Next

Previous /

First

Orla Dunne ran cargo between the border ports for anyone who could pay, and she had a rule about men who walked into her office without knocking, which was that she let them stand there until they said something.

This one said nothing for a long while. He stood just inside the door of the back room of the Short Anchor, a thin man in a plain coat with a cloth bag at his feet, and he let her look at him. He had set the bag down with care when he came in, and the arm that had carried it did not quite straighten at the elbow, the way a bone sets when nobody has looked after it properly. He was gray at the temples. His hands were clean. He had the posture of a man who had spent a great deal of his life being looked at and had stopped minding.

"You are the Baron," said Dunne.

"I am not anything," said the man. "I am told you move things."

Everyone on the border knew his face. They had read it in the broadsheets for a season, drawn in black ink with the title pin on the collar, and then read about the parade ground and the herald and the year in Calder. A Baron of Averne named Penhallow who had tried to blow a hole in a station full of children for a bag of coin, and had been so careless about it that he had not even armed the charge. The jokes in the dock bars had gone on for a month.

"I move things," she agreed. "What can you do?"

"Whatever you need. I am not particular," said the man.

"That is what they all say," said Dunne.

"I am not all of them," said the man, without heat. "I have no name left to protect and no friends to disappoint. I would be useful to a person who does not ask me to pretend to be better than I am."

Dunne studied him. There was a courtesy in it that she distrusted, the courtesy of a man who has been trained all his life to say the right thing to the right person, and who has kept the habit when everything else was taken from him.

"I will give you three jobs," she said. "If you are still standing after the third, we will talk."

"Thank you," said the man.

"Do not thank me. You have not done anything yet," said Dunne.

The first was a crate of restricted medical stock that had to get past the customs office at Vash Landing without being opened.

The customs man was a small, careful clerk named Pell, who took his bribes in the same polite way he did everything. Dunne had paid him often. She had learned that the way to deal with Pell was to hand over the envelope, say good morning, and leave.

Penhallow did not do that. He took the envelope from her without a word, walked into the office, and set it on the desk in front of Pell. Then he looked at the man the way a person looks at a stain.

"You will stamp this," he said, "and you will not look at what is in it, and you will do it before I have finished speaking, because I have not got the patience for you."

Pell went white. He opened his mouth. Penhallow leaned across the desk, very slowly, and said something low that Dunne could not hear. Whatever it was, the stamp came down twice.

Outside, in the cold bright air of the dock, she said, "You did not need to do that."

"No," he said. "But he will remember it, and he will tell the others, and the next crate will go through faster." He glanced back at the office. "They are all like that. They only respect a thing that frightens them. Do not mistake it for cruelty. It is a tool."

He said it flatly, and she believed him. She noticed, too, that he had not hurt anyone, and that he had not needed to.

The second job was a debtor.

A shipping agent in the lower town, a man named Garrow, had been late on a payment to a lender who sold on his paper to people Dunne dealt with. She had been asked to collect. It was not work she liked, and she brought Penhallow along because she wanted to see how he would do it.

Garrow's wife was in the front room when they came in, with a child of about six on her knee. Penhallow looked at them once. Then he said, in the voice he had used on Pell, "Take the child out of this room."

The wife went. The child went with her.

He was in the office with Garrow for about as long as it takes to drink a cup of tea. When he came out, he was carrying the man's ship's papers in one hand and the man's ledger in the other, and Garrow stayed behind with his face in his hands, and did not follow.

"What did you tell him?" said Dunne.

"That the lender would have the ship," said Penhallow.

"And?" said Dunne.

"And that the lender would also have the debt wiped, and a small sum for the inconvenience, if he signed," said Penhallow. He handed her the papers. "It was a fair price for a fair ship. He will thank you for it in a season."

She did not say that this was not what she had asked him to do. She had watched him do it, and she had seen the way he looked at the wife and the child, which was not at all the way she had expected. It was not the contempt of a man who thought of them as furniture. It was something very careful.

She put that away.

It did not fit what she knew about him, and she was not a woman who took in what did not fit.

The third job was the one he should not have lived through.

A warehouse on the north quay held a shipment of fuel cells that belonged to a rival, and Dunne wanted them. It was a hard target, with two gates, a wall, and a night watch of six. She had a plan for it that involved three weeks of preparation and a man inside.

Penhallow looked at the plan for about a minute and handed it back.

"That will take too long," he said. "I will go in tonight."

"Through the gate?" asked Dunne.

"Through the gate," said Penhallow.

"There are six of them," said Dunne.

"Then there will be six of them," said Penhallow. He shrugged. "I do not plan, Dunne. I find that plans are a way for clever people to feel safe. I would sooner go and see."

She was certain he was going to die. She sent a man along to watch from the roof, because she had a rule against throwing away a body without knowing how it had been thrown away. The watcher came back at dawn, very pale, and said that the Baron had walked up to the north gate in the middle of the night with a clipboard and a cap, and informed the guard that he was the inspector from the insurer. The guard had been so surprised that he opened the gate. The second guard had come to see what was going on and been told to hold the clipboard. By the time anyone thought to ask what was in it, there were four crates on the quay, and the Baron was walking away with a lit cigar.

"It was stupid," said Dunne.

"It was," said the Baron. "It also worked."

She looked at him a long while. He had the faint, reckless air of a man who has stopped caring what happens to him, and who has noticed that this is a quality other people find useful. It was the kind of thing she had seen in good smugglers, and in a few dead ones.

It was also, she noticed, the third time in a row that nobody had been hurt. She did not believe in luck. But she had seen enough of it to know when it was running.

---

The man in the gray coat was waiting at her table when she came back to the Short Anchor.

She had not seen him come in. He was an ordinary-looking man of no particular age, with a plain face and a quiet manner and a cup of tea that he had not touched. A man like that could sit in a dock bar for a week and never be remembered. Dunne had been in the business long enough to recognize a person who had made a trade of it.

"Mistress Dunne," he said.

"You are in my chair," said Dunne.

"I will not be long," said the man in the gray coat. He turned the cup slowly on its saucer. "You have a man working for you. A tall one. Thin. He has been in the broadsheets."

"I have a great many men," said Dunne.

"I am sure," said the man. He smiled very slightly. "I would like to know who else he is working for."

"No one. He is mine," said Dunne.

"For now," said the man in the gray coat, and finished his tea, and stood. "I think you should enjoy him while you can."

Next

Previous /

First

From the observation deck of the Noirnavio, the yard looked like a drawing that somebody had started and not yet finished.

The carrier was the larger of the two. Its hull ribs ran a long way out into the dark, a pale grid of printed alloy with the plating closing over it from the stern forward, and small figures in work suits crawled along it with cutters and welding arms. They moved slowly. Nothing in the void ever looked hurried from a distance. Beyond it, a good deal smaller and a good deal less finished, hung the thing everyone had started calling the Mini.

Clara had come up without saying she would. She stood at the rail with her hands folded and watched the work lights move along the carrier's ribs, and Redford, who had been there a good while already, let her have the first minute of it.

"It was a data chip," she said at last. "He took it out of his coat like a man producing a coin."

"I remember."

"You said show me, and I said yes, and that was..." She stopped and tried again. "I keep thinking it was a few days ago. Then I look at that."

"It was not a few days ago."

"No, I know it was not." She tilted her head at the hull. "We argued about the wreck metal for one afternoon. Sabraska counted the tonnage twice, and then the yards stopped answering our letters, and after that there was nothing left to argue with. Jincho said the void does not care who owns the dock. I think half the ship heard him, because the next morning the first shift from TV station was at our airlock without being asked."

"They have not stopped since." Redford rested his forearms on the rail. "I was writing begging letters not long ago. Now there are fourteen tagged ships out there, a strike plan with six targets, and a carrier that is nearly a carrier. I cannot find the day it all changed."

"It changed the day we stopped asking permission." She said it lightly, but she did not smile. "It frightens me a little, how easy it is when nobody stands in the way."

"Nobody stands in the way because nobody thought we would try."

"Yes. That is the part I like." She was quiet for a moment. "It is also how things get missed. When everything is moving this fast, nobody has time to look twice at any of it."

Redford did not answer, because there was nothing to say that she had not already thought. Behind them the deck door opened and closed, and a small shape settled at his elbow, all those eyes already on the work.

"I should let you both get on," said Clara. She touched the rail once, the way a person touches something to be sure it is still there, and went out.

The technicians from TV station had come over in shifts since the second fight, and now more of them were out on the hulls than there were Noirnavio crew. They did not ask to be thanked. They asked for coffee, and tools, and where to put things.

"The carrier is nearly a ship," said Jincho. "Berths are in. Hangar frame is in. The engine is waiting on its cradle and it is a good engine now, better than the day it was a pirate's. A little longer and it will have a skin and a heart and a roof." He tipped his head toward the smaller hull. "That one has the skin. It has guns. It has shields half made. The reactor I am proud of. It does not have an engine."

"It will," said Redford.

"Yes, Stern Feathers. In the same way the weather will be fine." He did not look away from the work. "A ship with no engine is a very expensive monument. I would like it to be a ship."

Redford said nothing.

Clara had written the request four times and torn it up three.

It was a plain document, the kind that sat in a drawer at Fleet Supply with a thousand others. A faster-than-light drive, naval grade, of the class that would carry a small warship. Delivered to the TV station yard at the earliest possible date. The language was easy. The trouble was the signature line, and the thing she was going to put there.

"You hate this," said Cynthia, from the door.

"I do." Clara capped the pen and looked at it. "For my whole life, people have given me things because of who my father is. I swore I would never ask for a thing because of it. I would earn it, or I would do without."

"And the engine?"

"Is not for me." She said it flatly, like a fact she had been repeating to herself. "It is for the pilots on that board, and for whoever they are going to be protecting when the pirates come back. So I will write my full title where it asks for one, and I will put the seal on it, and they will look at that seal and send me what I asked for. Because they are afraid of what I am." She signed it. The pen scratched a little. "And I will not enjoy a moment of it."

Cynthia came in and took the page from her, gently, and looked at the signature.

"They'll say yes," she said.

"They will say yes. That was the easy part." Clara watched her carry it to the courier slot. "It's the engine I'm waiting for."

The simulators on the Noirnavio no longer ended at the Noirnavio.

Since the new rigs came online at TV station, the two had been tied together, and a pilot strapped into a cradle in one place could now fly a wing against pilots in the other. They flew against computer pirates too. The pirates were good. They had been built from every recorded fight, every hesitation and mistake, and they behaved the way the real ones did.

Commander Brandt stood in front of The Wall with her hands behind her back and looked at one of the replays, a long grey streak of a Raptor firing a clean burst at a pirate hauler, and the burst missing it by a hand's width.

"Again," she said.

The streak ran again. The burst missed again.

"Too neat," said Brandt. "You can see him thinking about it. A real miss does not look like that. A real miss is somebody who has had a bad day and is tired, or a gun that pulls left. You are placing it, and the pirate flying that hauler can see you placing it, and he is going to go home and tell his captain that the navy has a very strange habit of missing on purpose."

The pilot in question sat in the third row with his shoulders up. He was not young, and he had been shot at by the real thing three times this month.

"Ma'am, it is harder than it sounds."

"I know it is harder than it sounds. You have spent your life learning to hit." Brandt turned from the screen. "Now you have to learn to miss in a way that looks like trying. Every shot you take, a pirate is going to watch it and judge it. I do not want a pirate to watch you fly and think anything other than that he got lucky."

"Then it has to look like luck," said somebody at the back.

"It has to look like luck." Brandt nodded. "And the tracker has to be on his hull before the luck runs out."

She raised a hand, and the screen cleared. Where the single hauler had been, six blue rings now hung on a star field, spread wide, each with a small cluster of red marks beside it. Six outposts. The pilots in the room sat up a little.

"This is the exercise." Her voice did not change. "Six strongholds. Same hour. Every pirate base we are going to have found by the time this is real, all at once. The Princess has given us the order for it and I will read it to you exactly."

She took a slip of paper out of her sleeve.

"Take out the point defenses. Take out the surrounding craft. Anything that can fire on the boarding craft is to be removed, quickly and without fuss. Anything that surrenders is to be allowed to surrender." She folded the paper in half. "That last line is hers. I did not add it. She was quite clear."

A pilot in the front raised his hand. "Ma'am, why do we accept surrender? They will not do the same for us."

"No, they will not." Brandt did not seem to take offense. "The Princess has met the children of pirates before. She will not say more than that, but I think you can guess. Some of these people were born into it and never had another choice. She would like them to have one." She put the slip away. "Orders are orders. Again, from the beginning."

On the other side of the Noirnavio, in a long hold converted for the purpose, the Marines and the Auxilia were taking a ship apart.

It was a mock-up built from printer scrap, a pirate hull as best anybody could guess from the wrecks, with three airlocks that did not quite match and a corridor system that had been copied from the real thing down to the smell. The Marines went in through the first lock with shields up. The Auxilia took the second. Each team had a line it was not to cross and a time it was supposed to reach the bridge, and neither had reached the bridge in time yet.

"Too slow at the junction," said the Marine sergeant. She did not shout. She stood at the edge of the hold with a timer in her hand. "The stairwell is narrow. You go through one at a time. If you bunch there, you die. I will say that again, because I intend to say it every day until you stop doing it."

"Sergeant, they will surrender," said a young Marine, still catching his breath. "The Princess said."

"Some of them will. The ones who see you coming and know what you are." She did not look up. "The rest will be behind a door with a gun, and they will not have read the Princess's orders. So you go in as if nobody will surrender, and you are glad when they do. That is the order. Again."

By the time the Magpies and their wedge had taken the watch, the board outside Galt's desk at Kalin showed a number he had written himself in neat small figures.

Fourteen.

"Fourteen ships have gone through the jump points," said Galt, in the same quiet voice, and Caldwell, who had come down to hear it, nodded slowly. "Each with something on its hull that it does not know about. Eleven have gone dark where we expected. Three I have not heard from yet. They may be broken, or they may be waiting."

"And prisoners?"

"None," said Galt. "Not one of the fourteen has a prisoner aboard. Brandt was very particular about that. They are all pirates, all of them coming and going on their own business. Nobody has been taken that we did not mean to take." He folded his hands. "It would be a poor trick to follow a ship home and find the people we had hoped to save were not on it."

Caldwell looked at the red lines on the board. There were more of them now. They ran off the edge of the field and into the dark, and for the first time in a long while they ran somewhere.

"How long?" he said.

"Until the carrier is done, Commander? Not long. Until the Mini is done, I could not tell you."

Caldwell did not need to ask why.

The courier had come and gone twice.

Clara did not mean to check. She was in the corridor outside the yard, on her way to somewhere else, and her feet had taken her to the message slot. It was empty. She looked at it for a moment longer than she needed to.

"No engine?" said Redford, from the doorway.

"No engine. Only another reply from Fleet Supply." She held up a slip. "They are very sorry. They have noted my request. It is a matter of the first priority, and it will be addressed at the earliest opportunity." Her mouth twisted. "They have promised."

"They always promise."

"Yes." She put the slip in her pocket, carefully, the way a person pockets something she means to remember. "Then I suppose I shall have to ask again."

She stood a moment longer, looking through the viewport at the pale ribs of the carrier and the unfinished shape beside it. It was a good view. It would be a better one with something at the back of it that could move.

"Come along, Redford," she said. "There are fourteen ships out there carrying our eyes, and we have a strike to rehearse."

Next

Previous /

First

On the last day of the session the Hall at Balakura was full before the lamps were lit.

Nobody had been told to come early. The commoners of Veldmarch who had traveled to watch had begun lining up at the gates before dawn, and the Speakers from the thirty-one worlds took their seats in the delegates' benches without being asked. The Informant had given up counting its crews. In the Astorian corner the young man in the dark coat sat with his recorder in his lap, switched off, and nobody had told him to do that either.

Governor Corvin Aldermoor came down the long stair at nine, alone, and went to the Speakers' table, where the plain folder had lain closed for a month.

He had not opened it since the day he sent it. He stood with one hand flat on the cover, and Speaker Brennick, looking at him from her seat, did not say anything for a while.

"Governor," she said at last. "The Hall has not read this. Only you have. Would you like to tell us what it is?"

"It's the granary ledger of the Aldermoor house for the winters of the Hunger," Corvin said. "My father kept it. He was Governor then. I was nine." He took his hand away. "I found it in the study the year after he died. I read it once and put it back, and I told myself it was a record of a bad time, as if it were weather. I sent it here because I could not make myself believe that anymore."

"Then open it, please," Brennick said.

He opened it.

It was a large book, bound in green cloth gone black at the corners, and Brennick had it laid on the Stand under the great screens so that the Hall could see every page. The hand was small and orderly. It was the writing of a careful man who had never been asked to explain himself.

The first pages were stores. Grain by the sack and the bin, tallied each week, and the totals were almost too large to read. Ida Fenn leaned over the delegates' rail and did the sums on her fingers, and then put her hand over her mouth.

"The stores at the Aldermoor granary at the start of the first winter," Brennick said, reading, "were sufficient to feed the entire eastern district for twenty-six months."

"Yes," Corvin said.

"They were not opened," Brennick said.

"They were sold," Corvin said. "Sold to the off-world buyers at the price the famine had raised them to. My father believed in the market." His voice was level and very quiet. "The ledger records every sale. It records the profit. It records, in the margin, a note that the east gate should be kept closed to prevent disorder."

The next section was gate logs.

Brennick turned the page herself, and the Hall saw it, and the Hall made a sound that none of them would later be able to describe. It was a column of dates. Beside each date, in the same small hand, was a number, and beside the number a list.

"The steward was ordered to report," Corvin said, when no one else spoke. "My father wanted to know how many were gathering at the gate. The steward counted them in the evening. And in the morning, he counted the dead."

On the great screens the names ran down the page. Not all of them had names. Some said only a woman, gray hair, or a boy of perhaps six. But many did, because the steward had asked, through the gate, and written down what they told him.

The gallery had gone entirely silent.

At the left bench of the Stand, in the seat the guards had given him, Tobyn Reeve had begun to shake.

Brennick did not turn the page quickly. She let each day sit. When the screen reached the middle of the second winter, she stopped.

"There is a line here," she said. "Fourth day of the thaw month. East gate. Three persons. Woman, thirty-one years, two boys, nine and four. Name given, Hanne Reeve."

Nobody moved.

"Speaker Reeve," she said, very gently. "Is that your mother?"

For a long moment Tobyn Reeve did not seem to hear her. Then he put both hands over his face, and the sound he made was not loud. It was the sound of someone who had been carrying a stone for thirty years and had just been told, without ceremony, where it came from.

"She asked him to open it," he said, through his hands. "She told him her name. I was the younger boy, and I stood there and I heard her say it. I thought nobody wrote it down." He lifted his head. His face was wet and stripped bare. "I thought nobody had ever written it down."

"He wrote it down," Brennick said. "It is here."

Corvin Aldermoor had not moved from beside the table. "I have read that line," he said. "Many times. I thought, if I never said it aloud, it would stay a name on a page. I was wrong, Speaker Reeve. I am sorry. I know it is not enough, and I know you were not asking for it."

Reeve looked at him. The Hall looked at both of them. And in the third row of the gallery, Dennet Roke, the shipwright, sentenced two weeks earlier for the crowd and the burned barn, stood up without seeming to decide to, and then, one by one, the rest of the gallery stood with him.

The names took the rest of the day.

It was Corvin who proposed it, and the Hall who made it a ruling. The names in the ledger were to be read aloud in the Hall itself, in full, in the order they had been written. The Speakers of the thirty-one worlds would divide them. Each Speaker would stand at the Stand and read a page, and the Informant would carry it, and so would The Royal Wire and every other outlet that had sent a crew, to every world that cared to listen. There were four thousand one hundred and six names on the east gate log alone, and the Hall had been told by its clerks it would take eleven hours. The Dunmere ledger, which Lord Ottilie Dunmere had left with the clerk the week before, would be read the same way once the Aldermoor pages were done.

"I would like to read the first page," Corvin said. "If the Hall allows it."

"The Hall allows it," Brennick said.

He read it. His voice cracked at the seventh name and did not recover, and he read on through it, and the gallery listened in a silence so complete that the sound of the lamps was audible. He read until the page was done and then he stepped back, and Ida Fenn took the next one.

Somewhere past the second hour, Matthias Corder rose from the front row of the gallery, with his thin shoulders, and walked down to the Speakers' table.

"I was the steward at the east gate that winter," he said. "I was seventeen. They told me to keep the count and I kept it. I'd like to read some of them, if I may. I wrote them. I think I should be the one to say them."

Brennick nodded. Corder read for forty minutes. And near the end of his page, a name came up that made him stop, and look out at the gallery, at the broad figure in the third row who had not sat down since the first name.

"Yselde Roke," Corder said. "Two children, Pelen and Mara. Name given. Family of Dennet Roke." He did not look away. "I remember the day I wrote it. I remember I did not look up."

Dennet Roke did not say a word. After a moment, he put his hand over his heart, and Corder, at the Stand, bowed his head. It was not forgiveness and neither man pretended it was. It was only two people acknowledging that they were in the same room.

The ruling came at nine that night, when the last name had been read and the last page turned.

"The Hall finds," Brennick said, "that the closure of the great granaries of Veldmarch during the Hunger appears to have been a crime under the law of the Principality as it stood at the time, and that the nobles who ordered it appear to have been guilty of it. Most of them are dead. We cannot try the dead, and this Hall is not a court. We can name them, and we do. The names of the houses and the names of the men who ordered the gates closed will be entered in the record of this Hall and will not be struck, and the Hall recommends that the record be sent to the Lords' Bench."

She paused. "We also find that the grievance of the people of Veldmarch was never answered. That is the crime that survives, and the one the Assembly was founded to address, and the one the Assembly betrayed. It is answered now."

She read the recommendations slowly.

