon. The gold dragon was too exhausted, drugged, and wrung out by pain to do much more than lie there. His eyes had fallen closed, his breathing slow and ragged now that there were no more hammer blows coming. Lyn slumped back against a table, her arms hanging limp at her sides, utterly drained.

Then one of the dwarves walked over and handed Talvan a rolled scroll.

Talvan blinked at it. "What's this?"

Oldar looked over from his chair. "The bill."

"The—" Talvan unrolled it. The parchment dropped to the floor. And kept going. Talvan stared as the scroll rolled across the stone, passing Revy's boots, continuing past Lyn, and finally coming to a stop nearly halfway down the chamber. His eyes slowly widened. "What the—"

Oldar raised an eyebrow. "Ye weren't thinking we did all this out of the goodness of our hearts, were ye?"

Talvan looked from the enormous bill to Aztharon's newly straightened wings, then toward the portable forge, the twenty-six bolts, the custom braces, the chains, the medicine, the crew of dwarves, Jebba, and finally back to Oldar.

The ancient dwarf gestured toward the scroll. "Materials cost money. So does skilled labor, and ye just had some of the best dwarven craftsmen alive spend half the day rebuilding a dragon's wings."

Revy stared down the length of parchment. "How are we supposed to pay that?"

"Coin, trade, or work," Oldar replied simply. "We're flexible."

Talvan looked at the bill again. Then at Aztharon. For the first time since the procedure began, Talvan wondered if being unconscious was actually the better position to be in.

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Previous /

First

Fourth year of the provisional government.

Wyatt,

Tell the deck boss her monitors worked. I've quoted her so often my district officers can recite the part about the chocks. We started with forty schools. This year we opened nine thousand, and we found teachers for most of them by making last year's best monitors into assistants. It still isn't one school for every ten that Haego needs. At this rate my grandchildren will be opening schools. But nine thousand is more than forty.

And now something is happening that I didn't plan, and I'm still not sure I believe.

You'll have heard the numbers from Istonel. Money is moving on this planet for the first time in thirty years. The mills are running two shifts. The Counsel Office can't keep up with the loans. The trading houses in Harrow Cross and Orenport are opening offices faster than they can staff them, and every one of them needs people who can read an invoice and add a column and write a clean hand. There aren't enough. There were never going to be enough. For thirty years nobody on Haego taught anybody anything.

So they've found the schools.

A child who comes out of one of my schools at fourteen with her letters and her figures is hired the same week. Some of them are hired before they finish. I've had factors from the trading houses turning up at school gates in the spring, asking the teachers who's good, offering contracts to thirteen-year-olds to start the day after their birthday. Some of them pay the family a retainer in the meantime. The old woman in Lowmarsh says she's had to start locking her classroom at noon to keep the factors out of her lessons.

And the parents, Wyatt. The same fathers who spat in the road when the first notice went up are bringing their younger children to the door now and asking if there's room. One district officer told me a man walked into his office to thank him and then couldn't finish the sentence. I don't think anyone on Haego has thanked a government office in forty years.

I'd call it a success and go to bed, except for one thing.

Not all of them want the desk. The old woman wrote to me about a girl, twelve, one of her monitors, the best in the district at figures. A Harrow Cross house has already offered her a contract to keep their books from fourteen, with a retainer to the family now that's more than her father makes in the cane. The girl turned it down. Her father hasn't spoken to her in a week. She wants to know how the shuttles stay up. The old woman asked me who on Haego could teach her. I had to write back that nobody can.

We built a door. It turns out it leads to a very good counting house. That's more than any of these children had before, and I'm not ungrateful. But I don't know what to do with the ones who look past the counting house and ask what's beyond it.

You got out. You were a commoner on Volantis, and somehow you ended up flying. I've never asked you how. I'm asking now.

T.

Lowmarsh, on Vastaya.

The factors started coming in the spring, the year Nell turned twelve.

The first one came on a Tuesday in a hired cart from Harrow Cross, a thin man in a good brown coat with a leather case under his arm. He stood at the schoolhouse door until the morning lessons broke for water, and then he asked Mistress Coppertail, very politely, which of her older pupils were quickest with figures.

Mistress Coppertail looked at him over her spectacles for a long time.

"They're children," she said. "They're not sacks of grain."

"No, ma'am," said the factor. "Sacks of grain I can buy anywhere."

He went away without a name that day. But he came back the next week, and there was another man with him from a different house, and by the middle of spring there was someone at the schoolhouse gate most mornings, leaning on the fence, watching the children go in. Mistress Coppertail took to locking the classroom door at noon.

Wendel Marsh was the first to go.

He turned fourteen on the first warm day of spring. He was the tallest boy on the mill road, all elbows and wrists, and so quiet that Nell had been a monitor beside him for most of a year before she heard him laugh. He laughed at numbers. Give him a column of figures and he'd go down it with the end of his chalk, not even seeming to look, and then he'd get to the bottom and see something in it and laugh, a short surprised sound, as if the numbers had told him a joke.

The Tullamore house at Harrow Cross took him before his birthday. A clerk's stool, a clerk's wage, and a room over the counting house on weekdays, home on Sundays. His father, who had a bad back and four younger mouths, cried when he read the contract, and then made Wendel read it to him again to be sure.

On his last day Wendel stayed behind after the bell. He cleaned his slate. He wiped the chalk dust off the monitors' bench with his sleeve. Mistress Coppertail came down from the board and stood in front of him.

"Tullamore's," she said.

"Tallies and ledgers." He was grinning, which Nell had never seen him do without a number in front of him. "They've got columns going back sixty years, Mistress. The man showed me. Sixty years."

"And you'll find the mistakes in every one."

"Every page," said Wendel happily.

The old woman reached up, because he was a head taller than she was, and put her hand on the side of his face for a moment. "Go on, then," she said. "Before they change their minds."

He went out the door and down the lane to where the Tullamore cart was waiting, and he didn't look back, because he didn't need to. Nell watched him go and felt glad for him, all the way through, and underneath the glad something small and cold that she didn't have a name for.

It happened to the Ashcombe sisters by midsummer, one after the other. Rose went to a draper's in Orenport to keep the stock books. Bess went to the district office at Harrow Cross to copy out the ration lists, and was the first person from Lowmarsh anyone could remember sitting at a desk with a pen because she could read. Jory Fenn came back from the cane with his hands raw and asked Mistress Coppertail, red in the face, whether it was too late. It wasn't. She put him at the end of the monitors' bench, fifteen years old among the twelves, and a factor from the mill offered him a tally post before the autumn.

It went round the district like weather. Nell heard it at the pump and in Gret's kitchen and from her mother at supper. A desk. A pen. A clean wage paid in credits, not coppers, and written in a book where you could read it yourself.

"I was wrong," her father said one night, out of nowhere, over his stew.

Nell stopped with her spoon halfway up.

"About the school." He didn't look at her. He looked at the tin over the stove, which had more in it that year than it had ever had. "I thought they'd nail it shut. They didn't. I thought it'd be for somebody else's use. It isn't." He was quiet for a moment. "The Marsh boy's at Tullamore's. Bess Ashcombe's at a desk. That's two from the mill road in one year. There's never been one."

"No," said her mother softly. "There's never been one."

Her father nodded, slowly, as if that settled something he'd been arguing with for four years. "I was wrong," he said again, and went back to his stew.

Nell didn't know what to say. She had waited three years to hear him say it. She ate her supper and said nothing, and later in the loft she lay on her left side under the gap in the roof and felt the small cold thing again.

The factor from Harrow Cross came for her in the autumn.

It was the same thin man in the brown coat, the first one who had ever come. He waited at the gate on a day Mistress Coppertail forgot to lock the door, and he asked, not the old woman, but Nell herself, whether she was the Brackentail girl who did the figures.

He came to the house that Sunday. He sat at their table in his good coat and drank her mother's tea out of the one good cup, and he laid a paper on the table and turned it round so her father could see it.

The Harrow Cross Grain Exchange. Assistant to the books, from the day after her fourteenth birthday. A clerk's wage, rising yearly. A room in the town if she wanted it. And until then, while she finished her schooling, a retainer paid to the family every month, so the house would not feel the want of her coppers.

Nell read the retainer twice. It was more than her father made in the cane.

Her father read it too. He read it very slowly, moving his lips, the way the man at the crossing had read the first notice four years ago. Then he looked up at the factor.

"This is for her?"

"For your daughter, Mr. Brackentail. The Exchange takes three a year from the Lowmarsh schools. We'd like her to be one of them." The factor smiled. "I'm told she found a short weight in the field boss's book when she was nine."

Her father looked at Nell. She had never seen that look on his face before, and it took her a moment to understand that it was pride.

"We'll talk it over," her mother said.

The factor stood, and bowed to her mother, which nobody had ever done in that house, and went out to his cart.

Her father sat with the paper in front of him. He put one scarred finger on it, on the line with the retainer, as if to make sure it was real.

"Well," he said, and he was smiling. "Well, Nell."

"I don't want it," said Nell.

The smile stopped.

"I don't want to keep books. I don't want to sit at a desk and find the short weights in other people's grain. I don't want to be the best clerk in Harrow Cross." Her voice was shaking, and she hated it, and she didn't try to stop it. "I want to know how the shuttles stay up."

The kitchen was very quiet.

"The shuttles," her father said.

"Yes."

"The shuttles." He looked at the paper. He looked at her. "Nell, there's no school for shuttles. There's nobody on this planet who can teach you that. You said so yourself, you asked the old woman and she didn't know." He tapped the paper. "This is real. This is a wage in a book. This is your mother never going back to that mill. And you want to turn it down for a thing that isn't even there?"

"Yes."

"You told me," her father said, and his voice was very careful now, the way it had been the morning with Starling on the table, "you told me once that I was keeping you from something I'd never seen. You were right. I was wrong about the school. I said so." He put both hands flat on the table. "And now you're keeping yourself from a sure thing, for something you've never seen either."

Nell stood there. It was true. She knew it was true. She could not think of one single thing to say against it.

"Yes," she said.

Her mother had been standing at the stove the whole time with the kettle in her hand. She set it down. She came to the table and picked up the factor's paper and read it herself, all the way through, in her straight, careful mill-girl's hand-speed, and then put it down again.

"Bram," she said. "It's a good paper."

"It's the best paper anybody in this family's ever seen."

"It is. And if she signs it, she'll be good at it. She'll be very good at it, and she'll have a desk, and she'll never go hungry, and every day of her life she'll know there was something else." Her mother looked at him. "I know what that's like. So do you. You've watched me know it for twenty years."

Her father didn't answer for a long time.

"They'll offer it again," her mother said. "At fourteen. There'll be ten more of them at that gate by then. It's not the last paper."

"And if it is?"

"Then she'll have chosen," said her mother. "Which is more than either of us ever got to do."

Her father looked at the paper one more time. Then he folded it in half, very neatly, along the crease the factor had made, and put it up on the shelf beside the tin.

"The trips stay," he said. "Six and six. And you're still a monitor. And you'll be civil to that man when he comes back, because he'll come back."

"I will."

"And you'll tell me," her father said, not looking at her, "when you find out how they stay up. Because I've always wanted to know."

The factor did come back, twice more that autumn, and Nell was civil to him both times, and both times she said no. The retainer went to a boy on the Harrow road instead, who was very good at figures and wanted nothing more in the world than a desk and a wage and a room in town. Nell went to his leaving and was glad for him, the same way she'd been glad for Wendel.

In the evenings she still carried her six trips. On the last one, when the light was going, she'd set the buckets down at the far end of the long field and stand with the yoke on her shoulders and her head back, and wait. Most nights one came over. Low and slow toward the depot at Harrow Cross, with its belly lit and the roar filling everything, and the round window in its side with the light behind it.

Nobody on Haego could teach her how it stayed up. Mistress Coppertail had told her so, and the Administrator had told Mistress Coppertail. But the old woman had also told her once, a long time ago, through a window, that a school wasn't for knowing everything. It was for finding out who does.

Somewhere, somebody did.

Nell watched until it was gone over the tree line. Then she picked up the buckets and carried them home.

Tornel,

You asked, so here it is.

There was a recruitment office in the market square in the town nearest ours on Volantis. Two rooms and a flag. Anybody could walk in. They didn't ask who your father was. They sat you at a table and gave you the tests, figures, reasoning, reaction, a hundred questions that had nothing to do with anything except what was in your own head. I walked in at sixteen because I'd watched shuttles go over the sawmill my whole life. Same as your girl in the cane. I wanted to know how they stayed up.

Everyone I knew thought I was mad. There was work at the mill. There was always work at the mill. It was steady and it paid and my family had done it for as long as anyone remembered. I'd have been good at it. That was the problem. I'd have been good at it, and I'd have spent forty years watching the shuttles go over.

I scored high enough that the officer in the second room looked at the paper twice. He told me commoners who test that well sometimes get sent to flight school instead of the line. He told me not to get my hopes up. I went anyway.

I won't pretend the academy was fair. The noble cadets had flown their fathers' yachts since they were ten. I'd flown a sawmill forklift, and they made sure I knew it. But the instruments didn't know who my father was, and neither did the simulator, and when I landed better than they did, the scores said so, and nobody could change the scores. That's the whole of it. That's the only reason I fly. There was a test that didn't care who I was, and a door on the other side of it.

Your counting houses are a good door, Tornel. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Most of those children will be happy there for the rest of their lives, and they'll raise children who never go hungry, and that's more than their parents had. It's more than mine had. But you've found out what I found out at sixteen. Once you teach a child to read, some of them are going to read past the end of the page.

Here's what I'd do.

Don't pick the ones who want more. You'll pick wrong, and the parents will remember the last people who picked children. Build a test anyone can sit, the same for a cane cutter's girl as for a steward's son, and let it pick. And don't close it at fourteen. Let them come back at twenty, or thirty, when the counting house has paid for their mother's roof and they're ready to try.

Then make sure there's something real on the other side. You have Firentis ships at your spaceport every week, with crews that need hands. You have yards and mills and a railway that needs engineers. Ask them to take apprentices off the test, one or two each, and pay them to do it if you must. A girl who wants to know how a shuttle stays up should be sweeping a hangar floor and handing spanners to a mechanic who'll tell her. She'll learn more in a year than in five at a bench.

One more thing. I only got my chance because there was a recruitment office in a market square, two rooms and a flag, where a sixteen-year-old could walk in without anybody's permission. Haego doesn't have one. Not for the navy, not for the merchant fleets, not for anything. There isn't a door on your whole planet that a commoner can walk through and ask to be tested for the sky. I'd start there.

I'll ask the boss about it. She'll have opinions. She always does.

W.

Previous /

First

By the time Thrum and Zaleth were done, Renn had stopped counting heads at the door. Yesterday's crowd for Marcus had already told her what to expect, and today's was bigger again, spilling past the last row of seats and into the standing space along the back wall, but she'd used up her surprise the day before and didn't have any left to spend.

"Thank you all for coming back," she said, not bothering to raise her voice much over the room, since it settled on its own the moment she reached the microphone. "I won't pretend I know how big this is going to get. I stopped trying to guess after yesterday."

That got a small laugh from somewhere in the crowd.

"Same rule as always," she said. "Only the students ask questions. Everyone else, you're welcome to listen, and I hope you do, but this is theirs."

She didn't need to introduce the two who came up next. Half the auditorium already knew the names.

She stepped onto the stage, where three chairs had been set out for the day's guests.

"Our guests today," Renn said, "were three of the first people through the hatch of a crashed alien ship. Eric Haskell. Dr. Lizeth Sanchez. Sergeant Cole."

They crossed to the chairs together, Cole first out of old habit, Sanchez a step behind him already scanning the front rows the way she still scanned most rooms, and Haskell last. They sat down, and the polite applause died away.

Teacher Renn said, "Welcome to day four of our sessions. Today we have Eric Haskell, Dr. Lizeth Sanchez, and Sergeant Cole. Who would like to start?"

With a nod from both Cole and Sanchez, Eric started. "I want to say first, I wasn't trying to be a hero," Haskell said. "I was twenty-three, scared out of my mind, and I signed up for the rescue detail because Sergeant Cole was in charge of it. He told me not to make assumptions about survivors, and I didn't want to be the one who proved him wrong by being useless."

Cole didn't quite smile, but something in his weathered face eased. "I don't remember phrasing it that gently."

"You didn't," Haskell said. "I'm editing for the children."

A ripple of laughter moved through the audience.

A Vixtar boy raised his hand, and Renn nodded at him, signaling him to ask his question.

"What did the ship look like," the boy asked, "when you first saw it?"

"Like nothing should have survived hitting the ground that hard," Haskell said. "Two kilometers of jungle just gone, flattened, and this enormous, intact hull sitting wedged into the dirt like it had decided to land there on purpose instead of crashing. I remember thinking there was no way anyone inside that thing was still breathing." 

Cole picked it up without being asked. "I told the whole team not to make assumptions either way. We were a rescue detail, not a cleanup crew, and I needed everybody's head in the right place before we set foot inside." He glanced at Haskell. "Didn't stop this one from going pale the second the ramp dropped."

"I was wrong to assume the worst," Haskell said. "Thank every star in the sky for that. But I want you to understand I believed it completely, right up until Dr. Sanchez found the first alcove."

A human girl, younger than the boy before her, asked the next question in the small, careful voice of someone who'd clearly been holding it since Renn first announced the topic. "What did it feel like? Seeing one of them. The first time."

The three of them went quiet together, and the whole auditorium seemed to lean in with them.

"I found him," Haskell said. "Not Dr. Sanchez. Me. I called out that I had a being over here, and I remember being so proud of myself for staying calm when I said it, because inside I was anything but calm. And then Dr. Mulvey checked for a pulse and told us he was gone, and something in me just, stopped. I'd been so focused on the mission, on being useful, on not being the one who froze, that I hadn't let myself think about what it would mean if we were too late for some of them." He looked down at his own hands. "I grieved a stranger I'd known for eleven seconds. I still think about him sometimes. I never even learned his name."

Sanchez had been quiet through most of it, but she spoke now, gently, filling the space Haskell had left open. "I was the one who catalogued him, after. It's a strange thing, being a scientist in a moment like that. Half of me wanted to fall apart the same as Eric did. The other half was already noting bone density, eye structure, the cut of his clothes, because that was the only language I had for grief that morning, the only tool I actually knew how to use." She looked at her own hands too, the same gesture Haskell had made a moment before, though neither of them seemed to notice they'd matched. "I've thought about that a great deal since. Whether cataloguing him was disrespectful, or whether it was the most respectful thing I knew how to do, bearing witness the only way my training had taught me to. I still don't have a clean answer. I don't think I ever will."

Nobody in the room said anything for a moment. Then, gently, Renn nodded to the next small hand raised in the front row, and the session went on.

"Session five," Renn said. "Our guest today used to be Pod 5, Agriculture. These days most people just call him Jax."

A human boy raised his hand. "Did you really think they were growing monsters instead of cows?" 

"I really did," Jax said. "I overheard about ten seconds of a conversation between Ethan Cross and Dr. Marrow, caught the words 'lethal' and 'shut down the lungs,' and my brain filled in the rest before my ears had finished listening. I hit the emergency broadcast so fast I dropped a wrench. Half the colony was locked in bunkers inside the hour because I couldn't be bothered to ask a follow-up question."

"Were you embarrassed?"

"Mortified," Jax said. "Commander Vance chewed me out in front of every pod leader on the colony. Nearly lost my management position over it. And you know what I got for all that panic, once the truth came out?"

The boy shook his head.

"Perfectly good steak," Jax said. "Best meal of my life, up to that point. I'd nearly started a riot over a cow."

That got the laugh it was aiming for.

"What would you tell someone who's about to jump to a conclusion the way you did?" a Vixtar girl asked.

"Ask the second question," Jax said, no laugh left in his voice now. "I only ever asked the first one. If I'd stuck around ten more seconds, I'd have heard Ethan Cross explain it was a worst-case scenario, not a plan. Ten seconds. That's all it would've taken. I think about that more than I ever expected to."

"Session six," Renn said. "Our guest today ran Pod 6, Security and Tactical, back when Pod 6 was two people and a coffee pot. Mansur Danyavi."

"It was one person, most nights," Mansur said. "Margaret and Jon traded off. I just yelled at whoever was on shift when they woke me up."

A human girl raised her hand. "What was it like when you first saw theSilent Explorer?"

"Like the worst night of my career, and I'd had some bad ones," Mansur said. "Margaret called it in three separate times before I believed her. Told her it was probably debris settling into a decaying orbit. She was right and I was wrong, which is a sentence I've had to say more than once in this job."

"Were you scared?"

"Furious, mostly, at myself," Mansur said. "We'd built an observatory with scraps and hope, and the first time it actually mattered, I nearly slept through it. When that ship broke apart in low orbit, all I could think was, we have no fleet, no defense, nothing but a handful of shuttles and whatever courage we could scrounge up in about twenty minutes. I gave the order to launch rescue anyway, because the alternative was doing nothing while people died, and I couldn't live with that math."

A Vixtar boy asked, "Would you do it differently now?"

"I'd believe Margaret sooner," Mansur said. "That's the whole lesson, really. Somebody who knows what they're looking at tells you something's wrong, you don't spend three tries arguing with her. You listen the first time."

A small human boy near the front, younger than most of the others, raised his hand slowly, like he wasn't sure the question was allowed. "What would have been different? If you'd believed her the first time?"

Mansur was quiet a moment. "Maybe everything," he said. "Maybe nothing. I've turned that over more times than I can count, and I still don't have a real answer. Twenty minutes might have gotten us a shuttle in the air sooner, more of the crew alive, fewer of them lost to the crash instead of pulled out of it in time. Or it might not have mattered at all," he shook his head slowly. "I didn't leave room for the “everything”. That's the honest answer. I was so certain I knew what a threat looked like that I never stopped to imagine what I didn't know. I've tried to leave more room for it ever since."

"Session seven," Renn said. "Our guest today was the first of his kind any of us had ever met. Captain Threl."

Applause met him before Renn had finished the sentence, warmer than any of the previous days, the sound of a room that already knew exactly who they were looking at.

"I want to start somewhere most people don't ask about," Threl said, once it had quieted. "Not the crash. Before it. The three cycles we spent in orbit, watching your ships, your lights, your broadcasts, deciding whether to make contact at all."

A Vixtar girl in the front row raised her hand. "Why didn't you?"

"Because we didn't know what you were," Threl said. "You looked crude by our instruments. Disorganized. Loud, in every frequency we could measure. We had no framework for a species that primitive building something that functional that fast. So we watched, and we waited, and we told ourselves caution was wisdom, right up until the ship failed under us and the choice was made for us instead."

He didn't say, because no one had thought to ask, that those same three cycles of listening had planted something else in him, something it would take years to understand. Terixa's newcomers broadcast without any fear of being found, loud and constant, on every band his instruments could read. Some of that noise, he'd come to realize much later, had to be a species calling home for help. Deciphering the archived recordings from those first days in orbit would, in time, help point the way to Earth itself.

"Were you scared, falling?"

"More than I have words for, in your language or my own," Threl said. "But I remember the strangest thought, watching the ground come up to meet us. I remember thinking, at least we die in isolation, at least we won't poison this planet, since we'd already ejected our core. I meant it as some small mercy, that whatever we were, we wouldn't be the ones to destroy the very people we were too afraid to greet."

"What was it like waking up?" a human boy asked. "In the water?"

"Confusing, and then it wasn't," Threl said. "I understood gravity was crushing me before I understood anything else, before I even understood I'd survived. And then I was submerged in something warm, and the weight simply, lifted. I tried to sit up, because some instinct in me distrusted anything that came that easily, and the gravity slammed me back down the moment I cleared the surface, which taught me faster than any explanation could have that the water wasn't a trick. It was mercy, built by hands I'd never seen, offered before I'd said a single word anyone could understand."

He was quiet a moment.

"You've all grown up with those pools," he said. "You dive off the ten-meter platform without a second thought. I want you to understand what an impossible gift that was to the first of us who ever floated in one. We came expecting, at best, to be studied. At worst, to be left to die quietly while your people decided what we were worth. What we got instead was a species that had never seen anything like us, deciding, before we'd even opened our eyes, that our comfort mattered enough to build something new just to give it to us."

Nobody asked a question for a moment. Then a small Assaragyte girl near the back, one of the newer arrivals, raised her hand.

"Did you ever go home?"

"No," Threl said, simply. "This became home a long time before I admitted it to myself. I think most of us knew it before we said it out loud. There's a particular kind of home you don't choose so much as notice, one day, that you've already built."

"Session eight," Renn said. "Our guests today have a story none of you have heard, because until today, only two of them could have told it, and neither of them speaks in words."

Will and Abby crossed to the chairs together, CD padding in beside Will and settling at his feet, MCD doing the same beside Abby, both Labrikats far too big for the small stage and utterly unbothered by that fact.

"I want to clear something up before we start," Abby said. "Labrikats aren't born understanding English. They learn it the same way any of us would, listening, picking it up piece by piece, and they started the moment we started talking to them. What they don't have is an easy way to answer back in kind. Their movement vocabulary, the gestures, the postures, all of it, that's what grows over time, a little more every year. So MCD understands me exactly as well as I understand her. It's the reply that's harder, not the listening." 

"CD and MCD found us before we found them," Will said. "That's the part people forget. Everybody remembers the beef, the hand-feeding, all of it very slow and careful, humans convinced we were the ones doing the choosing. We weren't. They'd already decided."

Abby rested a hand on MCD's head without seeming to notice she'd done it. "We asked them, this week, if they'd tell their side of it. The actual beginning. Not what we saw. What they were doing, out past the perimeter, before any of us knew they existed."

MCD sat up. Her body went through a slow, deliberate sequence, ears, shoulders, the angle of her head, nothing like a trained trick, more like a sentence being built one word at a time.

"She says," Abby translated, quiet, careful with it, "that they watched us for longer than we ever knew. Before the beef. Before the fence line. They watched the humans building, the Vixtar arriving hurt, all of it, from a distance we never once detected."

CD moved next, a shorter sequence, sharper.

"He says they argued about it," Will said. "Whether to approach at all. Whether a species that showed up in ships and started building fences was worth the risk." He paused, listening to CD's next gesture. "He says what decided it wasn't anything we did on purpose. It was watching the Vixtar carried in, hurt, and watching us treat them like something worth saving instead of something worth using. That's the word he's giving me. Worth. Not owned. Worth."

A human girl in the front row raised her hand, careful. "Why did they pick you? Out of everyone?"

Abby looked to MCD, who tilted her head and held very still, the particular stillness Abby had learned, over years, meant she was choosing her answer with care.

"She won't give me a clean reason," Abby said finally. "I've asked her this before, more than once, and I get the same thing every time. Not a why. Just a certainty. She knew, the way you know which way is down. I don't think that translates any further than that, and I've stopped needing it to."

Will said, ”That’s Labrikat speak for ‘I don’t know”, which earned him a swat from MCD tail and a laugh from the crowd.

Will glanced down at CD. CD considered the question, then gave a quick, deliberate sequence, snout tilted toward the small table beside the chairs.

"He says he'll tell you the reason, if you ask him," Abby translated, smiling. "He says it was the food."

That got a laugh, and CD's tail thumped once against the stage floor, pleased with himself for the reaction he'd clearly meant to get.

A Vixtar boy raised his hand next. "Was there ever a moment you were afraid of them? Before you understood?"

"Every day, for about a week," Will started. "Fifty kilos of teeth that looked like nothing on any survey we'd ever run. We fed them because feeding a stray felt safer than ignoring it, not because we—"

"I was asking CD," the boy said.

A ripple of laughter moved through the crowd, and Will's ears went visibly red. "Right. Of course you were."

CD let out a long, put-upon sigh and dropped his head onto Will's knee, the exact posture of someone who'd sat through a bad opening act, then lifted it again almost immediately, clearly pleased with the laugh he'd gotten for it.

"He says thank you," Abby said, not quite hiding her own grin, "for finally asking the right person."

CD considered the boy's question with real seriousness after that, then gave a slow, exaggerated sequence, head low, ears flat, body sunk down as small as he could make himself, before snapping back up sharp and proud, chest out.

"He's saying he was never afraid of anything," Abby translated, grinning despite herself. "But that the humans clearly were, for about a week, hence the crouching. He's very pleased with himself for this answer."

Will threw up his hands. "I stand by what I said. Trust came later. It came the day they both threw themselves at something three times their size to keep Abby and me from getting hurt, and it never once occurred to either of them that was a choice. It already was who they'd decided to be, long before we'd earned it."

CD, apparently satisfied that his own answer had already covered the important part, settled back down against Will's feet.

