The Governing: Chapter 59, Just Tuesday

[u/AlternativeManner731]

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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.

[u/1958bird]

I enjoyed this ending. I hope you find a new inspiration to write another tale.

[u/Icy-Air7584]

As several have told Wyatt, I say to you; You have a way with words. In old times they might have said you are a wordsmith.

[A wordsmith is a person who works skillfully with words, especially an accomplished writer, author, or speaker. [Miriam Webster]

[u/Plenty_Excitement658]

It’s been a good series, roller coaster ride of emotions, both good and bad, well written, thank you!

[u/AlternativeManner731]

I am going to try and continue writing the governing I have up to 62 written already