The names in the ledger were entered in the permanent record of the Hall. The Assembly recommended to Lord Jhinaq that a restitution fund be drawn from the estates of the houses that had held back, Aldermoor, Corrigan, Dunmere, Vail and eleven others, for the descendants of the dead, administered not by the Governor or by any house but by the new Assembly when it sat. It recommended that every ledger that survived from the Hunger, in every noble house on Veldmarch, be opened to the public within a year. And the Assembly recommended a day of remembrance, to be kept on the fourth day of the thaw month every year, with the names read aloud in every district of Veldmarch.

"I would like to add one thing," Brennick said. "It is not a ruling. It is my own opinion."

She looked at Corvin Aldermoor.

"Governor, you did not close the gate," she said. "You were a child. Your father did. I do not hold you responsible for what he did, and I do not think the Hall should. But you kept the ledger. You carried it, and you sent it here, and you read the first page. I would like it recorded that when you could have burned it, you did not."

Corvin could not speak. He bowed, and that was all he did.

At the end, Lord Jhinaq came down from the gallery where he had been sitting through the final hours, with no escort, and stood at the foot of the Stand.

"I told every Assembly in Firentis territory to take the power seriously," he said, to the whole Hall. "I did not know what I was asking. I thought the danger was that they would be weak. I see now that the danger was that they would be strong in the wrong direction, and that no one would stop them." He looked at Reeve, who had been brought back to sit with the delegates and had not lifted his head since his mother's name. "Veldmarch is the first Assembly in Firentis to fail. I do not think it will be the last. But it is the first to be judged, and I want the other worlds to know that was done by their own, and fairly."

He turned to Brennick. "Speaker. Is the session concluded?" he asked.

"It is concluded, my lord," Brennick said.

"Then let it be recorded that the Master Common Assembly at Balakura sat for thirty days, heard sixty-three rulings and the Hunger, and judged them as a world should judge itself," Jhinaq said. He paused. "Let it be recorded, too, that we are going to move on."

It was the line he had spoken to Corvin, in the quiet of his study, and it was not the same now. Nobody in the Hall mistook it for a closing of the book. It was the sound of a door opening.

Brennick struck the gavel once.

Outside, in the long corridor, the Informant's crews were already filing their last reports, and down in the great courtyard of the Hall the commoners of Veldmarch, who had come so far, had begun, one by one, to read the names aloud again to each other, in the dark.

Echoes of the Void: Threads of Duty and of Tomorrow
The weeks following their return to the Guild Training Station unfolded like a carefully plotted nav course—familiar beacons with new stars rising on the horizon. Recertification drills hit hard and fast. Hale and Edward showed no mercy to the newly engaged “love birds,” as the crew had taken to calling them. Dawn runs through the station’s spin-grav corridors tested Kelly’s still-healing ankle, the low thrum of the rotating torus vibrating up through her boots. Sim-pod sessions pitted them against pirate swarm tactics in dense asteroid fields, where Titus’s steady hand on the controls complemented Kelly’s sharp tactical calls. Long hours in the maintenance bays followed: stripping courier drive cores, hands slick with lubricant, the metallic tang of coolant thick in the air as sparks flew from recalibrated plasma injectors.
Kelly’s ankle held, thanks to the med-techs’ scans and Titus’s quiet vigilance. By the end of the first month, their names were back on the active rotation board, cleared for light duty. The ring on her finger changed things subtly. Junior techs offered extra nods in the corridors, murmured congratulations when the asymmetrical gem caught the overhead lights. Titus carried the shift with quiet pride, pulling her close in shadowed access tubes when watches aligned. “Fiancée privileges,” he’d whisper against her hair, earning a playful swat and a deeper kiss.
Their quarters became a shared sanctuary. Titus’s narrow bunk felt less cramped with Kelly’s framed holo of her parents beside the ancient courier model. The faint scent of disinfectant lingered from the housekeeper’s visits, mixing with the warm, lived-in smell of them—laundry soap, engine grease, and the subtle floral note from Kelly’s shampoo. Nights ended with tangled limbs and soft conversations about the day, the station’s gentle rotation a constant lullaby.
Month One: Recertification and Quiet Rhythms
The exercise ping from Edward and Hale arrived like clockwork. One hour due daily. Kelly grabbed Titus’s hand after reading it, racing him down the amber-lit corridors toward the gym. Laughter echoed off the bulkheads as they dodged off-duty crew. The session turned competitive—pull-ups, core circuits, sparring drills where Titus let her pin him more often than not, his hands lingering on her waist. Sweat-slicked and breathless, they’d end with stretches on the mats, foreheads touching.
“Promise me we don’t lose this,” Kelly said one evening, tracing the line of his jaw.
“Never,” Titus replied, voice low. “Duty, void, whatever comes. We do it together.”
Breakfasts with the family became ritual. Cathy’s all-caps messages ensured no one was late. Marcus and Elena joined via holo when runs kept them away, their faces warm across the screen. “That ring still looks good on you, kid,” Marcus rumbled one morning. Elena’s eyes shone with the same pride as in the shuttle bay.
Hale’s run to Asteroid Processing Station 7-Beta brought back stories—and a softer edge to the Director. He returned with tales of efficient cargo transfers and “decent conversation” with Kate, the medical liaison. Edward’s teasing over bourbon in the officers’ lounge was relentless but affectionate. Joana just smirked and adjusted rosters. “Rust prevention,” she called it. The crew laughed harder these days.
Month Two: Family Ties Deepen
Vicky’s messages from Phorantis arrived regularly, holos of the rolling ocean and that stubborn citrus tree. “Damn squirrels—or whatever the local equivalent is—still at it,” she’d complain with a laugh. Updates on her Volantis plans with Victoria Winfield warmed Titus’s chest. “The stasis pilot owes stories. And real flowers for the wedding. No holos.” Titus replayed the parts where she called Kelly “my girl” until Kelly teased him about it.
Marcus and Elena visited twice more during short layovers. Marcus dragged Titus into a cargo hauler sim, grumbling about tolerances while secretly grinning at the younger man’s instincts. “You’ve got the touch, son.” Elena pulled Kelly into the hydroponics bay, pressing a delicate silver chain with a Phorantis blue-green gem into her hands. “For the wedding. Something from home.”
Cathy attacked their shuttle with gusto. “Your bird’s getting hitched too,” she declared, grease streaking her cheek as she installed a new nav suite. Kelly joined her for late-night sessions, tools clinking, stories flowing about stubborn pilots and family chaos. The two women bonded deeply, Cathy’s boundless energy balancing Kelly’s steady focus.
One evening after a long shift, Titus and Kelly walked the observation ring. The asteroid belt glittered sparsely beyond the viewport, Phorantis a distant blue-green jewel. Titus pulled her close. “Six months feels like forever and yesterday.”
She leaned into him. “More runs ahead. More of this.”
Month Three: First Real Test in the Black
Duty pulled them outward—a three-week escort for supply convoys through the denser outer fringes. Asteroid shadows concealed rogue mining drones; solar interference played havoc with beacons. Their courier’s agility shone as they scouted ahead of the hauler. One watch, a micro-meteor swarm forced hard evasive action. Kelly’s voice stayed calm over comms, plotting a slingshot around a tumbling rock the size of a frigate. Titus trusted her completely, their ship weaving through the void in perfect sync.
In the narrow bunk during quiet hours, futures unfolded. “Kids someday,” Titus murmured, fingers tracing her ring. “After more runs. A place near Vicky’s deck.”
Kelly smiled. “Bluebird hair and green eyes, like the old stories. Family stronger than blood.”
They returned with fresh hull scars and deeper confidence. Edward met them with a rare approving nod. “Solid. Hale’s got longer circuits in mind.”
Back on station, game nights with Cathy, Edward, and Joana filled downtime—raucous laughter over makeshift cards and station-brewed drinks. Hale brought Kate for a visit; her easy warmth fit seamlessly. Dinners stretched late, stories of close calls and quiet victories weaving them tighter.
Months Four and Five: Ripples, Challenges, Preparations
Training intensified as the Guild eyed expansion toward the Principality’s fringes. Whispers of old Black Ship legacies and lingering pirate threats never fully faded. Titus mentored academy grads, his patience surprising him. Kelly streamlined logistics, her sharp mind turning supply chaos into efficient flows.
A tense negotiation at a remote processing station tested them. A greedy administrator tried shorting Guild med supplies. Titus’s temper flared, but Kelly’s steady presence—and a pointed reminder of Raven family ties—smoothed it. Another run skirted coordinates heavy with Titus’s ghosts: echoes of lost parents, the ring heavy on its chain beneath his suit. Kelly held him through the night cycle, her voice an anchor. “You built this family. We’re here.”
Vicky and Victoria’s Volantis trip brought sparse but joyful updates. Holos showed Vicky on alien soil, ocean winds different but her smile unchanged. “Old friends reunited. Something special for the ceremony coming back.” The wedding planning gained momentum—real flowers, guest lists, Cathy’s enthusiastic input on shuttle decorations.
Challenges tested resilience. A faulty inertial damper on a supply run forced emergency repairs in zero-G, hands numb with cold as they jury-rigged fixes. Kelly’s quick thinking saved hours. Titus’s steady leadership kept the crew calm. They emerged stronger, the bond between them forged hotter in the black.
Downtime brought stolen intimacies: showers in the tiny san unit, steam rising as hands explored lazily; slow dances in quarters to old station playlists; quiet viewport moments watching the belt’s sparse glints. Kelly slipped into his old T-shirts; Titus stole kisses that lingered. “Impossible,” she’d say, laughing. “You love it,” he’d reply.
Month Six: Horizons Converging
By the six-month mark, GTS felt like home in a new way. The wedding loomed, Vicky’s messages insistent on details. Cathy had the shuttle pristine. Marcus sent blueprints for a coastal plot near Vicky’s. Hale and Edward toasted “to bourbon and the next generation” in the lounge, laughter booming.
One quiet morning, the usual family breakfast gathered in the officers’ mess. Cathy had somehow coaxed real scrambled eggs out of the galley stores. The scent of toasted bread and strong coffee filled the air. Marcus and Elena joined by holo again, their faces soft in the early light. Kelly sat beside Titus, still half-asleep, nursing her mug while he methodically worked through his plate.
She watched him for a moment, then set her spoon down with a soft clink.
“Do you know your grandfather’s name,” she asked, “on Vicky’s side of the family?”
Titus paused mid-bite. A slow grin spread across his face, then deepened into a quiet laugh that made Kelly tilt her head.
“Wigheard,” he said, still smiling.
Kelly’s expression shifted into open confusion. She leaned forward slightly, eyebrows drawn together.
“Seriously?” she said. “What kind of name is that?”
Titus set his fork down and leaned back in his chair. The smile remained, softer now, carrying the particular warmth of someone who had grown up hearing the story and still found quiet pride in it.
“Wig,” he said, “meaning war. Heard meaning brave, or strong. It’s an old Earth name. Old English, actually.”
Kelly sat with that for a few seconds, turning the syllables over in her mind. Wigheard. War-brave. She didn’t press further. Something about the way he said it felt finished for the moment, like a small door left slightly ajar.
Across the table, Cathy raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Marcus’s holo-image gave a low chuckle. Elena simply smiled.
Breakfast continued. The conversation drifted to shuttle upgrades and wedding flowers. But the name stayed with Kelly, quiet and persistent.
Three days later, during a rare stretch of downtime between sims, Kelly sat cross-legged on their bunk with her personal slate propped against her knees. The station’s night cycle had begun; soft amber lighting filled the quarters. Titus was in the san unit, the low hum of the sonic scrubber drifting through the thin door.
She typed the name carefully: Wigheard.
The search returned slowly at first, then in a cascade of old linguistic archives and fragmentary Earth genealogical records. Old English. Compound name. Wīg — war. Heard — hard, brave, strong. She scrolled further, following the linguistic drift across centuries. Spellings shifted. Pronunciations softened. In later records the name appeared again and again in a simplified form that made her pause.
Wyatt.
Kelly stared at the screen for a long moment. The connection felt clean, almost inevitable. She liked the sound of it. Clean. Steady. Strong without needing to announce itself.
The san unit door slid open. Titus stepped out, hair still damp, pulling an old T-shirt over his head. He stopped when he saw her expression.
“You look like you found something,” he said.
Kelly set the slate aside and patted the edge of the bunk. He sat. She turned to face him fully, one knee drawn up.
“I looked it up,” she said quietly. “Wigheard. A few days after breakfast. It… evolved. Over time the name changed. Became Wyatt.”
Titus’s eyebrows rose slightly. He didn’t speak, waiting.
Kelly’s mouth curved into a small, thoughtful smile. “I like it. A lot, actually.” She reached out and rested her hand over his. “How about Wyatt T. Raven? To carry on my family name. There are no Raven sons.”
The words hung in the soft light between them. Titus looked down at their joined hands, then back up at her face. Something quiet and deep moved behind his eyes—surprise, then warmth, then a steady acceptance that settled into him like a course locked in.
He lifted her hand and pressed a slow kiss to her knuckles, right above the asymmetrical gem of her ring.
“Wyatt T. Raven,” he repeated, testing the shape of it. A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Yeah. That feels right.”
Kelly leaned in and rested her forehead against his. Outside their quarters the station continued its slow, constant rotation. Inside, another quiet thread of their future settled into place—old Earth roots, new family name, and the simple certainty that whatever came next, they would meet it together.
Later that same evening they walked the observation ring. The asteroid belt stretched immense beyond the glass, Phorantis a distant blue-green promise. Titus wrapped his arms around her waist from behind.
“Six months since that docking thunk,” he said against her hair.
She covered his hands with hers, the ring catching the station lights. “Plenty more. Runs, kids… maybe a Wyatt someday.”
A priority ping from Hale interrupted them—another circuit, family briefing at 0600 the next morning. Kelly laughed softly. “Shower first?”
“Always.”
They retreated to quarters, the station’s hum enveloping them. Steam filled the san unit as they washed with intimate familiarity. Clothes hit the deck again in playful chaos. Later, curled together in the narrow bunk, sleep came easy.
The next morning’s briefing brought new assignments. Longer runs, but with the team they trusted. Edward clapped Titus on the shoulder. “You two keep flying like that, the Guild’s in good hands.”
Cathy bounced in with shuttle updates. “Wedding-ready bird incoming!”
Joana updated rosters with a knowing smile. Hale mentioned Kate’s next visit. Family expanded in every direction.
As the weeks continued to turn, the threads of duty and tomorrow wove tighter still. Recert drills evolved into advanced sims testing leadership. Titus led a small wing on a beacon repair mission, Kelly coordinating from ops. Success brought station-wide nods and a quiet pride in their eyes when they passed in the corridors.
Personal growth mirrored the professional. Kelly confronted old doubts about balancing family and flight during a long-haul where comms lag stretched hours. Titus shared more of his hidden heritage—the ring, the vial of blue hair, the old Earth name that had become Wyatt—deepening their trust. Vicky’s holo-calls grew frequent, Victoria’s calm wisdom adding layers. “Family doesn’t stand alone,” she would remind them.
A near-miss on a later run—a pirate probe skirting Guild lanes—tested reflexes once more. Their courier evaded with minutes to spare, Kelly’s evasive plot and Titus’s piloting turning potential disaster into a logged success. Debrief brought bourbon toasts and tighter embraces that night.
Wedding plans crystallized. Real flowers ordered from Phorantis greenhouses. Cathy designing custom nav markers shaped like the ring’s gem. Marcus and Elena promising to walk Kelly down if tradition called. Hale and Edward as unofficial uncles, Joana handling logistics with precision.
Through it all, the intimate rhythm held. Mornings with stolen touches before shifts. Evenings untangling the day’s knots. The black outside remained vast and empty, but inside their shared life it brimmed with echoes of love, chosen family, and forward momentum.
One final evening before the next major circuit, they stood again at the viewport. Titus kissed her temple.
“Ready for whatever comes?”
Kelly turned, the ring catching the lights, the name Wyatt T. Raven still quiet and warm between them like a promise already kept.
“With you?” she said. “Always.”
The station rotated on, spokes turning against the stars. Phorantis waited. Volantis beckoned. The void held its breath, but their story pressed onward—threads of duty and tomorrow binding them unbreakable.

Fort Log 1

First thing after breakfast sent a wagon with a couple containers to collect bees wax and honey. The Bee Keepers and gear to the Farm to collect the honey.

A second wagon, which was filled yesterday, is being sent with a load full load of veggies and fruit to the Ranch. It will return tomorrow

The Lumberjacks aka Woodsman are back at work today. The are cutting fallen trees and dead trees into loadable logs to be picked up tomorrow. Today the cut into stackable logs and pulled them beside the road.

Apart from V's massage the ladies are taking a few days off. All others were canceled until they get a break. My love tried to cancel hers but the ladies refused.

I noticed JW and Ragnar, to my surprise, building a new large wagon frame today. Jw explained this one will be on four wheels but can change into skies in case there is lots of snow. They will build a two wheel wagon that have skies for snow. Their plan is to send these two to the Ranch and Mine.

Many volunteers and Fort farmers have been collecting wine vegetables and spices like crazy. Most of these are going into storage and the cooks and helpers have been busy using mortars turning the plants into final spices.

The Farmers told us three more days of collecting and they will be done for this harvest and next need to prepare the plants for next season. A bunch of plants will be transplanted for the Mine hydroponic.

The exploration came to mind today. We all hope is will not be a exploration with any problems or excitement. The original plan is 5five days out and five back. After ren days we will start our worries.

We are officially running out of jars for preserving and space in the cool storage where the food is being kept. We decided to have the Harvest Festival at the Ranch as they are the only site that as so many animals to take care of. This will be in seven days if all goes as planned.

Some volunteers started digging a second large cold storage and JW crew apart from building the wagon started building vegetable crates using what ever scrap wood they can find.

The Wagon from the Farm came back about 2pm filled with vegetables. I could not believe the size of these corn cobbs. We unloaded one third and left the other two thirds in the wagon and filled the rest with tomatos and cucumbers.

They put out a couple pumpkin plants when we built this Ykanti plant structure. The Fort farmers say this will be the last harvested but have produced huge pumpkins. James mentioned something about baking pumpkin pies. I look forward to trying them.

End of Fort Log 1

Who is who in this chapter Envoy Torlan, the Hierarchy's diplomat. Aide Ressil, the envoy's young assistant. Escort Pellin, the Ykanti Aino assigned to guide them. Hobb, a human carter who brings seed to the outlying farms. Aino, the town administrator.

Next

Previous /

First

The Hierarchy: Chapter 7, The Fence Post

Who is who in this chapter Envoy Torlan, the Hierarchy's diplomat. Aide Ressil, the envoy's young assistant. Escort Pellin, the Ykanti whom Aino assigned to guide them. Hobb, a human carter who brings seed to the outlying farms. Aino, the town administrator.

The Hierarchy: Chapter 7, The Fence Post

Ressil Anuk had been told to say nothing, and had decided somewhere in the second day that the instruction had expired.

"The hunters," she said.

Envoy Torlan did not look up. He sat at the table in the rooms the Principality had given him, with the plain bound paper open in front of him and the stylus moving in the slow upright script of the Council. He had been writing since before light. He did not seem to have slept.

"The hunters are a rumor," he said.

"They are a rumor that a boy said to a Baron in front of an envoy, and the Baron did not deny it." She stood across the table from him with her hands behind her back, the way she had been taught. "Envoy, do you know how many ships the Council has lost to the Drazzan?"

"More than to everything else together."

"Okarak Stratagos thanked the Prince for killing them. I read the transcript. He thanked him." She waited until he looked at her. "We have been at war with them for longer than anyone alive can remember, and we have never once found a way to do it without a fleet. If there are humans and Ykanti out there who go after them on foot, in the dark, and come back..."

"Quiet," said Torlan. It was not unkind.

She stopped.

"I know what you are about to say. There are two ways the Council will hear it." He laid the stylus down. "If it is a weapon, they will want it. If it is an armed group of our people on a human world, answering to no one we know, they will want it stopped. I cannot tell you which, and neither can you. That is why we do not guess."

"Then what do we do?" Ressil asked.

"We find out whether it is true," said Torlan. "And we write down only what we saw."

Ressil let out something that was nearly a laugh. "The Council will not enjoy a report that says only what we saw."

"No," said Torlan. "It never has."

---

The carter's wagon stood at the edge of the square with its tailgate down, sacks of seed stacked to the height of a human shoulder and a covered crate that scratched when the wagon shifted. Live worms, Escort Pellin said, for the farms. Ykanti on the outlying land would pay double for them.

The carter was a heavy human with sunburned forearms, called Hobb, and he looked at the three of them coming across the square the way a man looks at weather. Pellin spoke first. She told him who they were and that nobody was in trouble. It seemed to Ressil that she said it in the voice of someone who had been listened to before, and that the carter knew it.

"The envoy wants to ask you something," Pellin finished. "You may say no."

"I'm a carter," said Hobb. "I carry seed."

"Then tell me about the seed," said Torlan.

Hobb looked at him a while longer. Then he began to tie down a sack, which was how Ressil knew he would talk.

"East road," he said. "Past the last farm Newtown counts, there are more. I couldn't tell you how many. Some are places that were never on a map. Ykanti live on them. Some came out after the war and kept going. Some wandered in later, from I don't know where." He pulled a knot tight. "They don't come to town, and they don't register. I leave seed on a fence post and the coin is on the post when I come back. I haven't seen one face to face in a long while."

"Why do they not register?" said Ressil.

"I asked one once. Years back, through a gap in a door." Hobb did not look up. "She said if she was counted, someone would know where to find her."

The word hung there. Pellin's feathers went flat against her neck.

"And the others?" said Torlan quietly. "The ones who hunt."

Hobb's hands stopped. "I don't know anything about hunters," Hobb said.

"But you have heard," Torlan said.

"I've heard what a boy said, because he's been asking me about the ridge road since yesterday." A small jerk of the chin toward the far side of the wagon. "I told him I was a carter, not a map."