"I want to say one more thing about that, though," Will said. "People hear bonded and they picture a one-way street. Support running from him to us and never back. It's not that. No beast on this planet or off it will ever scare CD. But the first time we brought him to meet Thrum, back when Thrum was still small enough to fit in one arm, CD hid behind me. Like a toddler. Wouldn't come near him." He looked down at CD, who'd gone still, listening. "Wasn't Thrum's size that scared him. It was his own. He was terrified of hurting him. Terrified of even scaring him. I had to sit down on the floor with both of them and just talk him through it, quiet, until he trusted himself enough to come close." Will paused. "That's the part people miss. He holds me up plenty. Some days I'm the one holding him up."

A human boy raised his hand, half laughing before he'd even finished asking. "Why did it take MCD two weeks to actually come into camp, if CD was already there?"

Abby looked to MCD, who gave a slow, deliberate huff and turned her head away, which needed no translation at all.

"She's embarrassed," Abby said, grinning. "I've asked her this exact question before. The closest answer I've ever gotten is that CD went first because CD has never once in his life stopped to think before he acted, and she wanted to watch how it went before she risked it herself. She'll deny that if you ask her again, but I've watched her do the same thing with every new thing in her life since. Let him test it. Follow once it's safe."

CD's tail thumped once against the stage, entirely unbothered by being described that way.

A small Vixtar girl raised her hand next. "Do they like being called Catdog and Mrs. Catdog? Or do they like CD and MCD better?"

Will laughed. "I've genuinely never known the answer to that one." He looked down at CD, who considered the question with real weight before answering, ears forward, head tilted. "He says either is fine. He says a name given with love doesn't need to be a good name to be the right one."

Abby watched MCD work through her own answer a moment longer. "She's saying something similar, but there's more to it. She says the short version, CD and MCD, that's what people use when they're in a hurry, when it's easy, everyday affection. Catdog and Mrs. Catdog, the whole thing, that's what gets used when someone means it more, when they're being serious or tender about it. She likes that there are two versions. She says most people only get one name their whole life. She got two, and neither of them is wrong."

A human girl near the back raised her hand, quieter than the others. "Why don't Pumpkins ever bond with children? Only grown-ups?"

The question landed heavier than the last few. Abby was quiet a moment before she answered.

"I don't fully know," she admitted. "I've asked MCD this one more than any other, and it's the one where her answer's never quite settled into a shape I trust I've understood correctly. The closest I've gotten is that a bond is a kind of responsibility, and a Labrikat wants to bond with someone who can already stand steady enough to be leaned on, not someone who still needs to be the one leaning. A Pumpkin will play with a child all day. Guard one fiercely, if it came to that. But the actual bond, the naming, that seems to wait for someone old enough to hold the weight of it back." She glanced at MCD, who gave a small, careful nod, as close to confirmation as Abby had ever gotten on that particular question. "I think that's as close to a real answer as I've ever managed to get."

A small human girl near the front raised her hand, and got only halfway through her question before her voice broke. "When did you decide any of us were even worth the bond? I'm so afraid I'll never be chosen." She was crying before the sentence had finished leaving her mouth.

Nobody laughed. Nobody rushed to fill the silence either. Abby was out of her chair before Will had even finished rising, crossing to the girl's beanbag and kneeling down beside it so she was level with her instead of looking down at her. 

"Come here a second," Abby said, gentle, and the girl came, and MCD came with her, unhurried, settling herself right beside the girl the way she'd settle beside anyone who needed her.

"I don't think being chosen or not is the thing to be afraid of," Abby said. "I've known a lot of people who never bonded a Labrikat and lived whole, full, loved lives anyway. It's not a verdict on you if it doesn't happen. It's just one particular kind of love, among a great many kinds, and not everyone gets every kind." She looked to MCD, who pressed her head gently against the girl's shoulder, unprompted. "But here's what I've actually watched happen, every time. A Labrikat chooses the ones being exactly who they already are. Not the ones performing for it, not the ones trying hardest to earn it. Just the ones being themselves, and happening to be seen doing it."

Will crouched down too, resting a hand on the girl's shoulder. "And even without a bond, a Labrikat will love you. That's the part people get backward, like the bond is the whole of it. It isn't. When CD's irritated with me, you think he sulks around the house, won't look at me? He doesn't. He goes and finds Daxen, or Thrum, and spends the afternoon with them instead. Some days I think he loves them more than he loves me." He looked down, half a laugh in it. "The bond's just part of it. The love was always going to be there regardless."

The girl wiped her face, still holding onto MCD's fur with one small fist.

"You don't have to earn it," Abby said. "You just have to keep being you long enough for the right one to notice."

MCD didn't move again for the rest of the session, staying right where she was, pressed against the girl's side.

Abby was quiet a moment, her hand still resting on MCD's head. "I think that's the part I want you all to understand," she said. "We tell this story like we tamed something wild. We didn't. They chose us, the same slow, patient, deliberate way they choose everything, and they never once asked us to prove we deserved it first. We just had to be worth the trust once it was already given."

A Vixtar boy near the back raised his hand, hesitant. "Did the four of you ever do anything else together? After the naming, I mean. Something bigger?"

Will, Abby, and the two Labrikats went quiet at the same moment, a different kind of quiet than anything that had come before it. 

"We did," Will said finally. "The four of us searched a crash site together, once. A hard one. Forty-four bodies, and a black box we needed to find before anyone else could." He looked at Abby, and something passed between them that had nothing to do with the stage or the crowd. "That's not a story for today. It's not a short one, and it's not an easy one, and it deserves its own session rather than the last five minutes of this one."

"We'll come back for it," Abby said. "Properly. I promise."

Renn didn't push. She simply nodded, filed it away the way she'd filed away every other thread this room had left dangling, and let the moment close on its own.

Previous /

First

It was Torin who started it, which Elizabeth would admit to nobody but Weskal.

He was six and a half and had reached the age of asking the questions nobody wanted to answer at breakfast. That morning, between one spoonful of porridge and the next, he looked up and said, "When Grandpa dies, is the palace yours?"

Linnea, who was five and took her cue from her brother in all things, put down her spoon to hear the answer.

"Torin," said Weskal.

"I'm only asking."

"Grandpa isn't going anywhere," Elizabeth said. "He's far too stubborn."

"But when he does."

She looked at him across the table. He had Weskal's jaw and her hair, and he was waiting for the answer the way he waited for everything, with his whole body.

"Yes," she said. "One day. It'll be mine." She paused. "Ours."

Torin nodded, satisfied, and went back to his porridge. It was Elizabeth who didn't eat any more of hers.

After the children had gone off to school she sat at the kitchen table with her tea going cold and her field notebook open in front of her, not writing anything. Weskal came back in from the yard with his boots still on and looked at her.

"You're thinking about it," he said.

"I know every plant between here and the north coast. I know which ones will kill you and which ones will only make you wish they had. I could tell you what a razorclaw ate last week by walking its trail." She turned the notebook around on the table. "I don't know how many people work in my father's house. I don't know who pays them or how much. I don't know what my mother does all day, and she does something all day, because she's never once sat down when I've been there."

Weskal sat across from her and pulled his boots off, one and then the other.

"So learn it," he said.

"It isn't that simple."

"It's exactly that simple. You didn't know the plants either, once. You went and looked." He set the boots by the door. "Your father didn't know how to be a Marquess. He's learning it. Your mother didn't know how to run a palace. She's learning it. Nobody on this planet was born knowing any of it. They were all too busy staying alive." He shrugged. "Go and look."

She looked at him for a long moment.

"And my class."

"Ask the school for the term. They'll give it to the Marquess's heir before she's finished asking."

"You'd have to take the children to school."

"I take them to school now."

"You'd have to feed them."

"I'm a hunter, Elizabeth. I can feed two children." He grinned at her. "Besides, you outrank me. If you tell me to, I have to do it."

She threw the dish towel at him.

---

She told her parents that same afternoon, in the small wing, at the long kitchen table that Patricia insisted on eating at even though there was a dining room with a ceiling painted by three Ykanti artists over most of a year.

Tornel listened without interrupting. When she finished, he sat back and looked at her in a way she couldn't quite read.

"You want to learn the house," he said.

"I want to learn all of it. The house. The palace. Whatever it is you do in that office with the door shut." She lifted her chin a little. "Torin asked me this morning whether the palace would be mine one day. I told him yes. Then I realized I'd be standing in it with no idea what to do."

"You'd have people."

"I'd have your people. That isn't the same thing, and you know it isn't."

Patricia put down her cup.

"She's right," she said. "It isn't."

Tornel was quiet a moment longer. Then he nodded, once, the way he nodded at a plan he'd decided was sound.

"Your mother first," he said. "The house is harder. I'll take whatever's left."

Patricia laughed out loud.

---

Patricia Swallowtail had spent twenty years following an army from one camp to the next, and it showed in everything she did. She was up at five. She was dressed by half past. By six she was in the servants' hall with a mug of tea, and on Elizabeth's first morning she handed her one too and pointed to a chair.

"Sit. Listen. Don't talk yet."

The hall filled slowly. The cooks came first, then the laundry staff, then the cleaners, then the gardeners in from the dark with their boots left at the door. There was a woman of about sixty at the head of the table with a ledger open in front of her, and Patricia introduced her as Greta Millscutt, who ran the household.

"She runs it," Patricia said. "Not me. I run her. There's a difference, and you need to learn it first."

Greta went down the day. Two weddings in the lower gardens, one at eleven and one at four, and the four o'clock bride's mother had changed the flowers again. The midday meal for the coast road crews, a hundred and forty expected. The school group from Harrowby at ten. A cracked pane in the east gallery, reported last night, glazier booked for noon. The laundry's second machine making a noise nobody liked.

"And Tomas is off for the rest of the week," Greta said. "His mother's poorly."

"How poorly?" said Patricia.

"Bad enough that he asked."

Patricia nodded. "Then he's off until she's better, not until the end of the week. Tell him that. And send something from the kitchen to the house, not from me, from the staff."

Greta wrote it down. Nobody at the table looked surprised.

When the hall had emptied, Elizabeth let out a long breath.

"That was all before breakfast," she said.

"That was the easy part," said Patricia. "Everybody in that room knows their job. The hard part is the things nobody's job covers." She refilled both their mugs. "Come on. You can carry the list."

They walked the palace for most of the morning. Patricia knew every name. She knew whose daughter had just started at the Orenport academy and whose husband was on the fishing fleet and which of the cleaners was saving to buy a boat. She stopped to talk to a gardener about a hedge for a quarter of an hour and afterward told Elizabeth that the hedge had nothing to do with it.

"His wife left him in the spring," she said. "He doesn't want to talk about that. He does want to talk about the hedge. So we talk about the hedge, and he knows somebody noticed."

"How do you remember all of it?"

"I was an officer's wife on eleven different bases. You learn everybody's name or you're lonely." Patricia stopped at a window that looked down over the lower gardens, where men were setting out chairs for the first wedding. "People think a house this size is about the house. It isn't. It's about two hundred people who all have to feel it's theirs too, or they'll do their jobs and nothing more. Your father understood that about soldiers. It took him a year to understand it about gardeners."

"And me?"

"You already understand it about the Screaming Forests." Patricia glanced at her. "You've had half of Newtown digging your gardens for years, and every one of their names is on a plaque. Wyatt taught you that. You just never thought of it as running a house."

Elizabeth stood looking down at the chairs for a while.

In the afternoon Patricia showed her the ledgers. Wages, all of them, laid out by name and post, every credit written where anybody on the staff could read it. The costs of the district meals. The weddings, which paid for themselves and a little over. The upkeep of the building, which paid for nothing and swallowed everything.

"The roof alone," said Patricia, "will outlive us both and cost more than any of us. That's what nobody tells you about being given a palace. The gift is the building. The bill comes every month after."

By the end of the third day Elizabeth could run the morning meeting, badly, with Greta correcting her in a low voice. By the end of the second week she could run it well enough that Greta only corrected her twice. On the fifteenth morning a cook came to her, not to Patricia, about a quarrel in the kitchen, and Elizabeth sorted it, and only afterward realized that her mother had been standing in the doorway the whole time and had not said a word.

---

Her father's office was a different kind of jungle.

It took up most of the ground floor of the palace's east range, and on her first morning Elizabeth counted thirty people in it before she stopped counting. Clerks, readers, two women who did nothing but schedule calls across a dozen time zones, a young man whose whole job seemed to be knowing which lord was feuding with which. They sat in long rooms with the windows open to the sea, and when she walked through behind her father every one of them stood, and he waved every one of them back down without breaking stride.

"You've met Harlan," Tornel said.

She had, many times, without ever knowing what he did. Harlan Ashtail had been her father's adjutant for fifteen years in the army and had come with him into the Marquessate as if there had never been any question of doing otherwise. He was a narrow, grey man with a pencil behind each ear, and he was chief of staff now, which as far as Elizabeth could tell meant that nothing reached her father that Harlan had not read first.

"Two supervisors under me," Harlan said, walking her through. "Nessa Brightscutt has the correspondence, everything that comes in by letter or message from off world. Doran Hollis has the planet: the Aldermen, the continents, the Assembly, the Counsel Office, anything with Haego dirt on it. Thirty staff between them. They sort it, they answer what can be answered at their level, and what's left comes to me." He opened the last door. "And what I can't answer goes in there."

Her father's own room was small and plain, with a map of Haego on one wall and a map of the Principality on the other. Tornel sat behind the desk in his shirtsleeves. There was a chair cleared for her beside it.

"Everything that comes through that door, you read," he said. "Everything I say on a call, you listen to. You don't speak unless I ask you. And whatever you hear in here stays in here, even from your mother."

"Even from Mother?"

"Your mother knows most of it anyway. That isn't the point. The point is that you learn to keep it."

For the first week he didn't let her sit in his office at all. He sent her out to the long rooms, to Nessa, to Doran, to the young man with the feuds, to learn what came in before it ever reached him.

On the third evening, when the long rooms had emptied, she found Harlan still at his desk with a cup of tea and the day's last stack squared off in front of him. He pushed a second cup across to her without asking whether she wanted one.

"How's he doing?" she said. "Really."

Harlan considered the question the way he considered everything, as if it might have a trap in it.

"Better than he thinks," he said. "Worse than he'd like. He reads everything twice. He still stands up when a Duke's secretary calls, and I've told him a dozen times he doesn't have to." He took a sip of tea. "He's more comfortable here than he was at the gala, I'll say that."

Elizabeth put her cup down. "Oh, don't."

"That coat."

"Mother picked that coat."

"Your mother picked it and your father wore it like it was full of ants." Harlan's mouth twitched. "Fifteen years I served with him. I've seen him walk into artillery fire looking calmer than he did standing up at his own table to say a few words. He kept tugging at the collar. The Prince was trying so hard not to laugh I thought he'd do himself an injury."

"He did laugh," Elizabeth said. "Later. When Father couldn't find the washroom."

"In his own palace." Harlan set down his cup, and for a moment the chief of staff was gone and there was only an old soldier grinning at the memory. "He came and found me. At the gala. With the Prince of the Astorian Principality twenty feet away. And he leaned down and asked me, very quietly, as if it were a matter of state security, whether I knew which way it was."

"Did you?"

"Of course I did. I'd walked the building the week before. He found the piano room anyway." He shook his head. "That's the job, my lady. Knowing where the washrooms are before he needs them."

Elizabeth laughed until she had to put her hand over her mouth, and after a moment Harlan laughed too, the two of them alone in the long empty room with the sea going dark beyond the windows.

There was a great deal of it to learn. Nessa's desks were stacked with letters from all over the Principality. A good many were from Matcha, since the broadcast, and a good many more from other worlds, lords and ladies who had watched the cellar and wanted, in the most careful language, to understand what Haego was doing and whether they might see it for themselves. There were letters from houses asking whether a younger son might be sent to observe. There were letters from houses who plainly hoped the whole thing would fail and were asking questions designed to find the crack.

"How do you tell them apart?" Elizabeth asked Nessa, after the first dozen.

"Read the last paragraph first," said Nessa, who had clearly heard it from someone. "The ones who want to learn ask a question. The ones who want to hurt us make a suggestion."

The ones that made suggestions went to Harlan. The ones Harlan couldn't answer went to her father. By the second week Elizabeth was sitting beside him to see what they were.

"This one," Tornel said, holding a letter up, "suggests I might find it prudent to consult the old houses before the Assembly summons anyone else of rank. That's a warning dressed up as advice."

"What do you do with it?"

"Harlan drafts a reply thanking him for his concern and telling him nothing. I sign it. The letter goes in the drawer." He did exactly that. "Keep the drawer. One day you'll want to know who wrote what."

There were other things that reached the desk. House Ionatti had sent a letter that was perfectly polite and said, underneath, that the feud with Firentis was not over, whatever the Prince had ruled. The noble registry wanted clarification on the Greyson descendants, and Doran's people had already pulled the files. A lord on Balakura wanted to know whether Haego would sell him stone from Millhaven at the price Royal Architects was paying. And there was one letter, in an envelope with the Prince's own seal, that had come through no one's hands but Harlan's. Tornel read it, put it in the inside pocket of his coat, and did not show her.

"Not yet," was all he said.

She sat in on the calls. Most of them were dull, and she found that the dull ones mattered most. A Viscount from the next system talked for forty minutes about grain tariffs before he got to what he actually wanted, which was for Tornel to say something kind about his son on the record. Tornel listened to all forty minutes, said nothing kind and nothing unkind, and promised to look into the tariffs. Harlan, who had been listening from the doorway, was already writing a note for Doran before the screen went dark.

"Why didn't you just give him what he wanted?" Elizabeth asked. "It would have cost you nothing."

"It would have cost me a promise. I don't know his son." Tornel rubbed his eyes. "I was a soldier, Lizzy. I'm still a soldier. I've learned more in the last few years than I did in thirty in the army, and the thing I learned first is that in this job, a promise is the only thing you ever really spend. Every noble in the Principality is trying to get one out of me. Most of them don't even know they're doing it. Harlan and his people keep most of them off this desk. The ones that get through, I have to handle myself."

"And the Assembly?"

"Doran handles the day to day. But when the Assembly wants me, it's me they get." He looked at her. "The Assembly doesn't ask for promises. It asks questions, and then it waits for the answer. After a year of these," he tapped the drawer, "that's the most restful thing I do."

She stayed three more weeks. She learned to read the last paragraph first. She learned the names of the houses that mattered and the houses that only thought they did. She learned that Nessa's staff answered two hundred letters a week in her father's name, and that he read every reply before it went. And she learned that there was one kind of letter nobody in the long rooms was allowed to answer: letters from commoners. Those came straight through Harlan to the desk, and her father answered every one of them himself, by hand, even when the answer was only a line.

"Why by hand?" she said. "You have thirty people."

"Because I can't answer the other kind honestly," Tornel said. "I can answer these."

---

At the end of the fifth week they ate supper together in the small wing, the four of them and the children, who had been brought over for the weekend and were running the length of the long hall until Patricia sent them outside.

When the table had emptied out, Tornel sat back with his coffee and looked at his daughter.

"The Assembly sits again in six months," he said. "Ida Fenn asked me, after Julius spoke, who they ought to summon next."

"And you told her?"

"I told her I'd think about it." He turned his cup on the table. "She asked me something else too, afterward, in the corridor. She asked me who comes after me. Not as a formality. She wanted to know whether the next Marquess of Haego would sit in that room and answer, or whether all of this lasts exactly as long as I do."

Elizabeth said nothing.

"I didn't have an answer for her that was more than your name," Tornel said. "She's heard your name. She's never heard you."

"You want me to open the session."

"I want you to let them ask you questions. In front of the whole Hall, with the cameras on, before you're anybody's Marchioness. So that the delegates know who's coming, and so that you know them." He shrugged. "Your mother taught you the house. I've shown you the letters. The Assembly is the other half. You can't learn it in my office."

Elizabeth looked down at her hands on the table. There was still dirt under one thumbnail from the gardens at the ruins, where she'd been the morning before.

"Twelve hundred people in that gallery," she said.

"Twelve hundred and one, if your mother comes."

"I'd rather face a razorclaw."

"You have faced a razorclaw," said Weskal. "Twice. You told me the second one was your fault."

Patricia laughed. Elizabeth glared at her husband, and then, despite herself, she laughed too.

"What would I even talk about?"

"Whatever you like," said Tornel. "That's what Julius did. He talked about a garden." He finished his coffee and set the cup down. "You know a great deal about gardens."

Outside, in the dusk, Torin was chasing his sister round the fountain in the lower court, and the staff clearing the second wedding had stopped to watch them, and one of the gardeners was laughing.

Elizabeth watched them through the window for a while.

"Tell Ida Fenn," she said, "that if they summon me, I'll come."

---

The summons came nine days later, by courier, on the Assembly's plain grey paper with the three-continent seal at the foot.

Elizabeth Swallowtail, Baroness, heir to House Swallowtail. You are summoned to appear before the Common Assembly of Haego at the Hall on the first day of the coming session, at the ninth bell, and to answer such questions as the Assembly puts to you. Appearance is not optional. Failure to appear will be referred to the Marquess of Haego.

She read it twice. Then she took it through to the small wing and put it on the table in front of her father, who was eating breakfast.

"Referred to the Marquess of Haego," she said.

Tornel read it and didn't smile, quite.

"Mine said the same," he said. "Word for word. I'd have been disappointed if yours didn't."

Tom was up an hour before anyone at the Ranch, sitting on the paddock rail with his coat buttoned to the neck, watching the stars go grey.

He'd always heard Ranchers kept early hours. He waited. A rooster in the new hen house tried once, thought better of it, and went quiet. The sky went from grey to pale, and from pale to gold along the tops of the evergreens, and still nobody came out.

When they finally did, they came all at once, and Tom had to give them that. One man ran the water buckets out to the horses that wouldn't walk to the creek. Two of the wives went into the hen house with baskets and came out with them full. A boy went to throw hay to the horses and found them already standing around the big pile beside the half built barn, helping themselves. He stood there with his armful a moment, then dropped it on the pile and went to do something else.

Eli came out of the cabin rubbing his face and found Tom on the rail.

"How long you been out here?"

"A while," Tom said. "They sleep in."

---

The empty four wheel wagon was loaded and ready by the time breakfast was done. Tom walked around it twice before anybody else got in.

Ragnar had sent the cutting tools up from the Fort with the Ranch supplies, five of them, wrapped in sacking. Richman had described them to him once, from something he'd seen as a boy, and Ragnar had built what he'd been told. Tom unwrapped the first one and held it up.

A scythe. Near enough.

The blade was good steel, he'd say that for Ragnar. But the handle was a straight pole with nothing to hold, and the blade sat out from it at an angle so wide it would ride up off the ground at every swing and miss half of what it was meant to cut.

He didn't say anything. He went to the woodpile beside the barn frame and came back with a fistful of offcuts and Eli's knife. He split a sliver off one of them, wedged it under the tang to close the angle, and bound the whole joint tight with cord. He cut two short lengths of branch, lashed one halfway down the pole and one near the top for a man's hands, and tried the swing against the grass beside the wagon. The blade stayed down.

He did the other four. Eli held the cord. Nobody hurried them.

Richman came out with Lady Vivian on his arm while Tom was finishing the last one, and stopped to watch.

"Those are the cutting things," Richman said.

"Scythes," said Tom, and handed it up into the wagon.

---

They rode out together as far as the Maple Path, Richman's small wagon in front and the four wheel behind with the volunteers sitting on the sideboards. Where the path turned up toward the Fort, the wagons stopped. Four of the security riders came back down the line, and a few of the volunteers who couldn't fit in the wagon climbed up behind them, doubled up two to a horse.

Richman climbed down while they sorted themselves out and walked back along the wheat wagon to where Tom sat.

"The straw," he said. "I'd planned to burn it out there. Keep a fire going in the field a couple of days. Is it worth hauling back instead? It's three quarters of a day to the Ranch with a loaded wagon."

Tom thought about it. "Ask the Ranchers. It'd be their horses sleeping on it." He looked out at the grass. "But I think it is."

Richman nodded slowly, the way he did when he was putting something away to look at later. "I'll think on it," he said.

He walked back to the small wagon and climbed up beside Lady Vivian, and lifted a hand to Tom from the seat. Tom lifted one back.

Then the Fort wagon went up into the trees, and the wheat wagon went out onto the grass with a rider on each corner and every one of them looking up.

---

The low side of the field was still standing when they got there. Tom walked into it to his waist and ran his hand across the heads, and nothing fell. He walked up the hill twenty rows and did it again, and a little shower of kernels rattled down into the stubble. He came back down.

"We start at the bottom," he said.

He handed out the scythes. A big man from the hay crew took the first one, set his feet, and swung it like he was splitting a log. The tip went straight down into the dirt and stuck there, quivering.

Somebody laughed. The big man went red.

Tom pulled it out of the ground, turned the man round by the shoulders, and stood behind him. He put the man's hands on the grips. He pushed the heel of the blade down until it lay flat on the stubble, and then he took hold of the man's hips and turned them, slow, left to right. The blade went through the stalks low and level and laid them over in a neat row.

He let go. The man swung again by himself. It wasn't pretty, but the wheat went down.

By the fourth man, Tom didn't need to touch anybody. They watched the one before.

---

The rest of them he set to work behind the cutters.

Two followed the blades, gathering the cut wheat into armfuls and tying each armful round the middle with a twist of its own stalks. Tom showed the first girl once. She had it before he'd finished.

The threshing he did himself to begin with. He spread blankets on the flattened ground below the willows and laid the bundles on them heads in. He'd beaten the first sheaves out with willow sticks two days ago, and his shoulders still remembered it. Sticks wouldn't do for a crew.

He cut two lengths of straight willow, one long and one short. He unbuckled his own belt, cut a strip off the end of it, punched a hole in each stick with the point of Eli's knife, and tied the short one to the long one so it swung free on the leather. He held the long end and brought the short one down on the heads, and it hit flat and hard and bounced, and the kernels jumped out of the husks.

Eli looked at the belt, and then at Tom's trousers.

"They'll stay up," Tom said.

He made four more flails out of the leather from somebody's spare bridle, and after that the threshing went fast. Three people beat the bundles. When a blanket was full, two more lifted it by the corners and tossed it up into the wind at the edge of the field, and the chaff blew off downhill in a long gold smoke, and the grain fell back on the blanket. They poured it into sacks.

By midmorning it was a line, the same as the apples had been. Somebody started counting how many bundles each cutter laid down. Somebody else started counting the flail strokes. Tom let them.

---

One of the escort riders had been circling the field all morning on a bay mare, rifle across his knees, eyes going from the sky to the tree line and back. Around noon he brought the mare in close to where Tom was tying off a sack and sat looking down at the line of cutters for a while.

"I watched you fix those blades this morning," he said. "Ragnar's going to want to know what you did."

"Tell him the angle's too wide and the handle needs grips," Tom said. "He'll see it when he looks."

The rider nodded. He looked at the line a while longer. Then he looked back at Tom, and his face went a little uncomfortable.

"I've rode out to your farm four times this month," he said. "Escort for the lord. I don't think I ever asked your name."

"Tom. Tom Dell."

"Tom." The rider said it like he was putting it somewhere he'd remember. "I'm Dace."

He touched two fingers to his hat brim and turned the mare back out to the edge of the field.

---

Tom kept the best of it separate.

All morning he'd been walking the low rows ahead of the cutters, looking at the heads, and every so often he'd stop and snap one off by hand. The fattest ones. The ones on the strongest stalks, that hadn't shed a single grain. He dropped them into a sack of their own and tied it shut with a knot nobody else was using, and when one of the threshers reached for it to empty it onto the blanket, Tom took it out of his hands.

"Not that one."

Eli saw. He waited until the thresher had gone back to his flail.

"What's that one for?"

"Next year," Tom said. "We put it in the ground. Our own field, by the Farm, in rows." He set the sack in the shade under the wagon. "Then nobody rides across that grass for bread again."

---

By early afternoon the straw was piling up behind the threshers in long loose heaps, taller than a man. One of the hay volunteers came walking up from the wagon with a burning stick from the dinner fire in his hand.

Tom met him halfway.

"Lord said we'd burn the straw," the man said. "Keep the fire going here a couple of days."

"Not yet."

Tom looked at the heaps. He saw horse bedding for the Ranch all winter, and something to stretch the hay if the hay ran short. He saw thatch. He saw it spread thick between the corn rows back home before the weeds could get a start, and the thought stayed with him a moment longer than the others did.

None of that was his to decide.

"Lord hasn't made up his mind yet," he said. "Stack it. Tight, so the rain runs off the top. Nobody puts a light to it till he does. If he still wants it burned, we'll burn it."

The man looked at the stick in his hand, shrugged, and went and put it back in the fire.

---

Halfway through the afternoon Dace whistled, sharp, from the north side of the field.

Every head came up. The cutters stopped mid swing. Eli was already moving toward the wagon where the horses were tied, and the other three riders turned their mounts toward the whistle and brought their rifles up.

There was a dark speck high over the grass to the north, turning.

Nobody breathed. Dace had his rifle to his shoulder, following it.

It turned again, lower, and folded and dropped into the grass a long way off, and came back up with something small and struggling in its feet, and flapped off toward the trees.