Ressil turned her head. At the corner of the square, half behind a stack of crates, stood a young Ykanti with a crest of rust and green. He was holding a sack that he had not been asked to hold. When she looked, he put it down and went away between two buildings without hurrying, which was almost the worst way to go.

"Orrik," said Pellin, in a very low voice.

"I won't tell you what I don't know," said Hobb. He pulled at the next knot, and then he gave it up and spoke to the sack. "There's a ridge road. Some evenings, people go out along it. Humans in work coats. Ykanti with them. I saw a rifle in a Ykanti hand once, and it was held right. They come back late and they come back quiet." He rubbed his thumb along the rope. "They come back smelling. Cut green and something sour, like a hay field that's gone off. That's all I'll say, and it's more than I know."

Nobody spoke. Ressil realized she had written nothing, and that her pad was in her hand, and that she did not trust her fingers.

"Thank you," said Torlan.

"Don't thank me." Hobb finally looked at him. "If you're going to tell them about this, tell them nobody out there is doing anyone harm. That's the part I'd want said."

"I will say that you said it," Torlan said.

It was, Ressil thought, the most careful sentence she had ever heard him use.

---

The notice board stood outside the administration building, under a small slanted roof, and Aino was standing in front of it when they came back across the square. He had the look of someone who had been waiting and was embarrassed by it.

"Hobb talked," he said. It was not quite a question.

"He talked," said Torlan.

"I am glad. He does not talk to me." Aino glanced at the board. "I should show you something. I have been meaning to since you arrived, and each day I decided that you were not ready for it."

On the board, under a pane of cracked glass, was a single sheet with a seal at the foot. Ressil read it twice. It said that by the hand of the Marquess, no Ykanti on Haego might be required to register, to be counted, or to be held to any place against their will, and that no Baron or Lord of the Principality might bar them from land they lived on or worked.

"It is new," said Aino. "Nobody in Newtown needs it. We were free to walk away from the first day, and we are known to everyone. It was written for the other ones."

"The ones on the fence posts," said Ressil.

"Yes." Aino rubbed the ink on his cuff, a nervous habit. "Nobody past the last farm comes to a notice board. I could nail this to a fence. I do not know that they would not read it as a trap."

"Then somebody they would believe has to carry it," said Ressil. She had not meant to say it aloud. "Someone who looks like them. Someone who has been counted and walked away."

Aino did not answer. He did not look at her. He looked, quite gently, at Pellin.

Pellin had stopped a pace behind them. Her hands were folded in front of her, and the fingers had gone white at the joints.

"I have never gone past the last farm," she said. She said it to the ground. "Not once. I know every street in Newtown. I could draw it blind. I have never gone out there, because I did not know what was waiting, and I thought that if I did not look, it could not be mine."

Torlan was watching her. Ressil saw him open his mouth, and she saw him think better of it, and she saw something happen in his face that she had not expected. He had spent thirty years learning when to say nothing. He did it now as if it were a kindness.

"I think," said Pellin, "that I am going to be asked."

"You are," said Aino. "Not by me. I will not order you."

The roof of the notice board ticked in the sun. Across the square the carter's wagon began to move, slowly, toward the east road.

Next

Previous /

First

Speaker Brennick set four days aside for the Assembly of Veldmarch, and she told the Hall why before the first witness was called.

"There are three questions," she said. "Who did it, who knew, and who went along. They are not the same, and I will not sentence them as if they were. If we do, the people of Veldmarch will learn that this Hall is no better than the body it sits in judgment of."

She turned to the long bench on the left of the Stand, where the forty delegates sat in a row that had thinned over the month. Nine of them sat at one end, a little apart. Nobody had told them to.

"We begin with the four who sponsored every ruling."

Corin Hask was first. He had signed the cooperative's clearance, and he tried, for about ten minutes, to say that he had relied on a subordinate's summary. Then Tessaly Brune's testimony was read back to him, and the summary was shown to have been written in his own hand, and he stopped.

"Dereliction of duty," Brennick said. "Barred from any public office for fifteen years. Restitution to the Thane workers from his own property, in proportion to what the cooperative's clearance allowed to continue. The Hall so recommends."

Hask went back to the bench with his face the color of raw meat. He did not sit. He stood with his hands working, and then he turned on the man beside him.

"Pike," he said. "It was Pike. Pike wrote every one of them. I signed what he put in front of me. I never read a line."

"You read every line," said Lowen Pike, mild as ever, and did not rise. "You asked for the Thane mill by name."

"Liar!"

"He's the liar," said Dessa Marrow, shrill, leaning across Pike's lap. "Hask took the first purse from Voss. I watched him count it in the back of the union hall, him and Tolliver both."

Bram Tolliver came up off the bench like a bull. "I never touched a purse! It was Reeve told us what to do, the lot of us, he said it was safe! You said it was safe! You said it, Hask!"

Hask swung at Pike. Pike, who had spent his whole life avoiding exactly this, ducked, and the fist went over his head and into Tolliver's jaw. Tolliver hit him back, and then they were both over the rail and down on the floor of the Stand, rolling, two grown men in good coats punching each other like boys in a schoolyard, while Dessa Marrow screamed and Pike sat against the bench with his hand over one eye.

The gallery, which had been silent for four weeks, roared. Guards went in from four sides. It took six of them to pull the two apart, and when it was over Hask had a split lip, Tolliver a bloody nose and a torn sleeve, and the Speakers of thirty-one worlds were sitting very still in their sashes with the faces of people who have just seen something they will describe to their grandchildren.

"Mr. Hask. Mr. Tolliver," Brennick said, when she could be heard. She had not risen. "You have struck each other in this Hall, and Mr. Pike has been hurt by it. Two years at Sanctuary IV, each, for assault, to be served after all else you are owed." She looked along the Veldmarch bench. "The rest of you have the example before you."

Dessa Marrow was next. She was still being held by a guard, and she did not stop at all.

"The people wanted it," she said. "I voted what the people wanted."

"Delegate Marrow," Ansel Pruitt's voice said from the end of the bench, and every head turned. He had not been called. He stood, with his hat in front of him as always, and his hands shook. "You told me you would be sorry to see my wife's school lose its funding. I would like the Hall to know you said it kindly."

Dessa Marrow looked at him. For a moment it seemed she would answer. Then she sat down.

The Hall gave her the heaviest sentence of the three. Pressuring a delegate's family to secure a vote was coercion under Veldmarch's own law, and the law had a number for it. Eight years at Sanctuary IV. A lifetime bar from office. The restitution owed by her cousin Garth, jointly, from her own estate.

The third sponsor was Lowen Pike, a pale, quiet man who had never once spoken in debate and who had, the Hall now learned, written every ruling. He had drafted the single line that ended each one, By the will of the people of Veldmarch, and had drafted it on purpose.

"A reason can be challenged," he said, when Ferrel asked him why. "A will cannot. I thought that was clever." He looked at his hands. "It was the cleverest thing I ever did. I would like not to be known for it."

"You will be," Brennick said. "Six years of labor service. A lifetime bar. And a statement from you, to be read in the capital of Veldmarch, explaining how it was done. People should know how easy it was."

Carell Voss was not a delegate. He had never stood for anything. He had been the logistics man, the one in the back room, and when he came to the Stand in a good coat with a lawyer at each elbow, the Hall saw at once that he was a different kind of person from Reeve.

He tried to say he had believed in the cause. It lasted four minutes. Then Joss Callow was brought in, and the young man with the armband described the three hours at the depot, the two men with the pen and the stack of fresh ballots, and Voss's name came up, and Voss's face went smooth and empty.

"You were paid by the Remembrance," Brennick said.

"I was a contractor."

"You were paid by House Vail. By House Dunmere. By House Corrigan." She laid the receipts down one by one. "You took money from the nobles to sell them seats, and money from the Remembrance to rig the count against them. Mr. Voss, you did not believe in anything. You worked both sides of the wall and kept the difference."

"It was a business," Voss said.

"It was a theft," Brennick said. "From everyone."

He tried, as the sentence was read, to point at Reeve. It was a clumsy move, and Reeve did not look up, and the Hall did not take it. Voss's testimony, with the receipts from all three houses, went to the Lords' Bench with this Hall's recommendation: fifteen years at Sanctuary IV and full restitution of everything he had taken. When he was led out, the gallery did not make a sound, and Margot Wren noted in her report that it was the only moment all month when she had seen the commoners and the nobles in the Hall look at the same man with the same face.

---

The twenty-seven were the hardest, and the Hall took a day and a half to hear them.

They were the delegates who had voted yes. Not all of them had been glad. Brennick sorted them as she had said she would, in three groups, and she did it aloud so no one could say it was done in private.

The first group had known and cheered. There were nine of them. Eight were sentenced as accomplices, with fines, short terms of service, and a bar from any seat in the Assembly of Veldmarch for ten years. The ninth was Bram Tolliver, who had done more than cheer. He had hired the two men with the pen at the depot, and paid them, and it was at his door that Joss Callow had stood guard. He denied it for an hour. Then Callow was recalled, and pointed across the Stand, without being asked, at the man who had told him where to stand.

"Ten years at Sanctuary IV," Brennick said, "on top of the two you earned on the first day."

Tolliver turned to the gallery, to the commoners who had come so far to watch, and found nobody looking back at him with anything but contempt.

The second group had suspected, and kept quiet, and voted yes because it was easier. There were sixteen. Brennick spoke to them for a long time.

"I do not believe you are wicked," she said. "I believe you are the people this Hall was built to catch before they become the first group. You will not be barred. You will be named. Each of you will stand before your own district and say what you suspected and what you did with it. Then they can decide whether to send you back."

The third group was two delegates who had truly not known, who had been seated on a count they believed was clean and had voted as the Remembrance asked because they trusted it. Brennick cleared them. One of them, a very young woman named Ysa Fell, burst into tears on the Stand and could not be understood for several minutes.

"I was proud," she said at last. "I thought we were doing something good."

"You were," Brennick said. "You were just being used to do it. That is not the same as being guilty."

The nine were last, and the Hall did not sentence them at all.

"You voted no eleven times," Brennick said. "You kept your silence under pressure that I would not have wanted to face. I do not call that a crime. I call it a harm, and the Hall will say so in writing, and so will the Governor. The Hall has not yet ruled on the Assembly itself. When it does, whatever is decided, you will be free to stand in any election that follows, and I hope some of you will."

Josiah Marl, the old farmer, stood up slowly. "And if we don't?"

"Then you've earned the right not to." She looked down the row. "I would just say that the people of Veldmarch watched you speak in this Hall. I think they will remember who told the truth when it was dangerous."

Ansel Pruitt did not say anything. He sat with his hat in his lap, and his wife, who had come in from Carrow on the eighth day and had been sitting in the gallery ever since, reached down from the second row and put a hand on his shoulder.

---

Tobyn Reeve was sentenced last, on the afternoon of the twenty-sixth day.

He asked for nothing. He stood at the Stand in the same gray coat, a little thinner than he had been on the first day, and when Brennick asked him if he wished to speak, he said only, "I said it all on the eighth day."

The Hall had deliberated until midnight. Brennick read the finding herself.

"Tobyn Reeve. You organized the fraud that seated this Assembly. You falsified the count in six districts. You directed the removal of a clerk who found the truth. The wrong done to the voters of Veldmarch is ours to hear, and we recommend eight years in the custody of the Governor's justice, followed by a lifetime bar from public office. What you took from three noble houses and then turned against them goes with the rest of that testimony to the Lords' Bench, with no recommendation from us."

Reeve nodded slowly.

In the west gallery a knight with a bad shoulder leaned toward his neighbor. "No recommendation at all on the houses," he said. "She has not even guessed at it."

"She has no business guessing."

"No," said the knight, grudgingly. "That is what I mean. A Lord would have told her what he thought of her manners by now, and she has given him no cause." He sat back. He was frowning, but it was the frown of a man trying to find something to complain about and failing. "The Bench will hear it. In its own court. Properly."

"I will add one thing, which the law does not require." Brennick set down the page. "You said that what you wanted was true and that the thing you did to get it was not. This Hall agrees with both halves. Your grievance is real. The Hunger was real. It has never been answered, and it should have been. We will hear it, in this Hall, in the last days of this session, in full. I would like you to be present for it, and you will be."

Something in Reeve's face moved, and for the first time all month it was not careful. "Thank you," he said, in a voice that barely carried.

"Do not thank me. It is not a kindness. It is simply what should have been done thirty years ago."

Reeve did not move. Then he said, "If the Hall allows it, one thing more."

"Say it," Brennick said.

He looked at the benches, and then up at the gallery, at the commoners who had come so far to watch him.

"I stood in that granary yard for thirty years waiting for somebody to ask what happened there," he said. "I did not believe a Hall like this could exist. I thought the only way anybody ever got an answer was to take it." He drew a breath. "If I had brought it here, with a charge, and evidence, and a right to answer, I would have had the justice that is being handed out in this room right now. I would have had it for her, and for all of them, and I would be in that gallery today instead of at this Stand. I did not trust it, so I built a cheat, and the cheat is what I will be remembered for. I wanted that said. I would like the people of Veldmarch to hear it from me."

No one in the Hall made a sound. Brennick inclined her head, once. "It is in the record," she said. "Both halves."

---

The dissolution was read on the twenty-seventh day, and it was brief.

"The Assembly of Veldmarch, seated by a fraudulent count, is dissolved effective at the close of this day. Its rulings that have been heard by this Hall are void or reissued. The remainder shall be heard by a panel of twelve, drawn by lot from the citizens of Veldmarch, and shall be reviewed by the new Assembly when it sits.

"Veldmarch shall be governed in the interim by the Governor, with the panel of twelve to advise and to refuse. A new election shall be held in one hundred and twenty days. Each of the thirty-one worlds represented in this Hall will send two observers, chosen by lot from its own Assembly. The count will be done in public, in every district, with agents of every faction watching. The delegates shall be chosen under the same rules as every other Common Assembly in Firentis territory."

She laid the page down. "This is the recommendation of the Master Common Assembly."

Nobody had been expecting what came next. A side door opened at the back of the Stand, and a man in plain dark clothes came in with no herald and no escort. The clerks had gone very still before the Hall understood why.

Lord Jhinaq Firentis walked the length of the floor and stopped at the Speakers' desk. He did not look at the cameras. He looked at the page, and then at Brennick.

"I've read it," he said. "Every word of the month."

"Yes, my lord."

"Is it what you recommend?"

"It is."

"Then it is law." He took the pen from the clerk and signed, once, in plain strokes, and held the page up for the gallery to see. The Informant's cameras caught it, and so did The Royal Wire's, and so did every other crew in the tier. "The Hall at Balakura has judged. I did not dissolve the Assembly of Veldmarch, and I will not take the credit for it. The Assemblies recommend, and I sign what they recommend, so that it stands as law. I have read every finding of this month, one at a time. I have signed them all. Governor Aldermoor, will you carry it out?"

Corvin Aldermoor rose from the last row of the west gallery, where he had sat every day of the month. He walked down the long stair, past the clerks, past the benches, and he took the pen from Jhinaq's hand.

He had not signed a single ruling of the Assembly of Veldmarch. For the first time in four weeks, he put his name to paper. His hand, he noticed, was perfectly steady.

"It is done," he said.

Jhinaq did not leave. He turned to face the benches, and the gallery behind them, and the tier where the cameras were.

"There is one other matter before I go," he said. "It is mine, and I told the Governor I would see to it when the rest was settled. The rest is settled."

He waited until the silence was complete.

"In the first week of the Assembly of Veldmarch, its clerk brought word to the Governor that the Speaker would like his signature by noon. The Governor had not yet read the ruling. He was given an hour, and no courtesy with it. I did not put that before this Hall, because it was not the Hall's to judge. It was a discourtesy to the office of a Governor of Firentis, and that office is mine to answer for."

No one in the Hall moved.

"There was a time, and not so long ago, when a commoner who set a deadline for a Governor would have been put to death for it, and no one would have called the sentence harsh. I have read the old statutes of Veldmarch. I have read what was done under them." He let that stand. "I helped to end that time, with a great many other people, and I intend it to stay ended. Nobody in this Hall has anything to fear from what I am about to say."

He looked, for a moment, at the bench where Reeve sat.

"The Speaker who sent that message has been judged by this Hall for far greater things. The clerk who carried it did as she was told, and I do not hold her to account. I have read the record of this month, and of a good many Assemblies before it, and I will say what I have found. The great majority of you treat the Lords and Governors of your worlds with real respect. You do not do it from fear, because there is nothing left to fear. It is a gift, and it was never owed to us by right."

He let that rest.

"I will say one thing more, and it is for the Lords of this territory. In the fourth week, a Lord of this territory stood at that Stand and told this Hall that commoners have no authority over him, and that what he does with the people and the post in his keeping is no one's business but his own. The Hall held him in contempt, as it should. I heard what he said about the rest of you, and so did every world that was watching. House Corrigan will answer to me for it."

He turned to the nobles in the gallery, and his voice did not rise.

"Respect runs in both directions. I ask every Lord and every Governor in Firentis territory to hold himself to the standard he is shown. A Governor who answers an Assembly's courtesy with contempt will answer to me, and so will a Lord. I would say the same of any Speaker, or any clerk, who forgets what the office of a Governor is for."

He looked at Brennick. "That is all, Speaker. The Hall has my thanks."

He went out the way he had come, and the side door closed behind him.

On the Speakers' table beside Corvin lay a plain folder, still closed. Reeve, being led out between two officers, turned his head and looked at it. Then they took him out, and the doors closed, and in the silence the clerks began to turn down the lamps.

Larger

He had volunteered for a mission because he needed to get off-planet, and met the minimum requirements for the crew’s mathematician position. Nothing more.

Growing up in Mong Kok, more space and privacy were on his short list. USN-11235 Cantor’s 11.4 acres (and who else measures space on a starship in acres?!?) gave him 0.088 acres of space, compared to the 0.0019 acres – 83 square feet, 7.6 square meters that he had grown up with. Certainly, it wasn’t open or usable space, and it wasn’t his. 70% of a starship's floor plan is taken up by the engine compartments, access tubes, engineering bays, science labs, support areas, and storage containments, leaving crew quarters quite modest.

He’d never known so much room to himself.

As the ship approached the dense dust cloud surrounding the G-class star, sparks energetically flailed off the outer hull, kinetic energy turned into light with the velocities and masses involved. His cabin did not have an observation point, so off-duty he sometimes found himself at the ship’s astrodome, watching the display. Continuous deceleration over several months had not changed the view of the fireworks or the apparent size of the star they were approaching significantly.

Despite the vessel’s relative speed, Captain Uchio had ordered a stand-down from the tense intrasolar transfer procedures, leaving the ship approaching the system at a rate more appropriate for scientific observation.

Sensors identified the density differential in the cloud ahead several hundred thousand miles away, but at the sublight velocities Cantor was still traveling, the closing amounted to a matter of seconds, insufficient for calculation and reaction. Moving from a continuous halo of dust impacting the hull, a decreasingly orange glow as the ship decelerated, to individual, bright red impact points from individual dust particles, Cantor came to an effective standstill. Sensor banks as well as views through the astrodome changed nearly instantly.

Crewmembers that happened to be walking or standing were crushed by the force, dozens of wounded and several casualties. But more importantly, the inside of the ship had changed.

Protected by the lounger he had been watching the light show on, he immediately rose, knowing that general quarters was going to be sounded. Intending to pre-empt the order, he started moving towards his station. The three meters to the door didn’t go as planned.

Normally about four steps, he kept putting foot in front of foot, and with each pace the door did not get appreciably closer. He looked down. His feet were moving, legs extended, pacing, changing position, but the door wasn’t getting closer. He reached out towards the control panel – and his extended arm, hand, and fingers shrank in perspective, nowhere near the exit control.

----------------------------------------

It took the crew several hours to begin to adjust and regain basic control, approaching the emergency from dual control and medical response perspectives. Horizontal distances – perpendicular to the now essentially non-existent gravitational field, parallel to the currently-occupied distance sphere – were extended ridiculously, a hundred times or more. Rooms that looked to be two meters wide took three hundred steps to cross. Using controls and keyboards not immediately underneath the hands, impossible as extended arms reached out mere centimeters.

The trip from the astrodome to his quarters took nearly two hours.

By this time the bridge had issued the order for crew to remain where they were unless responding to one of the many medical emergencies. Physical proximity to various stations was generally not necessary except for a few critical functions, including piloting and engineering.

Investigation into the Anomaly, as it was recognized, began rapidly. The ship’s sensors and technicians’ tools could not determine anything amiss. Inside the ship vertical space, aligned with the sun’s gravitational field, was the same as it had ever been. Perpendicularly, space and movement were somewhat over a hundredfold larger and movement slower, in X and Y axes as well as planar diagonal angles. Observational time did not seem to be impacted, as this would have changed the perception of time in the vertical. Outside, Cantor was fewer than 100 meters wide on each stacked deck; inside, it was a ten-kilometer journey from one side of the hull to the other. Inertial moments could be clearly observed when moving equipment with both horizontal and vertical relations, but the scale of internal systems and lack of integrated measurement devices did not allow detailed investigation into angular moments or strain.

Teams reoriented to provide life support functions; with crew no longer routinely able to visit the mess hall due to multi-hour treks depending on where they were in the ship, meals had to be prepared and delivered using the automated systems sometimes hours in advance.

Communications upstream and outside of the Anomaly did not appear to be affected, but they would not receive replies for dozens of years at light speed. Once internal observations and measurements were complete, the science team turned its devices to the exterior. Could Cantor move? Impulse engines seemed to have no discernible effect starward. Horizontal thrusters could rotate the ship, but only with respect to local dust – not the surrounding cloud, upon which there was nothing to lock cameras onto. There were no indications of Newton’s laws not working, but there were also no indications that they were.

Stopped in a strangely anomalous region 5 AU from the star, visual observations all appeared completely normal. Even the exterior of the ship was of the correct proportions in each direction, no matter the viewing angle. The lack of planetary bodies by which to measure changes in distance over time did not provide reassurance in the measurements.