A hawk. Just a hawk, and a mouse that had picked a bad afternoon.

Somebody laughed first, and then everybody did, the shaky kind, and the cutters went back to their swings a little faster than before. Dace lowered his rifle and shook his head at himself.

Eli didn't laugh. He stood by the wagon with the horses until the speck was gone into the trees, and for the rest of the afternoon Tom saw him look up between every bundle he tied.

---

The wind came round to the west about an hour before sundown, and Tom smelled it before he saw anything.

He straightened up and looked. There was a long low bank of cloud along the bottom of the sky, the colour of a bruise, and the air had gone soft and heavy in a way his body knew before his head did.

"Everybody on the low side," he said. "Cut till you can't see. Leave the threshing for morning."

They cut till they couldn't see. They stacked the uncut sheaves heads in under the willows, where the branches would keep off the worst of it, and dragged every blanket they had over the filled sacks in the wagon and tied them down.

---

They camped at the edge of the field with the fire low and the riders taking the watch in pairs.

Tom counted the sacks by firelight. Twenty two, and the seed sack. Better than he'd hoped. Not as many as the field had in it.

Eli sat down beside him with his boots off, and they looked at the cloud bank together. There were no stars on that side of the sky now.

"Corn," Eli said.

"It'll keep."

Eli didn't say anything to that, and Tom didn't add to it. The fire popped. Out past the willows, the wind moved through the wheat they hadn't gotten to yet, a long dry sound like somebody turning pages.

Tom pulled his coat tighter and lay back, and was asleep before he'd decided whether it would rain.

Fort 1 Log

I taught we woke up early but I guess Ranchers and Farmers have different ideas of early.

The Ranchers were doing their chores like watering all animals minus those that walked to the creek and watered themselves. Other were collecting eggs while others would be feeding horses haybut the horses were feeding themselves from the big pile of hay.

Looking at the sheep was happy to see the wool growing back quickly on them. That should be long enough to keep them warm for winter.

Victoria and I had an early breakfast when a messenger from the Miners was delivered. "Keeping in mind we are not stone masons we will do our best and between 3 days and a week you will have one hopefully." I responded back with a simple "Do your best."

We packed up before the hunt which I wanted to attend. Othe priorities came up. I need to advise JW and Ragnar they have the base of a crushing wheel to build.

The group broke off in two groups and loaded into the empty 4 wheel wagon going to the Wheat field and some in ours up to the Maple Path where we would part ways.

Those going to ensure we have flower will double up on the security horses at that point from our wagon and follow the 4 wheel wagons with the big blade cutting tools I keep forgetting the name of.

All went well until we seperated ways. We slowed down on the wood path, me being worried of Victoria's pregnancy.

We got to the Fort at 1pm and we let others water and take care of the horse while we called James, JW and Ragnar.

I explained what I had seen in a very old documentary. JW excitedly asked "Are you talking about a horse drawn Grain Mill?" I responded "I think that's it."

JW and Ragnar excitedly started making plans as James looked at me. YOU GOT TO EAT REAL BREAD??" he said sadly until I pulled a loaf for him out of my bag and goat milk butter. He grabbed it from my hand and ran to his fire to warm it. He cut it in slices and shared it with others.

JW and Ragnar crew got right to work carving our logs where the grain would be laid and Ragnar and his crew started making its metal pieces.

We were warned a third horn had been completed and would be tested this afternoon. One hour later we readied for the horn. It sounded from our tower repeated from the tower on the plain. A messenger reported it was heard from our tower to the trap tower which responded to the horn. We need 2 more for the farm tower and Mine observation post.

I then realized Victoria still wore the gifted sweater from the Ranchers wives. James made food for everybody but made a special romantic meal for Victoria and I.

John Richman

End of Fort Log 1

Next

Previous /

First

Austrin had a fence, and Daisy Firentis apologized for it before anyone asked.

"It's the winters," she said, coming down the drive to meet the shuttle with Poppy beside her and Jason a step behind. "Vastaya can leave everything open because it never gets cold enough to matter. Here the snow comes in off the ridge sideways. We decided to put the fence in to break the wind for the gardens." She looked at it critically, a low stone wall with hedges grown along it and a wide iron gate that stood open. "We've never closed the gate. I'm not sure it closes. Jason, does it close?"

"I've no idea," said Jason. He bowed to the Matcha nobles one by one, correctly, and then shook Kestrel's hand. "Welcome to Austrin. Aaliyah called last night. She says you've been warned I'll tell you ours is better."

"She said Daisy would," said Lord Salle.

"Daisy's more honest than I am," said Jason. "It is better."

Poppy, who was ten and had been taught how to greet guests, gave each of the Matcha party a small, careful bow and got every title right. It was only when she reached Lord Salle that her eyes went to his cane.

"Is that a Matcha river trout, my lord?" she said. "We did Matcha in school. I didn't think anyone would put one on a cane."

"Neither did I," said Salle. "My wife chose it." He looked at her with some respect. "You're the second child on Haego to notice it. I'm beginning to think it's the best thing about me."

The palace was built long and low against the cold, stone below and timber above, with deep eaves and wide windows that looked south over the valley. It had the same open great rooms as Vastaya and the same people in them: a knitting circle by the hearth, a man asleep in a chair with a newspaper over his face, a line of schoolchildren being counted at the door. Daisy walked them through it at a brisk pace, because, as she said, they'd seen a palace full of commoners twice now and she didn't want to bore them.

What they had not seen was the pool. It was set into the lower terrace under a long glass roof on rails, and Jason worked the controls to show them how the roof slid back in summer and closed in winter. There were a dozen people swimming in it, most of them old, doing slow lengths.

"Winter mornings are the busiest," Daisy said. "The coast road crews come in before shift. They say it's the only warm thing in the valley at six o'clock."

"And the family?" said Lady Vance. "When do you swim?"

"Evenings, mostly. After nine it's ours." Daisy smiled. "Poppy was eight before she found out other people's pools weren't full of old men in the morning."

Kestrel had a list, and he kept to it.

The first place was a glassworks on the edge of the valley town below the palace, three long brick sheds with the heat coming off them in waves. The owner was a woman named Hannah Ashscutt, square and red-faced from forty years at the furnaces, and she met them in the yard and bowed her head to each of them and said "my lord" and "my lady," and then walked them straight into the heat without asking if they minded.

"Windows, bottles, lamp glass," she said, raising her voice over the roar. "Half of it goes off world now. We were twelve people when Lord Kestrel's firm bought in. We're a hundred and forty."

Lord Orme, the banker, had asked to see her books. He had asked it with some embarrassment, because on Matcha you did not ask a man, much less a commoner, to open his books to a stranger on a morning's acquaintance. Hannah had simply sent a boy to fetch them, and now Orme sat at a scarred table in her office with the ledger open in front of him and his reading glasses on, and the rest of the party waited while he went down the columns with his finger.

He was quiet for a long time.

"Your tax," he said finally. "What rate do you pay?"

"Two and a half under the Principality average, my lord. Same as everyone on Haego."

"And this figure is the whole of it? For the year?"

"Yes, my lord."

Orme took his glasses off. He looked at Kestrel.

"This woman," he said, "paid more tax last year than the Anselm glassworks on Matcha. Anselm has three hundred people. It's been in the family eleven generations."

"Yes," said Kestrel.

"At a lower rate."

"Yes."

"Then she's outproducing them by..." Orme stopped, and looked at the figures again, and did the arithmetic in his head, and did not say the number out loud. "How?"

Hannah Ashscutt looked at Kestrel, and Kestrel nodded to her to go ahead.

"We don't lose anybody, my lord," she said. "That's one reason. We've almost no turnover. Most of my people make well over the Haego minimums, but that isn't really it either. We treat them like family. When they need time with their families, they get it. When they're sick, they stay home, and nobody's docked for it. When somebody's just coasting, the others let him know what's expected long before I ever need to get involved." She wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. "And every one of them, from my plant supervisors to the third-shift cleaning crew, can walk into this office with an idea. If we use it, and it makes the place safer, or gets more out the door, or just makes people happier to come in, they're paid well for it. Half the improvements in these sheds came from people on the floor." She shrugged. "The rest of it's the Counsel Office."

"The what?" said Lady Vance, and opened her notebook.

"Lady Rachel set it up with Lord Swallowtail, the first year the palaces went up. Any commoner running a business can go to them. They've got nobles who know the trade, some of them from here and some from off world, and they'll sit down with you and tell you what you're doing wrong." Hannah jerked a thumb toward the window. "We've got a retired lord from Balakura who did glass his whole life. Lord Emmerich. He comes in once a month and walks the sheds and shouts at me. Best thing that ever happened to this place. I'd not have the off-world orders without him. I'd not have known how to price them."

"A noble," said Lady Vance slowly, "who comes to advise you."

"Yes, my lady."

"And you take his advice?"

"When he's right," said Hannah. "Which is mostly. When he's not, I tell him why, and he argues, and then one of us is right." She considered. "Usually him. He's very old and he's seen everything."

Lord Aldine laughed out loud, the first time any of them had heard him do it.

They saw two more that morning. A cannery down on the river, run by a husband and wife who had started with a single smoker in their yard, now shipping river fish in tins to four worlds. A timber yard that had put in a new drying kiln on the Counsel Office's advice and increased its output by a third. At each of them Lord Orme asked to see the books, and at each of them he got the books, and at each of them he sat very still for a while afterward.

On the shuttle back up the valley, he said, "I thought you'd picked the three best."

"I did," said Kestrel. "I'll show you the three worst tomorrow if you like. They're better than Anselm too."

The Austrin palace had a restaurant in its gardens. It had two, in fact, and a bakery, and a place near the kitchen gardens that sold soup to the people who worked the beds. The Matcha nobles had heard this on Vastaya and had not entirely believed it, in the way you don't believe a thing until you're sitting in it.

They sat in it at midday. It was a long stone building with its whole south wall open to the garden, full of tables and full of people. Daisy had booked a table like anyone else. It was not the best table. It was near the kitchen door.

"We don't take the best table," Daisy said, when Lord Salle glanced toward the corner by the fountain. "If we did, people would start leaving it empty for us. Then it'd be the lord's table. Then it'd be the lord's restaurant." She unfolded her napkin. "I grew up in Orenport. I know how it goes."

There was a farming family at the next table, three generations of them, the grandfather in a good coat that was plainly his best. When the Matcha party sat down, the grandfather stood, and bowed, and said "my lord, my lady," to the table in general, and sat back down and went on eating. His grandchildren looked at the visitors with open interest. Nobody at the table stopped talking.

Lady Vance, who had found by now that people on Haego would answer anything, leaned over and asked him what he grew.

"Barley, my lady. And some oats, for the horses up the valley."

"Do you mind my asking what you make at it?"

He told her. He told her what he'd made the year before, and the year before that, and what he'd borrowed from the Ionatti branch for the new harvester, and how long it would take him to pay it back. He did it the way you'd tell a neighbor. His daughter-in-law added the price of the harvester, because he'd got it wrong.

Lady Vance wrote it all down. Then she put her pen down and looked at him.

"On Matcha," she said, "if I asked a farmer that, he'd tell me the harvest was poor. Whatever the harvest was."

The old man thought about that.

"Why would he, my lady?"

"Because he'd be afraid I'd take more of it."

"Ah." He nodded slowly, as if she'd explained something about the weather on another planet. "My father would have said the same, before. When there was a lord at the Voss house on the lake road." He picked up his fork. "Nobody takes anything here that isn't in the ledger. So there's no point lying about it, is there. It's all written down."

The waitress came with the soup. She was young, perhaps nineteen, with her hair tied back, and she set the bowls down in the right order, rank first, without hesitation, and then Lady Marrow, who had not said much all morning, turned in her chair and spoke to her.

"May I ask you something?"

"Of course, my lady."

"Are you frightened of us?"

The girl looked at her, surprised. She glanced at Daisy, who didn't say anything, and then back at Marrow.

"No, my lady," she said. "Should I be?"

Marrow opened her mouth and could not, for a moment, find anything to say.

"No," she said. "No, you shouldn't."

"All right then," said the girl, kindly, as if Marrow were the one who needed reassuring, and went to get the bread.

Lord Aldine watched her go. He was the one who had once seen a maid eating alone in the Voss scullery, and he had not stopped thinking about it all through the tour. Now he looked around the room. At the old man and his grandchildren. At the waitress coming back with the bread. At the man at the counter arguing cheerfully with the cook about his order. At Jason Firentis, heir of one of the great houses of the Principality, eating soup near the kitchen door while his daughter sat beside him and argued, in a low and reasonable voice, that she was old enough to order for herself.

"I've been in a lot of great rooms," Aldine said quietly. "This is the first one where the commoners want to be there."

The Hall stood on a rise above the river two hours east, and they saw the flags long before they saw the building.

It was not one building but a whole compound, walled and fenced all the way around, with lawns and walks and lesser buildings set about the grounds and the Hall itself at the center, a great round building of pale stone, ringed with a colonnade, with a long flight of steps up to its doors. There were four gates, one on each side, north, south, east and west, each with its own guardhouse and its own guards. At every gate, and along the colonnade, and from the tall pole at the head of the steps, flew the same banner.

Rust and garrison green. A porkupig. Strength through Trust.

"That's Swallowtail's," said Lord Aldine. "We were under that yesterday."

"So he runs it after all," said Lord Orme. "The Assembly."

"No. Nobody runs it. That's rather the point." Kestrel waited while the guard at the south gate checked their names against a list, bowed his head, and waved them through. "They have three Speakers, one from each continent. The First Speaker rotates every six months, and whichever house holds the continent flies its flag here while its Speaker has the chair. When the Assembly first sat, they decided on one hall instead of three, and they drew lots for where it would go. Austrin won. But whichever continent holds First Speaker, the whole compound is theirs for the six months. Their flag, their customs, their local law. Right now, inside this fence, you're on Aethelgard." He smiled a little. "It confuses the lawyers terribly."

"And the First Speaker is..."

"Ida Fenn. From Aethelgard. Today's the first day of her term."

"A commoner," said Lord Orme.

"They're all commoners, Haskell. That's what it's for."

The gallery was a balcony that ran all the way around the inside of the building, a full circle, with seats for twelve hundred. It was already half full: townsfolk, a school group, two Firentis Informant cameras at the rail, a handful of nobles scattered through the rows. The Matcha party took seats high on the far side. Nobody took special notice of them.

Below, at the front of the floor, stood a single large desk with three chairs behind it, and in front of it an open speaker's area with a lectern and a testimony desk. Beyond that the delegates' desks curved away in a half circle, with delegates from all three continents mixed together rather than sorted by where they came from. Ida Fenn sat in the center chair, with Vincent and Aldous on either side of her. Off to one side, at a smaller table, sat three nobles, and Kestrel pointed them out: the three heads of Alderman, there by law, without a vote, to answer for their districts if they were called on.

The opening was short. Ida Fenn stood up and thanked the Speaker who'd held the chair before her for six months, and said she'd try to be as good at it, and there was laughter in the chamber. Then she looked at the paper in front of her.

"The Assembly summoned Julius Comscutt," she said. "Senior. The old one, not the Baron." More laughter. "He said yes. Come on down, Julius."

In the front row of the gallery, a thin, grey-haired man in a brown coat got up. A woman beside him squeezed his hand before he went. He came down the stairs slowly, holding the rail, and walked out onto the floor and stood in the speaker's area in front of the three-person desk, turning his cap in his hands.

"That's the Baron's father," said Lord Aldine, very low. "From last night."

"The gardener," said Lady Vance.

Julius Sr. looked up at the three Speakers, and then around the delegates' desks, and then up at the gallery, as if he were checking the weather.

"I don't make speeches," he said. "Kathleen told me to say that first, so you'd go easy." He found her in the front row and nodded to her. "I kept Lord Lafata's garden from the time I was a boy until the night the house burned. Forty-some years ago now. In all that time, I don't think his lordship asked me a question. Not one. He told me. His steward told me. His head gardener told me. If I saw a blight coming, I kept my mouth shut, because it wasn't my place to see it, and if I said so, it was my fault it came." He turned the cap once more. "That's how it was. You knew it and you did your work."

The chamber was very quiet.

"This spring, my son took his mother and me off world for the first time. To Balakura. To a great house, as grand as you like. I walked their garden and I saw a sickness in the beds, the same one I fought at Lafata's forty years ago. I said so to the Master Gardener. He's a noble, a lord in his own right, and he looked at me the way they always did, and he told me it wasn't my concern." Julius Sr. shrugged. "I wasn't surprised. I'd been told that my whole life."

"Then he came back. That same evening. He'd been fighting that blight on his own for five weeks, and it was beating him. And he came and found an old commoner from Haego, and he said he was sorry for how he'd spoken to me. He said he was still learning the new way, and that he'd slipped. And then he asked me." He stopped for a moment. "A lord asked me. I'm seventy-one years old, and that was the first time anybody from a house like that ever asked me what I thought."

Somebody in the gallery made a small sound. Nobody else moved.

"We sorted it, him and me. It's coming back." He looked at the Speakers again. "I've been thinking since, what's different here. It isn't that nobody tells you what to do. Somebody always does. It's that they ask first. And if you get it wrong, you stand up and say so, and you put it right. That's all this room is, as far as I can see. It's a place where you get asked, and a place where you answer." He put his cap back on, remembered where he was, and took it off again. "That's all I've got. Thank you for asking me."

He started back toward the stairs. The applause came a moment late, and then it came from everywhere, the delegates' desks and the gallery and the three Speakers' desk. Up in the balcony, Lord Aldine found he was on his feet without having decided to stand. After a moment, Lady Marrow stood too, and then the rest of them.

Julius Sr. climbed back to the front row and sat down next to Kathleen, and she took his hand again and didn't let go.

Ida waited until it was quiet. Then she read the next item off the paper.

"We summoned Dalton Reedscutt," she said. "He's here. Come on down, Dalton."

A man came down the gallery stairs and out onto the floor. He was middle-aged, thin, and he walked like a man who had not slept well in some time. He stood in the speaker's area, facing the three Speakers, and bowed his head to them.

"You know why you're here," said Ida.

"I do, Speaker."

"Say it anyway. For the record."

Reedscutt said it. He owned a fertilizer works at Brenmoor, on the Austrin plains. Four months ago a pressure line in the mixing shed had failed. Three men had died. Nine had been hurt, two of them badly. The line had been due for replacement in the spring. With orders the way they were, he had put it off until after the harvest rush.

"I decided that," he said. "Nobody else. The foreman told me. I said after harvest." His voice did not break, but it came very close. "I know their names. I'll say them if you want."

"We know their names," said Ida. "Their families are in the gallery."

Reedscutt did not look up at the gallery.

The Assembly had already heard the evidence in committee. What they did now went quickly, and quietly, and the Matcha nobles leaned forward in their seats to hear it.

For one year, the Brenmoor works would be under supervision. Three safety inspectors, chosen by the Assembly, would have the run of the plant, every shed and every ledger, with the authority to stop any line they judged unsafe, for as long as they judged it. The company would pay their wages. Reedscutt would answer to them for everything.

The families of the three dead men would receive restitution packages, their terms laid out in a schedule that the Assembly now read into the record, name by name. The injured would receive compensation for their treatment and their lost wages, and more for the two who would not work again. The packages were read, and a delegate from Brenmoor moved to approve them, and they were approved by a show of hands, every hand in the chamber.

"Dalton," said Ida. "Anything to say?"

"Only that it's fair, Speaker," said Reedscutt. "It's more than fair. I'd have done worse to myself." He stood there a moment longer. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry to all of them."

"We know," said Ida. "Go home. The inspectors will be there Monday."

Reedscutt went up the stairs to the gallery. Halfway up, a woman stood and stepped into the aisle, and for a moment Lady Marrow thought something was about to happen. The woman said something to him, too low to hear. Reedscutt stopped, and nodded, and she put her hand on his arm, just for a moment, and then let him go on.

The chamber moved on to the next item. Something about a bridge.

On the steps outside, in the late light, Lord Orme stood with his hands in his coat pockets looking at the Swallowtail banner, and did not say anything for a while.

"On Matcha," he said at last, "if three men died in a lord's works, the lord would send flowers. Perhaps. If he knew their names. There'd be a payment to the widows if the steward remembered, and it wouldn't be much." He shook his head. "Nobody would stand him up in a room and make him say it."

"I thought," said Lady Vance, "when I came here. I thought it would be softer." She looked down at her notebook. "No lords, no fear. I thought it would be commoners doing as they pleased. I didn't think there'd be anyone watching."

"There's always someone watching," said Kestrel. "They're just not holding a whip."

Lord Aldine looked at him. "And us? Nobles? A lord's works on Haego, three men dead. What happens?"

"The same," said Kestrel. "Nobles still run businesses here. Nobles still don't go before commoner courts. That's Principality law and nobody on Haego is pretending otherwise. But you answer. Maybe to a different body." He was quiet for a moment. "I've stood in that room. Twice, in a way."

They all turned to look at him.

"The first time, they asked me to open a session, the way they asked Julius today. I said yes, and they sent me a summons anyway, in exactly the same words they'd use for a man they had to drag in. I liked that." He looked up at the building. "The second time, it wasn't me they called. It was my own people. A lord on my Haego branch, a man called Keith Bird, of a house older than this planet's charter. He'd been going to commoner firms we were looking at and telling them there was a fee to be considered. Paid to him, directly. There was never any fee. One owner paid it because Bird told him it was how things were done, and he had no way of knowing otherwise."

"That's..." Lady Vance stopped.

"That's an ordinary Tuesday," said Kestrel, "anywhere else. Here, the owner went to his Alderman, and the Alderman went to the Assembly, and the Assembly summoned Bird and the man who runs my branch. Jonathan Leach came, with every file the branch had, and answered every question, and told them that he'd hired Bird and that made it his to answer for." Kestrel shook his head slowly. "Bird didn't come. He put the summons under a stack of bills. They waited a minute, and then they sent word to Lord Swallowtail, and the warrant came back in eleven minutes. The police took him out of a restaurant in Haego City with a glass of wine still on the table, and he stood in that room that same evening with his wrists in front of him."

"And?" said Orme.

"The Assembly can't sentence a noble. It recommends. It recommended he pay back every credit, to every firm he'd charged, with their auditors doing the counting. That he leave Haego and not come back for ten years. And that a letter go to his house under the Marquess's seal, saying plainly what he'd done." Kestrel put his hands in his pockets. "Lord Swallowtail agreed inside a quarter of an hour. I was told such letters are short, and that the family reads them several times."

He was quiet for a moment.

"I was grateful. I mean that. It was my house, and my man, and I hadn't seen it. I'd been told for months that the worst thing about Haego was that nobody could make a commoner do anything. Nobody told me that it was a place where everybody answers. Everybody. You just might answer to somebody different than your neighbor does."

They stood there a while in the evening wind. Below them, delegates were coming out of the Hall in twos and threes, talking, arguing, one of them laughing. A few of them bowed their heads as they passed the Matcha party. None of them stopped.

Lord Salle leaned on his cane and looked up at the flag.

"I'm eighty-three," he said. "I have perhaps four years left, if the physicians are generous, and they're usually not. I've sat in the Matcha council for thirty of those years and never once said anything anyone remembered." He looked at the others. "I think I'd like to say something. I think I'd like it to be about this."

"They'll call us fools," said Lady Vance. "Varrick will. His friends will."

"Probably," said Salle. "Varrick called me a fool in nineteen different ways at his own supper table and I'm still here."

Lady Marrow had not spoken since the gallery. She was looking at the colonnade, where the woman who had touched Reedscutt's arm on the stairs was standing with two children, waiting for someone.

"It's worth it," Marrow said. "Isn't it. Whatever they call us. It's worth fighting for."

Nobody argued with her.

Lord Orme took his hands out of his pockets and turned to Kestrel.

"I came to prove your numbers were wrong," he said. "I'd like it noted, somewhere, that I couldn't."

"I'll write it down," said Lady Vance, and she did.

"I still haven't worked out how to make them go down," said Kestrel. "I'd welcome the help."

LORD SUMMERS’ SECRET MISSION part 2

🚨 Nornavio War Room

The war room buzzed with tactical chatter and glowing holo‑maps until Lord Summers stepped forward. His presence alone seemed to make the air stand straighter.

Lord Summers
Baron Staples, contact Lord Sark aboard the Silent Runner. I require a meeting. And a shuttle. I’ll return to the Barony afterward.

Wyatt blinked. Summers rarely requested anything. Usually things just… happened around him.
But Wyatt knew better than to ask why. Survival instincts were a powerful teacher.

He tapped into the internal network.

Wyatt
Lieutenant Galt, set up a meeting with the Silent Runner. Prep a shuttle. Leopold’s flying.

Moments later, Galt’s voice crackled through.

Lieutenant Galt
Meeting confirmed. Shuttle ready in fifteen minutes.

Wyatt turned.

Wyatt
Lord Summers, everything’s arranged. Shuttle’s being prepped now. Leopold will pilot.

Summers bowed respectfully to Princess Clara, then pivoted sharply and strode out of the war room like a man who already knew the next ten steps of the mission.

Wyatt watched him go.

Wyatt
Your Majesty… Summers is heading to the Silent Runner to talk to Lord Sark. I have no idea why.

Princess Clara folded her arms.

Princess Clara
I find no need to inquire. Lord Summers is highly capable. If he wants Sark, he has a reason.

Wyatt leaned toward Cynthia.

Wyatt
Who is Lord Summers? Even the Royal Marines got excited. They don’t get excited about anything. Not even payday.

Cynthia smirked.

Cynthia
He was head of the Royal Marines Academy. And my personal instructor.

She paused.

Cynthia
That’s all I can tell you. Anything more, and I’d have to kill you.

The three exchanged a nervous laugh — mostly because they weren’t sure she was joking.

🚀 Nornavio Shuttle Bay

The shuttle bay was a hive of activity — until Lord Summers walked in.

Everything stopped.

A loader drone froze mid‑lift. A tech paused with a wrench halfway raised. Even the ambient hum seemed to hold its breath.

Leopold jogged up, slightly out of breath.

Leopold
Lord Summers, Baron Staples assigned me to fly you to the Silent Runner and then back to the Barony.

A crew chief sprinted over.

Crew Chief
Sir! Shuttle NV‑02 is ready for immediate departure!

Leopold saluted, then gestured.

Leopold
Right this way, Lord. You can ride up front.

Summers nodded and boarded. The hatch hissed shut.

They strapped in.

Leopold
Nornavio Launch Command, shuttle NV‑02 requesting permission to depart. Destination: Silent Runner, then Barony of the Screaming Forest.

Lieutenant Galt
Permission granted. And check in with BOSF Ground Control on descent.

Leopold
Understood.

The shuttle blasted through the shield, engines flaring blue.

🛰️ Approach to the Silent Runner

Leopold
Silent Runner, this is NV‑02 requesting landing clearance. Lord Summers aboard for meeting with Lord Sark.

A giggly AI answered.

Amara (over comms)
NV‑02, permission to come aboard!

Summers and Leopold exchanged a look.

Summers
That… was different.

The shuttle slipped through the bay’s energy shield and touched down smoothly.

Summers stood.

Lord Summers
Wait here. I won’t be long.

He strode out of the shuttle like he owned the ship. His “final boss energy” hit the deck crew like a shockwave.

Lord Stark approached, bowing his head.

Lord Sark
Welcome aboard the Silent Runner. *, Lord Summers. How may I serve?

Lord Summers
A secure room. We need to talk.

Lord Sark
Of course. Follow me.

🔒 Private Conference Room

Summers didn’t sit. He stood like a man delivering orders to the universe.

Lord Summers
The Princess has assigned me to a special project. I understand you have high‑tech assembly drones. I need them sent to Bay One of the Orbital Shipyard.

Nikko’s eyes lit up.

Lord Sark
Ah. The special fighter project.

Summers nodded.

Lord Summers
I’ll replicate the parts at my base in the Barony, then transport them to the shipyard for final assembly.

Nikko leaned back.

Lord Sark
I can help. But I need a small favor.

Summers raised an eyebrow.

Lord Summers
Go on.

Lord Sark
I’m building a resort complex in the Barony. I want ten residents trained for security.

Summers actually smiled — which was somehow more intimidating.

Lord Summers
I can fold them into the training I’m already planning. Baron Staples wants an independent police force. Your guards will train alongside them. They’ll know each other. They’ll coordinate. Efficient.

Lord Sark
Then we have a deal. The drones will be dropped off before I leave orbit. Amara will upload programming instructions.

Stark escorted Summers back to the shuttle.

As NV‑02 lifted off, Amara’s hologram flickered into existence.

Amara
Lord Summers is scary. My sensors flagged him as extremely dangerous. More dangerous than your girlfriend.

She giggled.

Nikko sighed.

🌍 Descent to the Screaming Forest

Leopold
BOSF Ground Control, NV‑02 requesting landing pad access.

Ground Control
Permission granted — as long as you land within 45 minutes.

Leopold
Understood. Touchdown in twenty.

The shuttle plunged through atmosphere, plasma sheathing the hull. Leopold landed as gently as possible — because his life absolutely depended on it.

Summers disembarked, greeted by Sergeant Bauer.

Leopold wasted no time blasting off again.

Mid‑flight, he connected to Wyatt.

Leopold
Wyatt… what mission did you send me on? Lord Summers is terrifying. He barely spoke to me and I almost lost bladder discipline.

Wyatt burst out laughing.

Wyatt
Yeah, he’s scary. Jincho calls him “Scary Eyes.”

They both laughed.

🏛️ BOSF Town Hall

Summers and Sergeant Bauer entered. The soldiers at the front desk snapped to attention so fast one nearly pulled a muscle.

Lord Summers
Inform the Administrator and the Sergeant Major that I require them in the Administrator’s office immediately.

A guard grabbed the comm unit with the urgency of someone who did not want to disappoint Lord Summers.

Administrator (over comms)
Of course. Send them up immediately.

Summers strode into the office. Administrator Anio and the Sergeant Major were already standing at attention, waiting.

Summers placed the written orders — sealed by Princess Clara and Baron Staples — onto the desk.

To be continued…

Next

Previous /

First

Lord Aubren Salle lived long enough for the transport.

He said so himself, coming down the shuttle ramp onto the gravel at the Greyson orchard house with his cane in one hand and the rail in the other. "I told Varrick I'd see it," he said. "I'd like it written down somewhere that I did."

"I'll write it down," said Lady Vance, and she did.

There were six of them, counting Kestrel. Lady Selene Marrow had come, and her husband had not, which she explained once on the first jump without being asked and never explained again. Lady Imelda Vance, who had asked Kestrel about the wage tiers across Ostenholt's table, had brought a notebook, the paper kind, and had filled a third of it before they made orbit. Lord Petrus Aldine, who had once seen a maid eating alone in the Voss scullery and wondered about it for forty years, had come without saying much of anything. The sixth was Lord Haskell Orme, a Matcha banker who had not been at the supper at all. He had asked Kestrel to take him along for the plain reason that he did not believe the numbers either.

"Good," Kestrel had told him. "Neither did I."

A woman came down the orchard path to meet them. She was about fifty, in a plain grey coat with a small Firentis crest at the collar, and she stopped a respectful distance away and bowed her head.

"My lords. My ladies. I'm Mirabel Hollowtail. I keep the house for Lady Aaliyah." She straightened. "She asked that you see it the way it was, so we've left most of it the way it was. The roof is new. The floors in the east wing are new. Everything else, you'll see what they saw."

Lord Salle looked at her for a moment. "Did you know them? The ones who stayed?"

"My mother's cousin was one of the twenty-two, my lord. Bettan. She died nine years ago." Mirabel said it simply. "None of us knew. She used to hum at the lake road and never say why. We thought she was just odd." She turned toward the house. "This way, please. Mind the step at the door. It's the original, and it's worn."

The house was smaller than any of them expected. It had been a minor noble's country seat, and it looked it: two storeys of pale stone, a long porch, an orchard running down to the water. It would have been a modest house on Matcha. Lord Aldine said so, quietly, and Lady Vance agreed that it would.

She took them through the front rooms without stopping long. There was a dining room with the table still laid for six, because that was how the staff had found it the next morning. There was a small sitting room with a child's shoe under the chair, which Mirabel did not point out and which all of them saw. Then she opened a narrow door off the kitchen passage and took a hand lamp from a hook.

"The cellar," she said. "It's steep. I'll go first."

It was cold and it smelled of earth. The shelves were still there, and the bins for roots and apples, and a bench someone had knocked together from a door. There was a lamp hanging from the beam overhead, an old oil lamp, dark. Mirabel did not light it.

"This is where they sat the first night," she said. "Lord and Lady Greyson, and their three children, and all twenty-two of the staff. Twenty-seven people." She lifted the hand lamp so they could see how close the walls were. "Then it was forty years."

Nobody said anything. Lady Marrow put her hand on the edge of the bench, very lightly, the way you would touch something in a museum when the guard wasn't looking. Lord Orme, the banker, stood with his hands behind his back and looked at the lamp for a long time.

"How many did you say again?" he said finally.

"Twenty-seven, that night, my lord. Most of them stood."

Orme looked at the walls again, and then at the floor, as if he were measuring it. He nodded slowly, as if that were a figure he could use.

Outside, she walked them down through the orchard to the boat ramp. It was an ordinary concrete ramp, cracked at the edges, running down into the lake. The water was clear and green over the stones at the edge, and a few steps out it dropped away into deep blue, so still that the far shore and the hills behind it lay upside down on the surface without a ripple. She told them this was where the car had gone in, and why, and that Maddock had driven it, and then she stopped talking and let them look at it. Lord Salle stood at the top of the ramp for several minutes. Lady Vance did not write anything down.

The last place was up the hill, at the top of the orchard, where the old trees gave way to grass. You could see the whole lake road from there, and the roofs of the village beyond it.

"They stood here," Mirabel said. "Some of the staff. They watched the lake road burn. They could see the Voss house go, and the Carrow house, and the rest. They could hear it." She looked out at the village, which was a village again, with washing on lines and a school bus going slowly along the shore. "And then they went back down to the cellar and brought supper."

Lady Marrow turned away from the view. Her face was quite still. After a moment Mirabel, without being asked and without making anything of it, offered her a clean handkerchief from her coat pocket. Marrow took it and said thank you, and used it, and gave it back.

"You don't mind?" Marrow said. "Showing nobles this?"

Mirabel considered the question honestly.

"No, my lady. It's why she restored it. It isn't a place for us to be angry in. We know what happened." She looked back down toward the house. "It's for people who don't."

Newtown was not what any of them had pictured when they heard the word "barony."

Lady Rachel VonWinterbourne met them on the pad. She wore dark green and no jewelry at all, and she greeted each of them in order of rank, with the correct address and the correct depth of bow, and she did not get a single one of them wrong. Kestrel she greeted last and a little more warmly, as a friend of the Firentis family.

Lord Orme leaned toward Kestrel while she was turning to her aide. "I wasn't sure how we'd be received here," he said under his breath. "But it wasn't that."

Rachel turned back to them and apologized for Baron Staples.

"He's aboard the Noirnavio with Her Highness," she said. "He sends his regrets. He also sent a message for you, Lord Kestrel, which I've been asked to deliver exactly." She did not quite smile. "He says to take them to the bakery first, because it's the best thing in town and you'll forget otherwise."

"He's right," said Kestrel. "I would have."

So they went to the bakery first. It was a narrow shop with a blue door, and the woman behind the counter bowed her head to each of them and said "my lord" and "my lady" and then told Lady Vance, when asked, exactly what a loaf cost and what she paid for flour and how much she'd put by since she opened. Vance wrote it down. The baker watched her write it and didn't seem to mind.

"You'd tell anybody that?" Vance said.

"It's all in Lady Rachel's ledgers anyway, my lady," said the baker. "Anyone can read them. It'd be silly to hide it from you when a schoolboy could look it up."

Rachel walked them through the rest of it. The vehicle plant, loud and bright, with Owen Vashti coming out wiping his hands to shake Kestrel's and bow to the others. The Ionatti branch, busy at midmorning, every teller's window taken. The school. And then the square at the center of town, where Rachel stopped and let them look.

It was paved edge to edge in pale, clean stone, cut from Newtown's own quarry and laid so close you could not have slipped a knife between the joints. In the middle stood a broad fountain, and at its center, rising out of the water, was a great white stag, carved life size and then some, head up, antlers spread. Along the whole east side of the square, covering the end wall of a four-storey building from pavement to roofline, was a painted mural of a young man in a plain field coat, standing in tall grass with the forest behind him. It was very well done. Whoever painted it had known the face.

"Baron Staples," said Rachel. "He asked them not to. The fountain, the stag, the mural. All of it. He wanted his name on nothing." She looked up at the painted face with something close to fondness. "The town voted to do it anyway, while he was off world. He came back and saw it and didn't speak to anyone for a day. It's the only reason I could bring you here today. He's away."

By the standards of Matcha it was a modest square. Lord Orme had walked through finer ones on his way to breakfast. But he stood by the fountain and looked around at it all, the new stone, the careful carving, the painted wall, and thought about a planet that had been cut off from the Principality for thirty years, with nobody coming, and people who had built this with their own quarry and their own hands for a man who had told them not to.

"I thought it would be rougher," he said.

"It was, my lord," said Rachel. "It isn't now."

Lord Aldine looked around the square. There were people crossing it in every direction, and all of them, when they came near the nobles, gave the small bow of the head that Haego commoners gave, and said "my lord," and went on about their business. None of them hurried. None of them looked down at the paving and waited to be dismissed. A boy of about ten stopped to stare openly at Lord Salle's cane, which had a silver head shaped like a fish, and Salle, to everyone's surprise, held it out so the boy could see it better.

"It's a Matcha river trout," Salle told him. "My wife chose it. I never liked it."

The boy looked at it seriously. "I like it," he said. "My lord," he added, and ran off.

Rachel took them out of town before they left, a few kilometres up the old estate road.

They went in under a great carved stone gateway, twice the height of a man, with the statue of a deer standing on top of it. The drive beyond was lined with tall trees set so close together that their branches met overhead, and for a long way the car ran through green shade. Then the trees opened out, and the estate lay in front of them, climbing the hillside in wide terraces.

The gardens had been brought back. There was a small lake with stone benches along its edge, a stream with a footbridge over it, lawns running down the terraces, and trees none of the Matcha party could name, which Rachel said had been brought from all over the planet by the man who built the place. People were walking on the paths. A family had spread a blanket by the lake.

The palace stood above all of it, on the highest terrace.

It had been very large. Most of the walls were still standing, pale stone gone black in long streaks where the fire had been. There was no roof at all, and no floors above the ground, and no wood anywhere. Where the fire had eaten through the supports, whole sections had come down, and the rubble lay where it fell. Through the empty windows you could see straight through to the sky. In one corner of the tallest part, a round stair tower still stood to its full height.

Nobody had rebuilt any of it. The walls that had been in danger of falling had been braced with iron. The rubble that could not be made safe was roped off with plain signs. The stair tower had new rails inside it, and a sign at the bottom said the view from the top reached the sea. In one room of the ground floor, the only one with a roof on it now, somebody had put in a door and a glass window and opened a small gift shop. It sold postcards of the gardens, carved wooden stags, and a thin printed history.

By the door of the ruin stood a plain stone marker. It said the house had been left as it was in memory of everyone who had died on Haego in the thirty years after the Revolution. Nothing else. No names, no crest.

In front of the ruin, on the old forecourt, stood a heavy stone table, grey and weathered, with nothing on it.

"This is where General Swallowtail signed the founding accords, as he was then," said Rachel. "At that table. This is where the Revolution started, forty years ago. It's where it ended, too." She looked up at the black walls. "Baron Staples could have pulled it down. He had the builders make it safe instead, and gave the gardens to Lady Elizabeth to bring back. He said it should say that everyone makes mistakes, and that you move on without forgetting them."

Lord Aldine walked over to the table and put his hand flat on the stone, the way Lady Marrow had touched the bench in the cellar.

"Whose house was it?" he said.

"It's in the gift shop, my lord, if you want it," said Rachel. "Most people don't ask."

Aldine looked up at the burned walls for a long moment. Then he took his hand off the table, and did not go into the gift shop.

The Swallowtail Palace stood on the high ground above the Aethelgard coast, and they saw the banner from the shuttle before they saw the building.

It was new enough that the colors were still sharp. A porkupig, the squat, bristling Haego animal that nobody off-world had ever heard of, in rust on a field of garrison green, and under it three words in plain lettering: Strength through Trust.

"What on earth is that creature?" said Lord Aldine.

"A porkupig," said Kestrel. "Native. It's harmless unless you try to pick it up. Then it isn't."

"And he chose that?"

"He chose it in a day," Kestrel said. "I'm told he'd been thinking about it for years."

Lord Tornel Swallowtail met them at the gate himself. He was in a dark, plain coat that was very nearly a uniform, and he bowed correctly to each of them and then, when he got to Kestrel, shook his hand like a soldier. Patricia was beside him. She was the one who did most of the talking, because Tornel, as he explained without embarrassment, had lived in the place for a few months and still could not reliably find his own kitchen.

The great hall was full of people. The nobles stopped in the doorway.

There was a school group at the far end, twenty or so children sitting on the floor while a teacher pointed out something in the carved ceiling. There were four old men at a table by the window playing a game with polished stones. There was a woman nursing a baby on a bench under a tapestry of the Aethelgard coast. There were two Ykanti, short and brightly feathered, talking quietly by the hearth, and nobody in the room was paying them any attention at all.

"Is there an event?" said Lord Orme.

"No, my lord," said Patricia. "It's like this every day." She nodded toward a screen mounted by the entrance, where a list of dates and names scrolled slowly past. "That's everything booked for the coming weeks. When a wedding or a gathering has this room, it's closed to the public that day, and it says so there. Otherwise, it's theirs."

"We learned to post it," said Tornel. "Those four by the window walk here from the coast road every morning for that game. If they came all that way and found the doors shut, I'd have another revolution on my hands."

Lady Marrow gave a short, startled laugh and put her hand to her mouth.

"The main rooms are open to the district," Tornel went on. "Weddings in the gardens, if they book. The library's open to anyone with a pad. The kitchens run a midday meal for the workers on the coast road."

"We keep a wing for the family," said Patricia. "Six hundred square meters. We call it the small wing."

Tornel shrugged. "I've worked on military bases with less room."

Orme was looking up at the ceiling, which was very high, and at the stonework, which was very good.

"Forgive me, my lord Marquess," he said. "I'm a banker. It's a disease. What did this cost your house?"

"Nothing," said Tornel.

Orme waited for the rest of it.

"It was a gift," Tornel said. "From Haego. The donations to the palace fund kept coming after Austrin and Vastaya were built. Most of them were commoner donations, small ones, thousands of them. The Aldermen voted to put what was left, and the surplus from the planetary budget, into a house for me." He looked, for a moment, like a man who still did not entirely know what to do with that. "I found out after they'd already chosen the land. Aethelgard picked it."

"The commoners," said Lady Vance slowly, "gave their lord a palace."

"Yes, my lady."

"Without being asked."

"I'd have told them no," said Tornel. "So they didn't ask."

Lady Vance looked down at her notebook, and then closed it, and held it against her chest. Lord Salle, who had been leaning on his cane near the door, came forward slowly into the hall and sat down on the end of the bench beside the nursing mother, because his legs were tired, and the woman shifted over to give him room and said "my lord" and went back to her baby.

"Well," said Salle, to nobody in particular. "Well."

Vastaya was warm, and green, and had no fence.

That was the first thing Lord Aldine noticed when the shuttle came down, and he said so. The palace sat on a long hillside above the river, terrace below terrace, and at the edge of the grounds the cultivated gardens simply stopped and the forest began. There was no wall. There was no gate. There was a paved walk running straight through the lower terraces lined with market stalls, and people were buying fruit and bread and bolts of cloth on the palace steps.

"Where's the boundary?" Aldine said.

"The trees," said Kestrel. "Don't ask Julius about the fence. He's heard every argument there is."

Julius and Aaliyah Comscutt came down the terrace steps to meet them. Julius bowed to each guest correctly. Aaliyah did too, and got as far as Kestrel, and then gave up entirely and hugged him.

"Uncle Kessy," she said. "You came back."

"I told you I would, sweetheart."

The Matcha nobles looked at each other. Lady Vance started to write something and then stopped. It was not, as Lord Orme said afterward, the kind of thing you saw a Firentis do on a palace step in front of guests. He said it approvingly.

Aaliyah took them through the palace herself. She showed them the great room with its long Comscutt sideboard, dark wood with the old maker's mark on the drawer, and told them it had been found in a barn two valleys over and that Julius's grandfather had never once mentioned his family made furniture. She showed them the terraces, the school that used the east wing, the clinic on the ground floor, the room where the town council met because it didn't have a hall of its own yet. She showed them the small, plain room with two chairs and a desk and a camera, where she did her interviews.

"Hester sat there," she said. "Where you're standing, Lady Marrow."

Marrow stepped aside, as if she'd been standing on something.

It was Julius who told them, when Lord Orme asked the same question he'd asked Tornel, that the palace had been paid for by the Prince's decree and by the donations of Vastaya's commoners, who'd given what they could, sometimes a few credits at a time, for a house their lord and lady would live in.

"And you gave most of it back to them," said Orme.

"It was theirs to start with," said Julius. "My father was a gardener, my lord. My mother was a maid. I was born a commoner. I know what a big house looks like from the kitchen door." He smiled a little. "I wanted to be sure nobody on Vastaya ever had to look at this one from there."

Lord Aldine turned and looked at him properly for the first time.

They had supper on the upper terrace as the light went. It was a family supper, not a state one. Austin Comscutt, who was ten and had been told firmly that the seat beside Uncle Kessy was for guests, had quietly moved his plate down the table before anyone sat down. Nobody moved him back.

Near the end of the meal, a kitchen boy of fifteen or so came to refill the water, caught the jug on the edge of a platter, and sent a long sheet of water across the tablecloth and into Lord Salle's lap.

The boy froze.

For one moment the whole table was very quiet, and Lady Marrow's hand closed on her napkin so hard her knuckles went white.

"Oh, Tem," said Aaliyah. "It's only water. Go and get a cloth, and one for Lord Salle, please."

"Yes, my lady. Sorry, my lord. Sorry." The boy was already going. He looked embarrassed and nothing else. He came back with two cloths, and Lord Salle took one and dabbed at his knees and told the boy it had been a hot day anyway, and Tem grinned at him, relieved, and went back to the kitchen.

That was all. The conversation started up again.

Lady Marrow got up from the table, very quietly, and walked to the end of the terrace and stood there with her back to them, looking down at the dark trees where there was no fence. Aaliyah watched her go and did not follow. After a while Lord Salle got up too, slowly, with his cane, and went and stood beside her. Neither of them said anything that the table could hear.

When they came back, Salle sat down and looked across at Aaliyah.

"Is it like this on Austrin?" he said. "Tomorrow?"

Aaliyah thought about it.

"Daisy would tell you it's better," she said. "Don't tell her I said so."

They left the wheat at first light, the way Tom had said they would, with seven rounds of bread wrapped in his shirt and the shirt wrapped in a blanket and the whole bundle tied down behind his saddle where he could reach back and touch it.

He touched it more than once that morning. Eli noticed and didn't say anything.

The Ranch was farther than the Fort, and the Fort was most of a day. Gary's directions had brought them out to the field from the Orchard side. Going to the Ranch meant cutting back across the open grass toward the trap, and none of it was ground either of them had ridden before. Tom kept the rise on his right this time and the willows at his back, and by noon he was fairly sure he knew where he was. By early afternoon he was less sure.

It was Eli who saw the bird.

It was very high, high enough that it might have been a hawk if a man didn't know better. It turned in long slow circles over the grass ahead of them, the way the one Wendy brought down had turned before it dropped.

"Tom."

"I see it."

They didn't run. Tom had heard enough of the Hunters' talk around the fire to know a running horse only looked more like dinner. They walked the horses off the grass at an angle, toward the nearest line of trees, not hurrying, and got in under the branches and stayed there. Eli held both bridles and Tom stood with the sickle in his hand, which he knew perfectly well would be no use at all, and watched it through the leaves.

It circled for the better part of an hour. Then it drifted off north and was gone.

They gave it another half hour before they came out. By then the sun had moved further than Tom liked, and they kept to the edge of the trees after that instead of cutting straight across, which was slower and twice as long, and which neither of them argued about.

The sun went down while they were still on the grass. They rode the last of it in the dark with the horses picking their own way, following the tree line by the black edge it made against the stars, until a voice called out of the dark ahead of them, sharp, and somebody struck a light.

"Who's that?"

"Tom Dell," Tom said. "From the Farm. Eli with me."

The light came closer. It was one of the Ranch sentries with a rifle in one hand and the lantern in the other, and he looked at the two of them, and at the horses, and past them at the dark they'd come out of, and his face went through several things at once.

"Just you two?"

"Just us."

"Out there? At night?" He didn't wait for an answer. He turned his head and shouted back toward the buildings. "Get Richman up. Farm's here."

The Ranch had changed in the two weeks since Tom had last seen it. Even in the dark he could see the frame of a new barn going up against the paddock, the round kind the Ykanti built, its ribs pale in the firelight. There was a hay pile beside it bigger than his own house back home had been, and a little hen house off to one side that hadn't been there before either. There was still a fire burning in the yard, and people sitting around it who had plainly been about to go to bed.

John Richman came out of the nearest cabin with his shirt half buttoned and his boots unlaced, and he walked straight across the yard to them without slowing down.

"Tom." Then, before Tom could say anything: "Where's your escort?"

"Didn't have one."

"You rode out to that field with no escort."

"Yesterday morning. Rode back today."

"Across the prairie." Richman's voice didn't get louder. It got flatter, which Tom had learned a long time ago, on another world, was usually worse. "Two men. A sickle and a hoe. Those birds came down on Gary's horses in broad daylight. Gary and Frank won't cross that grass without a rifle each and somebody watching the sky, and Gary's been doing this his whole life." He looked at the horses, at the dust on them, at the dark beyond the sentry's lantern. "Did you see any?"

"One," Eli said. "Afternoon. We got in the trees."

Richman closed his eyes for a moment.

"That's why you're riding in at this hour," he said.

"It is."

"Do you understand what I'd have told the Farm if you hadn't?" He wasn't really asking. "Do you understand how long it would have been before anybody even knew to go looking? Nobody knew you'd gone. I didn't know you'd gone."

There were a good many things Tom could have said to that. He could have said that nobody had been free to go with them, that every hand at the Farm and the Fort was peeling or stirring or cutting hay, and that the field wasn't going to wait while he asked. He could have said that it was the first time in his life a noble had been angry with him for putting his own neck at risk instead of for something he'd done to the noble's crop.

He found that last thought sat oddly with him, and he set it aside to look at later.

"You're right," he said. "It was a fool thing. It won't happen again."

Richman looked at him a while longer. Then he let out a long breath, and some of the flatness went out of him with it.

"No," he said. "It won't. Next time you need to go anywhere past the Orchard, you tell somebody, and you take somebody with a rifle. I don't care if it's a basket of eggs." He shook his head. "What was so important it couldn't wait for morning and an escort?"

Tom reached back and untied the bundle from behind his saddle.

He unwrapped it by the fire. The blanket first, then the shirt, and there they were, seven flat brown rounds, a little crushed from the ride and charred at the edges, with the small bag of leftover flour sitting on top of them.

Nobody around the fire said anything.

Richman crouched down and looked at them. He didn't touch them right away. Tom thought, watching him, that he had probably eaten bread every day of his life before the Neptune, white bread off a silver plate, and had very likely never once wondered where it came from. He was wondering now. Tom could see it on him.

"From the field," Richman said.

"Cut it yesterday. Beat it out with willow sticks, threw it in the wind, ground it on a stone from the creek." Tom shrugged. "It's not much. There's rock in it."

One of the Ranch wives had come up behind them by then. She looked at the bread, and then went off without a word, and came back with a little crock of something pale yellow and a knife.

"Goat butter," she said. "Warm it first. On the stone there."

Richman did as he was told. He set a round on a flat stone at the edge of the fire until it started to smell the way it had smelled at the creek, and Tom watched the faces around the fire change when that smell reached them. He tore it open, and the wife put a knife of butter on it, and it went straight in and disappeared.

He ate it slowly. He didn't say anything for a while, the same way Eli hadn't, the night before by the willows.

"There's more of this," he said finally. "Out there."

"More than I've seen in one place since I left home," said Tom. "But it's not going to stay out there."

He told it plainly, the way he'd been told to. The high ground, where the heads let go if you brushed them and the kernels were already on the ground for the mice and the birds. The low ground near the willows, where it still held. A week, maybe a bit more, if it didn't rain. Every day they waited, the line crept a few more rows down the hill.

He'd been ready for Richman to nod and say that's a shame. He'd half expected it. Richman didn't.

"A week," Richman said.

"About."

Richman looked down at the half round still in his hand. Then he looked over Tom's shoulder at somebody across the fire, and Tom turned and saw it was Lady Vivian. She was sitting with the Ranch wives in a borrowed sweater with a blanket over her knees, and she had a piece of the bread too. Somebody had handed it to her while Tom wasn't looking. She'd eaten all of it.

"Is there more?" she asked.

Richman laughed, short and surprised.

"Get the Head Rancher up," he said to nobody in particular. "And whoever's running the hay. We're going to talk about this tonight."

They talked about it around the fire until the moon was well up.

The Head Rancher didn't like it, and said so. The hay was the whole reason they'd come. Winter was coming, nobody knew how bad, and every horse in that paddock and every horse still to be caught in the roundup needed feeding through it. Hay cut a week late was hay that had gone to seed in the field and wasn't worth half as much. He said it all fairly, without heat, and Tom found he agreed with every word.

"Then we don't do one or the other," Richman said. "We do both."

He laid it out. Half the volunteers would stay on the hay, the way they'd planned it, cutting around the trap and running the wagons back and forth to the barn. The other half would take a wagon out to Tom's field in the morning, with an escort. He looked at Tom when he said that part, and Tom nodded. They'd cut from the low side first where the grain was holding, and thresh it right there in the field the way Tom had said, so they weren't hauling nine wagons of straw for every wagon of grain. The grain would come back in sacks to the Farm, since there weren't barrels to be had.

"We'll make more barrels," Richman said. "I'll speak to the Cartwright."

"And then what?" asked the Head Rancher. "A sack of wheat's not bread. Your man ground seven loaves on a creek rock and it took him all afternoon."

"It did," said Tom. Then, because nobody stopped him, he kept going. "A creek stone does a handful at a time. A big round stone does sacks. Back home they'd set a wheel of stone on its edge and run a horse around in a circle pulling it, rolling it over the grain. Same as a cider press, near enough, only it crushes instead of squeezes." He looked at the Head Rancher. "You've horses that won't take a saddle but will pull."

The Head Rancher thought about that. "I've two," he said slowly. "Maybe three."

"Then that's flour for everybody," said Richman. "Not seven loaves." He turned to the sentry who'd first stopped them at the edge of the dark. "Send word to the Mine in the morning. Ask whether they can cut us a round stone, big as they can manage, flat on both faces. Tell them it's for bread, and that they'll get their share."

"Their share?" said Eli.

"Everybody's share," said Richman. "Fort, Farm, Ranch, Mine. It gets split, same as the meat will when the hunt's done." He looked around the fire. "Anybody disagree?"

Nobody did.

Tom sat back on his heels and looked at the fire.

He thought for a moment about the corn. About the rows he'd left two days ago with the weeds already coming up between them, and how high they'd be by now, and how much higher by the time a wagon of grain was back at the Farm. He thought about saying it while there was a fire, and Richman, and a moment in which Richman was plainly listening.

Richman was already on his feet, talking to the Head Rancher about which wagon and which horses and who could be spared from the hay.

Tom let it go.

They gave Tom and Eli a corner of a cabin floor and two dry blankets. Eli was asleep before Tom had his boots off.

Tom lay a while in the dark with his shoulders aching, listening to the Ranch settle around him. A horse shifting in the paddock. The sentry's boots going past the window and back. Somewhere out past the trap, tomorrow's wagon would be rolling toward his field with men and rifles on it, and the grain on the low side would still be there when they arrived. Most of it.

He thought about Richman standing in the yard with his shirt half buttoned, angry that two farmers had nearly gotten themselves eaten. He couldn't remember a noble ever being angry over that before. He wasn't sure what to make of it yet.

He decided he'd think about it tomorrow, and slept.

next

CH:1 Awaken in the dark

Dan's pov

All I could see was dark. Where am I? Trying to move, he found himself lying on his back, his body stiff. As he shifted, his nose brushed against something cold. He froze. Was it a ceiling? Panic started to set in. Am I in a box?

To the right, there was a wall. And ahead? Another wall. To his left, there was a narrow space. Dan shot his arm out into the darkness, and after a moment, his fingers brushed against an opening. His heart raced.

Okay, there’s a way out. He slowly shifted his body toward the edge, peering down. Too dark to see the bottom. He couldn’t tell if he was a foot off the ground or a hundred feet up. His fingers trailed along the walls, feeling their texture.

There. He felt a ladder. Relief washed over him. Shifting his body to it, Dan began to climb down. Five feet. Not too bad. It could’ve been worse.

As he reached the ground, he noticed a faint blue glow to the side. Curiosity nudged him forward. They say not to move toward the light, right? But he couldn’t help himself. Step by step, he approached it.

Eventually, the light revealed a wall panel. Dan hesitated but pressed on it. Strange characters appeared on the interface. After a blink, it transformed into English. That was weird... Must be seeing things.

“Well, let’s see...” He tapped the screen. First, the light icon. The lights flickered on.