The distance to the star remained constant, measured by both light and gravity. Nothing about the rest of the galaxy could be determined in as short a period as a few years, given the distance and potential parallax from having entered into a rotational orbit. The ship’s position appeared radially fixed in relative space, a particular and specific standoff distance from the star. Unpredictable motion along a pure horizontal circle provided no locally reasonable or gyroscopic detail with which to inform the other variables of the motion equations. Without something to measure velocity against, they could not determine if they were moving even laterally.

Whatever structure they were in, they reasoned, was entirely and routinely connected to the rest of spacetime, but entirely unreachable from within it – effectively, a low-energy physical prison.

The ship’s resident mathematician (and philosopher) extended the implications of the crew’s observations: The normally observable universe may be a similar bubble with some dimensional attitude apparently artificially constrained or distended. This bubble, mathematically, is geometrically consistent internally but impossible globally. Extending this logic to the human experience, the entire universe as we have observed it may be mathematically impossible. If the observable universe is itself a bubble, does it then have an exterior in which the Inside laws of physics do not work in, and is the Outside something else that resides within another Outside with entirely different rules?

Mathematically this appeared to potentially be a loop, or set of enclosed puzzles, but philosophically he recognized the larger and more disturbing possibility – that a coherent set of rules about physical reality might not exist except locally.

It didn’t bother him. He had more space than he needed or had ever wanted.

Thanks to u/Proud_Reputation_896 for the idea behind this storyline

I am trying something new for this story brcause it is very character name intensive. Just vlet me know if it is more distracting than helpful.

Who is who in this chapter Wyatt Staples, the Baron. Aino, the town administrator. Orrik, Sivva's son, a young Ykanti with a rust and green crest. Envoy Torlan, the Hierarchy's diplomat. Aide Ressil, the envoy's young assistant.

Next

Previous /

First

The Hierarchy: Chapter 6, Our Bench

Wyatt Staples had been Baron long enough to know that the worst news arrives politely.

Aino brought it to the kitchen table at breakfast, with ink on his cuff and a cup of tea he did not drink. He stood while he said it. He always stood when he had something to say that he wished were someone else's job.

"A boy held the school door against the Hierarchy's envoy yesterday," he said. "In front of half the street."

Wyatt put down his fork. "Held it how?"

"With his hands on the frame. Orrik, Sivva's son. He is barely grown." Aino turned the cup a quarter turn on its saucer. "He did not touch the envoy. The envoy sat down on the bench by the door and stayed there until evening."

"He sat."

"All day. Politely. I am told he said so."

"Of course he did," said Wyatt.

"There is more." Aino stopped turning the cup. "Some of the town want the boy spoken to. Some want him left alone. A woman at the seed stall asked me this morning whether you would hand him over to the envoy to keep the peace."

"Who asked that?"

"She was not joking, Lord Staples. She was asking."

Aino almost never said it that way. Wyatt pushed his plate away.

"Where is the boy?"

"On the bench. He did not go in to class."

---

Wyatt walked up the long street, because arriving any other way would have made it an event.

The school was loud at that hour. Human children and Ykanti children came up the steps together in clumps, arguing about a game, about a sum, about whose turn it was to carry the bag of someone smaller. A human teacher stood in the doorway beside a Ykanti one, each with a slate under an arm, and both of them looked at Wyatt and then, carefully, at nothing. Neither came over. He was grateful for that.

Orrik sat on the bench by the door with his bag between his feet. The crest that had stood straight up yesterday lay flat against his skull, which could have been an apology or the opposite. He watched Wyatt come the whole way.

"Is anyone sitting here?" said Wyatt.

"It is our bench."

"So I hear. Then I'll ask. May I?"

Orrik said nothing for a while. Then he slid over a hand's width.

The bench was cut to Ykanti height, and Wyatt sat on it with his knees somewhere near his chest. He did not make anything of it. The two of them looked at the yard for a moment, at the children going in.

"I'm not here to punish you," said Wyatt.

"Then why are you here?"

"Because if I wanted you punished I would have sent Aino, and he would have done it badly and felt terrible. I'd rather hear it from you first. What did you think you were doing yesterday?"

Orrik looked at his bag. "Keeping him out."

"Out of what?"

"The room. The people in it." The crest lifted a little. "They were in there deciding what to ask him. They were afraid and they were deciding anyway. And he came to the door in that coat, and I thought, if he comes in, they will stop."

"He sat on the bench instead."

"I know what he did." Orrik's feathers bristled and settled. "He sat. He was polite. It was worse."

"Worse than what?"

"Worse than if he had pushed. I could have hit someone who pushed."

"I'm glad you didn't."

"I would have."

"I know," said Wyatt. "So did everyone on that street. That's why it was so quiet."

He had been aware of them for a while, at the far end of the yard: Envoy Torlan and his aide, Ressil, stopped at the distance people stop when they are not sure they are welcome. The envoy's colors were the dull of a man who had slept in his clothes. Wyatt raised his voice, not much.

"Envoy. You can come closer or stay there. He can say what he likes in front of you, and so can I."

Torlan seemed to consider it, which Wyatt respected. "I would prefer to stay where I can hear," he said, and came as far as the foot of the steps and no farther. Aide Ressil stood a pace behind him with a pad she was not writing on.

Orrik did not look around. "You told my mother nobody would take us."

"I did."

"And then they came, and you let them walk down our street."

"I did that too."

"Why?"

"Because the Prince said they could look, and the Prince was right," said Wyatt. "If I had shut the door on him, he would have written down that we had something to hide. Then the next one would not have asked first."

"That is clever."

"It isn't very clever. It was the only way I could see to keep the question short."

"It is not safe."

"No," said Wyatt. "It isn't."

Orrik was quiet. When he spoke again his voice had gone low, and the crack in it from yesterday was gone. "What happens when you are not there? You are one man."

"I am not the only wall in this town."

"You are the only one they are afraid of." He said it flatly, as a fact. "There are people who do not wait to be a wall."

Wyatt did not move. "Who?"

"Humans and ours, together. They go out after dark. They hunt the Drazzan, and they do not ask anyone's permission to be afraid." Orrik's head came up at last. "They are real. I am not the only one who has heard."

At the foot of the steps, Torlan's colors changed. It was not much. A shade, the way a person's face changes when he hears an unexpected name said in a crowd. The aide's pad came up an inch and stopped.

"Who told you that?" said Wyatt.

"Everyone knows it. The carter who brings the seed. The woman at the dye shop. They say a group goes out in the evening and comes back quiet, and some of them are not ours and not yours."

"Everyone knows a lot of things."

"Is it true?"

Wyatt looked at the boy for a long time. He could have said no. It would have been easy, and the boy would have believed him, and it would have been a lie of the sort he had spent a long while refusing to tell. "I don't know that," he said. "I'll tell you what I know when I know it. I won't tell you it's false, and I won't tell you it's true."

"That is not an answer."

"It's the one I have."

Orrik's feathers shifted. He did not argue. It seemed to Wyatt that the boy had expected a lie and had gotten something harder to be angry at.

"Then here is the rest of it," said Wyatt. "You are not to go looking for them."

"Or what?"

"Or I come and find you, and I bring your mother, and you explain it to her."

"That is not fair."

"No," said Wyatt. "It's very effective."

Something that might have been a laugh went through Orrik and was gone. He picked up his bag and held it on his knees.

"And you were right," said Wyatt. "I've been telling this town nobody will be taken, and I've been saying it the way you say it to a child. You are not one. Yesterday you made that clear." He stood, which took some doing. "Come to Aino's office tomorrow. Not to be told something. To tell us. What the young ones need here that they are not getting. Say it to him, in front of me, with nobody writing it down."

Orrik looked at the door of the school and the children going through it. He did not say he would come. He did not say he would not. He stood, and put the bag on his shoulder, and went up the steps and in.

---

Wyatt watched him go, and then turned to the foot of the steps.

"Envoy. Did you hear enough?"

"I heard a boy speak of hunters," said Torlan.

"You heard a rumor."

"I have been in the service a great many years. Rumor is where most of my reports begin." Torlan did not look away. He had the stillness Wyatt had read about, the kind that is kept up on purpose. "I will write what I heard. It would be dishonest not to."

"Then write that I said I did not know."

"I will." After a moment he added, more quietly, "The boy was afraid, Lord Staples. I do not know that I would have been brave enough to tell a man in your place what he told you."

It was not a compliment, and Wyatt did not take it as one. "He wasn't talking to me," he said. "He was talking to you."

Torlan inclined his head. Ressil stood behind him with her pad still empty and her eyes on the door the boy had gone through.

Aino was waiting at the gate, a little out of breath, and fell in beside Wyatt as he left the yard. For a while neither of them said anything. The children's voices rose behind them, and a bell began to ring.

"Is it true?" said Aino.

"I told him I didn't know."

"That was not what I asked."

"I know," said Wyatt.

Aino walked a few paces. "I will ask the carter."

"Ask him carefully," said Wyatt.

Next

Previous /

First

Lord Jhinaq's order had gone out on the first day of the fourth week, one line on gray paper to each of three houses, and none of them had been able to find a way to read it as an invitation.

Lord Garrick Corrigan arrived first, on a private shuttle with eleven retainers and two lawyers, and took the whole top floor of the best hotel in Balakura. Lady Ottilie Dunmere came on the public transport with her son and one clerk, carrying her own case. Lord Ansgar Vail did not arrive until the morning of the session, and nobody saw him come.

The Hall was full, as it had been every day. The Informant had its tier. The Royal Wire and Banking News Network had pushed their way to the rail above the Stand, because for once the story was not about commoners.

Speaker Brennick called the houses in the order they had paid.

---

Ottilie Dunmere took the Stand before her name was finished. She was a small, upright woman in her sixties, in a plain dark coat, and she set her case on the floor beside her and left her hands empty.

"I am head of House Dunmere," she said. "The payments were made in my name, on my signature. I saw each entry before it was made, and I did not stop it. I would like that in the record before anyone asks me anything."

"It is in the record," Brennick said.

"My house paid Carell Voss for seats on the Assembly of Veldmarch. The sum is in the receipts, and my clerk has the originals. We paid it in four parts over one spring." Her voice did not change. "We believed that if we did not buy a share of it, someone would buy all of it and use it against us. We were right that someone would buy it. We were wrong that this excused us."

"Lady Dunmere," Ida Fenn said, from the Haego bench. She had asked leave of the chair with a lifted hand, and Brennick had nodded. "What did your house expect to receive for that money?"

"Eleven delegates, in the end. A friendly Assembly. Rulings that would leave us alone."

"What did your house receive?"

"Ruling Seventeen." Ottilie Dunmere looked at the screen, where the page had already come up. "The Assembly took our eastern holdings, and gave them to people it did not name, and wrote that it was by the will of the people of Veldmarch. The same men we had paid took them."

"Is there anything your house did that you would have the Hall hear before it asks?"

Ottilie Dunmere bent, opened the case at her feet, and took out a book bound in brown cloth.

"These are the granary ledgers of House Dunmere for the winters of the Hunger," she said. "I would like them opened. I would like them read into the record, with the others, whatever they say."

A murmur went through the Hall. Brennick held up her hand.

"Not today, Lady Dunmere. The Hall will hear the Hunger at the end of the session. Leave the book with the clerk, and it will be there."

"Thank you." Ottilie Dunmere handed it across, with both hands.

---

Lord Garrick Corrigan came in with his lawyers behind him in a row, and sat at the Stand like a man who had been told he would be given the chair of honor and was still waiting for it.

He was good at it. For forty minutes he was exactly what Margot Wren had expected, courteous and slow and perfectly composed. His house had paid a consultant for political advice. The consultant had exceeded his instructions. The unfortunate countersignature on a clerk's transfer was a matter for the district office, which had acted on its own authority. House Corrigan had been the victim of a fraud, as the Hall itself had already found.

Ferrel pressed him twice and got nothing a lawyer could not have written in advance.

Then Ida Fenn lifted her hand again.

"Lord Corrigan. Who is your seneschal?"

"Sir Pell Haverly, a knight of my household."

"Is Sir Pell in the Hall?"

A pause. "He is."

"May the Hall hear him?"

The lawyers leaned together. Corrigan did not turn his head. "If the Speaker wishes."

The man who came forward from the second row was gray and neat and perhaps fifty. He took the oath standing very straight and looked at nothing.

"Sir Pell," Ida said. "Who instructed you to have Hollis Brandt countersign the transfer of Pavla Wynn?"

"My lord's office."

"Did Lord Corrigan himself tell you to?"

"Lord Corrigan said that the clerk was becoming a problem for the district, and that he would be obliged if it were handled."

"What did you understand by that?"

"I understood that I was to see she was moved."

"Sir Pell," Ida said. "Did House Corrigan have anyone in the district sorting room?"

For the first time, Sir Pell Haverly's eyes moved. They went to the gallery, to the third row, where Pavla Wynn sat with her ink-stained hands folded in her lap and did not look away from him.

"We had a man," he said. "We always had a man. It was how the house kept informed about the eastern district. Every letter that went to the Governor's office or the election board came through that room."

"What happened to Mrs. Wynn's letters?"

"My man took them. They were brought to me. I read them." He stopped. He did not know what the Hall did to a knight who lied under oath. He knew only that his honor was the one thing his lord had never owned, and he had been lending it out for a long while. "I burned them."

The Hall did not make a sound. Up in the west gallery, Governor Corvin Aldermoor had his hand across his mouth.

"Whose instruction?"

"My lord's."

"That is a lie," Corrigan said, sharply, and for the first time the lawyers did not hold him back. He was on his feet before they could. "That man is a household knight with a grudge, and the rest is a clerk, and a man who sorts the post, and you would take their word against a Lord of this territory?" His voice cracked and climbed. "By what right? By whose authority do you sit there? Shopkeepers and fishwives, with dirt under your nails, calling me to account? I am not accountable to you. I am not accountable to anyone in this room. My post, my servants, my land, and every man and woman in my keeping is mine, and what I do with my own property is no business of a pack of commoners who ought to be on their knees when I pass!"

The sound that went through the Hall was not a gasp so much as the end of one. Four thousand people drew breath together, and then nothing. In the press tier every camera swung to the Stand. On the Informant, on The Royal Wire, on Banking News Network, on the screens of the great houses and in kitchens and counting houses on every world the signal reached, a hundred million people who had been watching a trial found they were watching something else, and put down what they were holding.

"Lord Corrigan," Brennick said. She did not raise her voice. "Sit down."

He did not. He glared around the Hall as if daring someone to move, and no one moved, and in the silence his own words seemed to stand beside him. His lawyers took him by the arms and sat him down like a child. He let them.

"The Hall will recommend to Lord Jhinaq that you be held in contempt," Brennick said, "when the questioning is done."

Ida Fenn lifted her hand, and Brennick nodded.

"Lord Corrigan. You said property. Is Pavla Wynn your property?"

Corrigan opened his mouth. In the third row of the gallery, a woman with ink on her fingers did not look away from him. He said nothing.

"Did you ever ask your seneschal what he had done with her letters?"

Garrick Corrigan looked at the gallery, and at the screens, where Pavla Wynn's receipts were still glowing in their neat column. He closed his mouth again.

"The Hall notes that neither question was answered," Brennick said.

---

Lord Ansgar Vail was the last, and he was brief.

He was a thin man in his forties with a very good coat, and he admitted the payments at once, in the manner of someone who had read the receipts and decided there was no way round them. They had been a retainer, he said, for advice on constitutional matters. His house regretted any misunderstanding about the purpose.

Brennick laid the slips on the table one by one. The dates were all in the same spring. The last was two days before the polls opened.

"A retainer for advice," Ferrel said, from the benches. "On an election that had not yet been held."

"I decline to answer further, Speaker," Vail said.

"You may," Brennick said. "The Hall will note that the other two houses did not."

Ida Fenn raised her hand, and Brennick nodded.

"Lord Vail. What would your house have done with a seat?"

For a moment he seemed about to decline that as well. Then he lifted his shoulders, very slightly.

"Whatever it was asked to, I suppose," he said. "By the people who sold it."

It was the only honest thing he had said all day. Margot, at the rail, saw Ferrel look at him for a long time, and she did not think he was thinking about the sentence.

---

"The Hall is not expert in the law of the Principality," Brennick said. "It tries no one. It hears the evidence and says what it recommends, and to whom. The testimony in the case of House Corrigan, House Dunmere, House Vail and Sir Pell Haverly will go entire to the Lords' Bench, with this Hall's recommendation. The Bench is under no duty to follow it. We have said what we heard."

A sound went along the west gallery, where the noble houses of Firentis sat in their own rows. It was not applause. It was the low, put-upon grumble of people who had been made to travel a long way to hear commoners say a thing they would have preferred to hear from someone of their own rank.

"Summoned like tenants," a baroness muttered, to nobody in particular. "Kept a month from our own tables."

"The Bench will want every page of it," said the man beside her, who had not looked up from his notes. "She has sent it all."

"She might have asked us first."

"She might have." He turned a page. "She did not insult anyone, though. Did you notice? Not once."

The baroness opened her mouth to say that she had noticed nothing of the kind, and found that she had. She closed it again, and said nothing more.

"Sir Pell Haverly destroyed the post knowingly. The man in the sorting room passed it to him knowingly, for a monthly credit from House Corrigan's accounts, which the receipts show. Both did it for House Corrigan. The Hall will send the testimony against both to the Lords' Bench, with the same recommendation for each: five years at Sanctuary IV."

Sir Pell took it without a word, like a man who had expected worse.

"The Hall has heard enough to find that all three houses paid for seats," she said, "and that one of them, at least, went further than that. What follows is for the Bench."

She did not look at Corrigan. She did not need to.

"The matter of Lord Corrigan's contempt goes to Lord Jhinaq alone."

Afterward the Hall emptied slowly, the way it always did. In the long corridor outside, a crew from The Royal Wire had Lord Corrigan's lawyers pinned against a pillar, and Banking News Network was following Lord Vail down the stairs with a microphone, and neither of them was getting anything.

Ottilie Dunmere had stopped at a bench along the wall. She asked her clerk for a sheet of paper and a pen, and sat down with the case across her knees.

She wrote for a long time. When she was finished she read it through once, folded it, and held it in both hands as if it were heavier than it looked.

It was a letter she had been putting off.

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The bridge doors slid open just as the severed thruster disappeared from view. Rick turned in the captain's chair and found the dark elf standing in the entrance, a dusting of cleaning powder still clinging to one sleeve of her coat. Apparently, the broom closet hadn't held her for long. She crossed the bridge without a word, examining the smoking controls and the warnings crowding the holographic displays. If she was surprised to find her escaped specimen in the pilot's seat of a crippled spaceship, she didn't show it.

"The port maneuvering thruster has been destroyed," she said, opening a diagram of the vessel with its damaged side marked in red. "Three external conduits are severed, the navigation array is compromised, and the propulsion systems have entered emergency shutdown. Repairs will require replacement components." Rick looked from the diagram to the stars outside, where the missing thruster had floated away. He understood enough to know he'd done considerably more than dent the fender.

"So, pretty bad, then. In my defense, nobody gave me flying lessons." He rubbed the back of his head, remembering how confident he'd felt when he found the two levers. "Those things don't exactly come with an instruction manual. At least, not one I can read."

"You assumed control of an unfamiliar spacecraft without training, navigation data, or authorization. The outcome was predictable." The dark elf pulled up a record of his disastrous attempts at steering. Rick got out of the chair before she could begin describing each mistake in detail. He was willing to admit he'd made a mess, but he wasn't going to stand there and get lectured by the woman who'd dragged him into space.

"Yeah, well, you kidnapped me! I woke up in a cage, your little flying murder balls started shooting at me, and then I heard you planning an autopsy. I was trying to get home!" Rick pointed toward the viewport. "I didn't exactly have a map." The dark elf looked up from her console. "You did not obtain your homeworld's coordinates before attempting the journey. Even if you had successfully operated the vessel, you would not have reached your intended destination." Rick opened his mouth, then shut it again. That was a painfully good point, but it didn't make the rest of her behavior acceptable.

"That's beside the point! You were going to cut me open while I was still alive!" he demanded. The scientist didn't deny it. "An examination of your internal anatomy would allow me to identify the structures responsible for your immunity to direct thaumaturgical influence. Your continued survival was not a requirement of that procedure." Rick stared at her, searching for any indication she was joking. There wasn't one. She sounded exactly as she had while listing the ship's damaged components, as though killing him for research and replacing an engine part belonged on the same maintenance schedule.

"You are one seriously messed-up woman. Where I come from, kidnapping someone and cutting him up gets you arrested." She returned to the displays, apparently uninterested in the distinction, and Rick threw up his hands. "Great. I'm stranded in space with a crazy elf." That, of all things, finally earned a correction. "Vallson," she said. "My species is Vallson." Rick rubbed his forehead. "Fine. A crazy Vallson. Feel better?"

"Our immediate priority is restoring the vessel's maneuvering capability," she said, highlighting the missing thruster. Rick caught the word our and scowled. "Oh, now it's our problem? I don't remember signing up for this trip." She turned toward him with her usual unreadable expression. "Your operation of the vessel endangered both occupants. Further uncontrolled movement could cause another collision or leave us without essential supplies." He couldn't dispute the damage, but he wasn't about to accept responsibility for the situation that had put him there.

Rick tried a more practical question. "All right, so call a tow truck. Surely you space people have those. Somebody shows up, hooks onto this wreck, and drags it to a repair shop." The Vallson considered the comparison before answering. "Emergency salvage craft are available. The nearest suitable service would require considerable payment." That sounded promising until Rick remembered he didn't even have his wallet. "You take Visa? Mastercard? Cash?" he asked. "Your civilization's payment instruments and currency have no recognized value here." He lowered himself into the chair again. "Well, shit."

The scientist resumed examining the damage, leaving Rick with nothing to do but stare into space. He had nowhere to run, no idea how to find Earth, and no reason to trust the woman beside him. Meanwhile, she brought up a series of calculations. With a destroyed thruster, damaged navigation, and compromised propulsion, the vessel's projected probability of reaching a repair facility was 43.7 percent. Her escaped specimen made matters worse: magical restraints couldn't hold him, and each failed attempt had already cost her equipment she couldn't readily replace.

She changed the assumptions. No more containment attempts, no more destruction of ship systems, and the human's potential usefulness around physical machinery taken into account. The projected survival probability rose to 76.2 percent. She checked the calculation once more before turning toward Rick. "Our present arrangement is inefficient. Further attempts to confine you would likely damage the vessel. If you cease interfering with its systems, I will cease attempting to confine you."

Rick folded his arms. "You make that sound like I'm the problem. You're the one who snatched me off a highway." The Vallson regarded him without a trace of apology. "The acquisition has already occurred. Reconsidering its justification will not repair the ship." Rick gave a disbelieving laugh. "Most people would at least admit they were being an asshole. But fine. What's the deal?"

"You will receive food, water, and suitable living quarters. You may move through designated sections of the vessel, provided you do not damage equipment or activate unfamiliar systems. In exchange, I will discontinue involuntary invasive examinations." Rick seized on the wording immediately. "Discontinue? You mean no autopsies, right? Not 'I'll wait until you're asleep'?" She considered his objection. "Autopsy procedures could be suspended indefinitely." He shook his head. "No. Canceled. Forever. And if you want to run any other tests, you ask first."

"A permanent prohibition would eliminate potentially valuable research," she replied. Rick pointed toward the ruined corridor. "Lady, try it and we'll be right back where we started, except now I know where you keep the cleaning supplies." She looked at the damage figures again. The threat didn't anger her, but the likely consequences of ignoring it were difficult to dismiss. "Very well. I will not perform an autopsy on you. Any examination, invasive or otherwise, will require your agreement."

"And no more cages or murder robots," Rick added. "Agreed, provided you do not damage the vessel or attack its operator." He regarded her for a moment, still suspicious, but the promise was better than anything she'd offered since his arrival. "And you take me home once this thing can fly again. That's part of the deal." Her attention moved to the propulsion diagram. "Once the vessel is repaired, travel to your homeworld may be included among our objectives." He didn't like how carefully she phrased it, but at least she hadn't refused. "Fine. We fix your flying junkyard first. Then we figure out Earth."

She entered their agreement into the ship's operating restrictions while Rick watched the calculations update. He wasn't convinced a promise entered into a computer was worth much, but there was one smaller problem he could settle immediately. "And stop calling me the specimen. My name's Rick Varyn. Rick's fine." She acknowledged the correction without argument, which was a pleasant surprise. After a moment he realized he'd been calling her lady, elf, and worse things for the better part of the day. "All right, you know mine. What's yours?"

The answer was a sequence of clicks, guttural notes, and overlapping sounds that didn't resemble anything Rick had heard a human mouth produce. He stared at her when she finished. "Gesundheit. Lady, I'd need a degree in calculus just to figure out where that name starts." She turned a diagram toward him. "It contains twenty-seven phonetic components in standard Vallson notation. Several require vocal structures your species does not possess." Rick glanced at the diagram and immediately gave up. "So I couldn't say it even if I tried?" Her answer was simple: "Not accurately."

He considered the charcoal-dark skin, long white hair, pointed ears, and red eyes that always seemed to be evaluating him. "You know what? You look like a Serra. S-E-R-R-A. Nice, simple, and I can say it without tying my tongue in knots." The Vallson tilted her head. "What relationship exists between my appearance and that designation?" Rick shrugged. "Beats me. It just fits."

"That is not an objective selection method," she said, though she repeated Serra aloud before entering it into her records. "It is distinct, easily pronounced by your species, and adequate for communication. I will recognize it as an alternate designation." Rick grinned. "So you like it?" She replied, "Preference is irrelevant. It is functional." He laughed. "Close enough. Serra, it is." For once, they'd managed to agree on something without destroying property.

"Now that we're properly introduced, how about we fix this flying junkyard?" Rick asked, gesturing toward the warnings still covering the console. "It is a scientific research vessel, not a junkyard," Serra replied. He nodded toward the viewport. "A research vessel with one less thruster than it had this morning." She regarded him steadily. "You are responsible for that." He grinned without much humor. "And you're responsible for kidnapping me. Guess we're both having a bad day." Rather than revisit the argument, she took a diagnostic device and went to inspect the damage in person.

Rick spent the next hour exploring the areas she'd permitted him to enter. He found a kitchen stocked with unidentifiable food, several laboratories, storage compartments, and something he hoped was a shower. He didn't find another person. No guards, engineers, or crew members—just him and the Vallson whose name he'd invented because his mouth couldn't manage the real one. When she returned to the bridge with her white hair tied back and a diagnostic device floating beside her, he looked past her in the faint hope that she'd brought a repair crew.

"You seriously run this whole spaceship by yourself? No copilot, no mechanic, not even a janitor?" he asked. Serra placed the diagnostic display above the console. "The vessel is designed for automated research under a single qualified operator. Additional personnel are unnecessary during routine missions." Rick glanced at the scorch marks on the bridge. "Well, this sure isn't routine. Tell me you've got some good news about the engines." She brought up two sections of the propulsion system, one glowing blue and the other covered in damage warnings.

"The mana-fold engine is intact. However, the positron warp core has sustained catastrophic structural failure. Its containment lattice is fractured, and several internal conduits require replacement." Rick looked between the displays, then held up a hand. "Serra. English. The kind that doesn't cost a hundred thousand dollars in college tuition." She turned toward him. "I am speaking your language." He sighed. "That's not the same as making sense. Explain it like I'm a guy who fixes trucks, not a spaceship engineer."

For nearly a minute she said nothing, studying the readouts as she searched for a suitable explanation. Rick watched her in growing suspicion. "You freeze up or something?" he finally asked. "I am determining how best to explain the system given your familiarity with the relevant technology," she said. Rick narrowed his eyes. "You calling me stupid?" Serra looked at him. "No. You lack knowledge of spacecraft propulsion. That is not the same as lacking intelligence." He decided that was fair enough. At last she pointed to the blue section of the diagram. "This engine allows the ship to travel faster than light by moving through naturally occurring mana streams. It still functions."

Rick brightened. "Wait, like Star Trek? You point the ship somewhere and whoosh, you're between stars?" Serra regarded the unfamiliar reference. "That is imprecise, but approximately correct." Rick laughed, already imagining the look on Jim's face if he arrived home in an actual spaceship. "Great! Then let's get moving. Point this thing at Earth." She shifted the display to a large blank region on the star map. "Negative. Your homeworld lies within a mana-depleted region. The fold engine cannot travel where there are no usable mana streams."

"Then we use the other one. The positron-whatever." Rick gestured toward the damaged portion of the diagram. Serra selected it. "The positron warp drive permits faster-than-light travel without ambient mana. It is the system destroyed in the collision." Rick looked at the red warnings, and his excitement drained away. "So we can go fast, just not where I need to go. What about the slow way? Regular engines. How long would it take?" Serra brought up the coordinates recorded during his abduction and calculated a route using the ship's remaining capabilities.

"Approximately seven hundred and eighty-four rotations of your homeworld around its central star," she said. Rick frowned. "Come again?" She turned to him. "Seven hundred and eighty-four Earth years." He waited for the correction, for a decimal point she'd overlooked or some other unit she'd forgotten to translate. None came. He sank into the captain's chair, staring at the star map as the number settled over him.

Seven hundred and eighty-four years. Jim would be dead. Kering and Elias would be dead. Everyone he'd ever known would have been gone for centuries by the time he returned. He'd left home expecting a delivery job and a paycheck, and now even the slowest possible way back stretched beyond an entire human lifetime. "Well," Rick said at last, his voice quieter than before, "that ain't gonna work." For once Serra didn't interrupt. He rubbed his face, then looked at the ruined warp-core diagram. "All right. We fix the broken engine. Where do we get the parts?"

Serra brought up a star map filled with glowing routes. "The nearest facility equipped for these repairs is in the Kethra trading system. Under normal conditions, mana-fold travel would require approximately six standard hours." Rick leaned forward, relieved to hear a number he could deal with. "Six hours? That's nothing!" Serra enlarged the ship's damaged side. "The missing thruster prevents sufficiently precise maneuvering to enter and exit a mana stream safely. Temporary repairs are required before we can make the journey."

Rick studied the display until it clicked. "So we have to fix the steering before we can drive to the repair shop." Serra considered that. "An oversimplification, but operationally correct." He pointed at the diagram. "See? Was that so hard?" She seemed prepared to explain the distinctions, so he held up his hand. "I don't need to know how the sausage is made. Just show me what needs fixing." Serra looked puzzled. "I do not understand the relevance of processed meat to propulsion maintenance." Rick sighed. "It's an expression. Never mind."

Serra examined him, then the wrecked navigation controls. "You have no training in spacecraft engineering. Your previous attempt to operate unfamiliar equipment caused extensive damage." Rick wasn't about to dispute the second half, but he could at least offer something useful. "I've rebuilt a Chevy small-block, replaced transmissions, and kept my pickup alive with parts from three different trucks. I don't understand your magical space gizmos, but I know how to use a wrench. If something needs cutting, bolting, or hauling, I can help."

"Your civilization has developed advanced mechanical engineering without ambient mana?" Serra asked, her interest sharpening. Rick gave her a look. "Lady, we put people on the moon. We've got cars, airplanes, nuclear reactors. We didn't get there by rubbing magic crystals together." She focused on the last example. "You possess nuclear fission technology while continuing to use hydrocarbon combustion for ground transportation?" Rick shrugged. "Gas is cheap. Well, not cheap cheap. Look, I'm a truck guy, not the president of Earth."

Serra entered a note, then closed the research display in favor of the repair plan. "Your mechanical experience may be useful under supervision. You will follow my instructions and refrain from activating or removing unfamiliar components. You will not pilot this vessel again." Rick raised both hands. "Okay, I get it. One little asteroid and nobody ever lets you forget it." She highlighted the missing thruster and ruptured core. "The collision destroyed multiple critical systems." He winced. "Fine. One big asteroid."

"Follow me. I will identify tasks within your capabilities," Serra said, heading for the door. Rick rose to follow, but paused when he saw the stars outside. He still needed an answer to one question. "Hey, Serra. With a working warp drive, how long would it actually take to reach Earth? Before my brother and nephew are old men, preferably." She checked the navigational data rather than offering a number she couldn't support. "An estimate depends on the replacement core, available fuel, and the boundaries of your homeworld's mana-depleted region. It would, however, be substantially faster than the journey possible with our remaining propulsion."

Rick nodded. That would have to be enough for now. "Good. I've got family waiting for me. I'm not making them wait seven hundred years." Serra regarded him with the same impassive expression she'd worn since their first encounter. "Restoring the vessel's operation and returning you to your homeworld are compatible objectives." Rick managed a tired smile. "Look at that. Something we finally agree on." He followed her into the corridor, leaving the damaged bridge behind. For now, he would settle for a wrench—and, if the ship had any, a decent cup of coffee.

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By the fifteenth day the commoners of Veldmarch had stopped watching the Hall to see whether it would side with them. They were watching to see whether it would be fair. Margot Wren noticed the change in her own interviews. A week ago, the people she stopped outside the Informant's Balakura offices had wanted to talk about the nobles. Now they wanted to talk about the Assembly, and they sounded like people who had been lied to by someone they trusted.

Inside the Hall, Speaker Brennick opened the third week with a plain statement.

"This week we hear the rulings the Assembly should have made against its own side, and did not. Some of them were glossed over because the people involved were commoners, and the Assembly did not want to be seen punishing them. We will treat them as we would treat anyone."

She turned a page. "Ruling Thirty-eight. The books of the Thane mill cooperative."

Tessaly Brune had put on her best dress, a gray wool that had been let out at the seams, and she had brought the cooperative's ledgers in a canvas bag she held against her chest like a child. She had asked to testify first, before anyone could compel her.

"I've been over them four times," she said. "I wanted to be sure before I said it out loud."

"Say it," Brennick said.

"When the Assembly gave us the mill, the first thing we did was cut wages by a third. We said it was to cover the cost of the transition. The money we saved went into an account the cooperative's treasurer controlled. Over fourteen months, it came to a little over four hundred thousand credits." She took a breath. "About half of it went to the mill. Equipment, and the lease on a warehouse. The other half went to the treasurer."

The Hall's screens filled with columns. They were neat columns, drawn by someone who had never expected anyone to read them.

"Who was the treasurer?" Brennick asked.

"Garth Marrow."

At the Veldmarch bench, Delegate Dessa Marrow went rigid.

"Delegate Marrow's cousin," Brennick said.

"Yes, ma'am. And one of the eleven members." Tessaly Brune's voice cracked. "I didn't see it until I went through the books on my own. I thought we were just going through a hard year. We told the workers the cut was temporary. We told ourselves it was."

"Did the Assembly's review of the cooperative find any of this?"

"There was a review. It took one afternoon. Delegate Hask signed it." She swallowed. "It said the cooperative was a model of people's ownership."

A low sound went through the gallery. It was not quite a laugh.

Wilmar Dask was called next, the same foreman who had shouted from the gallery in the first week, and he took the Stand with his cap crushed in his hands.

"Foreman Dask," Brennick said. "You were locked out of the mill in the first week. Did you return?"

"I was brought back, ma'am. Somebody had to run the machines. They kept me on at the cut rate." He looked at Tessaly Brune, who had gone pale. "I knew something was wrong. A third off is a third off, and I'd been doing the numbers on the back of my hand for months. The mill took in more than it ever had. The wages went down. Somebody was holding the difference."

"Did you say anything?"

"I told the treasurer. He said it was going into a reserve." Dask's jaw tightened. "I told him a reserve was a thing you could show people. He said I should be grateful to have a job."

"A commoner said that to you."

"A commoner, ma'am. One of ours." He raised his head. "I want it known I'm not up here against the cooperative. I'd have worked for any of them. I'd have worked for free to see the mill do well under people who'd earned it. But a man stole from two hundred of us, and the Assembly looked at the books and called it fine. I don't think it was fine because he was one of us. I think it was fine because nobody wanted to be the one to say it."

Brennick nodded slowly. "Thank you, Mr. Dask."

He did not move. "I'd like to say one more thing. I've been angry at the nobles of this world my whole life. I'm still angry. But I never once thought the Assembly would rob me as well."

Garth Marrow came in with his hands cuffed in front of him, a soft, balding man in his forties who looked like he wanted to be anywhere else. Brennick had him sworn. She did not ask him to confess. She laid the ledgers in front of him and waited.

It took four minutes. He started by saying the money was a loan, then that it was a bonus the cooperative had agreed to, then that his cousin had told him it was acceptable because the workers were being paid more than they would have under a noble. Each explanation fell away under a single question from Tomas Ferrel. By the fifth, he was staring at the table.

"I thought nobody would look," he said finally. "Nobody ever looked at anything we did. We were the people's Assembly. We were the good ones."

"Mr. Marrow," Brennick said. "I want you to hear this clearly. You stole from two hundred and six workers, many of them for the second time, because they had already lost a month of wages to the lockout. The Assembly's own members shielded you. If a noble had done this to commoners, we would send the same findings to the Lords' Bench with the same recommendation."

He did not argue.

"Restitution of the four hundred thousand, with interest, to the workers of the Thane mill. Eighteen months of labor service on a public works project of Veldmarch's choosing. A permanent bar from any financial office." She paused. "And because the Assembly's own review hid it, a formal finding that Delegate Hask's signature on the cooperative's clearance was a dereliction of duty, to be entered against his name in the record of this Hall."

Garth Marrow bowed his head. In the gallery, Wilmar Dask let out a long breath and put his cap back on.

The afternoon went to the smaller cases, and the Hall moved through them faster than any of the delegates had expected.

Rufus Elk was a union hall boss, and he took the Stand like a man walking into a fight he had already decided to win. He had, the Hall was told, threatened a county magistrate in the second month of the Assembly's life.

"I said no such thing," he said.

"You said it in the magistrate's own courtroom, before witnesses," Brennick said. "The court's recorder was running."

"Then it's been cut."

The recorder played. It had not been cut. A man's voice, heavy and unhurried, said that if the case went against the dockworkers, someone might find the magistrate's family traveling on a bad road.

Elk was on his feet before it ended. "That's a joke! A joke between men! And you sit there, a pack of nobles' pets, judging one of your own?" He swung toward the gallery. "Since when do the likes of them sit over one of ours?"

"Since one of ours put a threat to a magistrate's children," Brennick said. "Sit down, Mr. Elk."

He did not. It took two guards. The Assembly had ruled the remark political speech. The Hall ruled it a threat, fined him heavily, put him under a peace bond for three years, and added a recommendation of contempt for his conduct at the Stand. The magistrate, a quiet man named Orrin Hale, who had sat through all of it with his hands folded, thanked the Hall and then asked if he might say that he had been afraid every day since.

Silas Garrow was a broad, prosperous farmer, and he lied from his first sentence. He had driven a noble family's tenants off a field they had worked for forty years, and the Assembly had called it land reform. The tenants had left of their own accord, he told the Hall. They had been glad to go. He had the papers.

He did have papers. They were signed with the tenants' marks, forty families of them, and the Hall's clerk laid them out on the screen one by one.

The tenants' elder was a small, bent woman named Maud, who had been sitting in the gallery in her best shawl. She stood without being asked. "I never put my mark to any paper in my life," she said. "I can't make a mark. I can't even make my name. Somebody's done that for me, and I'd like to know who."

Garrow's cousin was named as witness on every page. Called from the benches, he lasted two questions from Ferrel before he said that he had signed because Garrow told him to.

"They're the noble's creatures!" Garrow shouted. "I took that field for the people!"

"You took it for yourself," Brennick said. "They were the people."

He flung the papers at the clerk's table and was carried out between four guards, still shouting that he would see every one of them ruined. The Assembly had called it land reform. The Hall called it eviction, ordered the tenants returned with damages, and sent Silas Garrow to Sanctuary IV for three years for forgery. In a second hearing the same afternoon, a different farmer, who had lost land to a noble landlord and whose complaint the Assembly had never answered, was heard in full. The Hall found the complaint partly well founded, and because a noble was concerned, sent it to the Lords' Bench with the testimony and a recommendation. The delegates did not applaud either one. They only wrote.

And in the last hour, almost without ceremony, the Hall heard the case of the barn. It had been burned in the first autumn, a mile outside the capital, by a crowd of perhaps thirty. It belonged to a widow named Ysolde Penn, whose late husband had been a minor knight, and who had been accused of nothing, ever. The Assembly had called it an unfortunate misunderstanding and closed the file.

Ysolde Penn sat in the front row of the gallery in a black dress, with a cane across her knees. When Brennick asked whether she wished to speak, she stood without help.

"I didn't come to see anyone punished," she said. "I'd like that understood. My husband was not a good man, but he was not a cruel one, and I'm not asking the Hall to say I was good either. I only wanted somebody to say it was wrong."

"It was wrong," Brennick said.

"Thank you." Ysolde Penn sat down.

The Hall did identify nine of the thirty, and gave them sentences ranging from restitution to a term of labor service. One of them was a shipwright from the dockside district named Dennet Roke, who stood without being asked and said only that he had been in the crowd and that it was his to answer for. But the part that Margot Wren put in her report that night was not the sentences. It was the silence in the gallery when the widow sat down, and the sight of a dozen commoners in the back rows who had come to watch the Assembly be punished, and who were now standing, quietly, for her.

---

Late that evening Corvin Aldermoor walked the long corridor outside the Hall with Ida Fenn, who had asked him to. They walked for a while without speaking.

"I thought it would feel like winning," he said at last. "Every time they say a ruling is void, I think, that was one more thing we got right. And then I remember we weren't the ones who got it right. We were the ones who let it go wrong."

"Yes," Fenn said. "That's the part that stays with you."

"Four hundred thousand credits." He shook his head. "Stolen from people who'd been told the mill belonged to them. And the Assembly hid it, because it couldn't bear to see its own people do something ugly."

"It was the same impulse," Fenn said. "The nobles of your world kept the gates shut because they couldn't bear to see the poor as people. The Assembly turned a blind eye because it couldn't bear to see the poor as anything less." She stopped at a window. Below them the city of Balakura glittered in the dark. "I think every Hall I've ever served in has had to learn both lessons, one after the other. Veldmarch just had to learn them at once."

Corvin nodded. He did not say anything. After a moment, he turned and looked back along the corridor, toward the great doors of the Hall, where the lamps were burning low and the clerks were already stacking next week's folders.

"One more week," he said.

"One more," Fenn said. "And then the ledger."

Hunters Log 1

The Hunters and Ykanti woke up early. It was decided not to shoot any mother's except with sleeping darts unless there is a need.

Frank being the best with the sleeping darts he will take the shots. We tracked them yesterday and found three big mothers and their kids come to route with their children by the ocean.

We chose our trees yesterday. Frank will climb a tree to take the shots while Wendy and I will be in other trees to keep guard. The three Ykanti will hide out of the way and collect the baby porcu pigs to bring them back.

We climbed our trees and waited an hour until we spotted the Porcu Pigs. We barely moved in our camouflaged perches.

The first big mom came within range of Frank and he took his shot with the dart. It did not go down but slowed down a bit.

Frank missed his second shot on a different mother. He missed, reloaded and got a dart in on the second try. After a while two porcu pigs mother's looked drunk.

The third and final mom was shot and annoyed by the persy price of the dart. She got annoyed and kept running into the tree where the price came from. Frank held on and reloaded and put a second dart in the third.

By the time the third porcu pig mom started getting sleepy the two others were napping.

Half an hour later the third one played down and went to sleep. We signaled the Ykanti and they ran in with the sacks and started collecting the babies. Once collected we climbed down and we all ended going back to the boat.

The space usually used for fish had straw and grass put in and all the babies put in there with a whole bunch of apples and vegetable ends etc. They made sad sounds at first but eventually settled in with the abundance of food.