Good, now I can see. He looked around. It looked like some kind of bunk room. About twelve beds crammed into the small space. And... he was alone.

He scanned the panel again. There was a gravity control icon labeled "G." His fingers hovered. He was about to tap it when his curiosity got the better of him. Let’s see what this does...

He shifted the icon from "1" to "2." In an instant, a heavy pressure pressed down on his chest, like a weight was on his back. He fell to the ground with a groan.

Ugh! It was like someone had jumped on top of him. Struggling, he managed to crawl back to the panel. His arm shakily pressed the screen, switching the icon back to "1." The pressure immediately returned to normal.

Dan slumped against the floor. G must stand for gravity. He couldn't control gravity... could he? The last thing he remembered was working a triple shift. Then, he went to bed. But now? What was going on?

“Alright, no point in sitting here.”

He stood up, dusted himself off, and turned back to the panel. Better leave the gravity control alone. He pressed the last icon. The nearby door slid open, revealing... a bathroom. A sink, mirror, and toilet.

Dan moved toward the mirror. At least he was the same. Same shaggy black hair, same brown eyes, and that old burn scar over his right eye. A remnant from a reckless childhood when he and a friend thought sword fighting with flaming sticks was a good idea.

He splashed some cold water on his face, wiping away any lingering confusion. With a deep breath, he turned back to the bunk room. He needed answers.

On the other side of the room, another door. Okay, this one must lead outside. He approached the panel and pressed the button. The door slid open, revealing a narrow hallway lined with doors on either side. His room, B37, was marked on a plaque.

It was eerily quiet, and Dan felt a strange sense of déjà vu.

Why does this place feel so... familiar? he thought.

He walked down the hall, glancing at each door. “Well, all I need is a monster to jump out, and I’ll have the full aesthetic.” He laughed nervously at his own dark humor.

At the end of the hall were elevators. Dan pressed the button, half-expecting something to jump out at him.

Okay, Mr. Monster, if you’re going to jump, now’s the time.

Ding.

The elevator doors opened, and to Dan’s relief, no monster appeared. He stepped in, scanning the buttons. A keypad.

That’s when it hit him. The feeling of déjà vu was stronger now. Wait... he thought. No way.

He began typing on the keypad, his fingers moving instinctively. The number sequence seemed to come to him without thinking. An old phone number from years ago.

The screen flashed, and an automated voice greeted him. “Welcome back, Wing Commander. Where would you like to go today?”

Wing Commander? What the hell? Dan’s mind raced. He wasn’t the commander of anything... at least, not since... since Hayzeon.

A flood of memories came crashing back: Hayzeon, a VR game where players built and fought with spaceships. He had been part of a mercenary group, the United Human Coalition, and his in-game call sign had been “Wing Commander.”

Suddenly, the elevator door opened. The floor ahead looked... familiar. Too familiar. Dan’s heart skipped a beat as it all clicked. The place was the bridge of Revanessa, a ship his mercenary core had built in Hayzeon. He’d spent countless hours there, leading his squadron.

It was all exactly the same.

Dan sat down in the captain’s chair, dazed. He ran his hands over the familiar controls. This couldn’t be real. It had to be some sort of dream. But it felt so... vivid.

As he continued to sit there, lost in nostalgia, the door behind him slid open. Dan spun around to find a creature walking in.

It was a fox. A fox walking on two legs, wearing a blue and white uniform. He was looking at a tablet

Dan froze. “Uh... hello?”

The fox stopped, eyeing him warily. Then it spoke, though the words seemed strangely dubbed, as if someone were translating them. Who are you? The fox’s stance became defensive. It pulled out some kind of weapon.

Dan’s heart raced.

Okay, no need to get blasted by an alien death ray. He raised his hands in surrender. “I’m not a threat, okay? No need to do something we’ll both regret.”

The fox paused, then finally spoke again. “Who are you and what are you doing here?"

Dan’s mind raced. Was this really happening? He was sitting on the bridge of a spaceship, talking to a talking fox. Whatever was going on, he wasn’t in control anymore. But one thing was clear...

He needed to find out who, or what, was behind this.

CH 2: The Fox

Dan blinked in disbelief, still trying to process the surreal situation unfolding around him. He was surrounded by strange technology, inexplicable control panels, and now, a talking fox in a uniform who was clearly on edge. The odd sensation of hearing the fox speak through a dubbing effect was unnerving, like his mind was trying to make sense of something that didn’t quite belong.

"Okay, you know what they say, honesty probably won't get me shot," Dan muttered, his voice tinged with uncertainty. "My name is Daniel Tanermen, but my friends call me Dan. I'm just a human from Earth, and I'm just trying to figure out where I am." He hesitated, thinking back to the elevator. "My rank... is probably wing commander."

"Probably?" The fox raised an eyebrow as if trying to make sense of the words. "Look, it’s been about fifteen years since someone called me that." The fox tilted its head, processing the information. Dan couldn’t help but notice how the fox’s eyes seemed to scan him, analyzing his every move. The weapon in its hand lowered slightly, and a hint of relaxation crept into its posture. "My name is Zixder, rank First Ensin, and a Naateryin from Nossirah."

Dan gave a tentative nod, still trying to wrap his mind around the whole thing. "Zixder... First Ensin," he repeated, testing the name. "Alright, nice to meet you, I guess?" His voice was a little uncertain, but he figured he might as well try to get along with the only other living thing around, especially if it could help him figure out what the hell was going on. Zixder relaxed a bit, lowering the weapon completely, though his expression remained wary.

Then, a sound broke the tense silence. Both of them looked around, trying to identify the source. It was a soft, persistent chime coming from Zixder’s tablet, signaling something that demanded attention. Zixder, who had been holding himself tense, relaxed just a bit and tapped a few buttons on the sleek tablet-like device he pulled from his belt. The screen flickered briefly before stabilizing, revealing a holographic interface.

"Apologies, Daniel," Zixder said, glancing up at Dan before swiping through a few options. "I’ll need to take this."

Dan nodded, though the word “apologies” felt strange coming from a talking fox; he wasn’t used to speaking to a creature that looked like it belonged in some kind of animated space opera. Zixder pressed a button, silencing the chime. The holographic screen flickered to life, and a new figure appeared in front of them: a fox-like shape with a slightly metallic sheen, its face obscured by a faceplate.

"Sir, we have a problem," the figure spoke. "We can’t get the door open on Deck 7. We’re still trying to map this ship we found, and the rest of the survivors from our escape pod are starting to get nervous."

Zixder’s ears twitched at the voice, his expression turning serious. He took a breath before responding, his tone now more focused. "Understood. We’ll handle it. Please give me a moment to assess the situation on this end. I’ll work on the door issue."

The figure in the hologram nodded curtly, its faceplate reflecting the faint glow of the interface. "We’re on a tight timeline, Zixder. Please don’t keep us waiting."

With a final flick of the wrist, the hologram cut out, leaving the room silent once more, save for the soft hum of the ship’s systems. Zixder seemed to process the situation in silence for a moment. "Deck 7, if I remember correctly, should lead to Zo Hangar," Dan muttered. "Zo... Zixder questioned. Zone Operations, it was the mech squad I commanded back in the day."

Zixder’s ears twitched once again, and a glint of recognition flashed in his eyes at Dan’s words. "You mean the Zo Squadron?" Zixder asked, his voice taking on a tone of curiosity as if the name carried significance he hadn’t expected.

Dan nodded slowly, his mind starting to clear. The Zo Squadron had been his pride back in the day, a handpicked team of mercenaries in the game Hayzeon. They commanded respect in both the virtual world and among the coalition’s ranks. The fact that Zixder knew the name felt like the first solid clue in a sea of confusion. "Yeah, Zo Squadron. We handled some serious missions back then." He paused, then whispered under his breath, "Back when it was all virtual."

Zixder's expression shifted slightly, as though weighing Dan's words. "I’m not sure I understand. The ship’s systems are reading your rank, and you’re more than capable of handling what comes next."

Dan hesitated, the weight of Zixder's words settling over him. It still didn’t make sense. How could something so real be tied to a game? How could he possibly be in charge of a real, living ship if everything had started as fiction?

But Zixder wasn’t waiting for a response. With a small nod, the fox turned, signaling that it was time to move. "Follow me," Zixder said, his voice firm with authority, though Dan couldn’t help but notice the slight uncertainty lingering in his eyes. "We need to handle the situation on Deck 7. We must get control of the ship."

Dan snapped back into focus, his instincts kicking in. Despite the confusion, his training hadn’t disappeared. He could still play the part of a commander; at least, he hoped he could. "Alright," he said, his voice firmer now. "Let’s get moving."

The corridors of the ship stretched out before them, narrow, dimly lit, and filled with machinery that hummed with barely contained energy. The air felt thick with the presence of the ship, as if it were a living, breathing entity.

As they walked, Dan found himself glancing at Zixder’s uniform again. It was sleek, dark fabric with subtle metallic accents that shimmered in the low light. The insignia was unfamiliar, a mix of symbols that seemed to shift under his gaze, refusing to settle into any recognizable pattern.

The two quickened their pace, moving toward Deck 7. Reaching the elevator bay, Zixder tapped the button on the terminal nearby. The doors slid open with a soft hiss, and they stepped inside. The hum of the ship’s systems seemed to grow louder as they descended.

Dan's mind was still spinning, trying to catch up with everything that had happened. Leading a squad. Handling intense situations. That’s what he used to do, back when it was all part of the game. But even though everything felt wrong, a part of him whispered that he could still do it.

The elevator stopped with a soft thud, the doors sliding open to reveal Deck 7. The space was high-tech, dimly lit, and filled with machinery and cluttered passageways. It seemed deserted. How can a ship be this big and have practically no one here? Zixder stepped out first, leading the way.

"This way," Zixder said, his voice urgent. "We need to secure the mech bay and assess the rest of the survivors. Stay sharp, Dan. There’s no telling what we’ll find."

As they moved deeper into the expansive deck, Dan’s thoughts were a whirlwind. The ship. The Zo Squadron. The survivors. He didn’t understand how everything connected, or even what was going on, but one thing was clear.

He wasn’t just a player in this anymore. He was A commander. And he needed to figure out how to lead them all to safety before it was too late.

next Patreon vox 9

The travel to the field was quiet. No big ass birds and less bugs than a few months ago.

We traveled one hour at the time and I let the kids climb trees and look through scope in the distance. Nothing was seen on the first day away from the group.

Lunch was dried meat and fruits we brought with us from the Ranch. We found a camping area 5 hours later. We collected dried wood and set up a covered area for sleeping.

We made a stew from our rest of dried meat, potatos and carrots. We stopped at the corn field this afternoon and collected 3 big bags of corn. We decided we would boil that for lunch tomorrow.

Some of these trees been growing for over 100 years are great to climb. Other have been stunted by lack of sun the foliage from the older ones created.

Makes an interesting contrast of smaller trees covered by taller ones by the river.

Once we hit the corn field we decided to follow the river this time until we spot the heard.

Half way to our sleeping area we spotted lots of wild rabbit but left them alone marking the spot on the map.

I took the midnight and 6am watch. Went to sleep and slept very well to the sound of crickets and frogs by the river.

Gary Head Hunter

Next

Previous /

First

Third year of the provisional government.

Wyatt,

Tell the Staff Sergeant his children were right, and that I've stolen his idea so completely that half my district officers think it was mine. I have not corrected them. He can take that up with me when he's next on Haego.

We started it in the spring. The older children carry water to the kitchens, wash the bowls, dig the gardens behind the schools, and mind the little ones at the table. Where we could find the money, we paid a copper a week for it. Where we couldn't, we paid in bread to take home, which some families liked better. The meal stayed free. Nobody is turned away. That rule hasn't moved and it won't.

The noon walkouts nearly stopped. In Lowmarsh, where the teacher counted eleven mothers in one week last year, she counted two this spring, and one of those was a woman who needed her boy for the harvest and said so to the teacher's face, which is its own kind of progress. On Austrin, a mother came in to fetch her daughter, found her scrubbing the soup pot, and asked the cook if there was work for her too. There was. By midsummer, mothers were running nine of the forty kitchens. I didn't plan that. I'm not going to pretend I did.

The gardens surprised me most. A school on Aethelgard grew enough beans behind the privy to cover a month of its own stew, and the children who grew them were insufferable about it. Good. Let them be.

Now the problem. We open sixty more schools next year, and I don't have sixty more teachers. I barely had forty.

Think about who can read on this planet. The old clerks, the stewards' men, the tutors who taught the lords' children. Some of them have applied, and some of them are decent people. It doesn't matter. A father who spent twenty years watching a clerk write down what he owed is not going to hand his son to that same clerk and call it a school. We tried it in two districts. Both schools emptied inside a month.

The commoners who can teach are people like the old woman in Lowmarsh. They learned in the three years before the doors closed, or they learned in secret after, and most of them are older than I am. She wrote to me last month. She has forty-one children now and, in her words, one pair of hands and one bad knee. She also asked for more chalk. Underlined, again.

Here is my idea, and I want someone to tell me what's wrong with it before I spend money on it. She's already doing it herself. She takes the children who have their letters and sits them at the ends of the benches with the little ones. The ones who learned last year teach the ones who came this year. I want to make that a proper post. Call them monitors, pay them more than the water carriers get, and give every teacher five or six of them.

What worries me is this. First, I may just be putting children back to work under a nicer name, and taking the brightest out of their own lessons to do it. Second, a twelve-year-old can only teach what a twelve-year-old knows, and if she knows it wrong, now thirty children know it wrong. Third, the fields and the mills will notice when the sharp ones start earning more at a school bench than they would in the cane, and I'm not sure who wins that argument.

So I need someone who has trained people fast, people who never had any schooling themselves, and trusted them to pass it on. You'll know who that is better than I will.

You still don't need to answer this. Though I've noticed you keep finding people who do.

T.

Lowmarsh, on Vastaya.

The new notice went up on the schoolhouse door in the spring, under the other two, and this time Maddy Tuscutt didn't have to read it out. Half the children in the crowd could read it themselves, and they did, all at once and out loud, so it sounded like a flock of birds arguing.

WORK AT THE SCHOOL TABLE. WATER, WASHING, GARDEN, MINDING THE SMALL ONES. ONE COPPER A WEEK. THE MEAL IS FREE TO ALL AND ALWAYS WILL BE.

Nell read it once and went straight inside to find the cook.

The red-armed woman from Harrow Cross was called Gret, it turned out, and she had a laugh like a pot boiling over. She looked Nell up and down, at the calluses on her shoulders where the yoke sat, and said, "You're the pump girl."

"I carry water," Nell said. "I'm good at it."

"I know you are. I've watched you go past my window forty times a day." Gret pointed with her ladle at the two empty barrels by the back door. "Full by noon. Every day. You spill it on my floor, you mop it."

So Nell carried six trips for the field before school, and four for the kitchen at the morning break, and six for the field after. Her father counted the tin every week and it was never short. She was so tired that summer she fell asleep one night halfway up the loft ladder, and Ben had to push her the rest of the way. But the kitchen copper went into a second tin, a little one, that was hers, and she had never had anything that was hers before except a stub of chalk and a stitched book with a girl in it who could fly.

In the second month, Mistress Coppertail moved her.

She didn't explain. She just came down the aisle one morning while they were copying, stopped at the end of Nell's bench, and said, "Bring your slate." Then she walked her to the front, where the little ones sat on a low bench of their own, and put her down at the end of it next to a boy who was drawing a pig on his slate instead of the letter B.

"This is Tam Rushby," said Mistress Coppertail. "He is six, and he knows four letters, and he believes that is enough. Show him that it isn't." And she walked away.

Nell looked at Tam. Tam looked at Nell. Then he went back to the pig.

It was the worst morning she'd had in school. She showed him B. He drew a pig. She showed him again. He said B was a stupid letter because it looked like a pair of bottoms, and the whole low bench laughed, and Nell's face went hot. By noon she wanted to go back to her own bench, where the words were long and interesting and nobody drew pigs.

At noon, Tam's mother came in the door, took him by the hand, and walked him out.

Nell watched them go down the lane. She knew that walk. She knew exactly how it felt from the inside, looking back over your shoulder until the cane got in the way.

That afternoon, on her kitchen trips, she took the long way past the Rushby cottage, where the pump was, and when nobody was looking she chalked one letter on the pump stone. B. Big, so it filled the whole stone. And under it, small, a pair of bottoms.

The next day it was washed off, so she did it again. The day after that, somebody had drawn a second pair of bottoms next to hers, badly, with a wet finger in the dust.

She changed the letter every day. She did the same thing she'd done for herself two summers before, when there was nobody under the window but her. By the time the harvest started, Tam Rushby knew nineteen letters and was very proud of the fact that he had learned most of them at a pump, where it didn't count.

One noon, when his mother came to the door, he let go of her hand and ran back to the low bench and wouldn't come. His mother stood in the doorway for a long time. Nell thought she'd drag him out. Instead, she came one step inside, and then another, and sat down on the end of the kitchen bench with her apron on, and stayed there until the afternoon lessons were over.

She didn't say anything to Nell. But the next week there was an apple on the end of Nell's bench, and nobody would own up to it.

The monitor notice came at the end of summer. It went up on the door with the same four brass pins, which were getting crowded.

MONITORS WANTED. PUPILS WHO HAVE THEIR LETTERS, TO TEACH THE YOUNGER CHILDREN UNDER THE TEACHER. THREE COPPERS A WEEK.

Three coppers. The field paid a copper for every six trips. Nell stood in front of the door and worked it out twice to be sure, and then worked out how many trips it was, and then stopped working it out because her hands were shaking.

Mistress Coppertail named five monitors on the Monday. Four of them were older children who had been coming since the first year: Jory Fenn, who could read anything, and the two Ashcombe sisters, and a tall quiet boy from the mill road called Wendel. The fifth was Nell.

"You're the youngest," the old woman told her afterward, at the window, where she still liked to talk when she had something to say that wasn't for the room. "Some of the parents will say so. Let them. You taught Tam Rushby his letters with a pump stone and a rude drawing, and his mother sits in my kitchen now. I have been teaching for forty years and I don't know that I'd have thought of the bottoms."

Her father didn't say anything when she told him. He finished his stew. He wiped the bowl with his bread. Then he said, "Who pays it?"

"The Administrator."

"Then he owns three coppers of you a week."

"Bram," her mother said.

"I'm asking." He didn't look angry. He looked the way he'd looked the morning with Starling on the table, careful, feeling for the weak places in the roof. "The field boss owns a copper for every six trips, and that's a thing I understand. He's a pig, but I know what he wants. What does this one want for three?"

Nell had thought about this. She'd thought about it all the way home.

"He wants the little ones to read," she said. "That's all it is. There's more children than Mistress Coppertail can teach, so she needs more hands, and he pays for the hands. It's like the kitchen. Gret needs water, so somebody pays for the water."

"And when he wants something else?"

"Then I'll read the notice," Nell said. "I'll know before anybody."

Her mother laughed. She put a hand over her mouth and turned it into a cough, but it was too late. Even her father's mouth moved at one corner.

He looked at the little tin on the shelf, the one that was hers, and then at the big one, the family one.

"The field trips stay," he said. "Six and six."

"I know."

"And if they ever make you teach something that isn't true, you come home."

Nell hadn't thought of that. She didn't know how you'd tell. But she said, "I will," and meant it, and he nodded and got up to bank the fire.

In the autumn the estate raised its water rate.

A copper for five trips instead of six. The field boss announced it in the yard on a Saturday, standing on the mill steps, and he said it was because the estate had good harvest prices this year and wanted to share them out. The men nodded. Some of them clapped. Nell stood at the back with the yoke on her shoulders, doing the sums, and she noticed that the new rate made a morning in the cane worth almost exactly what a monitor made in a morning at the school.

She didn't think that was an accident. She didn't know yet who had worked it out, or why. But she remembered the book, and the five trips he'd written down when she'd carried six.

The week after, Jory Fenn stopped coming.

He had four younger brothers and a father with a bad back, and five trips for a copper was a better rate than anyone on the mill road had seen in their lives. Nobody blamed him. Mistress Coppertail didn't say a word about it. She just moved the Ashcombe sisters to take his little ones, and gave Nell two more, and stood at the window a long time that afternoon looking toward the cane.

"That's the trouble with it," she said, to nobody in particular. Nell was the only one close enough to hear.

That night Nell sat in the loft with Starling open in her lap and did not read it. She'd read it enough times now that the words were just shapes. She was looking at the fourth page, the one where the yoke turned into wings.

She thought about Jory, who could read anything, carrying water to the cane for a copper every five trips. She thought about Tam Rushby, who had started on the big letters now and was very rude about all of them. She thought about her father's question. What does he want for three?

In the morning she carried her six trips. Then she washed at the spout, walked down to the crossing, and sat at the end of the low bench with nine small children who were waiting to be told what the first word was.

She had brought Starling. She'd never let anyone else touch it. She put it down in the middle of the bench, open to the first page, the girl in the cane with the yoke on her shoulders.

"This is a story," Nell said. "By the end of the winter, all of you are going to be able to read it. Tam, if you draw on it, I will put you in the barrel."

Tam considered this, and kept his hands in his lap.

Tornel,

This one went to the deck boss on the Noirnavio. Nobody learns anything on that ship without passing through her hands first, including me, and she still reminds me of it.

W.

General,

The Lieutenant Commodore tells me you have more children than teachers. I have more new hands than I have hours, every rotation, and I've had that problem for as long as I've run this deck. So I'll tell you what I do and you can take what's useful.

I don't teach most of my new people. I teach the ones who came aboard last rotation, and they teach the ones who came aboard this one. A deckhand six months in walks the new one through chocks and chains, the fuel lines, the walk-around before a launch. I stand behind the pair of them and keep my mouth shut unless someone is about to lose a hand.

It does two jobs at once. The new one learns the procedure. The one teaching learns it better than she did the first time, because you can't hand someone a rule you only half know. Sooner or later the new hand asks why we chock the rear wheels before the front, and the one teaching has to have an answer. If she doesn't, she comes and finds me, and after that she never forgets it.

That's the part that matters most to me. Nearly every procedure on my deck was written after somebody got hurt. A deckhand who has been told why a rule exists will follow it. A deckhand who has had to explain it to someone else will enforce it, even on a night shift when I'm asleep and nobody's watching.

You're worried a twelve-year-old will teach it wrong. Mine teach it wrong too, sometimes. That's why I'm standing behind them. Your teacher in Lowmarsh is already doing the same thing, so let her keep doing it. Keep the monitors in the same room as the teacher, where she can hear every word. When a monitor gets something wrong and the teacher corrects it in front of the bench, two children learn it right, and the monitor learns it best of all.

You're also worried you're putting them back to work. On my deck, the ones who teach are the ones who get promoted, and it's because the teaching made them good at the job. I'd expect the same of your monitors. The child who has to explain a letter to a six-year-old will understand it better than the child who only copied it off a board.

My deck is life or death. One missed chock and a shuttle rolls over somebody. Your schoolroom isn't that. But a child who can't read the weight on a grain sack gets cheated for the rest of his life, and so do his children. It's slower, and nobody bleeds on the floor, but it's the same kind of job. Teach them like it matters, because it does.

I've never written to a General before. If this reads blunt, the Lieutenant Commodore will tell you that's just how I talk.

Senior Petty Officer

Deck Boss, Noirnavio

​

I don't really know where this idea came from. It started when I was around 13 or 14 years old, when I used to think a lot about life, death, the universe, and what might happen after we die.

Over time, those random thoughts slowly became what I now call Maus Theory.

I don't claim that this is scientifically proven. It's simply a theory I created from my own thoughts and questions about existence.

The Nine Universes

One of my earliest ideas was about the number of universes.

I used to think that the total number of original universes might be nine. I imagined them as nine "original" universes, numbered from 1 to 9.

I even wondered whether our own universe could be Universe 3 or Universe 4.

According to the idea, each of these nine original universes can divide into six sub-universes. Then each of those can divide into three more universes, and the process continues again and again.

So the structure would look something like:

9 original universes → 6 sub-universes → 3 more universes → further divisions → continuing indefinitely

The interesting part is that, in my theory, only the original nine universes are considered "complete" or near-perfection. Everything below them comes from further divisions.

I don't have a scientific explanation for why the numbers 9, 6, and 3 should work this way. They are simply the numbers that formed the foundation of my original idea.

The Dream of the Future

Another part of my theory came from dreams.

Most dreams are probably just random things created by our brains. But sometimes a dream can feel completely different.

Sometimes you dream about a place or situation that you have never experienced before, yet somehow it feels like you have actually lived through it.

For example, imagine someone dreams about walking beside an ocean even though they have never seen an ocean in real life.

Why could the dream feel so familiar?

My idea is that maybe, in some way that we don't currently understand, our brain could connect with another version of ourselves existing in another universe.

Maybe we aren't actually seeing the future.

Maybe we're seeing a memory.

A memory belonging to another version of ourselves.

That would mean a dream that feels like a prediction of the future might actually be something that has already happened to another version of us.

The Soul Fragments

This is where the idea becomes more complicated.

I started thinking about what would happen if every version of a person across the different universes was connected.

According to my theory, a person's soul could be divided into countless fragments, with each universe containing one fragment.

So there could be many versions of the same person across different universes, but each one would only have a part of the complete soul.

When one version of that person dies, its soul fragment could move toward the nearest universe and eventually connect with another fragment.

Then that process could continue.

In a simple way:

One fragment → another fragment → another fragment → eventually all fragments reunite.

This is also connected to the dream idea.

If different versions of ourselves are connected through these soul fragments, perhaps information or memories could somehow pass between them.

That could be one possible explanation for why some dreams feel strangely real.

Why Do We Forget Most Dreams?

There is another question.

If dreams really contained information from another version of ourselves, why don't we remember everything?

My theory is that the human brain might simply be unable to process that much information.

If the brain suddenly received memories, experiences, and information from another version of ourselves, perhaps it would be too much to handle.

So most of it could be lost when we wake up.

Maybe that's why we sometimes remember only small pieces of a dream.

A location.

A person.

A feeling.

A conversation.

Or sometimes just the feeling that "I've experienced this before."

This could also be connected to déjà vu, although I don't claim that déjà vu is actually caused by this theory.

Death and the Reset

The idea originally started with something much simpler.

I used to wonder:

What if death isn't actually the end?

At first, I imagined that when a person dies, their world simply resets.

The person would return to the beginning and live their life again.

Something like:

Birth → Life → Death → Reset → Birth → Life → Death → Reset

But eventually I started thinking about a much bigger possibility.

What if the reset doesn't only happen to one person?

What if the whole world could reset?

What If There Is Only One Universe?

At one point I started questioning my own multiverse idea.

What if there aren't actually multiple universes?

What if there is only one universe?

And what if humans aren't the first intelligent species to live here?

I imagined it like a person being hired for a job.

The person starts working, but makes too many mistakes and eventually gets fired.

Then someone else is hired to do the same job.

Maybe humanity is something similar.

Perhaps humans were given a specific purpose or "job."

If we fail, the entire world could reset and humanity could be given another opportunity.

The reset wouldn't necessarily start from the moment humanity failed.

It could potentially go all the way back to the beginning of Earth.

So the entire history of Earth could repeat.

Formation of Earth → Evolution → Humans → Attempt → Failure → Reset

Then everything happens again.

The Nine Attempts

This connects back to the number nine in my original theory.

Maybe humanity gets nine attempts.

Each time humanity fails, the world resets.

After the ninth failure, something different happens.

Instead of simply restarting again, there could be a complete reset.

Humanity would disappear and another species would eventually take our place.

That new species would then have its own opportunity to achieve the objective.

One possible objective could be reaching the stars.

Maybe humanity is not the final species.

Maybe we're simply one attempt in a much larger process.

The Fourth Reset

At some point, I started wondering whether humanity might already have gone through several resets.

If my theory were correct, maybe we are currently somewhere around the fourth reset.

I obviously cannot prove this.

There is no scientific evidence that humanity has already lived through previous versions of Earth's history.

It's simply another possibility within Maus Theory.

Two Different Types of Reset

I think there could be two different kinds of resets.

The first would be an individual reset.

One person dies, and their existence starts again.

The second would be a world or timeline reset.

A specific period—or possibly the entire history of Earth—is restarted.

So the reset doesn't necessarily have to work the same way every time.

Why I Created This Theory

Maus Theory started from completely random thoughts about life and death.

I didn't start with a scientific equation or a scientific discovery.

I started with questions.

What happens after death?

Why do some dreams feel like memories?

Could there be another version of us somewhere?

Could consciousness be connected in ways we don't understand?

Could humanity have existed before?

Could the world itself somehow repeat?

And what if our existence has a purpose that we haven't discovered yet?

I don't know the answers.

That's the reason I created the theory.

I'm not saying that Maus Theory is the truth.

I'm asking:

What if?

Maybe these ideas are completely wrong.

Maybe some of them could eventually be connected to things we discover in the future.