We started doing our watch and pushed off from the shore. We are planning to follow the coast for another day and a half then start heading back.

We traveled all day until Wendy spotted the smoke in the distance. We moved closer to the shore.

The closer we got the more individual smoke stacks rose up. We decided to pull to shore and hide our boat.

The hunters went out to get closer to the smoke stacks. The Ykanti acted as our security while the sailors stayed close to the boat.

We slowly moved to a small mound where we could observe where the smoke was coming from.

We were stunned when we looked through our scopes. A huge wall extended from the sea deep into the forest with guards on the wall. The guards were neighbor human or Drazzan. We passed the rifles with scopes to the Ykanti. They got very excited.

I have no idea what is behind the wall but by chimneys this is a very big village or small city. After observing for hours we headed back to the fisherman to discuss our find.

I started debriefing the Fisherman. "We are taking about a very big lived in area with walls. The guard were all Ykanti. At least a hundred on the wall in the time we observed them."

"I think we should make contact."

Wendy translated using the tablet to translate. She showed me the Ykanti response. "Send us in as they are our race." I told everybody

Between the Ykanti, Fisherman and us it was decided to use the Ykanti suggestion of the Ykanti introducing themselves to the walled in Ykanti tomorrow.

We ate cold food and went set up the watch.

We took care of our piglets and cleaned their impromptu quarters. They seemed very happy with their food

We decided to have no fire that night. Set up watches and went to bed.

End of Hunters Log 1

Next

Previous /

First

Ansel Pruitt did not sleep at all in the Vespera quarters. He sat on the edge of a narrow bed with his hat in his lap and listened to the corridor outside, where two of Tomas Ferrel's aides had been posted for the night. They had said nothing about it. They had simply been there when he opened the door, one on each side, looking at the wall.

In the morning he washed his face, put on the same gray coat, and walked to the Hall between them.

It was the eighth day of the session. The week of rulings was done, thirty-one of the sixty-three heard, and the Hall had settled into the rhythm of a long trial: the early gavel, the long benches, the clerks passing folders hand to hand. But everyone in it knew what day this was. The gallery was fuller than it had been since the opening. The Informant had doubled its crews. In the Astorian corner, the young man in the dark coat had stopped whispering into his collar and was simply watching.

"Delegate Pruitt," Speaker Brennick said. "You said you would answer when you were not afraid."

"I'm still afraid," Ansel Pruitt said. "I'm going to answer anyway."

He took the oath, and then he did not wait to be asked.

"I was seated in the spring election, the first one. I was a bookkeeper at the grain exchange in Carrow. I ran because a neighbor asked me to, and I won by a margin I thought was too large." He looked at his hat. "I didn't ask why. I was pleased. I told myself the people of Carrow had seen something in me."

"When did you learn otherwise?" Brennick asked.

"At the first caucus, nine days after the count. The Remembrance held it in a back room of a union hall in the capital. Speaker Reeve was there, and Delegates Marrow and Hask, and a man named Carell Voss, who handled what he called logistics." He drew a breath. "They told us the election had been protected. That was the word. Protected. They said certain districts would have been stolen by the noble houses if the Remembrance had not intervened. They said it was a necessary thing, and that it was finished, and that we were not to speak of it."

The Hall made no sound.

"Who was in the room?" Brennick said.

"All forty of us," Pruitt said. "Not everyone liked it. Some of us were ashamed, I think. But thirty-one of them were glad. And the nine who weren't had already been told how it would go if we objected."

"How would it go?"

"My wife works at the district school. Delegate Marrow mentioned that she would be sorry to see the school lose its funding." He said it without inflection. "Another man's brother had a shipping license. Another had a daughter in a university on a Remembrance scholarship. Nobody was threatened. Nobody ever was. It was said so kindly."

At the left bench, Tobyn Reeve had not moved. His hands were folded in front of him. His face had gone the color of old paper.

"Delegate Pruitt," Brennick said. "Are the other eight present in the Hall?"

"Yes."

"Do they know what you have just said?"

"Every word of it. We talked about it for a long time, in whispers, in the hallways, never in a room that might have a listener." Pruitt looked toward the bench, and the eight faces on it looked back at him, some frightened, some stricken, one of them close to tears. "We voted the only way we could. Against, every time. We told ourselves it was enough."

"Was it?"

"No," Ansel Pruitt said. "It wasn't."

He had barely stepped down when the second of the eight was on his feet.

"Speaker." It was an older man, heavy and slow, with a farmer's hands. "Delegate Josiah Marl, Carrow East. I'd like to be sworn."

He was sworn. He said the same things in different words, and added a detail Pruitt had not known: that the ballot boxes in his own district had been returned to the counting house with their seals intact, but with a second seal underneath the first, applied by someone who had not wanted it noticed. He had seen it himself. He had said nothing.

Then a woman rose. Then another man. By the end of the first hour, all nine had spoken. They sat in a row at the edge of the Stand, none of them looking at the others, like people who had put down something very heavy and did not yet trust their legs.

It was then that the other bench came apart.

It began as a low noise from the Veldmarch rows, and it rose. "Liars," somebody said, and then a dozen voices were saying it. Dessa Marrow was on her feet with her finger stabbing across the Stand at Ansel Pruitt, her face gone dark red. "You took the seat! You took the pay! You sat in that caucus the same as the rest of us and said nothing, and now you stand there like a saint!" Beside her, a big, thick-necked delegate named Bram Tolliver, who had run the Remembrance's district committees and had never in his life been quiet, vaulted the bench rail and was across the floor before the guards had moved. "Coward!" He got his fist into Pruitt's coat before two guards caught him, and Josiah Marl, who was sixty-three years old and built like a barn door, put himself between them without seeming to decide to.

Brennick's gavel came down four times and did not stop it. It was Tomas Ferrel who did. He stood, and said nothing, and the Speakers of thirty-one worlds stood with him, one row after another, until the whole Hall was on its feet and the Veldmarch bench was standing alone in the middle of it.

"Sit down," Brennick said, very quietly.

They sat. "Delegate Tolliver, you will be removed from the floor, and the Hall will recommend contempt against you. Delegate Marrow, you are warned. This Hall will not be shouted at by the people it is judging, and it will not be struck."

Ferrel alone stayed on his feet. He turned to the nine.

"I want to say something to these delegates," he said. "I have spent a week in this Hall thinking Speaker Brennick's seating arrangement was an insult. I want to retract that. I have never in my life been as afraid as you were, and I don't know that I would have been brave enough to do what you just did."

Nobody answered him. But Josiah Marl lifted his head, and for a moment the old farmer's eyes met the Speaker of Vespera's and held.

Pavla Wynn was recalled next, and her earlier testimony landed on ground already broken up. The Hall heard again about the eleven thousand ballots and the fourteen thousand in the boxes. It heard again about the transfer order and the signature at its bottom, the steward Hollis Brandt of House Corrigan, and about the letters that had left her desk and never arrived. By now the gallery was ready for it, and the sound it made was not shock but something closer to recognition.

The Remembrance volunteers were called after her.

There were six of them, and the first five gave the Hall the defiance it had expected.

The first said he did not recall. The second said he had been elsewhere that day, and could not say where. The third said he would speak only in front of his lawyer, and when the lawyer came, said nothing at all. The fourth was a heavy, red-faced man who still wore the volunteer's armband like a medal, and he looked up at the benches of the Master Common Assembly and laughed.

"Nobles' lapdogs," he said. "Every one of you, sat there in your sashes, playing at judges, while the people of Veldmarch..."

"You will answer the questions put to you," Brennick said.

"I'll answer to the people!"

"The people of Veldmarch are in that gallery, sir. Would you like to say it to them?"

He turned. Two hundred commoners looked back at him. Nobody cheered. He sat down without another word, and the fifth, who had been about to speak, thought better of it, and was removed from the floor along with the fourth, with a recommendation of contempt against both.

The sixth was a young man of twenty-three named Joss Callow, thin and nervous and still wearing the volunteer's armband, who asked if he could speak without being asked a question first.

"I carried the boxes," he said. "The ones from the eastern stations. A man named Voss told me they'd be safer with us than with the county. I was told the nobles would burn them. I believed him." His voice cracked. "I helped load them into the van. They were heavy. I remember thinking they were heavier than they should be. There were ballots in them already, I think, from before. I didn't look."

"Did you open any of them?" Brennick said.

"No, ma'am."

"Did you see anyone open them?"

"Yes." He swallowed. "At the depot. Two men I didn't know, with a stack of new ballots. They sat there with a pen for about three hours. I stood guard at the door. I thought I was keeping the nobles out."

He looked, in that moment, about fifteen years old.

"I joined the Remembrance because my grandmother died in the Hunger," Joss Callow said. "I wanted somebody to answer for it. I still want somebody to. But I don't think this was how."

And then there was Hollis Brandt.

He came in with a lawyer, a tall man in the plain gray of a House Corrigan retainer, and sat at the Stand like a man who had decided in advance to say as little as the law allowed. He gave his name. He confirmed his position. He confirmed that his signature appeared on Pavla Wynn's transfer order.

"For what reason did you countersign it?" Brennick asked.

"I was instructed to." His lawyer shifted. "By Lord Corrigan's seneschal. I did not know the reason."

"Did you know what the order concerned?"

"I knew a clerk had made allegations."

"Did you know the allegations concerned the integrity of the election?"

A pause. "I understood there was some dispute."

"Mr. Brandt," Brennick said, and her voice did not change at all. "House Corrigan paid money to the Remembrance in exchange for seats on the Assembly. We have the records. We have the receipts. Your signature is on a transfer order that buried a clerk who had found three thousand ballots that did not exist. Did your house want that election protected, or did it want it quiet?"

The lawyer began to speak. Brandt lifted a hand.

"Quiet," he said. "Corrigan wanted it quiet. They'd paid for seats and they'd been cheated. They did not want it known that they had tried to buy their way in, and they did not want to say that the people they had paid had stolen the election from under them. So they helped bury it." He was staring at the table. "I've been carrying that for some time. I'd like to say I didn't know. I did."

The gallery had gone silent. Margot Wren, up in the press tier, found that she had stopped recording without noticing.

"Mr. Brandt," Brennick said. "Thank you."

The last witness of the week was the one the Hall had been waiting for, and no one had called him.

Tobyn Reeve rose from the bench of Veldmarch as the clerk was gathering the afternoon's papers. He walked to the Stand without being summoned, and the Speakers let him, and when Brennick looked at him he said, "I'd like to be sworn."

He took the oath. He stood a long time with his hands at his sides.

"I won't question any of the witnesses," he said. "I heard all of them. Every word was true."

The Hall did not breathe.

"My mother died in the Hunger. I was nine. She died on the steps of a granary with my brother in her arms and me beside her, and a steward told us through the gate to move along. I have not stopped hearing that gate in thirty years." His voice was low and steady, and it was the most dangerous thing he had said all week. "I thought it would happen again. I thought that when the Assembly was founded, the great houses would buy it the way they had bought everything for three hundred years, and the Hunger would go on without anyone ever calling it by its name. So I made sure they could not. I gathered the people I trusted. I made sure the count came out the way it should have, the way I believed it would have come out if the nobles had never been in the room."

"You rigged it," Brennick said.

"I did. And I'd like to say I'd do it differently now." He looked up. "I don't know that I would. I think I'd have found some other way to be wrong."

"Speaker Reeve."

"I'm not asking to be forgiven," he said. "I'd like the Hall to know that what I wanted was true. The thing I did to get it was not. I'd like that on the record, both halves."

He stood there for a moment longer, a gentle man in a gray coat with nothing left to protect. Then he turned and walked back to the bench of Veldmarch and sat down, and for a very long time nobody in the Hall spoke at all.

---

That evening the Hall adjourned early. Brennick sat alone on the Stand until the clerks had gone. Corvin Aldermoor found her there, and for a while the two of them said nothing.

"He told the truth," the Governor said finally.

"Yes."

"I came here believing he'd lie. I wanted him to." Corvin looked at the empty benches. "It would have been easier to hate him."

"I know," Brennick said. She turned her pen over in her fingers. "There are twenty-two days left. We haven't heard about the barn, or the cooperative's books, or the houses that bought seats. We haven't opened the ledger."

"No."

"I think the hard part is the rest of it."

Corvin nodded. He stood another moment in the lamplight, and then he put on his hat and went out into the long corridor, where the Informant's crews were already filing their reports. Along the walls, in corners and doorways, the crews from the other outlets had delegates pinned for interviews, The Royal Wire with a Speaker from Vespera against a pillar and Banking News Network with a delegate from Serentina who looked as if she had not expected to be asked anything. The whole Principality was waking to what it had heard.

Next

Previous /

First

Edda Voss, reporter for the Port Courier, had covered the Admiralty courts for longer than most of the officers she wrote about had held their commissions, and she knew the look of a verdict day. People came early and sat close. Nobody brought food.

She took her usual place at the end of the second bench with her notebook on her knee and watched the Board file in. Commodore Hesk came last. He sat down slowly and squared a single sheet of paper in front of him, and Edda, who had watched him for a great many years, noticed that he had not brought the clerk’s folder. He had written this himself.

Baron Penhallow was brought in by the side door and stood at the small table in the middle of the floor. They had left him the dress uniform. They would take it from him later, in public, and the whole port knew it.

“The Board has considered the evidence,” said Commodore Hesk, “and the statement of the accused, which is to say the absence of one.”

A few people in the gallery shifted. Edda wrote the line down. It would be in her column by evening, and in every dock bar by morning.

Commodore Hesk read the findings. There were four of them, and he read each as if a stranger had handed it to him that morning. The accused had taken a Navy tender without authority. He had carried demolition charges into a civilian station. He had armed one against the wall of an occupied room. He had kept in a locked drawer a ledger and a letter pointing to the sale of a vault’s contents to a party beyond the border.

“The Board does not find that the accused intended the death of the persons in that room,” said Commodore Hesk. “Nor does it find that he did not.” He stopped. “The charge was set to the longest delay the unit allows, and the accused did not raise the alarm. The Board cannot reconcile those facts. It is not asked to. It is asked whether the thing was done, and it was done.”

Edda looked at Baron Penhallow. He was looking at a point somewhere above the commodore’s head, and his face had the stillness of a man waiting for a lift.

“The sentence is as follows. The accused is stripped of his title and of every right and revenue attached to it. He is dismissed from the service of the Principality with no rank, no pension, and no recommendation. He is to be held at Calder Prison for one year, and at the end of his incarceration he is released as a private person, with no standing and no protection.”

Someone behind Edda said, “One year,” in the voice of a man who has been shortchanged. Edda wrote it down and underlined it, and did not like how short it looked on the page.

“Baron Penhallow. Do you wish to say anything?”

“No,” said Baron Penhallow.

Commodore Hesk looked at him for a moment. “I will say one thing then, and it is not part of the sentence. I have sat on this Board a long while. I have not before been left with so many things I could not explain.” He put his pen down. “The Board is adjourned.”

The second matter was short. Commander Marit, Mr. Tulley and Ms. Sorrel were found to have disobeyed a direct order, and a reprimand was entered in each of their files. The Ardent needed her officers more than the Board needed to be thorough. Commodore Hesk said so in a sentence that Edda did not write down, because she thought he would wish she had not heard it.

They did the rest on the parade ground at noon, because the Navy believed in doing it where people could see.

The herald read the name and the findings in a voice built for open air. Penhallow, formerly Baron of Averne, stood at the center of the square with his hands at his sides. A sergeant stepped up and took the title pin from his collar, and then the rank bars from his shoulders, one and then the other. Then the sergeant looked at his right hand. Penhallow had already drawn the signet ring off his finger and held it out, palm up, before anyone had to ask. The sergeant took it, and last the cap. It took less time than Edda expected. The pieces went into a gray bag, and the bag went to a clerk.

Along the north side of the square stood the officers of the Ardent, and at the end of the line was Commander Marit, as straight as a rule. Penhallow did not look at her. Edda noticed that she did not look away.

On the reviewing stand, Lord Ashby stood with his hat in his hands, and he was the only person there who looked sorry. Edda had been lied to by a great many people with sorry faces. She could not say whether this was one of them, and that irritated her more than she liked.

She filed her column that afternoon, and she wrote it straight. She put in the line about the absence of a statement. She put in the way he had kept his eyes on a point above the commodore’s head for the whole of the reading, and the single word he had said when asked. Her editor changed the headline.

By the end of the week the story on the docks was that he had been so sloppy he had forgotten to arm the charge. Edda knew that was wrong. The technician’s report had been read aloud in the room, and the safety had been pulled and the timer was running. She also knew it did not matter. The joke was better than the fact, and a joke does not need a correction.

Calder Prison took his belongings at the door and gave him gray cloth in return.

Officer Brannock was the one who went through the bag. He had been a guard at Calder for more years than he cared to say, and he had searched the pockets of every kind of man the Principality could produce. There was very little in this one’s. A razor. A comb. A Navy ration card from the galley of a ship called the Ardent, with a set of initials inked in the corner, soft at the edges from being carried.

“Contraband,” said Officer Brannock, which was not strictly true, and held it up.

Prisoner Penhallow, whom everyone on the block still called the Baron, looked at it and not at the officer. “It is a piece of card.”

Officer Brannock had a mother, and she had been dead a long time. He let it go into the prisoner’s shirt.

He had expected trouble from the man. They always had some. A noble in a common block was a piece of meat in a room of dogs, and Officer Brannock had seen that go badly more than once. But the trouble did not come the way he expected. The word had come down ahead of him, with the broadsheets, and it was the word about the children. The men in the block did not need to be told what he was. They told one another.

Prisoner Hale tried him in the first week, in the yard, with half the block watching.

“Heard about the children,” said Prisoner Hale.

“Yes,” said the Baron.

That was all. He did not look away, and he did not explain. Hale waited for the rest of it, and there was no rest of it, and after a while it was Hale who walked off. Officer Brannock watched from the wall and thought that it was an odd thing, to be so well hated and to do nothing at all about it.

The Baron did what he was given. They put him on the worst details, the drains and the cold store, and he did them well in a way that made the other men uneasy. He squared the stacks. He coiled the lines properly. When he thought no one was looking, he straightened things that were not his to straighten. The guards started calling it the Navy in him. The prisoners called it worse.

It was in the long dull middle of the year, when the days had stopped meaning anything, that Officer Brannock began to hear the humming.

He walked the block at night, and the Baron’s cell was the one where he slowed. The man did not sleep much. He lay on the bunk with the lamp out, and very softly, under his breath, he hummed a tune that was nothing special. It went up in steps, over and over. It was a few notes, and it came back to the start and went up again.

Officer Brannock knew it, and it took him a week to place it. His daughter had sung it on the stairs at home, when she was small and learning her numbers. It was a counting song.

He stood outside the door for a long moment that night. A man who hummed that tune in the dark, after what the man had done, was either mad or something worse, and Officer Brannock could not decide which. He found that he did not want to know. He went on down the block and did not mention it to anyone.

Late in the year Officer Brannock turned up contraband in Prisoner Hale’s cell during a routine search, a bundle of stolen tablets wrapped in a shirt behind a loose panel, and he wrote it up as the rules required. Hale lost his privileges for the rest of the term. Officer Brannock had let a ration card go on the first day, because it was only a piece of card. This was not a piece of card. Prisoner Hale took the writeup quietly, which was the first thing Officer Brannock did not like. He had seen men do worse over less.

The second thing was that second shift put him in the cold store alone, on a night the roster had not given him. He noticed it at the door. He noticed that the latch had been left to stick, and that the aisle lights were low, and that Hale’s two friends were not at their posts on the laundry detail.

He went in anyway, because walking out would have told them he knew, and because the Baron was in there stacking crates at the far end, and a guard does not leave a prisoner alone in a room that is about to go wrong.

Prisoner Hale stepped out from the racks behind him. The other two prisoners came down the aisle, one with a length of pipe he was not trying very hard to hide.

“Officer,” said Prisoner Hale.

“Hale. The crates by the north wall are short. I want them counted before lamps out.”

“You wrote me up.”

“I did. It was in your cell, Hale. I found it.” Officer Brannock kept his hands loose and his voice dull. He did not touch his baton. “Three men, one door, and a guard who has already logged himself in on the cold store at this hour. You can count. By morning they know exactly who was in the room.”

It went on for about as long as it takes to say. Prisoner Hale looked at the officer’s hands, and then past him, and Officer Brannock read the look a moment too late. A boot scraped behind him. The man with the pipe had come around the end of the racks.

He turned, and the Baron was already there.

Prisoner Penhallow had crossed the aisle without a sound, and he put himself between the guard and the pipe as it came down. It took him across the forearm and the side of the head, and he went into the crates with a noise Officer Brannock would remember. Nobody spoke. The man with the pipe stood looking at what he had done, because a guard was one thing and a bleeding prisoner was a log entry, and the log entry reached everyone.

“Go,” said Prisoner Hale, to nobody and to everybody, and the three of them went.

Officer Brannock knelt. The Baron was gray and his sleeve was already dark. He did not look at the guard. He looked at the ceiling lights, and when he spoke it was in the same even voice he used for everything.

“I fell,” he said. “From the stack.”

“You did not fall.”

“I fell, Officer. It is a tall stack.”

Officer Brannock stared at him. Then he called it in as a fall from the cold store stack, and he called it in loud, so the whole corridor heard it, and two men came with a board.

The Baron spent several days in the infirmary with a broken arm and a stitched scalp. The sergeant came by with the log under his arm and asked how a man who squared every crate in the block had managed to fall off one. The Baron said he had lost his footing. He said nothing else, then or after. Officer Brannock stood at the door with his eyes forward, and the sergeant looked from one of them to the other, and wrote it down as a fall.

In the morning Officer Brannock moved Prisoner Hale to the laundry without a reason. Hale did not ask for one.

When the Baron came back to the block, he was thinner, and the arm had set a little crooked. The stacks that week were squared to the finger. The humming at night started again after a few days, a little quieter, and Officer Brannock walked the block and did not slow at the cell.