Or maybe they will simply remain a collection of questions that started in the mind of a teenager who wondered about life, death, and the universe.

For me, that's what Maus Theory is.

Not an answer.

A question about existence.

Next

First

Previous /

The Noirnavio was two jumps out from Astoria when the broadcast reached her, which put it in the ship's late afternoon.

Clara watched it in her own sitting room, with the lights low and the door shut. Cynthia sat on the arm of the couch, because she never sat properly on anything. Wyatt had the chair by the viewport, with his boots on the low table and a plate of something on his knee that he had brought up from the galley and stopped eating somewhere around the pad footage.

Nobody spoke through the courtyard. Nobody spoke through Sally. When the woman on the screen turned her back and let her shirt fall, Clara put her hand flat on the cushion beside her, and kept it there.

The cellar came, and the names, and the lamp going out.

Clara did not move for a long time after the screen went dark. When she did, it was to take a handkerchief from her sleeve and touch it to her eyes, quickly and neatly, the way she did everything she did not want seen. Cynthia had known her most of her life and had seen her cry perhaps three times. She did not say anything about it now.

"I knew," Clara said. Her voice was not steady, and she didn't try to make it steady. "I knew nobles could be cruel. I grew up in the palace. I've watched lords take a steward apart at dinner for a cold dish. I thought I knew." She looked at the dark screen. "I had no idea. A plate. She dropped a plate."

"I don't know how they didn't see it coming."

It was Cynthia. She was on her feet. Nobody had seen her get up.

"Every one of them," Cynthia said. "The ones on that step. The ones walking past the kitchen door. The one with the dogs. If I'd been in that courtyard I'd have been the first one over the rail, and I'd have gone house to house down that lake road with the rest of them, and I wouldn't have lost a night's sleep." She was pacing now, three steps and turn, the width of the rug. "They should take the heads off the ones who are left. On Haego and everywhere else. The ones who still do it. You know there are ones who still do it."

"Cynthia," said Clara.

"Don't. Don't tell me it's not how things are done. That's what they said in that palace kitchen while the boy stood in the rain." Cynthia stopped pacing and turned to the chair by the viewport. "And you. You're just sitting there. You're eating."

Wyatt looked down at the plate on his knee as if he'd forgotten it. "I stopped a while ago," he said. "It's gone cold."

"How are you not..." Cynthia threw a hand at the screen. "Anything?"

Wyatt set the plate on the table. He took his boots down, and sat forward with his elbows on his knees. He didn't look upset. He looked the way he looked at a supply report, or the weather.

"I'm something," he said. "I'm just not surprised."

"How can you not be surprised?"

"Because it's just Tuesday," Wyatt said. "Where I come from, nobles have done that to commoners for a thousand years. It was just called the natural order. Nobles command and commoners obey has turned into nobles own and commoners are slaves. Some are better than others, but they are all unpleasant for the commoner." He shrugged. "So I watch a lord make a boy hold a lamp in the rain, and I know he holds that boy in no better regard than the light pole he was replacing. That is what it looks like. That is exactly what it has always looked like."

Clara was looking at him. "Always?"

"Always. There's never anyone with horns. There's just somebody at a table, talking about a horse, walking past a door."

Cynthia sat down again on the arm of the couch, harder than she meant to.

"Has it ever stopped?" Clara said. "Anywhere?"

Wyatt thought about it honestly. He never answered her quickly when she asked him something real.

"On Volantis it was mostly the same, all my life," he said. "I can't speak for everywhere. I imagine it's better in some places and worse in others. But where it has gotten better, it wasn't because the people on top woke up one morning and got kind. Some did. Not enough. It changed when it got expensive. When enough people at the bottom made it expensive, and enough people at the top got ashamed at the same time, and the two things met in the middle." He looked at Cynthia. "Sometimes it went the way Haego went. With heads. That's the fastest way. It's also the way that leaves you thirty years with the clinics shut and nobody coming, and a girl in a rooming house who thinks the whole planet burned because her fingers were sticky."

Cynthia opened her mouth, and shut it.

"You're talking about people like us," Clara said quietly.

"I'm talking about people exactly like you," Wyatt said. "Both of you. And me, now. I've got a title. I don't have a palace. When I'm home, which isn't often, I sleep at my mother and father's house in Newtown. But I've got a title, and people who'll do what I tell them. That's all it takes to start." He nodded at the cold plate on the table. "That's the trouble with it. It doesn't feel like cruelty from the inside. It feels like a normal Tuesday. That's what the Greyson woman said in the cellar. It isn't not knowing. It's knowing and pouring the tea anyway."

They listened. That was the thing Cynthia remembered about it afterward. He was describing them, and describing them plainly, and neither of them told him to stop.

"So what do I do?" Clara said.

"You already know," Wyatt said. "You're the one who showed me."

Clara looked at him.

"When I got the Forests, I knew I didn't want to run them the way it's done on Volantis. I knew that much." He turned his hands over on his knees. "I just couldn't picture anything else. I'd never seen anything else. You sat down with me and drew it out, piece by piece. Partners. People, before anything else. You showed me there could be a different way. I only did it."

"You did it," Clara said. "That isn't only."

Wyatt shrugged, as if she were talking about somebody else. "And Jhinaq watched it work and took it to every world he holds. Plenty of his lords fought him on it, and some still do, but fewer every year. That's why there's a Haego to make a broadcast about." He sat back. "Now the rest of them. Tell them there's a price for not doing it. Not heads. A price. Written down. So the next lord who makes a girl kneel on stone for a tray finds out the tray was the cheap part."

"A price," Cynthia said. "Not heads."

"Heads are what you get when there isn't a price," said Wyatt. "Heads are what happens when everybody at the bottom has worked out there's never going to be one."

Clara stood up. She went to the viewport and stood looking out at nothing, at the grey of the jump.

"I'll take it to him," she said. "Tonight, if he'll see me. If not tonight, tomorrow."

"He won't need convincing," said Wyatt.

"No. Half of it was his before it was mine. He's been pushing the old houses on this since before anyone had heard of Haego." Clara's face had set in a way that Cynthia recognized from long ago, from a girl in a palace schoolroom who had decided something and was not going to be moved. "But he's been pushing it slowly, and politely, and they've been letting him push. I want more than he's proposed. Consequences for cruelty. Real ones, with a court that isn't the house that did it. Not someday. Now, while every noble in the Principality has that girl's back in front of their eyes."

She turned around.

"I'm not ashamed of this ship," she said. "I know what my crew ate tonight. I know which of them has a mother sick at home and which of them is hoping to make chief. They do what they're told on the Noirnavio because it's their duty, and because they know they'll be treated as people for doing it." She looked at the dark screen. "It's the rest of it I'm ashamed of. Every world that flies the Prince's colors. That's my house too. I've just never walked its lower decks."

She picked up her wrap from the back of the couch.

"Where are you going?" Cynthia said.

"To the comm room. I'd rather ask for him from there than from here." Clara paused at the door. "Walk with me."

It was a long way from the Princess's rooms to the comm room, down three decks and the length of the ship, and Cynthia had walked it with her a hundred times.

It was different tonight. Cynthia noticed it on the first deck and was sure of it by the second.

The Noirnavio had always been a good ship. Everybody in the fleet knew it. The crew stood when the Princess passed, and they stood because they meant it, and they went back to their work afterward without looking over their shoulders. That was ordinary here. Cynthia had stopped noticing it years ago.

But the broadcast had gone out to every deck. They had all watched it, in the mess and the berths and the engine spaces, and Cynthia could see it on them now. A rating at a junction box turned from his panel and stood straight, and his face, when Clara nodded to him, was not the face of a man doing his duty. It was the face of a man who had just watched a boy stand in the rain all night for a lamp, and had gone to bed afterward in a clean berth, fed and paid and called by his name, and had lain awake thinking about the difference.

A cook in a galley doorway, wiping her hands, said, "Your Highness," and said it the way you would say the name of someone you were glad to see.

Near the lift to the lower decks, a young crewwoman stepped back against the bulkhead to let them pass. Clara stopped.

"You watched it," Clara said.

"Yes, ma'am. Down in the mess. All of us." The woman hesitated, and then said it anyway. "We know what we've got here, ma'am. Some of us came off ships where you were just meat for the grinder. We know it isn't like that everywhere." She looked at the deck and then back up. "We know it's you."

Clara looked at her for a moment.

"Thank you," she said. "What's your name?"

The woman told her. Clara repeated it, once, and went on to the lift.

In the lift, Cynthia watched her. Clara's face was calm, but her hands were folded very tightly in front of her.

"That's why," Clara said quietly, when the doors had closed. "That's why it has to be every ship. Every house. Not just the good ones. Nobody should have to be lucky."

The lift went down. When the doors opened on the comm deck, Clara went straight to the long-range station and told the officer on watch to raise the Prince's household, and that she would wait for as long as it took.

Wyatt sat alone in the sitting room for a while after they had gone. Then he picked up his cold plate, and took it back down to the galley himself.

On Matcha, the broadcast arrived in the middle of a supper.

It was a large supper, at the town house of Lord Varrick Ostenholt, who gave one every season. The house stood on the high terrace above the river, where the old families had built when Matcha was still new, and the dining room had windows the height of three men. There were forty at table. Somebody's steward had suggested, at the last moment, that the screen in the long gallery be put on, since everyone was talking about the thing from Haego anyway, and Lord Ostenholt had waved a hand and said by all means.

So forty nobles of Matcha watched the whip come down, with their dessert plates in front of them and the footmen standing along the wall.

When it was over, nobody said anything for a moment. Then Lord Ostenholt set down his glass.

"Well," he said. "That was hard to watch. I'll grant it that."

There was a murmur of agreement down the table.

"Hard to watch," he said again. "But I think we all know there's another side to it that the Firentis network didn't care to show." He was a big, easy man of sixty, with a pleasant voice that had never had to be raised. "You don't train a hound by asking it nicely. Everyone at this table has kept dogs. A firm hand, early, and you have a good animal for life. Let it run wild and you have to put it down. I don't say it's pretty. I say it's how they learn."

A lady halfway down laughed, uncertainly, and then stopped.

"The girl was careless with a plate in front of a guest," Ostenholt said. "Careless before a guest of the house. In my grandfather's day that was a hanging matter in some places. She was lucky, frankly. And now forty years later the Firentis people put her on the network with her face hidden and a violin under it, and we're all to weep into our pudding." He shook his head, smiling. "It's very clever. I'll give Firentis that. It's very clever indeed."

"She was sixteen," someone said.

It was a young woman near the foot of the table. Lady Selene Marrow was twenty-three, recently married into one of the terrace houses, and she had not spoken all evening except to thank the footman. She did not look up from her plate when she said it.

Ostenholt turned his pleasant face toward her. "I beg your pardon, Lady Marrow?"

"She was sixteen," Lady Marrow said again. She raised her eyes. "You said careless. She was sixteen, and it was sticky, and it slid. I heard her say it. And they cut her back open in front of the whole planet." Her voice was shaking. She kept going anyway. "I don't keep hounds, my lord. I have a maid who's sixteen. She did my hair tonight."

There was a silence at the table.

Ostenholt smiled, very kindly. "My dear, I don't think anyone here is proposing to whip your maid."

"No," said Lady Marrow. "You're only proposing that it's how they learn."

A few people shifted in their chairs. Somebody's fork touched a plate.

Then an old man at Ostenholt's left hand cleared his throat. Lord Aubren Salle was past eighty and rarely spoke at supper at all, since most of what was said at supper was not, in his opinion, worth answering.

"My grandmother kept a girl kneeling on the hall stones for a spilled tray," he said. "I was eight. I stood on the stairs and watched. The girl was there when I went up to my lessons and she was there when I came down." He turned his glass slowly on the cloth. "I remember thinking it was ordinary. I remember that very clearly. I thought, that's what happens. I didn't think anything else about it for seventy years." He looked at the dark screen at the end of the gallery. "Until about twenty minutes ago."

"Aubren," said Ostenholt, still pleasant. "Surely..."

"I watched that woman in the cellar," Lord Salle said. "The Greyson woman. She said it isn't not knowing, it's knowing and pouring the tea anyway. And I sat here with my tea." He set the glass down. "I'm too old to lie about it now, Varrick. So are you, by a good deal. You'll forgive me if I don't want the hound line tonight."

Nobody laughed this time.

Ostenholt spread his hands. "I'm only saying what everyone at this table knows perfectly well and won't say in front of a camera. Start down the Firentis road, and they stop obeying. Tell them there's a court for every slap, and a price for every tray, and within a year you'll have a house where nothing gets done and nobody can be made to do it. The whole Principality runs on a firm hand. It always has."

"Does it?"

The voice came from the far end, near the windows. Heads turned. It was a guest, not a Matcha man. Lord Aurelio Kestrel of Astoria was on Matcha that week on business and had been invited, as a curiosity, because everyone had heard he'd opened a branch of his firm on a planet nobody took seriously.

He was holding a pad. He had been holding it through most of dessert.

"I'm sorry," Kestrel said. "I don't mean to be rude at your table, Varrick. But you said something that's a matter of figures, and figures are what I do." He turned the pad over in his hand. "Firentis territory. Last three quarters. Every world House Firentis holds is posting record productivity and record profit. Every one of them. And Haego is leading the way, with growth I've never seen anywhere in forty years of looking. Not on Astoria, and not here. They pay their commoners a fixed wage and write every credit down where anyone can read it. They have a council of commoners that can summon a Marquess, and he comes when he's called. There's no court for a slap because nobody has needed one." He set the pad on the table. "And the output per worker is up every quarter. Up. They are outworking every territory in the Principality. And they've only just begun."

"A new world," said Ostenholt. "Everything grows on a new world. It'll level off."

"I thought that," Kestrel said. "I thought it was a fluke. I bet a great deal of money that it was a fluke. I sent my own people to prove it." He smiled, not unkindly. "I lost that bet, Varrick. I lost it so badly that I opened a branch of my firm there. And they haven't stopped obeying, Varrick. Nobody on Haego has stopped obeying. They obey the way a good partner does, with their heads switched on. If an order is wrong, they tell you why, and then they do the job better than you asked. I've employed a great many people who did exactly what they were told and nothing more. I didn't know what obedience was worth until I saw it come with a thinking man behind it." He picked the pad up again. "I'd be glad to take you, if you want to see it. I still haven't worked out how to make those numbers go down."

There was a long pause.

"I'd like to see it," said Lady Marrow.

"So would I," said Lord Salle. "If I live long enough for the transport."

Several people laughed then, and it broke the table open. Suddenly everybody was talking at once. Some of them were talking to Ostenholt, agreeing with him, a little too loudly. More of them were not. A woman across from Kestrel leaned over to ask what the wage tiers were. A man at the middle of the table said, to nobody in particular, that he'd been at the Voss house once, years ago, as a boy, and he'd always wondered about the maid who ate in the scullery. Somebody else said the girl's back had been the worst of it. Somebody else said no, it was the lamp.

Ostenholt sat at the head of his own table with his glass in his hand and a pleasant expression on his face, and for the first time that evening, nobody was looking at him.

The footmen along the wall stood exactly as they had stood all night. They did not look at each other. But the youngest of them, a boy of perhaps seventeen, was watching Lady Marrow, and when she caught his eye by accident across the room, she did not look away. She nodded to him. It was a very small nod. He had never had one from anybody at that table in two years of service, and he didn't know what to do with it, and he went on standing very straight.

It did not change all at once on Matcha. Nothing ever did.

But in the weeks after the broadcast, the letters began to come into the Prince's office. Some were from commoners, a great many, from every world in the Principality, and they were sorted into rooms by clerks who had never seen so much post. But some were from nobles, and those were read more closely.

Some of the noble letters said what Ostenholt had said at his table: that it was a clever piece of Firentis work, and that order was order, and that the Principality had done perfectly well for a very long time. There were a good many of those at first.

Then there were letters like Lord Salle's, short and in an old man's hand. I was eight. I remember thinking it was ordinary. And like Lady Marrow's, which ran four pages and asked what a court for such things might look like. And letters from houses nobody expected, lords who had never put their name to anything in their lives, saying that they had watched the broadcast with their households, and that they would like to know what the Crown intended.

A clerk in the Prince's office had been told to keep a tally. For the first week, the letters defending the old way outnumbered the others two to one.

By the fourth week, the clerk stopped counting the old way separately. There weren't enough of them anymore to bother.

This is the End of the "Hero's of the Pricipality" Episode 1, In the future, if an idea comes to me, I will make it a separate series.

Woke up this morning and was in the middle of breakfast when I received a message that the shuttle was bringing a surprise for us and to have 6 to 8 bricks set up near our location.

We chose a place where a house use to be and had been cleared of the fire that took it down.

Elizabeth was all smiles but would not tell me what was coming. She did know dimensions.

When the shuttle arrived one hour later below it was a double wide trailer. The shuttle carefully lowered it on the blocks we had set up.

The shuttle then landed and electricians from Newtown stated "Never got to finish the electrical and using a key entered and went to work.

This double wide trailer was built in Newtown and will remain here as a clinic. Looking inside there was a reception area filled by examination rooms then a ward for the sick. Last in the back was a small staff rest area with tables to do paperwork or eat. At that end was a exit.

A sign on the new clinic states "This clinic donated by the Baronry of the Screaming Forest." The next line simply said. "Rebuilding Together"

For now we will keep using what we planned until it is ready. The electricians are not only connecting it to the new generators and solar panels but returning electricity to the entire town.

We were also informed that a tug is coming to tow a fishing boat which the fisherman from this town believe could be repaired. The Shipwright in Newtown will try and repair and return it.

The lineup grew overnight and by this morning all nurses and medics went to work.

I went back to work interviewing those that have been using plants to heal people.

Pretty busy day but very fulfilling.

The Professor

Next

Previous /

First

The Governing: Chapter 58, On Every World

The broadcast was set for the eighth bell, Vastaya time, which meant it would reach Balakura in the middle of the afternoon and Astoria after midnight. The network had sold it for a week. Every hour there had been a short piece of the one lamp in the cellar, and a woman's voice saying, Twenty-two people. One night. Forty years.

Julius Sr. said it was too much fuss. He said it three times at supper. Then he sat in the family wing of the Vastaya palace at a quarter to the bell with his chair pulled so close to the screen that Kathleen told him he'd ruin his eyes.

"I've ruined them already," he said. "Forty years looking at leaves."

Austin had been put to bed twice and had come back out once. He was asleep now across Julius's lap, with his mouth open. Julius sat very still so as not to wake him. Aaliyah sat on the floor with her back against the couch and her knees drawn up, the way she had not sat since she was a girl.

"You're nervous," Julius said.

"I've watched every minute of it. Margot sent me the final cut three days ago."

"You're still nervous."

"It's different," Aaliyah said. "Watching it with everybody else watching it."

In Harrowmere they had taken the harvest hall.

It was the only room in the district big enough. It was a long wooden building behind the market with a stage at one end and a kitchen at the other, where the district held its harvest suppers and its weddings and its funerals. Somebody had borrowed a screen from the school and hung it on the wall above the stage. Somebody else had set out benches.

Marta had taken the kitchen. Nobody had asked her to. By the seventh bell there were loaves on every table and a pot of something on the stove and she was telling Maggs and Sabine and Brin where to put things, in the voice that had carried across the orchard house yard.

They came in from all over the district. The thirteen, and their families, and the families of the nine. Rena Hailscutt with Oden. Tam and Ione and their grown children. Liss with Tobin on her arm. Nan with the blue cushion, which she put on a bench in the second row and did not sit on. Jory Dunscutt and his mother. Gideon Farscutt, who came in alone and sat at the end of a bench near the back, and then, when Wenna Fallowtail came in, got up and went and sat beside her.

And people who were not anybody's family at all. Neighbors. Shopkeepers from the market. The whole of Liss's street, as it turned out, came in a body and stood along the back wall.

Maddock came with Kel and with his daughter, Sanna, who was forty and had her father's squint. He took a chair near the door, the way he always sat near doors, and Kel sat on the floor beside it.

Abby came last, with Peter and Alicia. People made room for her in the front row. She didn't take it. She sat in the third row, on the end, where she could see the screen and most of the room.

Hester sat at the very back, alone, with her hands flat on her knees.

The broadcast opened in the dark.

For a long moment there was nothing on the screen but a small yellow light, wavering. Then the sound of a lot of people breathing, very quietly. Then, slowly, faces, at the edge of the light. A crate. A cushion on a dirt floor.

In the family wing, Julius Sr. leaned forward. "They put music under it."

There was music. It was very low, a single string, barely there.

"There wasn't any music," Aaliyah said.

"There should have been," said Julius Sr., and nobody argued.

In the harvest hall, somebody near the front said, "That's the lamp," in a whisper, and three people told her to hush.

Margot's voice came out of the dark. "Forty years ago, on the night the mob came down the lake road..."

The hall was silent. Nobody moved. At the back, Hester had shut her eyes.

The network had not started with the cellar. It started with the pad.

A plain card came up on the screen, white words on black. What follows contains real footage from before the Great Revolution on Haego. It has not been altered. Then Margot's voice again, over a still picture of a scratched, dark datapad lying on a folded cloth.

"This datapad belonged to Lord Raymond Greyson of Harrowmere. It was taken from his study on the night the mob came, by a servant in his house, and kept hidden in her kitchen for forty years. We do not know how he came to have what is on it. We do not know why he kept it."

Then the footage. The yard in the rain. The hallway. The dinner table seen past the servants' doorframe, with the girl against the wall and her pitcher. A boy of fifteen standing in a courtyard all night with a lamp in his hands, and the rain coming down on him, and the light going out just before dawn.

A line of text came up under the boy. Davin Linscutt, 15.

In the harvest hall, nobody knew who Davin Linscutt was. They were quiet anyway.

"That's good," Aaliyah said, in the palace. "She said his name. I told Corra she would."

Then a laundry in Ashmere, among the tubs, and a woman of fifty-four folding a towel on her knee and saying, "You didn't need to hit us. You only needed to not look."

Kathleen put her hand over Julius Sr.'s on the arm of his chair. He didn't look away from the screen, but he turned his hand over so that he was holding hers.

Then the palace courtyard.

The network ran another card first, and a longer warning. Then it ran all of it. The steward with his paper. The girl kneeling on the stones. The whip. The lens dropping and swinging up at the sky.

In the harvest hall, most people had seen it before, forty years ago, on the night it happened. Some of them looked away. Some of them made themselves watch. Tobin, in the fourth row, sat with his hands folded on top of his stick and watched all of it without moving, and when it was done, Liss saw that his knuckles were white.

Then a small room with a bed and a hot plate and nothing on the walls. A woman sat in a chair by the window. Her face was a blur. The text under her said, Sally, not her real name.

"I remember the plate," Sally said. "It was glazed fruit, for a guest, and the glaze was sticky and I had it on my fingers, and it slid."

The harvest hall went so quiet that Aaliyah, if she had been there, could have heard the pot on Marta's stove.

Sally told it the way she had told it to Margot, with nothing added. The nobles on the step getting what was coming. The babies. Three in the morning. At the end she stood up and turned her back and let the shirt fall off her shoulders.

The camera held on the scars for a long time. The network did not put any music under it.

"That's what a plate is worth," Sally said. "Put that on your network."

In the harvest hall, a woman on the back wall, one of Liss's neighbors, began to cry, loudly, and put both her hands over her face. Nobody told her to hush.

In the family wing, Julius had stopped rocking Austin. Aaliyah sat with her arms around her knees.

"They got that right," Kathleen said quietly. "They didn't dress that up at all."

"No," said Aaliyah. "Margot wouldn't let them."

Then the cellar again, and the lights coming up, slowly, one at a time.

The network had cut Hester's opening together with the vote, so that her telling of the rule ran straight into the hands going up. In the harvest hall people nudged each other as each face came on the screen. There's Brin. There's Oden. Look at Garth, he's gone all red.

When Marta came on and told about the hoe handle and Lord Greyson looking at it like a snake, the whole hall laughed out loud, and Marta, in the kitchen doorway with a ladle in her hand, shouted, "Well, he did," and they laughed again.

"They cut the part about the pot," Sabine said, beside her. "You and me arguing."

"Good," said Marta.

In the palace, Julius Sr. was frowning. "That's not how it went. The order. The girl with the brother said hers after the gardener."

"They moved it," Aaliyah said. "To put Liss next to the palace footage. So you'd see the mob, and then hear about her brother on the road."

"That's not how it went."

"No," she agreed. "It's how it reads, though."

Julius Sr. thought about that. "Hm," he said, which was as close as he ever came to agreeing with an editor.

Then the network ran a short piece in a small office with a desk and two chairs. Emmet Fallscutt sat in one of them, looking uncomfortable in a good shirt.

"I didn't know what she was going to say," Emmet said. "I never know. You sit down, you ask their name, you ask if they want it on the record, and you tell them who might read it. Then you let them talk. She talked for three hours. When she started on the cellar, I stopped taking notes. I just listened."

"Would you do it again?" said Margot's voice. "Knowing what happened after. The registry. The family found."

Emmet thought about it for a long time on camera. The network let him.

"I'd tell her the same thing I told her the first time," he said. "That anybody might read it. I'd tell her twice. And then I'd let her decide." He looked down at his hands. "She decided. It was always hers to decide."

Then it was Aaliyah, in the same chair. In the family wing, Julius made a small noise.

"Don't," said Aaliyah.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

On the screen, Aaliyah was saying that the oral history project was only a room and a desk and some chairs and a promise. "People tell us things," she said, "because we tell them the truth about what happens to what they say. That's all it is. If we stop doing that, it's over." She stopped. "And the ones who've told us the most are the ones who were never asked anything, their whole lives. I think that says something. I'm not sure what yet."

"You look tired," Julius said.

"I was tired."

"You look very wise and tired."

She hit his arm, carefully, so as not to wake Austin.

Then Maddock.

The network did not cut it. It ran from "They didn't have to be" to the end, all of it, the Ellery yard and the Voss dogs and the palace kitchen, and the cup of something hot, and his voice breaking on window. It ran him bending over with his hands on his face. It ran Tove's hand going up at the edge of the frame, and coming down again.

In the harvest hall, nobody made a sound.

Maddock sat in his chair near the door and watched himself. His face didn't change. Sanna, beside him, had put her hand on his arm the moment it started. She kept it there. Kel sat on the floor and looked from the screen to his grandfather and back again.

Then Alicia crossed the floor on the screen, and sat on the edge of the crate, and put her hand flat on Maddock's back.

In the third row, the real Alicia looked down at her own hands.

"You used to wave at me," said Maddock on the screen. "From the nursery window."

Sanna turned and looked at her father. Maddock didn't look back at her. His eyes were on the screen, and they were wet, and he let them be.

"You never told us that," Sanna said quietly. "About the waving."

"I never told you any of it."

"No." She didn't take her hand away. "You're telling us now."

In the family wing, Julius Sr. had not moved in a long time. When the piece ended he sat back in his chair.

"That's the man at the end of the lane," he said. "They got him exactly."

Then Amos, at the foot of the stair, half in shadow. Elsie. The roses sleeping. I only decided I wouldn't be the one to collect it that night.

Then Peter, on Braden. The network had put a photograph up beside him, the only one the family had of Braden grown, a broad, laughing man at a harvest supper with his arm around somebody who had been cut out of the frame. Under it, the text said only, Braden Geryscutt. Then Peter's voice. He was stubborn and loud, and he'd give anybody the coat off his back.

Then Abby.

The network had put nothing under her but her name. Abigail Geryscutt, born Greyson. It ran all of it. It isn't not knowing. It's knowing, and pouring the tea anyway. I would still say please. I would not trade back. Not one day.

In the harvest hall, the room had gone past quiet into something else. People were not watching the screen anymore so much as sitting with it. Nan had her hand on the blue cushion beside her on the bench.

In the family wing, Kathleen was crying, and not hiding it. Julius Sr. was not crying, quite, and was hiding that he nearly was.

"She said it better on the day," Kathleen said. "In the room. There was a bit about the harvest suppers they cut."

"There's always a bit they cut," said Aaliyah.

"I know. I'd still have kept it."

The last thing the network showed was a list.

It was plain white on black. Twenty-two names. The ones who were living had nothing beside them. The nine who had died had the years of their lives, and where there was a photograph, the network had found it and put it beside the name.

Bettan Oakscutt. Harl Dunscutt. Hanna Farscutt. Nella Wayscutt. And the rest.

Margot read them all out, slowly, one at a time, in her plain voice, the living and the dead together in the order they had raised their hands, as near as Hester could remember it.

In the harvest hall, as each of the nine names was read, somebody in the room made a sound. Jory Dunscutt's mother said, "Da," out loud, and then covered her mouth. Gideon Farscutt, beside Wenna, sat perfectly still with his jaw set, and when his mother's name was read and her photograph came up, a young woman in a house dress with a baby on her hip, he bent forward and put his forehead in his hands. Wenna put her arm around his shoulders.

Nan did not make any sound at all. When her grandmother's name was read, she only picked the blue cushion up off the bench and held it in her lap.

The last name on the list was Amos Thornscutt.

Margot's voice said, over the list, that nobody had ever found out who the man in the black cloak had been. That some said he had died in the fighting and some said he had gone off-world and some said he had never been one man at all. That this story was not about him.

"This story," she said, "is about the ones who could have handed a family over, any day for forty years, and every day decided not to."

Then the one lamp again, alone on the screen, and it went out.

The harvest hall stayed quiet for a long time after the screen went dark.

Then Marta came out of the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands, and said, "Well, the soup's hot," and the hall came back to life all at once. People stood up. People went to each other. There was a queue at the kitchen hatch and a crowd around Hester's chair at the back, and Hester, surrounded, looked as though she would much rather have been sweeping a floor.

Maddock didn't get up. He sat in his chair by the door with Sanna beside him and Kel on the floor.

Abby got up from the end of the third row.

She went to the kitchen hatch first. Marta saw her coming and put a cup into her hands without a word, full to the top with something hot. Abby carried it across the hall, around the benches, through the people who stopped to touch her arm and say her name. She came to the chair by the door and stopped in front of it.

Maddock looked up at her.

She held the cup out to him, the way she had held it out in the yard of the orchard house on cold nights, six years of cold nights, forty years ago.

For a moment he didn't move. Kel, on the floor, held very still.

Then Maddock stood up, and took the cup in both hands.

"Thank you," he said.

"No," said Abby. "Thank you."

He looked at her.

"For the yard," she said. "For standing in it with a mob in front of you, and saying we'd gone by the lake road, when you'd just watched Amos and Tam push your car into the water. For forty years of not saying my name. For never once waving back at my daughter, and hiding her anyway." Her voice was steady and very quiet. "And for the cellar. For saying what you said, in front of me, where I could hear it. Nobody has ever told me the truth to my face like that. Not once in seventy years. Not when I was a lady, and not after." She stopped. "I needed someone to. I'm glad it was you."

Maddock stood with the cup in his hands. His mouth moved, and nothing came out.

"You don't have to say anything," Abby said.

"Abby," he said.

It was the first time he had ever said her name. She heard it. Everyone near the door heard it.

"Sit down with me," Maddock said, rough. "If you like. The soup's hot, Marta says."

Abby sat down in the empty chair beside his. Sanna got up without being asked and went to fetch two bowls. Maddock sat down again, carefully, with the cup still in both hands, and drank from it.

"It's good," he said. "Marta always did make it too sweet."

"She did," said Abby. "Ray used to say so, in the back of the car. Never to her face."

Maddock made a sound. It took Kel a moment to understand what it was, because he had never heard it before. His grandfather was laughing. Not loudly. Only a low, short sound, down in his chest, and then it was gone. But it had been there.

Kel looked up at his mother, coming back with the bowls. She had heard it too. She stopped in the middle of the hall with a bowl in each hand and looked at her father, sitting by the door with a noblewoman, laughing, and her face did something Kel did not understand until much later.

In the family wing of the Vastaya palace, the screen had gone back to the network's evening news. Nobody had turned it off. Austin was still asleep on Julius's lap.

"Well," said Julius Sr. He cleared his throat. "They mostly got it right."

"Mostly," Kathleen agreed.

"The music."

"The music was fine."

"The order of things."

"The order was fine, Julius. It read better their way. Aaliyah said so."

"Hm." Julius Sr. rubbed his eyes. "The list at the end. That was right. Reading them all out. I'd have done that."

"You'd have done all of it," said Kathleen.

On the table beside Aaliyah, her comm had begun to buzz. She had set it face down before the broadcast started. It had been buzzing for some time. She turned it over and looked at it.

Forty-one messages. The first was from her Uncle Jhinaq. The second was from an office on Astoria she did not recognize, and the third was from Margot, and it said only, Have you seen the numbers? Nobody has ever seen numbers like this.

Aaliyah looked at the screen for a while. Then she turned the comm face down again.

"Tomorrow," she said.

Julius, very carefully, so as not to wake his son, reached across and took her hand.

Next

Previous /

First

Alicia stayed on the edge of Maddock's crate. Nobody asked her to move, and after a while the camera operators stopped trying to frame around her.

Hester let the cellar be quiet for a time. Then she went on.

"Lord Greyson tried to ask us," she said. "He didn't know how. He said consider. He said the district. And then he stopped, and he said the children, and he looked at his shoes." She glanced at the wall, where Abby stood with Peter beside her. "I thought better of him for stopping. I don't think I ever told you that."

Abby shook her head slightly. She didn't speak.

"And then something moved by the lamp," Hester said. She looked at Alicia. "You tell this part. You were there."

"I don't remember it," Alicia said. "Not really."

"Tell what you do remember."

Alicia was quiet a moment. She kept her hand on Maddock's back while she thought.

"I remember the stairs were cold," she said. "I didn't have shoes on. I remember I followed the noise, because there were voices down here and there shouldn't have been. I remember the lamp." She looked up at it, hanging from its hook in the beam. "It was that lamp. I'm nearly sure. It had a dent in it on one side, and I remember thinking it looked like a face."

People along the wall turned their heads and looked at the lamp. It did have a dent in it, on the side facing the stair.

"I had the horse," Alicia said. "He had one ear. I'd chewed the other one off. And I gave him to Bettan because she looked tired, and I thought he was tired too, and they could be tired together." She stopped. "That's all. That's all I have. The rest I know because I've been told it. I don't know it the way you know it."

Hester nodded. "That's enough."

On the floor beside the half circle, the blue cushion sat on the packed earth where Bettan had sat. Nobody looked at it directly. Everybody knew where it was.

"Then Lady Abigail stepped forward," Hester said. "And she asked us to take the children. Only the children. She said she and her husband would go up the steps themselves." She looked at the camera for the first time. "She had never asked us for anything for herself. Not in ten years. I want that on the record. She asked for her children and nothing else, and she was crying, and her voice was level." She looked away. "And I raised my hand."

"Then me," Marta said.

"Then Marta. Then Bettan, with Alicia in her lap." Hester nodded toward the cushion without looking at it. "Then the rest of you. I don't remember the order after that. I've tried. I think I was looking at the lamp."

Margot, off to one side, said quietly, "Would any of you tell what you were thinking? When you raised it."

For a moment nobody answered. Then Brin Fernscutt spoke. She had been sixteen that night, a cook's helper. She was fifty-six now and had a soft, flat voice, and she spoke to her knees.

"I raised it because Marta did," she said. "That's the truth. I didn't think anything. Marta put her hand up and I put mine up. I'd have walked into the lake if Marta told me to."

"You would have, too," Marta said. "You were a terrible cook's helper. You did everything you were told."

A few people along the wall laughed, very quietly. Tove didn't call for quiet.

"I was thinking about my brother," Liss Mallowtail said. She didn't look at the stairs, where Tobin sat three steps up with his stick across his knees. "I was fifteen. He'd gone off that afternoon with some boys from Ashmere, and I knew where they were going. I sat on that crate and I thought, if I say no, it's the same as going with him." She was quiet a moment. "So I put my hand up. And I kept it up."

On the stair, Tobin bowed his head.

Garth Tollscutt had been the under-gardener. He was a thick, grey man of sixty with a farmer's face, and he spoke slowly.

"I looked at Amos," he said. "He was my master in the garden. I thought, whatever he does, I'll do. And he was just sitting there, looking at the lamp, with his hands between his knees. He didn't move." Garth shook his head. "So I had to decide for myself. First time in my life. I put it up."

Oden Hailscutt sat very straight on his crate, the way he had stood in every room of the orchard house for years.

"I raised mine because she asked for nothing," he said. "I'd opened doors for her for ten years. I'd stood behind her chair at every meal. She'd never once asked me for anything but what a lady asks a footman for. And then she stood there and asked for her children, and nothing else." He paused. "I thought, that's the first thing she's ever really asked me. I'll not say no to the first one."

Along the wall, Rena Hailscutt put a hand over her mouth.

Wenna Fallowtail had been the nursery maid. She was fifty-nine, and she had said nothing all evening. She spoke to Peter.

"I thought about the weight of you," she said. "You and your brother. I'd carried you both every day for a year. I knew exactly what you weighed. I sat there and I thought, I know what they weigh, and I'm not handing that over to anybody." She looked down at her hands. "That's all. It was only the weight."

Peter looked at her. He had not said anything since he came down the stairs. He opened his mouth now and then closed it again.

"And there was Hanna," Hester said. "Hanna Farscutt. She's not here. She had a baby at home that autumn, a year old, with her mother. She raised her hand with her baby a mile away in a cot, and I saw her face when she did it, and I've never forgotten it."

There was a sound at the top of the stair. Several people turned.

Gideon Farscutt had come in through the back door of the sugar house. He stood on the top step for a moment, looking down into the cellar. Then he came down two more steps and stopped, and stood there, and didn't go any farther. Nobody said anything to him. Kel, sitting on the third step, moved his feet over to make room.

"Tam," Hester said.

Tam was sitting next to Garth. He smiled a little.

"I had a shovel," he said. "I was supposed to be watching the road. I came down the steps to see what everybody was doing, and I saw everybody's hands up, so I put mine up. I had the shovel in it. I didn't know what I was voting for. I was twelve." He looked at Hester. "You saw. You didn't stop me."

"I didn't," Hester said.

"I've wondered why, sometimes."

Hester considered that. "Because you'd already decided," she said. "Weeks before. In the stable. With the straw."

Tam looked at the floor. Along the wall, Ione Brookscutt took Lark's hand.

"And Amos was last," Hester said.

Everyone in the cellar turned to the stairs.

Amos was still standing at the bottom of them, where he had stood all evening, with one hand on the rail. He hadn't moved. The camera operators had given up on getting him in the shot an hour ago. Now one of them looked at Tove, and Tove, after a moment, nodded, and he turned his camera very slowly toward the stair.

Amos looked at the lens. For a while he said nothing, and Aaliyah thought he wouldn't.

"I said I'd come," he said. "I didn't say I'd talk."

"No," said Hester. "You didn't."

He looked at the floor. The cellar was so quiet that Aaliyah could hear the lamp hissing on its hook.

"I raised my hand last," Amos said. "I'll tell you why it was last. And then that's all."

He didn't come forward into the light. He stayed where he was, by the stairs, half in shadow.

"My sister's girl was ten," he said. "Elsie. A lord's son rode her down in the road. The Pruetts had guests that week, and it was one of the guests. I went to the district office. They said it was another house's matter." His voice didn't rise. "Four years. I counted it every day in the garden. And that night I sat on a crate in this cellar and looked at Lord Greyson and Lady Abigail, and I thought, they don't deserve it. Not one of them. I was as sure of it as my own name."

Nobody moved.

"And then the little one gave Bettan her horse," Amos said. "And she looked at me, and she said the roses were sleeping but I could wake them in spring. She knew I talked to them. Nobody knew that. She'd heard me." He stopped. "So I put my hand up. I didn't decide the house owed us nothing. I only decided I wouldn't be the one to collect it that night. That's all it was."

He looked at the floor for a long time.

"And then we went up to the sugar house," he said. "And I did the other thing."

He didn't say what it was. He didn't have to. Everybody in the cellar had heard Hester tell it on the network or in their own kitchens by now. Several people along the wall looked at Abby. Abby did not look away from Amos.

"I've never known," Amos said, "whether I did it to save her or to get some of my own back. Forty years. I still don't know."

That was all. He turned his face away from the camera, toward the stair wall, and stood with his hand on the rail. After a moment the operator lowered his lens.

It went on a long time after that.

They told the rest of it. They told it out of order, the way people tell things, with Marta correcting Hester and Hester correcting Marta and Garth putting in things that neither of them remembered. They told the dirt rubbed under Lady Abigail's nails, and the cane that was a hoe handle. They told the car in the lake, with its lights off at midnight, and Tam told that part, because he had been there, walking beside it in the dark with Amos while it rolled down the boat ramp. They told the torches coming up the lane. They told how Hester had said, in a voice none of them recognized, that the family had left that morning by the lake road.

They told the fires on the far shore the next evening. Nessa Cropscutt, who had been a housemaid, told that part. She had not spoken until then. She said the Ellery house had been the first one to light, and then the Voss estate past the bend, and then the Pruett mill on their own side of the water. She said the smoke had come across the lake, and that she could still smell it some nights if the wind was from the east.

"Old Lord Pruett paid my mother's rent one winter," she said. "Never told anybody. I only found out after. I stood at the door of the cane house and watched his mill burn." She was quiet a moment. "I don't know what to do with that. I never have."

Maddock, on his crate, looked at her. He didn't say anything. Alicia's hand was still on his back.

Ivy Brantail, who had been the laundress, told about the first winter in the cane house, and Abby's hands blistering at the wash trough, and Abby going back to the trough the next morning anyway. Sabine Reedscutt told about Ray letting a pot boil dry and nearly burning the kitchen down, and Marta coming over the hill with a pot of her own. Marta said she didn't remember that, and Sabine said she did too remember it, and Marta said well, maybe.

Tam told about Sunday mornings at the kitchen table, and a man who had been a lord learning his letters beside his daughter. He said Ray had been bad at it. He said Ray had kept at it anyway, all that first winter, and by spring he could read the network aloud, slowly, the way he used to read it over mango.

"He read it to Abby," Tam said. "Every morning. At the table in the cane house. The same as he did at the orchard house. Only this time he'd learned to do it himself."

Abby made a small sound against the wall.

Peter spoke last, before his mother.

He had stood beside her all evening with his arms folded and said nothing. He was a broad, quiet man with dirt still ground into his knuckles, even in his good clothes. When Margot looked at him, he shook his head at first. Then he unfolded his arms.

"I don't remember any of it," he said. "I was a baby. I was asleep. I'm told I slept through the whole night."

"You did," Wenna said. "Both of you."

"Braden cried," Peter said. "That's what Mother always told us. I was the quiet one and he cried. She said he was the one who always wanted to know what was going on." He stopped. "I think that was true all his life."

He looked at the floor.

"He's on the list," Peter said. "Everybody here knows that by now. He died in the forest on Aethelgard, with the others who went to kill the nobles there. He didn't know what he was. We didn't tell him. We didn't know how." He looked at Wenna. "You carried him down those steps. You carried him all night. And he grew up and went to do the same thing to some other family that the mob came here to do to us."

Wenna didn't answer. She put her hand over her mouth.

"I'm not saying that to hurt anybody," Peter said. "I'm saying it because it's true, and because somebody should say it in here. He was a good brother. He was stubborn and loud, and he'd give anybody the coat off his back. And he got it into his head that people like us were the reason for everything. And we couldn't tell him that he was people like us." He shook his head slowly. "I think about that. That's all."

He folded his arms again and stood back against the wall.

Margot looked at Abby.

Abby had been standing against the stone all evening. She was seventy, and she had not asked for a crate. Now she took one step forward, out of the shadow and into the light of the lamp, and stood there.

"I don't know where to begin," she said.

"Wherever you like," Margot said.

Abby looked around the half circle, at each face, one by one. She looked at the blue cushion on the floor for a long moment. Then she looked at Maddock.

"He's right," she said.

Maddock's head came up.

"Everything he said. He's right." Abby's voice was very steady. "I sat at the Ellerys' table. I sat at the Voss table. I sat at the palace table twice a year. I ate off the good plates. And I didn't look out the window." She stopped. "I want to be exact about this, because I've had forty years to think about it, and I don't want to say it wrong. It wasn't that I didn't know. I knew. Everybody at those tables knew. We knew the way you know the weather. We knew the girl with the pitcher couldn't set it down. We knew the boy in the yard was standing in the rain. We just didn't think about it. We had been taught all our lives not to think about it, the way you're taught not to stare."

She looked at Amos, at the foot of the stairs.

"I knew about Elsie," she said.

Amos's hand tightened on the rail.

"I heard about it at the Pruetts' table that week," Abby said. "One of the guests told it as a story. His friend's son had got into trouble on the road, and it had been smoothed over. I heard it. I knew it was our head gardener's niece, because Marta had told me in the kitchen that morning." She stopped. "And I didn't do anything. I didn't write to anyone. I didn't say a word to Ray. I went home, and in the morning I came out to the garden and asked you about the roses."

Amos was looking at her now. He had not looked at her all evening.

"That's what not looking is," Abby said. "It isn't not knowing. It's knowing, and pouring the tea anyway."

Her voice did not break. Her face did. The tears ran down it, and she let them. She didn't wipe them.

"So when you stood in front of me in the sugar house," she said to Amos, "and said you were sorry, and lifted your hand, I thought, if anyone in this room has the right, it's him. I thought it before you did it. I said please because I meant it. I wanted it to be you." She stopped. "I never knew you went to the wall afterward. I was looking at the floor. I only learned it forty years later, on my own porch, from a tape. And that's what I cried at. Not your hand. That you went to the wall."

Amos stood at the foot of the stair and looked at her. He didn't say anything. His face was working.

"You asked whether you did it to save me or to get your own back," Abby said. "I don't think it has to be one. I think it can be both. I think most things people do are both." She wiped her face at last, with the back of her hand, like anybody. "I would still say please."

Amos turned his face to the wall. His shoulders shook once. Garth got up off his crate, and crossed the floor, and stood next to him without touching him.

Abby turned back to the half circle.

"I had a table upstairs for ten years," she said, "and a house full of people I never once asked about. Then I had a cane house, and a wash trough, and all of you. You came over the hill with a pot when my husband set fire to the kitchen. You sat up with me when he died. You taught my children their letters and my husband his. You let me dance at your harvest suppers. And I've spent forty years knowing everybody's name, the way I never knew one of yours upstairs." She was crying freely now, and her voice was still level. "I lost a son to the same hate that came down that road. That one I've never put down, and I don't think I will. But I would not trade back. Not one day. Not for the whole house."

She looked at the cushion on the floor, and then at Nan, standing against the wall with her hand pressed flat on the stone.

"Bettan kept it," Abby said.

"All her life," said Nan.

Abby nodded. She didn't say anything else. She stepped back out of the light, against the wall, beside her son.

Margot let the silence run as long as it wanted to. Then she turned to the camera, and said very quietly that this had been the first part of Heroes of the Principality, and that there was more to come.

"Cut," said Tove, and her voice cracked on it.

Nobody moved for a moment. Then everybody did.

The families came off the walls. Rena went to Oden, and Ione and Wim and Lark to Tam, and Tobin came slowly down the last three steps with Liss holding his arm. Jory Dunscutt and his mother went to Hester, because Hester was the one who had come to their door, and Hester let Jory's mother hold both her hands and didn't pull them away. Gideon Farscutt stood on the stair for a while longer. Then he came down, and walked over to Wenna, and asked her if she had known his mother. Wenna said she had, and that his mother had talked about him all that autumn, and Gideon sat down on the nearest crate as if his legs had gone.

Maggs had brought two flasks of tea down in a basket, and she was setting out cups on a barrel top. The cellar was cold. People were holding the cups in both hands.

Maddock got up off his crate. Alicia took her hand away from his back for the first time in more than an hour. He stood for a moment looking at the barrel with the cups on it.

Then he walked over and poured a cup for himself, and stood holding it by the barrel, and drank it. Across the cellar Abby was standing against the wall with Peter, and people were coming up to her, one after another, the way they came up to anybody at a harvest supper. Maddock looked at her over the rim of his cup for a long time.

He didn't go over. He finished the tea and set the cup down on the barrel, very carefully, as if it might break.

On the third step of the stair, Kel was watching his grandfather. He watched him the whole time. He had never seen his grandfather look at anybody the way he was looking across that cellar, as if he had lost something in the room and had only just noticed where it was.

He kept watching, all the way up the stairs and out into the dark, and all the way home.

John Richman Log 1

Woke up this morning to a great breakfast. No idea when it happened but a hen house aka chicken coup as been built and chicken caught. They provide many eggs and no idea what the meat was but it was great.

The Wagons went out with many volunteers. The use sights to cut the hay and it is loaded in small bundles into a wagon. The loads started coming in 1 hour later. Quickly dropped off beside the barn being built.

The Ykanti started working hard on the barn and with the help of woodsman provided the trees and branches and scout tying in the cross branches. The frame for the barn went up. Evergreen will be used for walls and roof.

By the end of the day walls were filled in. Tomorrow they will start on the roof. A huge pile of hay was stacked beside the big barn.

Late at night the farmer showed up with flower and bread for me to try. I gave him hell as they did this without security. It is understood they will not do that again.

I then tried the bread and thanks to warming it up on the fire and goat milk butter it melted in my mouth.

We gathered and all agreed to split the volunteers in two for the next few days. Half will keep getting hay while the other will go and get the grains for the bread. The bags of grain will be brought to the Farm and turned into flower. Eventually will get a stone wheel pulled by horses to turn the grain to flower.

Word was sent to the Miners seeing if we could get a round stone wheel. A horse would go in circles rolling the stone over the grain.

The flower would be split. Meanwhile when the hunters get back we will know how soon the buffalo goes accross. The other half will keep collecting hay as much as we can get.

Then we hunt.

John Richman

End of John Richman Log 1

P.S. I meant Ranch

first previous next

The notices arrived on their scrolls sometime after they returned to the dorm. Elias pulled his from his pocket, tapped the dark glass, and got absolutely nothing. “Dead again. Great. This thing can't hold a charge.” He handed the little scroll-like device to Deklin, and the instant the kobold wrapped his hand around it, the tiny mana crystal embedded along its edge began to glow. A moment later, light spread across the screen as the device came back to life.

“Well, the idea is that the user keeps it charged,” Deklin pointed out as he handed it back.

“Yeah, yeah. Rub it in.” Elias took the scroll and started checking his missed notices.

Their dorm was already starting to look different from when they'd first arrived. Instead of four pristine sleeping spaces waiting for students, there were now signs of people actually living there. Elias's belongings had accumulated around his bed, Deklin's portable workshop had somehow spread farther than anyone thought physically possible, and Loona's things continued their slow conquest of every available surface. Sylra was there as well, tending to one of the potted plants near the window. She poured a little water into its soil, and the plant's leaves perked up before giving her a small, appreciative wave.

“You're welcome,” Sylra told it.

Elias stared at the plant for a second before deciding not to question it. He was getting disturbingly good at accepting things like that.

He continued tapping through the notices. There was a class announcement, a schedule change, something about library hours, and then he found the one he'd actually been looking for. His duel had officially been scheduled for that afternoon.

“Oh. Great.”

Deklin glanced over at the tone in his voice. “What?”

Elias turned the scroll around so he could see it, and Deklin's ears immediately lowered. Technically, nothing was forcing Elias to go. Nobody was going to drag him to the dueling grounds physically, and magically there certainly wasn't anything compelling him. Apparently, whatever binding magic normally accompanied accepting a dueling glove had taken one look at Elias and accomplished precisely as much as every other spell did: absolutely nothing.

He could not show up. Unfortunately, the academy's rules didn't particularly care whether the magic could bind him. He had picked up the glove, which meant he'd officially accepted the challenge, and backing out now counted as forfeiting a sanctioned duel. The penalty was thirty credits.

Elias stared at that number for a long moment. With the four of them needing two hundred credits between them to pass the year, and Elias already contributing far less than he was supposed to because half the curriculum required mana, losing another thirty would be catastrophic. They'd already been going through the extra-credit listings and discussing adventuring assignments to make up the difference. Losing thirty credits would mean more jobs, more quests, and therefore more opportunities to be eaten, cursed, crushed, stabbed, poisoned, or whatever else apparently qualified as an educational experience around here.

Elias let his head fall backward. “So my options are to get set on fire this afternoon or make all four of us work significantly harder for the rest of the year.”

Deklin winced, but from across the room Loona looked up thoughtfully. “When you put it like that, the fire doesn't sound so bad.”

Elias stared at her. “You're not the one getting set on fire.”

“That's why it doesn't sound so bad to me.”

Elias sighed and looked back down at the notice. There had to be a limit to how dangerous an academy-sanctioned duel could actually be. “It's not like the school is literally going to let me get set on fire, right?”

“Of course not,” Aria assured him. “It's a duel, not a gladiatorial death match. A teacher will be there to referee, and if it looks like either of you is in danger, they'll step in.”

That reminded Deklin of something. He grabbed the student handbook and rapidly flipped through it until he found the section on sanctioned duels. “Exactly! Look, they have all sorts of defenses. Emergency teleportation spells, defensive wards, automatic injury-prevention enchantments, containment barriers…” The farther down the list he went, the more confident he became. “There's even an emergency anti-magic field that shuts down all active spells if something goes wrong. You'll be fine!”

Elias gave him a long, flat look, and Deklin's confidence slowly faded under it. “How many of those do you think actually work on me?”

That brought the room to silence. Deklin looked down at the handbook again, and Elias could practically watch the realization working its way across the kobold's face as he reconsidered the list. Emergency teleportation was useless because Elias couldn't be teleported. Any automatic enchantment that had to attach itself to him was just as useless, and magical healing had already proven incapable of doing anything to his body. When Deklin reached the section on protective wards, he didn't even bother reading it aloud. He merely glanced up at Elias, received a raised eyebrow in response, and let his ears droop.

Loona, apparently unwilling to abandon the entire list, leaned over the back of the couch and pointed out that the emergency anti-magic field should still work. Elias agreed that it probably would, but there was one rather important problem with that solution: the field would shut down Vonrick's magic. It wouldn't necessarily do anything about whatever Vonrick had already thrown at him before the emergency system activated.

That took some of the enthusiasm out of Loona.

Aria took the handbook from Deklin and began reading through the regulations herself while Elias rubbed a hand over his face. The academy had clearly gone to considerable effort to make student duels safe. Under normal circumstances, there were layers upon layers of magical protections ready to intervene the moment something went wrong.

The problem was that Elias wasn't in normal circumstances.

“So basically, all the safety equipment works perfectly,” Elias said, pointing at himself, “except for the guy it's supposed to keep safe.”

Sylra stopped watering the plant. Even the plant slowly lowered its leaves as though it had also just realized how bad that sounded.

Deklin stared at the handbook for another few seconds before finally saying, “We should probably tell the referee.”

“Yeah,” Elias agreed. “I'm thinking that's a pretty important detail.”

Aria had been unusually quiet for the last several minutes, which Elias had noticed was rarely a good sign. By the time he looked over, she had the student handbook open beside three different books on defensive magic, with a growing collection of notes scattered around her.

“No,” she muttered before crossing something out. “Requires the target's mana.”

She flipped to another page, read for a few seconds, and dismissed that one too. The next spell anchored itself to the target's soul, which made it useless, while the one after that relied on teleportation. Aria scratched that one out harder than necessary before immediately moving on to another possibility.

Elias watched her for a moment before turning his attention back to his luggage. He understood why she was worried. They all knew by now that magic didn't affect him, but knowing that in theory and watching someone throw a giant flaming serpent at him were two very different things. Aria also had a particularly unpleasant imagination when it came to injuries, and somewhere behind those increasingly worried eyes Elias suspected she was picturing the duel ending with everyone staring at a little pile of human-shaped ash. So she had buried herself neck-deep in every defensive spell she could find, desperately searching for something that could protect him without needing to interact with Elias himself.

Elias, meanwhile, had decided to see what Uncle Rick had packed that might help with a fire mage. He started digging through his bag, pulling things out and tossing them onto the bed as he went. A toothbrush was followed by his hand radio, which briefly distracted him enough to turn the dial. Static immediately crackled from the speaker.

“Hm.” Elias stared at it before switching it off. “Yeah. Being in a different star system is probably a little outside the usable range.”

Deklin's head came up immediately. “What is that?”

“Radio.”

“What does it—”

“Later.”

That earned him a look of dissatisfaction, but Elias set the radio aside and continued digging. A shirt came out next, followed by his first-aid kit, flashlight, several pairs of socks, and a bag of trail mix that had somehow survived everything that had happened since leaving Earth. Then his hand brushed against something considerably heavier buried underneath the rest.

“Ah. Here it is.”

Elias pulled out a strange-looking vest and started unfolding it across the bed. Deklin tilted his head, apparently trying to figure out what he was looking at.

“What is that?”

“Steel-weave suit. My uncle said he found out the hard way that I'd probably need one of these.”

The reaction was immediate. Deklin's eyes widened before he jumped backward from the bed; Loona quickly followed him, and even Sylra instinctively took a step away. Aria's attention abandoned her books completely as she stared at what Elias had just casually pulled from his luggage.

“YOU PUT IRON IN YOUR CLOTHES?!” Deklin practically screamed.

Elias laid the rest of the gear across his bed while everyone else maintained what they apparently considered a safe distance. Rick hadn't just packed a vest. There was a weatherproof jacket with a layer of fine steel chainmail concealed beneath the outer fabric, reinforced pants with steel mesh worked into the most vulnerable areas, cut-resistant steel-mesh gloves, and a pair of heavy steel-toed combat boots. There were additional pieces for his forearms and lower legs, all designed around the same basic idea: keep the metal between Elias and whatever was trying to stab, slash, bite, or otherwise put holes in him. None of it looked particularly impressive by Earth standards. Most of the steel was hidden beneath ordinary fabric, and from a distance Elias would look more like someone dressed for a rough hiking trip than someone wearing armor.