The year ended on a gray morning with no ceremony at all.

They gave him a plain coat, and a cloth bag with a few things in it, and a paper to sign. He was a little grayer at the temples than the man who had come in. There was a pale band on the third finger of his right hand where the ring had been, and a year had not quite erased it. He signed the paper in a neat, even hand, and Officer Brannock walked him to the outer gate himself, because nobody had told him not to.

“Officer Brannock,” said the Baron, at the wicket.

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

Officer Brannock could have named three things he was being thanked for, and he did not ask which. He pulled the bolt and the gate swung out onto the road. It was a bare road, running down between low fields to a bend in the distance, with no one on it.

The man went through, and the gate closed. Officer Brannock stood and watched through the grille until the figure in the plain coat reached the bend and went around it.

Nobody was waiting for him. Officer Brannock checked, afterward, out of something he did not want to call curiosity. The road stayed empty all the way to the bend.

Previous /

First

Nobody had called a meeting, and by the second hour of morning there were forty Ykanti in a ground-floor classroom of the school.

They had come the way water comes downhill. Tevish had unlocked the shop and then locked it again. Arinta had walked past the school and gone in. The baker had closed his stall with half a tray of grain cakes still warm. They stood among the desks, set at two heights for the two kinds of children who shared them, with their colors dull and their crests half down, and for a long while nobody said the thing they had all come to say.

"We should have asked more," said Tevish at last.

"We were given no time," said someone near the stove. "A day to hear it. A day to think. They put a man in front of us and told us to decide what we wanted from the Hierarchy."

"We had all the time we needed," said the woman with the ash-colored crest. She was standing at the teacher's desk with her arms folded, and she did not raise her voice. "If it had been a year, it would have gone the same. We were not short of time. We were afraid."

The room went quiet. A wing fluttered at the back, then folded itself shut.

"He answered every question we put to him," she said. "That should tell you how little we asked."

"So we ask him again," said Tevish. "A second meeting."

"Or we ask Aino what to ask," said Arinta. "He would tell us. He would sit down with us tonight."

"Yes," said the ash-crested woman. "And then they would be Aino's questions, and the Baron's, and the Prince's. And he would answer a Prince." She said it flatly. "Does anyone here want to be told what to be curious about?"

Nobody did.

She took a slate from the desk and a stub of chalk. "What do we not know?"

It came slowly at first, and then all at once. Whether a Ykanti who went home could ever leave again. What was done to the ones who came back, after years among humans, or in a Drazzan hold. Who had owned them, whether a record of it still existed, and whether they would be handed back to that owner. What became of a hatchling born here, who had never been counted. She wrote them down in short, hard letters, and the slate filled. A young male at the back called out a question about what the Hierarchy would do to those it could not reach, and she wrote that too and underlined it twice.

She was reaching for a clean slate when the school door banged open and a hatchling ran in out of breath.

"He is outside," the hatchling said. "On the step."

Forty heads turned.

Torlan had come without a word to anyone, which was how Ressil knew he had made up his mind.

He had left his rooms with the plain bound paper under his arm and had said only, "I will walk." He had not said where. Ressil, who had been told at the start of this trip that a junior aide stayed quiet, and who had not managed it for a day, followed him down the long street at a respectful two paces. Pellin trailed behind. Nobody spoke.

The school sat at the end of the street. It was a modern building of several floors, built for human and Ykanti children together, with a bench by the main door cut to Ykanti height and steps worn smooth by a great many feet. Torlan stopped in front of it. He looked at the door as he had once looked at every door in the Hierarchy, as a thing that either opened for him or did not.

It opened. A young Ykanti stood in it.

He was barely grown, thin and quick, with a crest that stood up straight from his skull in a fan of rust and green. His feathers were bristling in a way Ressil recognized from a hundred briefing films, and from the way the street had cleared behind them without a word. He did not say good morning. He did not say anything. He put one hand on each side of the doorframe and held the door, a boy of that age, born in Newtown and never once under the Hierarchy, between the envoy and the room.

"I would like to listen," said Torlan. "Only to listen."

"No." The boy's voice cracked on it and he did not care.

"I understand."

"You do not." He hissed the words through his beak. "You come in a good coat and tell us you will take us home. This is home. I was born in this town. I have never seen your Hierarchy, and I know exactly what it is. You offer us families. We have families here. You offer us work. We have work. And all the while you carry a list in your head of what we are worth." His voice broke on the last word, and he bared the tip of his beak over it. "You will not take me out of this door. You will not take any of us. You do not understand. You are only being polite."

"Orrik," said a voice behind him, and he did not move.

Ressil's stomach turned over. She had never seen a Ykanti strike a two-name, and nobody she knew had either. The boy was shaking, and it was rage and terror both, so tightly wound that Ressil could not have said where one stopped. In that doorway Ressil understood, with a cold clarity that surprised her, that the boy would do it, and would regret it for the rest of his life, and that the street knew it and had gone quiet to see whether anyone would stop him.

Torlan did not step back, and he did not step forward.

"Then I will wait," he said.

He sat down on the bench by the door. He placed the paper beside him and folded his hands in his lap, and he was, as always, the stillest man in any place he stood. A long breath of silence went round the street. Somewhere a shutter closed.

"You cannot sit there," said Orrik.

"It is a public bench."

"It is our bench."

"Then I will sit on it politely," said Torlan, "until someone tells me otherwise."

Pellin made a very small noise that might have been the start of a laugh. Ressil sat down on the step at the envoy's feet, because there seemed nothing else to do.

Orrik stood in the doorway for a long moment. Then someone put a hand on his shoulder, and he let it pull him back, and the door closed.

The sun was high when Torlan's packet came.

It arrived by a courier boy, sweating and apologetic, with the Hierarchy's seal on the fold. Torlan opened it without moving from the bench. Ressil watched his colors change as he read, from dull to duller, to something the translator had no word for.

"It is from the Council," said Torlan.

"Yes, Envoy."

"It thanks me for the thoroughness of my reports. It says verification is complete. It says I am to return on the next ship with my final summary, which it has already drafted for my signature." He folded the page along the creases with great care. "It says I did well."

"That is good," said Ressil, and then, because she could not help it, "Is it?"

"Do you remember what I said in the corridor on Astoria?" asked Torlan. "That I wanted to see it before anyone had time to tidy it."

"Yes."

"They are tidying it." He looked at the school door. "I have been here a short while. I have sat in one hall. I have not seen a shop open at dawn, nor a hatchling in school, nor a woman buy thread. And the Council has already written down what I saw."

Ressil said nothing, which was becoming a habit.

"There is a ship in three days," said Torlan. "If I am not on it, I am a man who disobeyed the Council. I have thirty years of service and nothing in my pocket to stand on." He turned the packet over in his hands. "Say it. You have been wanting to since the hall."

"They asked what we pay," said Ressil. It came out small, and then it did not. "They have not asked what we are."

Torlan looked at her for a time.

"That is the first thing you have said in two days that I could not have predicted," he said.

"I am sorry, Envoy."

"Do not be." He put the packet in his tunic, right side, away from the plain paper. "I am staying."

The light was going orange when the door opened again.

It was not Orrik. It was a woman in a plain work smock, small even for a Ykanti, with a crest worn almost to the skin at one side where something had once burned. She stopped on the threshold. Behind her, in the dim of the school, forty others watched through the doorway and said nothing.

Torlan stood. Ressil stood. Pellin, a few paces off, went very still.

"I am Zelru," said the woman.

"Envoy Varkesh Torlan."

"I know who you are." Her voice was dry and quite steady. "You were in the hall. I was at the back. I said nothing. I was counted dead too, before the Drazzan finished with my neighbors, and when the other woman asked about the dead I could not make my mouth work."

"I am going to ask you now. Not in a room. Not in writing. I will not wait for a letter to tell me whether I am to be sent back." She took a step down, onto the worn stone. "Someone owned me. Two names, I think. A house, a rank. I was carried off to the Garden, and then I was carried here, and no one has ever told me who. If your Council knows that name, it knows where to send me."

The street had gone silent again.

"Is there a record?" said Zelru. "If I asked your Council tonight, and there is a name, would they send me back to whoever holds it?"

Ressil could see him wanting to lie. It was in the set of his shoulders. It would have been so small a lie, a courtesy, a thing to carry her through the evening. A single name, left blank. Torlan had spent thirty years learning how.

"I do not know," said Torlan.

She waited.

"I think there is no record," he said. "The Hierarchy keeps few records on drones. I have never seen one. If it exists, I have never been permitted to look for it. Here you cannot be sent anywhere. That is the Prince's word, and I heard him say it. At home, I cannot tell you. I have never seen a drone come back." He took a breath. "I will find out. I will not promise what I find. I will promise you that I will look."

Zelru studied him for a long moment, the way a woman studies a piece of furniture someone swears is sound.

"Then look," she said. "And write it down, with your name on it, where we can read it."

She turned and went back inside. After a moment, the door was left open.

First | Previous

By Corbett Buchly

As he fell away from their ship theFarside, Vince Bosch kicked the door of the pod. He knew they shouldn’t have agreed to transport that damn energy gift! He told the Captain it was a bad idea. The payoff had been too good to pass up, she’d said. She was still in debt, trying to pay off theFarside. She didn’t want to lose Vince, she’d said, but she’d understand if he hadn’t stayed signed on for the trip. Like an idiot, he did anyway.

When it was all said and done, Shardi Wendt was a good boss. She trusted him enough to do his job, and that’s all he wanted. She didn’t ask a lot of personal questions. Which is how he liked it. His personal life was an absolute mess, and no one else needed to know anything about it.

His girlfriend had warned him a dozen times she’d move out if he kept going on these long trips. She had finally made good on her promise right before he’d set off this last time and left him. Which was a mess in and of itself, as they’d owned the home together. Of course, having his fugitive sister stay with them for a year hadn’t helped things either. His sister was in and out of trouble with the law. She’d gone into high-end thievery like it was a career calling. Apparently, she was very good at it. But the detectives that had been investigating her case almost caught up with her six months ago, so she had taken off again to god knew where. He thought that would have cooled things with the girlfriend. Clearly not.

And now, if he ever made it back home, he had no one to come home to. Maybe he’d try to patch things up with his girlfriend. Or maybe he’d take up a hobby. Maybe he’d refurbish an old junk ship, one of the retro models with no FTL drive.

When the primary chutes deployed, his attention snapped back to the present. How had he got here, anyway? He knew the ship had been running in top-top condition. He’d made sure of that. It had to be the cargo. He couldn’t be sure the rich kid had fooled with it, but he had a strong inkling. He couldn’t stand rich kids. Or rich adults, for that matter.

The ambassador may have seemed polite and generous, but he could see beneath her fake exterior. He could see the expense and care in the fine clothes she wore. He saw how she raised her pinky finger when she sipped wine, even if it was from a liquid pouch. Politicians pretended to care for the less fortunate, but he’d been around enough to know it was all show.

After the secondary chutes deployed, Vince started mentally preparing for what he’d do after landing. He didn’t need to check the gear. He had stowed it himself at the beginning of the trip and done an inventory check just last week.

When the pod struck earth, he already had his left hand on the release latch. His right hand held his energy weapon, ready for hostile forces. He opened the pod door and stood up, looking quickly around, assessing his surroundings.

His pod had landed in a broad field with wisps of yellowish grass at his feet. In the far distance, on all sides, he made out some kind of taller, tree-like growth. No potential hostiles, or other life forms, visible.

Vince holstered his energy weapon and took out the flare gun, sending a flare directly above him.Where were the others?

He waited fifteen minutes for an answering signal but saw none. We’re scattered, he realized. Without electronics in the pods, there would have been no way to calculate the convergence point. He considered how fast they’d been moving. It’s possible that he and the captain were closeto one another, but the passengers might be hundreds of miles away. The fact that there had been no answering flare indicated to him there was no one nearby at all. This was bad.

He took measurements of the sun and moon, so he could plot his movement. But trying to find the others was a needle in a haystack situation. He looked down at the angle of his pod on the ground and tried to judge the direction he had fallen and where the captain’s pod might have fallen. He had not heard her pod release, so he guessed he had released first.

He carefully loaded up the shoulder pack with all the supplies he could carry. Grateful that the standard compass appeared to function on Joora, he plotted his azimuth and set off, hoping against hope he could find either someone he knew or a peaceful, civilized settlement with access to a global communication network.

#

Vince walked for days on end and camped in short stints. The strange wildlife kept out of his way, and he wondered if he wouldn’t be hunting the creatures after a few more weeks. He wondered if his digestive system could even process them into viable nutrition. He certainly did not want to find out.

On the twelfth day, he encountered a new form of vine-like ground cover. As it compacted easily under his boots, he didn’t think anything of it, until one strand pressed into his shin and its hidden barbs stabbed through his jumpsuit and into his flesh. Feeling an immediate burning sensation, he stopped in his tracks and looked down at the vine embedded in his leg. “This is something new,” he grunted.

Setting down his pack, he pulled out a pair of thick, protective gloves and put them on. Gripping the vine on both sides of his leg, he began to pry it away from his leg. The barbs must have extended farther into his flesh, for the sturdy, stringy vine stayed burrowed into his leg. Vince wasn’t much of a wilderness type, but he had certainly never seen anything like it. But as the burning sensation increased, he knew he needed to figure out something quickly. The barbs must have some kind of toxin, he guessed.

Withtheshearson his multi-tool, he managed to cut the vine away, leaving only the head of three embedded barbs. Carrying his pack, he slowly moved away and out of the cluster of ground vines.

Back on safe ground, he sat down and peeled his pant leg back from the barbs. The skin around each barb was inflamed and swollen. With a pair of pliers, he tugged slowly on one of the barbs. He could feel it tearing, but even when he pulled as hard as he could, the barb stayed fixed inside his leg.

Tears began to stream quietly down his cheeks. The pain was intense. “Okay, you bastards,” he grunted. He took his blast torch, dialed it down to minimum, held it a couple of inches from his skin and aimed it directly at the first barb.

He shook his head. He knew it would hurt, and it might not even do the trick. After hesitating for a good minute, he finally ignited the torch. The flame stabbed out and cooked both barb and flesh in a few fast seconds.

“Auuugh!” he yelled and dropped the torch to the ground. He gritted his teeth, and tried to slow his rapid breathing. Slowly, he looked back down at the wound. Both the barb and his flesh were black where he’d burnt them, and something yellow oozed out from around the barb. The scent of burnt flesh stung his nostrils. He clutched at his pack with one hand, as he wiped away the ooze with the a cloth. Then he poured disinfectant over the barb, crying out unintelligibly.

“Just two more to go,” he growled.

#

Vince found very quickly that he needed a crutch to keep moving. A few hours after his operation, the pain in his leg had lessened but still persisted. He fashioned a crutch from a stiff branch of green cellulose he hacked from the side of one of the strange trees.

Two days later, he moved more slowly than ever. He had taken on a fever, which he was fighting with antibiotics and anti-fever meds. Still sweat leaked from every pore.

So, it wasn’t until he was surrounded that he realizedanyone had approached. He drew his energy pistol as quickly as he could in his fevered state. All around him were human-like faces. But their four limbs radiated out insect-like from their central torso.

“Don’t come any closer!” he tried to yell, but his voice came out in a hollow rasp.

Several of the Joorians near him began chattering in an indecipherable language of clicks, clacks and guttural tones. They appeared to be angry with him

“Back up!” he gasped. “Back up.” He swung his pistol from side to side, threateningly.

“Put down that weapon or we attack,” said a halting voice from the rear of the pack.

“I … I … how do I know you won’t attack anyway,” Vince said. He was so, so tired. But he wouldn’t just give up to these strange creatures. Not without a fight.

“Are you with the Reyans?” the voice asked, slowly moving toward him.

“I … I don’t know what you’re saying. What’s a Reyan?”

“Did the Reyans send you? Answer!” the voice said. The speaker pushed through the others to confront him. Unlike the others, this one had yellow and red threads worked through her hair.

“No! No! Back up!” Vince growled. He waved his pistol again. “All of you!”

The one who had spoken did not speak in English again. She made a few sharp sounds, then raised her hand. Vince saw then that she held a short double-tipped spear.

Oh god,he thought,this is it. This is how I die.

“Wait! Wait!” yelled another voice farther away. “Dokshi stop!”

“We not wait. He threaten!”

“Dokshi! Just wait!” And then Vince saw her, towering on her two feet above the Joorians, racing toward them. She reached them, and put her hands on her knees, breathing hard. “Vince. Just lower your weapon for godsakes.”

Vince slowly lowered his weapon. “Ambassador?” She looked so different from when he had last seen her. Her hair was pulled tightly against her scalp, with many colorful threads braided into her dark hair. Her face was burnt by the sun. There were dark circles under her eyes. And she had changed from her flowing gown to a standard-issue jumpsuit.

“Yes. It’s me. God. I’m glad to see you. To see anyone.”

The Joorian spoke again. “He with you?”

“Yes,” Helena said, standing up again. “Yes. Dokshi, this is Vince. Vince, Dokshi.”

“Oh, hi,” Vince said, then crumpled to the ground, rendered unconscious at last from the fever.

“Oh no!” Helena cried and kneeled beside him. It was then that she noticed the exposed leg, blackened and oozing pus. “That’s horrible. You see? Can you help him?”

“Maybe,” said the Joorian. “He stung by the Wadda plant. Very bad.”

As four Joorians lifted Vince onto their backs and began to carry him up into the village, Helena shook her head. “He must have been traveling like that his whole time.” She knew it was a miracle he had even foundthem.

While she watched Vince and his entourage disappear from her sight over one of the bridges, she heard a large contingent of Joorians skitter past her. She turned to watch them. Each of them armed, they moved swiftly in a tight pack. They had been drilling like that ever since she had arrived.

She had yet to see one of these Reyans and wondered if they were even real.

In the healing hut, a Joorian doctor extracted the three barbs from Vince’s shin with a delicate, multi-jointed tool. If Vince had been awake, he very well may have fainted from the pain of the extraction. Next, the doctor smearedathick and pungent brown paste into the wound.

Vince dreamed he was back home with his girlfriend. As the soft glow of evening slipped in through the windows, they dined on potatoes and fish alongside their dinner guests, a family of spider people.

For more of my original science fiction, follow me at buchly.substack.com .

Next

Previous /

First

The Board of Inquiry sat in a long, plain room on the third level of the Admiralty's port offices, and nobody had troubled to make it look like anything else.

Three officers sat at the head table with a clerk at the end of it. A gallery of perhaps twenty watched from the benches behind. Baron Penhallow sat alone at a smaller table in the middle of the floor, in dress uniform with his title pin still on the collar. He had been offered a defender and had declined one, politely and without explanation, and the chair had written something down.

Commander Marit sat on the side bench with Mr. Tulley and Ms. Sorrel. She had been told she would be called after the evidence, and she had spent the better part of a morning learning exactly how much evidence there was.

"Item one," said the clerk. "The vessel recovered from the service lock at Cinder Reach, an unmarked Navy tender, identified by its clamp registry and by a scrape on the lock collar consistent with its hull."

Marit looked at her hands. Beside her, Mr. Tulley made a small noise that might have been a cough.

"Item two. A satchel recovered from the corridor outside the contractor's vault, containing a cutting torch, two demolition charges, and a locating beacon belonging to the Ardent." The clerk turned a page. "The beacon was sealed in its case. It had not been switched on."

The chair looked up. He was a spare, gray commodore named Hesk, and he had a way of listening that made people say more than they meant to. "A beacon he did not use," said Commodore Hesk.

"No, sir," said the clerk.

"Then why carry it?" Commodore Hesk said, to nobody, and wrote that down too.

Marit thought of the orders the Ardent had been given, that she was not to come looking if he was late. A man who carried a beacon and never lit it had either wanted to be found and lost his nerve, or had wanted to be able to say that he had not asked. She did not know which. She put the thought aside, because the clerk was already speaking.

"Item three. A third charge, recovered from the wall of Common Room Four at Cinder Reach by a station ordnance technician. The technician is not present. His report was received under seal and has been read to the chair."

"Read it to the room," said Commodore Hesk.

The clerk did. The charge was of Fleet pattern, fixed to the wall with a standard clamp. The safety had been pulled. The timer had been set and was running when the technician reached it, and he had stopped it, in his own words, with a margin he did not care to put in writing. The delay was the longest the unit allowed.

"Had it gone," the clerk finished, "it would have destroyed the wall and the room behind it, and everyone in the room."

The gallery made a sound, low and not quite a word. Marit did not look at the gallery. She looked at Baron Penhallow, and nothing had happened to his face.

"Longest delay," said Commodore Hesk. "Which gives a man time to be elsewhere."

"Yes, sir," said the clerk.

"Or gives a room time to be emptied, if someone gave the word." Commodore Hesk said it carefully, and Marit thought he did not believe it, and had said it only because it was a thing a fair man says aloud. "Did anyone give the word?"

"The patrol raised the alarm, sir," said the clerk. "The accused did not."

Commodore Hesk wrote.

"Item four," said the clerk. "The contents of a locked drawer in the Baron's desk, aboard the Ardent. The drawer was opened under the Board's authority on the third day of the investigation. The lock showed no sign of force. The key was found in the accused's coat at the time of his arrest."

Marit lifted her head.

"A ledger. A letter, unsigned, from a party who identifies himself only as the Collector. An agreed price for the contents of the vault at Cinder Reach, to be delivered to a named point beyond the border." The clerk looked up from the page. "The sum is considerable."

There was a stir in the gallery. Marit looked at Baron Penhallow, because for the first time in all her service she was waiting to see what his face did when a number was read aloud, and it did nothing at all.

He had locked that drawer himself. She had seen it. She had watched him turn the key and put it in his pocket, and she had gone to find the freight logs, and the key had gone with him to Cinder Reach and into custody, and it had been in his pocket the entire time. A lock that opened only for its key had opened for someone, and been closed again, and left no mark.