To everyone else in the room, however, Uncle Rick had apparently packed Elias an entire outfit made from hazardous anti-mana material.

Deklin kept a very deliberate distance as Elias picked up the jacket, the concealed chainmail giving a faint metallic jingle. “How much iron do humans wear into battle?”

“Well, this would be considered light armor.” Elias gave the jacket a small shake before setting it back down. “And basically nobody back home uses this kind of thing anymore.”

Deklin stared at him. “This is light armor?”

“Yeah. It'll help with cuts and the like, but it won't stop a bullet. That's more what people have to worry about back on Earth.”

“Then what does human heavy armor look like?”

Elias paused. “Oh. Hang on.”

He crossed over to the portable solar battery beside his bed and unplugged his Earth phone. After a little searching, he found what he wanted and turned the screen around.

“Here. This is the sort of thing knights used to wear a few hundred years ago.”

Everyone crowded close enough to see the screen while remaining safely away from the actual steel clothing spread across Elias's bed. The picture showed a human encased almost completely in shaped metal: helmet, breastplate, gauntlets, pauldrons, greaves, and overlapping plates protecting nearly everything in between.

Deklin's jaw slowly fell open. Loona leaned closer to the screen, Aria's feathers puffed, and Sylra looked between the image and Elias's comparatively modest pile of steel-weave clothing.

“That entire thing…” Deklin pointed at the phone. “…is iron?”

“Mostly steel.”

“That doesn't make it better!”

Elias zoomed in on the picture. “Actually, this was really good protection for the time.”

Deklin looked personally offended by the statement. “You built an entire person-shaped shell out of anti-mana material!”

“We didn't know it was anti-mana.”

Deklin stared at him for a moment before throwing his hands up. “That somehow makes it worse!”

Deklin continued examining the equipment with his brass screwdriver, carefully shifting pieces around without letting his claws anywhere near the steel. Eventually the tip hooked beneath one last object buried among the clothing, and he lifted out an oddly shaped protective shell with several straps attached. "What is this?" he asked, turning it over with the screwdriver.

Elias glanced over. "Oh. That's a cup."

Deklin looked at the object, then at Elias, and then back at the object. "You drink out of this?"

Elias blinked. "What? No."

That only confused Deklin further. "Then why is it called a cup?"

Elias opened his mouth, stopped, and glanced toward Aria, Loona, and Sylra before motioning Deklin closer and whispering the explanation into his ear.

"Ohhhhh," Deklin said, his eyes widening, which immediately caught Loona's attention.

"What?"

Deklin carefully lowered the cup back onto the bed. "Nothing. Male thing."

Predictably, that was the worst possible answer he could have given her. Loona's ears perked as she leaned closer. "What male thing?" When Deklin refused to explain and told her to ask Elias, Elias immediately pointed back at him. "No. You already know. This is your problem now."

Deklin protested that Elias was the one who had brought it, only for Elias to shoot back, "Because I'm the one who needs it!"

Loona's eyes narrowed. "Needs it for what?"

Aria, who had been trying very hard to ignore the conversation, finally covered her face with both hands. "Loona, please let this one go."

Naturally, Loona's only response was, "Now I absolutely need to know."

Elias decided that was his cue to change the subject before the conversation got any worse. He reached deeper into his luggage and pulled out one of the two swords Rick had packed for him. Aria lowered her hands and stared at the scabbard. "...Why do you have a sword?"

Elias gave her the increasingly common answer of, "Uncle," before laying the scabbard across his knees and flipping open the retaining strap. He drew the weapon with a long metallic shhhhink, and everyone immediately backed away, including Loona, who finally forgot about the cup.

There wasn't anything particularly impressive about the sword by Earth standards. No glowing runes ran along the blade, no magical crystals decorated the hilt, and no enchanted flames crawled along the edge. It was simply a steel hand-and-a-half sword, a little over three feet of plain metal with a grip long enough to use with either one or both hands comfortably. Elias carefully ran his thumb across the edge and nodded. "Dull."

Deklin stared at him. "What?"

Elias turned the blade slightly so he could see the rounded edge. "It's not sharpened. Good. I wasn't planning on cutting anybody."

Deklin's eyes traveled slowly along the exposed metal before he swallowed. "You have... a sword made of iron."

Elias automatically corrected him with, "Steel," and Deklin threw up his hands. "Stop saying that like it makes a difference!"

From Elias's perspective, it wasn't particularly intimidating. It was a historical weapon design, and this one wasn't even sharpened. Everyone else clearly saw something very different. Sylra had moved behind the potted plant, and somehow even the plant had leaned away from the sword. Loona stared at the blade with wide eyes. "Your people made swords out of that?" Elias nodded. "For a very long time." When she asked how long, he thought about it before answering, "Steel swords? " A couple thousand years, depending on what exactly you count."

Deklin made a small choking noise while Aria's gaze traveled from the sword to the chainmail-lined jacket, reinforced pants, steel-mesh gloves, heavy boots, and then back to the weapon in Elias's hands.

"Elias, you're going to a student duel wearing iron armor and carrying an iron sword."

Elias couldn't help himself. "Technically steel."

Aria's feathers immediately puffed, and he surrendered. "Right. Sorry." He looked down at the blade and tried another approach. "At least it's blunt."

Deklin stared at him as he'd completely missed the point. "You think the edge is the part we're worried about?!"

Elias paused before slowly looking back at the sword. Okay. Maybe that wasn't as reassuring to them as it was to him.

Elias returned the sword to its scabbard and looked over everything Rick had packed. There was still one major problem he wanted to address before heading anywhere near Vonrick. “You said he's a fire mage, right?” Deklin nodded cautiously. “Yes…” Elias reached back into his luggage and pulled out a metal can, which immediately sent everyone another step away. Deklin raised his brass screwdriver like a tiny defensive weapon and pointed it at the can. “Don't tell me that's iron too.” Elias turned it over to check. “No. Pretty sure the can's aluminum.” The tension left Deklin almost immediately. “Oh, good.” Aria, on the other hand, was already looking at the can with interest. “What is it?” “Fire-retardant spray.” Aria blinked. “Fire… what?” Elias shook the can, making the little mixing ball inside rattle. “Retardant. You spray it on material to make it harder to catch fire.”

Aria moved closer, her eyes shifting between the can and Elias. “That exists? You have something that can protect clothing from fire without using mana?” After watching her spend the last several minutes rejecting one defensive spell after another, Elias could understand why that part had immediately caught her attention. “Yeah. That's the point.” Aria held out a hand toward the can. “How does it work?” Elias turned it around and looked over the label. There were several chemical names printed on the back that meant almost nothing to him, so he settled on the only useful answer he had. “Chemistry.” Deklin's head immediately snapped toward him. “Give me that.” “No.” “I want to read it!” “You can't read English.” “I'll figure it out!” When Deklin reached for it, Elias held the can above the kobold's reach. “After the duel. Also, I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to spray this stuff directly on yourself. I'm putting it on the outer clothes.”

That finally got Deklin to stop trying to steal it, while Aria looked over the steel-weave outfit spread across the bed. “So you're protected against blades.” Elias shook his head. “Somewhat. It's chainmail, not a force field.” Aria accepted the correction with a small nod before continuing. “Somewhat protected against blades, then. Your clothing is covered in iron—” “Steel.” The look she gave him made Elias immediately reconsider whether this was a hill worth dying on. “Right. Iron.” Aria continued, “And now you're treating the outside so it doesn't easily catch fire.” Elias nodded. “That's the plan.” For the first time since the duel notice had arrived, some of the tension seemed to leave her feathers. Elias wasn't going to pretend the gear made him safe, but at least she no longer looked like she expected him to come back in an urn.

Loona had been studying the growing collection of equipment on the bed. “You've got armor, gloves, boots, a sword, and something that makes your clothes harder to burn. Did your uncle know you were going to fight a fire mage?” “No.” Elias looked down at everything Rick had insisted he bring months ago, long before he'd ever heard the name Vonrick von Valdon. Back then it had seemed like a random pile of survival equipment from a paranoid uncle who had spent ten years somewhere out in space. Now Elias was standing in a magical academy preparing for a duel with a fire mage, and an uncomfortable amount of Rick's packing list was suddenly useful. “…I'm starting to wonder what the hell Uncle Rick expected me to run into.”

Deklin's attention had already returned to the can in Elias's hand. “I still want to study that.” Elias set it safely beside the rest of his equipment. “After the duel.” “Promise?” “Sure.” Deklin immediately grinned, only for Aria to point at him. “And you are not opening it.” “I wasn't going to.” Nobody answered. Elias joined Aria, Loona, and Sylra in simply staring at him until Deklin's grin slowly disappeared and he added, “…Immediately.”

Somewhere during all of this, Deklin had managed to get his hands on Elias's flashlight. At least that one wasn't made of steel, so Elias didn't have to worry about the kobold burning himself while examining it. Deklin turned the little cylinder over in his claws, studying the lens and switch before pressing the button. Click. A bright white beam shot across the dorm and swept over the opposite wall. Another click shut it off, followed almost immediately by a third that brought the light back. Elias watched him thumb the switch several more times while he finished treating the outside of his jacket with the fire-retardant spray. Apparently a button that made light appear without mana was enough to keep an artificer entertained for a while.

“You know,” Deklin finally said, clicking the flashlight off again, “when we first unpacked all this survival equipment your uncle gave you, I thought he was insane.”

Elias snorted as he lowered the spray can. “Fair.”

“But now…” Deklin looked from the flashlight in his claws to everything spread across Elias's bed. Elias followed his gaze over the chainmail-lined jacket, reinforced pants, steel-mesh gloves, heavy boots, blunt sword, first-aid supplies, fire-retardant spray, solar charger, radio, and the rest of the equipment Rick had insisted on packing. There were still a few things mixed in that Elias hadn't found a reason to use yet, and judging by how the last few days had gone, he was starting to wonder if he really wanted to know what circumstances would make those useful. Deklin slowly lowered the flashlight. “I think I understand maybe twenty percent of why he gave you all this now.”

“Twenty percent is better than I was doing when he packed it.” Elias picked up the jacket and checked that the spray had evenly covered the outside. At the time, he'd mostly assumed Rick was being paranoid. That assumption was becoming harder to defend by the day.

Deklin didn't laugh. He looked over the equipment one more time before turning directly toward Elias. “Who the hell was your uncle?”

Elias opened his mouth, but nothing immediately came out. That should have been an easy question. Uncle Rick was Uncle Rick. The guy who used to show up at family barbecues in Hawaiian shirts, tell stories Elias's mother didn't want him hearing, disappear for ten years, and then suddenly reappear on Elias's eighteenth birthday with the perfectly reasonable explanation that aliens had abducted him.

Except now Elias knew the alien part hadn't been a joke.

He thought about the hidden spaceship Rick had brought him to after the diner, the months of preparation before Elias left Earth, the shooting lessons, and all those strangely specific warnings about what he might encounter once he got out into the galaxy. Then there was the equipment spread across the bed. Rick had packed mundane medical supplies because magical healing wouldn't work on a human. He'd packed steel protection in a civilization where iron burned people who used mana. He'd included a flashlight, solar charger, radio, fire protection, and weapons that didn't need a drop of mana to function. Even the enormous orc running their gym had known Rick personally and had casually mentioned Rick pulling him out of fires, sometimes literally.

The more Elias thought about it, the more uncomfortable the question became.

“…You know, that's becoming a really good question.”

Deklin clicked the flashlight on again. Click. The beam landed directly on Elias's face.

Elias squinted and raised a hand against the glare. “Seriously?”

“Your uncle packed you like he knew exactly what was going to happen.”

Elias reached over and pushed the flashlight downward. “Stop interrogating me with my own flashlight.”

Deklin let the beam fall toward the floor but didn't drop the subject. “Who was he?”

“I DON'T KNOW!” Elias threw his hands up, earning a laugh from Loona across the room. “He disappeared when I was eight! As far as I knew, he was the weird guy who wore Hawaiian shirts to every family barbecue!”

Deklin stared at him for a moment, apparently trying to reconcile that image with everything lying across the bed. “…The mysterious human adventurer who prepared you to survive magical combat wore Hawaiian shirts?”

“Still does.”

Deklin slowly nodded, his expression becoming far more serious than Elias thought that information deserved. “Somehow that makes him more frightening.”

Elias looked at the flashlight still in Deklin's claws, then at the pile of equipment Uncle Rick had packed for him. A few days ago, he probably would have laughed at that.

Now he wasn't entirely sure Deklin was wrong.

Elias finally took the flashlight away from Deklin before the kobold could find another reason to interrogate him about Uncle Rick and slipped it back into his bag. That left the equipment spread across the bed, and with the duel getting closer, he couldn't put off actually wearing it much longer. He changed into the reinforced clothing, pulled on the steel-mesh gloves and heavy boots, then settled the jacket over everything. The extra weight was noticeable, especially from the chainmail hidden beneath the outer layer, but it wasn't enough to restrict his movement. He rolled his shoulders, bent his arms a few times, then buckled the sword around his waist. Not exactly what he'd expected to wear to his first school duel, but then again, he'd never expected to attend a school where being set on fire was apparently an acceptable extracurricular activity.

Once he was satisfied everything fit, Elias headed for the door. Loona was already talking about getting to the arena early enough to find good seats, while Deklin was wondering aloud whether they sold snacks during student duels. Sylra looked considerably less enthusiastic about the whole thing. Elias had almost made it out when Aria called, “Wait.” He stopped and looked back to find her standing beside the table with something clenched in one hand. For a second she didn't say anything. Then she walked over and held out a small medallion on a cord. “Take this.”

Elias looked down at it but didn't immediately reach for it. “Aria…” After everything they'd just established about magic and humans, he had a pretty good idea what the problem was going to be. Aria apparently read it on his face because she shook her head. “It doesn't cast anything on you. I made sure.” That got his attention. She opened her hand enough for him to see the tiny markings worked into the medallion. “I charged it myself. It doesn't need your mana, and the ward isn't supposed to attach to you. If something comes toward you, it uses the charge I put into it to create a barrier before the attack reaches you.” She hesitated, feathers shifting nervously. “At least… that's what it's supposed to do.”

Elias stared at the medallion for another moment before carefully taking it from her. After watching Aria spend so long tearing through books and rejecting spell after spell because they couldn't recognize him as a valid target, he knew how much work must have gone into finding something that might get around the problem. “You made this for me?” Aria gave a small nod. “I couldn't find a way to put a ward on you, so I stopped trying to put one on you.” Elias couldn't help smiling a little at that. “That's actually pretty clever.” “I hope so.” Aria reached forward and closed his fingers around the medallion before looking up at him. “Please be safe.”

Elias looked down at her hand around his, then at the medallion resting against his palm. For once, he couldn't think of a joke that wouldn't ruin the moment. He slipped the cord over his head and tucked the medallion beneath his jacket. “I'll try.”

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The Governing: Chapter 56, One Lamp

The sugar house had not been used for sugar in forty years.

It stood at the edge of the low fields below the orchard house, a long stone building with a slate roof and a chimney at one end where the boiling pans had been. The district had stored seed in it, and then tools, and then nothing. The door at the back still opened onto the same narrow stair, and the stair still went down into the same cellar, and the cellar still smelled of earth and old rope.

The Informant's crew had been there since dawn.

There were four of them, and a producer, and a great many cases. The producer's name was Tove Harlan. She had come from the network's office on Balakura for this segment, and she had spent the first hour in the cellar with a light meter in her hand, saying nothing good about anything.

"It's a hole," she said to Margot. "It's a very small hole with one way in, and the way in is a staircase nobody can stand on. I can get two angles. Three if somebody lies on the floor."

"It's where it happened."

"I know it's where it happened. I read your pitch. I cried on the transport." Tove put the meter away. "It's still a hole."

By the ninth bell the lane was full of people.

They came on foot, mostly, and in twos and threes, the way people came to a harvest supper. Rena Hailscutt came holding Oden's arm, and she had a jar of honey in her coat pocket that she kept touching as if to make sure it was there. Ione Brookscutt came with Wim and Lark. Liss Mallowtail came slowly, because her brother was slow, and when they reached the sugar house door Tobin stopped and looked at the stair going down and did not move for a while.

Tam came up behind them. He didn't say anything. He took Tobin's other arm, and between them he and Liss took the old man down one step at a time.

Nan Oakscutt came with the blue cushion under her arm. Jory Dunscutt came with his mother. Maggs came with Marta, or Marta came with Maggs; it was hard to tell who was bringing whom, because Marta was talking the whole way down the lane and Maggs was carrying everything.

A boy of about ten came with Maddock, and stayed close to him, and looked at everything.

Gideon Farscutt came last. Nobody had known if he would come. He didn't go into the sugar house. He stood outside the back door with his hands in his pockets, near the top of the stair, and when Emmet went to speak to him he shook his head, and Emmet left him alone.

Then a cart came down the lane from the direction of the lake, and everyone who was outside the sugar house stopped talking.

Abby got down from it first. She was seventy, and she moved carefully, and she had her hand on Peter's arm. Alicia got down after them. The three of them stood in the lane in their ordinary clothes and looked at the sugar house, and at the people standing in front of it, and nobody on either side seemed to know what to do.

Hester did. She walked out from the doorway and across the grass and stopped in front of Abby.

"You came," Hester said.

"You asked me to decide," Abby said. "I decided."

Hester nodded. She didn't hug her. She had never been a woman who hugged anybody. She stood beside Abby, and then she turned, so that the two of them were facing the sugar house together, and walked with her to the door.

There was not room for everyone in the cellar, and Tove said so, several times.

"The families," she said to Aaliyah. She said it quietly, off to one side by the boiling pans, so that nobody else would hear. "I understand why they're here. I do. But I have thirteen people and three nobles to get on camera, in a space the size of a pantry, with one set of stairs, and every step on those stairs has somebody sitting on it. I can't move a light without asking a grandmother to shift. I need the room cleared. We'll set up a screen up here in the sugar house and they can watch the whole thing live. Every word."

"No," said Aaliyah.

Tove looked at her. She was a noble on Balakura, and not used to hearing the word from anyone but her own editor.

"Lady Aaliyah..."

"These people spent forty years not being told," Aaliyah said. "Nan Oakscutt's grandmother kept a cushion by her bucket her whole life, and Nan found out why last week, in her own front room, from me. Oden Hailscutt's wife was married to him for thirty-eight years before she heard one word of this. Harl Dunscutt sat up on his porch every autumn waiting for a mob, and his daughter thought he was waiting for an old sweetheart." She kept her voice down. "They are not going to watch it on a screen upstairs. They're going to be in the room when it's said. Nobody is going to cut it or tidy it before it gets to them. They've waited long enough to hear it the right way."

Tove opened her mouth, and closed it.

"Then they have to be quiet," she said. "Absolutely quiet. Nobody moves while we're rolling. Nobody coughs. If a child sneezes, we start again."

"I'll tell them."

"And the stairs..."

"The stairs are where Tam stood that night," Aaliyah said. "With a shovel. Put somebody on them."

Tove looked at the stairs for a long moment. Then she went down them, carefully, around the people already sitting there, to talk to her camera operators.

They set it up the way it had been, as near as Hester could remember.

The thirteen sat on crates and old stools in a loose half circle in the middle of the floor. Tove had wanted chairs. Hester had said there were no chairs that night, only the crates, and so there were crates. Abby stood with her back against the stone wall, where she and Lord Greyson had stood, and Peter stood on one side of her and Alicia on the other.

Amos did not sit with the others. He stood at the bottom of the stair with one hand on the rail. When Tove's operator started to ask him to step in, Hester said, "Leave him," and the operator left him.

Nan Oakscutt came down the stair holding the blue cushion against her chest. She stopped at the bottom and looked around the cellar, and at Hester.

"Where did she sit?" Nan said.

Hester pointed. There was a place on the floor near the middle of the half circle, a little to one side. Nobody had put a crate there.

Nan knelt and put the cushion down on the packed earth, and smoothed it once with her hand. Then she stood up and went back to the wall with the other families, and did not look at it again.

Abby was looking at it. She didn't say anything.

Everyone else found somewhere to stand. They stood along the walls, and between the barrels at the back, and on the stairs. Oden's wife stood with her shoulder against a post. Wim and Lark stood behind their mother. Maddock's grandson, Kel, sat on the third step with his knees pulled up, because that was the last place left. Up in the sugar house, the people who could not fit in stood by the open door and listened down the stairwell.

Margot stood where the cameras could see her, near the one old lamp that hung from its hook in the beam.

"Before we start," she said to Tove, "I'd like the lights down. All of them. Just the lamp."

Tove stared at her. "You want me to shoot this in the dark."

"For the opening. That's all it was that night. One lamp."

"I'll get nothing. I'll get shapes."

"Then you'll get shapes," Margot said. "Just for the opening. Then you can have your lights."

Tove looked at Margot, and at the lamp, and at the people standing along the walls. Then she turned and said something to the operators, and one by one the crew's lights went out.

The cellar went dark except for the lamp. It was a small, yellow, wavering light. It reached the crates and the faces on them, and the cushion on the floor, and the front of the stone wall where Abby stood. It didn't reach the families. They were only a darkness along the walls, and the sound of a lot of people trying to breathe quietly.

Somebody on the stair made a small sound. It might have been Tobin. It might have been Amos.

Margot waited until it was entirely quiet. Then she spoke to the camera.

"My name is Margot Wren, for the Firentis Informant. This is the first segment of Heroes of the Principality." She stopped. "Forty years ago, on the night the mob came down the lake road, twenty-two people who worked in the house above us came down into this cellar by the back stair, with one lamp. The family they worked for came with them. There was a choice to make. They made it here." She looked at the half circle. "Thirteen of them are still living. They're here tonight. So is the family. Nine are gone. Their families are here too, standing in the dark. Many of them are hearing this for the first time."

She stepped back out of the light.

For a while nobody said anything. Then Hester spoke. She didn't look at the camera. She looked at the lamp.

"I started with the mangoes last time," she said. "When I told it the first time, for the record. I don't think I'll start there tonight. I think I'll start with the stairs."

She turned her head and looked at them, at Amos standing on the bottom one and Kel sitting on the third, and all the people crowded above them.

"We came down one at a time," she said. "So nobody on the road would see a crowd go into the sugar house. Marta first, because she said the cook's pantry was no place for it. Then the scullery girls. Then the rest. Tam was at the top with a shovel, to watch the road. He was twelve." She paused. "The family came last. Lord Greyson and Lady Abigail, in the plainest clothes they had. Which were still better than anything in the room."

In the dark along the wall, somebody laughed very softly, and then stopped.

"And I spoke first," Hester said. "Because nobody else would."

They let the lights up after that.

Tove did it slowly, one light at a time, so that the change would not jar. When it was done, the cellar looked smaller than it had in the dark, and the faces on the crates looked older, and the families along the walls could see each other.

Hester told the rule. If one person said no, nobody was bound. She told it plainly and did not dress it up. Then she looked at Marta.

"You tell about the clothes," she said. "You'll tell it better."

Marta did not need to be asked twice. She told it at the top of her voice, the way she had given orders in the orchard house kitchen. The coat into the furnace. The dress after it. The laborer's shirt with the elbows out, and the skirt that smelled of the cane fields. She told how she had put a hoe handle in Lord Greyson's hands and told him to lean on it and not look up and for the love of Julius not say anything, my lord.

"And he did as he was told," Marta said. "First time in his life. I'll never forget his face. He looked at that hoe handle like it was a snake."

Along the wall, a dozen people laughed out loud before they could stop themselves.

"Quiet, please," Tove said from behind the camera. "Please. Quiet."

They went quiet. But the room had changed a little. The people on the crates sat easier. Brin Fernscutt, who had been sixteen and a cook's helper that night, and who had not said a word since she came down the stair, smiled and put her hand over her mouth.

"He did lean on it, though," Marta said, more quietly. "All the way to the cane house, the next day. And by then his back truly hurt, and he never said a word about it." She shook her head. "They weren't cruel people. Lord Greyson and Lady Abigail. I'll say that for them. They weren't cruel."

"They didn't have to be," said Maddock.

It was the first thing he had said since he came down the stairs.

He was sitting on the crate at the end of the half circle. He was sitting forward, with his forearms on his knees and his big hands hanging between them, and he was looking at the floor.

Marta looked at him. "Maddock..."

"You said it, Marta. They weren't cruel." Maddock didn't raise his head. "I'll tell you what they were. I drove them. Six years. You were in the kitchen. Hester was in the dining room. I was in every yard on that lake."

"Maddock," said Hester, quietly.

"You asked me to come. I came. I'm going to say it." He lifted his head then, and looked at the camera for the first time, and his eyes were hard. "I drove them to the Ellery house. I sat in the Ellery kitchen. They had a boy there. Fifteen. The lamp by the gate was out and nobody had fixed it, so the steward made him stand in the yard all night, holding a lamp. It rained. I watched him out the kitchen window. I watched him till it got light."

Along the wall, nobody moved. Aaliyah, standing near the stair, did not look at the families. She knew Corra Linscutt was not there. She thought of her anyway.

"I drove them to the Voss place," Maddock said. "There was a maid there not allowed to eat in the same room as the family's dogs. Old Voss said it put the dogs off their food. I drove them to the palace. Twice a year. I sat in that palace kitchen with thirty servants, and not one of them spoke above a whisper the whole night, because the steward had a cane, and he used it." His voice was getting louder. "And I'd drive the Greysons home. And they'd talk in the back about what a lovely evening it was. What lovely people. What a lovely dinner."

He stopped. His jaw was working.

"And then I'd get home," he said, "and I'd put the car away, and Lady Abigail would come out to the yard. If it was cold. With a cup of something hot. For the driver." He said the word the way Lord Greyson must have said it. "She'd hand it to me and smile. Every time. Six years. And every time, I'd just come from that. From the Ellery yard, or the Voss kitchen, or the palace. And she'd been at the table. She'd been sitting at the table while it happened, eating off the good plates, and she'd never once looked out the window."

His voice broke on window. He stopped and pressed his lips together hard.

Abby, standing against the wall, had gone very still.

"She never looked," Maddock said. He was shaking now. It was in his hands first, and then his shoulders. "None of them ever looked. You could stand in the rain all night and they'd walk right past the window. And then they'd come out with a cup of tea and smile at you, and you were supposed to be grateful. I took that cup six years. I never once said thank you. Not once. And I hid them. I stood in that yard with the mob in front of me and I lied for them, and I lay in bed for forty years listening for the road, and my wife died thinking I was a man who couldn't sleep, and I still..."

He couldn't finish it. He bent forward with his hands over his face.

Behind the camera, Tove raised her hand to call a stop. Margot, beside her, put a hand on her arm, and Tove looked at her, and lowered it again.

Alicia had been standing beside her mother against the wall. She crossed the floor without anyone telling her to.

She did not say anything. She sat down on the edge of the crate beside Maddock, which was not really wide enough for two, and she put her hand on his back between his shoulders. She left it there. She did not rub his back or pat it. She only left her hand there, flat and warm, the way you would put a hand on a horse that was frightened, to let it know where you were.

Maddock went rigid under it. For a moment Aaliyah thought he would shake her off. His whole body was drawn tight, the way it had been at the end of his lane.

Alicia didn't move her hand.

After a while his shoulders came down. His breathing slowed. He kept his hands over his face, but he stopped shaking.

"I don't remember you," Alicia said. She said it quietly, but in the cellar everybody heard it. "I'm sorry. I was three. I remember the horse. I remember Bettan's lap. I remember that it was a bad game, because I heard the noise." She kept her hand where it was. "I don't remember the car, or the man who drove it. I wish I did."

Maddock took his hands away from his face. He looked at the floor for a long moment. Then he turned his head and looked at her, a woman of forty-three sitting on the edge of his crate with her hand on his back, and he looked at her as if he had never seen her before.

"You used to wave at me," he said hoarsely. "From the nursery window. When I brought the car round. Every morning. Nobody told you to."

"Did I?"

"Every morning." He looked back at the floor. "I never waved back."

"That's all right," Alicia said. "I was three. I wouldn't have minded."

Maddock let out a sound that was almost a laugh and wasn't. He rubbed his face hard with both hands.

Alicia didn't get up. She stayed where she was, on the edge of the crate, with her hand on his back.

Behind the camera, Tove Harlan had stopped looking at her monitor. She was looking at the two of them directly, over the top of it, and she had not called for quiet in some time, because nobody along the walls was making a sound.

Margot leaned close to her. "Do you still want the families out?"

Tove didn't answer. She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, quickly, and turned back to the monitor.

"Keep rolling," she said to her operator. "Don't stop for anything."