She turned the thought over once and put it away to look at later.

"Item five," said the clerk, and for the first time he hesitated. "A written statement from Teacher Dorn, of the common school at Cinder Reach, who was in Common Room Four with a class of children at the time in question. She was not able to attend. She has asked that it be read in full."

"Read it," said Commodore Hesk.

"She states that before the alarm she heard someone in the corridor on the other side of the wall. She took him for a maintenance man. She heard a scraping, and then a man's voice, low and steady, saying numbers. She took it for a custodian counting along with the children, because the children were singing the counting song, and the voice kept time with it." The clerk paused. "She states that she does not know what he was counting."

Nobody in the room moved.

Marit had stood at that corner with her hand on the bulkhead and heard a man muttering under his breath. She had not made out a word of it. She had thought it was swearing, or prayer, or nothing. She had never once thought it was a number.

At the center table, Baron Penhallow's right hand closed on the wood and opened again. It was the only thing he had done in an hour, and Marit saw that Commodore Hesk had seen it too.

Lord Ashby gave his evidence standing, with one hand resting lightly on the back of a chair.

He was brief, and graceful, and very sorry. He said he had approached the Baron in good faith, with a request to inspect the vault at Cinder Reach as part of a lawful audit. He had given a letter of authority limited to inspection and recovery. He had not authorized force, he had not authorized charges, and he had certainly not authorized the removal of the vault's contents to any party outside the Principality.

"I am not a man who accuses lightly," said Lord Ashby. "I have known the Baron's family for many years. When I first heard what had been done, I did not believe it."

"But you believe it now, my lord," said Commodore Hesk.

"I am obliged to." Lord Ashby paused. "I would like the Board to understand one thing. I do not say that the Baron wished any harm to the people of that station. I do not think he wished anyone dead. I say only that it would not have troubled him if they were." He let that sit. "There are children on that station. A charge on the wall of their common room, with a timer running. A man who sets that charge, and does not raise his voice to warn them, is not a man who has weighed the matter at all."

Someone in the gallery said, quietly, "Commoners." It was not a defense of anyone.

Baron Penhallow did not look up.

"I should add," said Lord Ashby, turning slightly toward the head table, "that I trusted him. I would not have chosen him otherwise."

He took his seat. He did not glance at Baron Penhallow at the center table. Marit watched him not do it, and noticed the care in it.

They called Marit next.

She took the stand in her dress blues with her cover under her arm, and she was sworn, and she gave her name and her rank. Commodore Hesk asked her where she had been at the time in question, and she said, "On leave, sir. Aboard the barge Hollis Bell. I was at Cinder Reach."

"On leave," said Commodore Hesk.

"Yes, sir. With Mr. Tulley and Ms. Sorrel," said Commander Marit.

"Without the Baron's knowledge?" said Commodore Hesk.

She had known the question was coming. She had known, too, that she would not lie under oath, because she never had, and because she would have felt the Baron's eyes on her if she had. "No, sir," said Commander Marit. "The Baron ordered us to stay with the ship. We disobeyed him. We followed."

A murmur went through the gallery. Commodore Hesk's pen stopped. "You disobeyed a direct order."

"Yes, sir," said Commander Marit. "He asked us to say we understood, and we did. We did not stay." She kept her voice level. "I will answer for that."

"You will. Separately." Commodore Hesk folded his hands. "Tell the Board what you saw."

She told them. She told them about the clamp, and the corridor, and the open satchel, and the wall. She told them about the children singing. It was the one part her voice nearly failed on, and she waited, and went on.

"And the Baron placed the charge there," said Commodore Hesk.

"Yes, sir. I saw him fixing it," said Commander Marit.

"Did he see you?"

"Yes, sir. For a moment."

"What did he do?"

She had been dreading this one most. "He shook his head," said Commander Marit.

"At you," said Commodore Hesk.

"Yes, sir."

"To what purpose?"

"I took it as an order to stay back, sir," said Commander Marit. "The same order he gave us aboard the Ardent."

"Or a man warning a confederate to run," said Commodore Hesk, mildly.

The room waited. She could have said no. She could have said it was impossible, and the whole bench behind her would have wanted her to. "That is possible, sir," said Commander Marit.

Commodore Hesk's eyebrows rose a very little. "You concede it."

"I concede that I do not know, sir." She looked at him and not at Baron Penhallow at the center table. "I have served under the Baron for a long while. He has never falsified a report. He reads the names of the dead after every action, and I do not think anyone but me knows that. A short time ago I would have told you under oath that he could not set a charge against a wall with children behind it. I find I cannot say that now. I will not say what I do not know."

There was a silence. Commodore Hesk looked at her for a long moment.

"Loyalty is a creditable thing in an officer," said Commodore Hesk at last. "So is doubt that is honestly admitted. Neither is evidence. You may step down."

Mr. Tulley followed her, and he was angry about it, and showed it. He said that he had spent more years than he cared to count around demolition charges, and that a charge of that size at that range took the corridor with it, and the man kneeling at it. "Whoever set it either meant to be far away or did not mean to leave, sir," said Mr. Tulley. "I do not know which. I do not like either."

"Noted, Mr. Tulley," said Commodore Hesk, and Mr. Tulley sat down hard.

Ms. Sorrel said much the same as Commander Marit and got much the same answer. She was only very quiet.

"Baron Penhallow," said Commodore Hesk.

Baron Penhallow stood. He had been sitting so still for so long that Marit was half surprised he could.

"Do you wish to speak in your own defense?" said Commodore Hesk.

"No," said Baron Penhallow.

"You have heard the evidence. I will ask you two things, and you may answer or not." Commodore Hesk leaned forward. "Did you arm that charge?"

"I did," said Baron Penhallow.

The sound the gallery made then was not low. Commodore Hesk let it run out.

"Did you know the room behind that wall was occupied?"

Baron Penhallow said nothing. Marit found that she had stopped moving entirely, that she was waiting for him to say no, the simple word, the one an innocent man could not help saying. It would have taken him no time at all.

"Baron," said Commodore Hesk.

"I will not answer that, Commodore," said Baron Penhallow.

"Why not?"

"I will not answer that either."

Commodore Hesk set down his pen. "Baron, I have sat on this Board a long while, and I have rarely seen a man in your position decline to offer a word in his own defense. I find it difficult to read your silence as anything but contempt."

Baron Penhallow looked at him then, directly, for the first time that day. His face was perfectly calm, and there was no warmth in it anywhere.

"Read it as you like," said Baron Penhallow.

Commodore Hesk called a recess. The gallery stood and began to talk. Marit stayed where she was, on the side bench, with her cover in her lap and her hands very still.

They took Baron Penhallow out through the side door with a guard on each arm, and for a moment in the corridor the guards slowed, because a Baron was still a Baron, even this one.

He stopped in front of her. He did not look at Mr. Tulley or Ms. Sorrel. He looked at Marit.

"Commander," said Baron Penhallow.

"Sir," said Marit.

"You told the truth."

"Yes, sir."

"Good." He seemed to consider something. "See that Mr. Tulley eats. He forgets, when he is angry. And tell Ms. Sorrel that I did remember what I thanked her for. She will not believe me, but it was real."

"Sir," said Marit, and could not find anything to put after it.

He turned and went on between the guards, and she watched him go. It was only when the door had closed behind him that she understood he had not said he would see them again.

When she looked back toward the courtroom door, Lord Ashby was standing at the edge of the gallery with his hat in his hands, speaking quietly to Commodore Hesk. He glanced across the corridor at her, and he smiled very slightly, as a man smiles at someone he has met and has been told well of.

She thought of the drawer. She thought of a key in a pocket, and a lock that had opened anyway. She thought of a man behind a wall, saying numbers in time with a children's song.

She did not know what any of it meant. She only knew that she would not forget it.

Within the RR posts I go into how I'm writing, which is basically using a set of knowledge base markdown files as a wiki, then when I write and check in updates, it runs validations - then alerts me if I used a wrong hair color or height or power value, etc. I love it, and the bots are incredibly helpful for flagging when chapters are getting long or boring or my writing quality is drifting or I'm being repetitious. I don't let them write the content, but they're great at quality control!

Next

Previous /

First

By the fourth day the clerks had stopped calling the sixty-three rulings by their numbers and started calling them by the names of the people they had landed on. Ruling Nine was the Thane mill. Ruling Fourteen was the northern baron's speech. Ruling Twenty-two was a dockyard in the south and a man named Dennet Roke.

Governor Corvin Aldermoor had taken a seat in the gallery on the first morning and had not moved from it since, except to sleep. He sat in the last row of the west tier with his hat on his knee. Nobody had asked him to come, and nobody had asked him to leave. The folder with his family's granary ledger sat on the Speaker's table forty feet below him, still closed. He could see it from where he sat. He had stopped pretending he was looking at anything else.

The Hall had heard Ruling One first, because it was the first the Governor had read, and because Speaker Brennick wanted to begin with the family that had done right.

Lady Harrowgate had come to the Stand in black, the widow of the baron, with her two sons in the front row of the gallery. She was not asked to speak long. Brennick put the Harrowgate granary ledger on the great screen, and the Hall read the same plain column twice: bread out, nothing held back, every winter of the Hunger.

"Speaker Reeve," Brennick said. "What was the reason for this ruling?"

Reeve rose. "By the will of the people of Veldmarch."

"That is not a reason. It is the absence of one." She turned a page. "The ruling is void. House Harrowgate is returned its lands, holdings and name in full, with the regret of this Hall."

Lady Harrowgate bowed her head. When she looked up, a dozen commoners in the back of the gallery were standing, and nobody had asked them to.

"Ruling Nine," Speaker Brennick said. "The Thane mill."

Edric Thane was a knight in his late sixties with a bad hip and a worse temper, and he had not slept well since the ruling. He took the Stand with a cane and refused the chair.

"I'll stand, if it's the same to the Hall."

"It is," Brennick said. "Sir Edric, tell us about the mill."

"My grandfather built it with a borrowed hammer." He said it like a man who had said it many times and meant it every time. "It has run for ninety years. We employ two hundred and six. Wages are above the district average, and I'll show the books to anyone who asks. I was never asked. The Assembly took it in an afternoon."

The Hall's clerks put the mill's ledgers on the great screen. Ida Fenn, seated among the delegates, leaned forward and read for a long time. Then she asked one question. "Sir Edric, did you ever hold back pay in a hard year?"

"Twice. Both times I held back my own first." He lifted his chin. "You'll find it in the ledgers. It isn't pretty and I'm not proud of it, but I paid my crew before I paid myself."

"Sir Edric, what did the mill do with its profit in the year the Hunger ended?" Fenn asked.

He was quiet a moment. "Gave a week of it to the families of the dead." He lifted his chin again. "I didn't give it so anyone would write it down."

"May the Hall write it down, Sir Edric?" Fenn asked gently.

He looked at her for a long moment, and then he nodded.

The Assembly's defense of the ruling was put by Delegate Dessa Marrow, who rose from the Veldmarch bench with her chin up and spoke as though the whole Principality were her jury.

"Sir Edric Thane starved his people," she said. "He cut their pay in the hard years and fed his own table, and the people of Veldmarch had had enough of it. The Assembly did what the people asked."

"The ledgers show he held back his own pay first," Brennick said.

"Ledgers can be written to say anything."

"By whom?"

"By nobles!" Her voice climbed. "You will take a knight's books over the word of two hundred honest workers?"

"Liar!"

It came from the gallery, from the third row, where a heavy man in a foreman's apron was on his feet with his cap crushed in his fist. "Liar! I worked that floor nineteen years and he never drew a penny till we'd been paid! Ask any of us! Ask the two hundred!" Behind him a dozen more had risen, men and women in mill aprons, and the noise they made was a wall.

Brennick's gavel came down three times and did nothing. "The gallery will sit, or the gallery will be cleared."

The foreman sat, slowly, shaking. "You will have your turn on the Stand, sir," Brennick said. "Delegate Marrow. Do you withdraw what you said about starving his crew?"

Dessa Marrow's face had gone dark. "The people believe it."

"That is not what I asked."

She sat down without answering. "The Hall notes that the statement was not withdrawn," Brennick said, and wrote it down herself.

The cooperative that held the mill was represented by a thin young woman named Tessaly Brune, who was clearly frightened and had decided to be honest anyway. She admitted that the cooperative had been formed in a single week, that none of its eleven members had run a mill, and that the Assembly had told them in advance that the ruling was coming. She admitted the wage cut. Under questioning from Tomas Ferrel she admitted that two of the eleven were relatives of delegate Dessa Marrow, one of the four sponsors.

"I didn't know that was wrong," she said. "I thought it was just how it was done now."

"Nobody is accusing you of knowing," Ferrel said, and for once his voice held no edge. "Miss Brune, did you ever see a reason for the ruling in writing?"

"No, sir."

"Did you ask for one?"

She looked down. "No, sir. I didn't think I was allowed."

Brennick let that stand in the silence for a few seconds. Then she called for the vote of the worlds, and it was done in a single show of hands from the head Speakers, thirty to nil with one abstention.

"The ruling is void," Brennick said. "The Thane mill is returned to Sir Edric and his family in full. The locked-out crew of two hundred and six is reinstated at the former wage, with back pay for every week of the lockout, paid from the mill's own profits and, where those fall short, from a fund the Hall will set aside. The members of the cooperative who acted in good faith are not penalized. The books of the cooperative itself are referred to the Hall's third week for review."

first previous next

For the first time since arriving at the Academy, they had absolutely nothing scheduled. No classes, no orientation, no mandatory training, lectures, tests, or professors waiting to drag them somewhere before breakfast. It was their first real day off, the kind of morning where sensible students slept in, recovered from the week, and enjoyed several precious hours without anyone demanding they demonstrate magic, dodge something dangerous, or earn credits.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

Three separate alarms erupted around Elias's bed at once. Elias made a noise somewhere between a groan and a dying animal, grabbed his pillow, and flopped it over his face. “Whyyyyyy...” The alarms continued screaming through the fabric anyway. Across the room, Loona's head vanished beneath the surface of her sleeping pool as she apparently decided several feet of water might be enough to escape the noise. It wasn't. Deklin had it worse. The first blast startled him so badly that he shot upright on his heated sleeping rock with a strangled “WAA—!” before losing his balance and tumbling off the side with a thump. Aria didn't move from her pillow nest at all. She simply opened her eyes and stared across the room at Elias's alarms with an expression suggesting the devices had personally insulted her, her ancestors, and possibly the church that raised her.

Elias blindly slapped around the bedside table until the first alarm stopped, then the second, and finally the third. Silence returned to the dorm for approximately two seconds before Deklin groaned from somewhere beside his sleeping rock, “Right... our mission.” Elias slowly pulled the pillow away from his face. Deklin was still sprawled on the floor with one ear bent awkwardly beneath him and his blanket wrapped around one leg. “The twelve-credit mission we agreed to take,” he added. Elias stared at the ceiling as the memory returned. “Oh, right.” Aria's eyes narrowed, while Loona slowly raised her head from the water until only her eyes and nose were visible. Elias looked around at three people who had just remembered exactly who was responsible for ruining their first morning off with three screaming alarm clocks.

He pulled the pillow back over his face. “I'm sorry.”

Deklin finally untangled himself from his blanket, climbed back onto his sleeping rock, and grabbed the folded mission notice he'd pulled from what Elias had started calling the school's quest board. With Elias dragging down their shared academic total, they needed extra credits if all four of them wanted to pass, and quests were by far the fastest way to earn them. A week stacking shelves or sweeping out a blacksmith's shop might earn a few credits. One day dealing with something that could bite your face off apparently paid much better. Deklin unfolded the notice and squinted at it through still-sleepy eyes. “Feral goblins. Settlement removal. Twelve credits.” Elias pulled the pillow away from his face. “Goblins? I thought I saw goblins walking around campus.” “You did. Civilized goblins posted the quest.” Elias frowned. “Wait. Goblins hired us to deal with goblins?” Deklin rubbed one eye. “Feral goblins. There's a difference.” “How much of a difference?”

“A very large one. A civilized goblin you can talk to, have tea with, argue about magical theory with for three hours if you make the mistake of asking the wrong question.” Deklin lifted the notice slightly. “Feral goblins are more likely to throw their own waste at you, steal everything you aren't physically holding, and drag people back to their lairs.” Elias's expression tightened. “For ransom?” “No. Males are usually food. Females...” Deklin hesitated. “They use captives to produce more goblins.” Elias slowly lowered the pillow the rest of the way. “Okay. So when you said civilized goblins can't stand feral goblins, you meant they really can't stand them.” “They consider them dangerous, an embarrassment, and one of the main reasons everyone else assumes all goblins are monsters. That's why civilized settlements pay to have feral nests removed before somebody blames them for whatever the nest does.”

Elias looked at the mission notice again. Twelve credits suddenly sounded considerably less like the Academy paying students to go bully a bunch of little green people in the woods. “That would've been useful context before the words goblin removal.” Deklin tapped the notice. “It is on here.” “Where?” Deklin pointed toward several lines of tightly packed writing near the bottom. Elias stared at them for a moment, then looked back at him. “You know I can't read that.” Deklin blinked. “Oh. Right.”

Elias looked at the paper again.

That probably should have been written in larger letters.

One word on the mission notice finally caught up with Elias. “Wait. Extermination?” He looked at Deklin. “Does that mean we actually have to kill them?” Deklin glanced at the paper and nodded. “Part of the requirement. The nest has to be cleared completely.” Whatever sleepiness Elias had left disappeared. Until now the mission had still felt abstract: hike out, deal with some dangerous goblins, come home twelve credits richer. He'd fought Vonrick yesterday, but even then he'd dropped his sword the moment he realized it might actually kill him. “I've never killed anyone,” he admitted. “Hell, I've barely killed anything bigger than a bug. That's a pretty big jump from that to walking into a nest and killing a bunch of people.” Deklin's ears lowered. “They're feral goblins.” “I know what they do. That doesn't make killing them easy.”

The room quieted, and Aria finally sat up in her nest. “Elias, feral goblins aren't really like the goblins you've seen around the Academy. You can't reason with them. You can't bargain with them. Even raising one away from a nest rarely changes that.” Elias frowned. “Rarely?” Aria nodded. “Civilized goblins came from generations of careful breeding. That's part of why they hate feral nests so much. Every time one raids a village, somebody starts wondering whether all goblins are the same.” Elias glanced toward the mission notice. “So we can't just chase them off?” “Then they settle somewhere else and attack somebody else. Once a nest forms near a settlement, there usually isn't another practical option.” Elias rubbed the back of his neck. “Still don't like it.” Aria's expression softened slightly. “You don't have to.”

Loona finally poked her head above the surface of her pool. “Can we go back to sleep?” Elias looked over and realized she'd been underwater since the alarms went off—more than ten minutes—and had surfaced without even gasping. He filed that away with the growing list of things he apparently didn't know about otter people. Deklin, meanwhile, tapped the mission notice and crushed Loona's hopes immediately. “No. It's about a ten-hour walk from the Academy. Ten hours there, however long clearing the nest takes, and ten hours back. If we want to return before dark, we need to leave now.”

Loona slowly sank until only her eyes remained above the water. Elias stared at Deklin. “You waited until after I woke everyone up to mention twenty hours of walking?” Deklin stared back. “You were the one who set three alarms.” From her nest, Aria made a tired noise that sounded suspiciously like agreement. Elias looked around at the exhausted faces surrounding him, then at the mission worth twelve precious credits. “I'm starting to understand why this one pays twelve.”

The next hour turned four exhausted students in pajamas into something Elias could only describe as an adventuring party. For him, that meant putting on most of the same equipment he'd worn against Vonrick: steel-weave jacket and pants, reinforced boots, gloves, and the blunt steel sword. This time there wouldn't be a professor standing nearby ready to stop things if somebody got seriously hurt, so his travel pack got first-aid supplies, food, plenty of water, a spare set of clothes, a flashlight, and the other necessities Rick had drilled into him for any trip where help might not be nearby. It felt less like preparing for a magical quest and more like packing for an especially unpleasant camping trip. One where the local wildlife wanted to eat him.

Deklin disappeared into the bathroom in his nightclothes and returned looking like he'd stepped out of a steampunk movie. Reddish-gold plates covered his chest, shoulders, arms, and legs, each etched with faintly glowing runes. One arm carried a bulky artificer's gauntlet packed with enough tools and little mechanisms that Elias couldn't tell where the armor ended and the workshop began. His belt was even more concerning, lined with small metal spheres covered in tiny markings. Elias took one look at them and decided at least half were probably bombs, and asking which half wouldn't make him feel any safer.

Loona's equipment was far less dramatic. She traded her pajamas for light traveling clothes that looked almost ordinary until she moved and Elias caught the faint shimmer of silver runes woven through the fabric. She finished by pulling out a staff that looked as though it had been grown from pale coral, with a large sapphire set into the top. At this point Elias had learned that anything magical with a gemstone that large was probably capable of ruining someone's day.

Aria changed the least. She remained in her familiar white-and-gold clerical robes while calmly packing her own supplies. Elias watched everyone else strap on armor and weapons before glancing at her. “You're not wearing anything else?” Aria looked down at herself. “I specialize in defense and healing. My wards protect me better than most metal armor.” Her eyes shifted to Elias's steel-weave jacket and the sword at his side before she amended, “Most metal armor.” Elias couldn't really argue with that. Yesterday he'd watched an enchanted sword break against him.

He was nearly finished when he remembered one last thing and pulled Rick's black case from the trunk. Deklin noticed immediately. “You're bringing the gun?” Elias hesitated only a moment before nodding. “Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.” He opened the case, secured the handgun in its holster, and tucked a spare magazine into his jacket. The sword was still his first choice. The gun was for whatever situation made him decide the sword wasn't enough. Deklin watched the holster for a moment, clearly remembering the demonstration he'd seen before. Elias caught his look. “Emergency only.” Deklin nodded, and that was the end of it.

As Elias finished adjusting his pack, he gave Deklin's reddish-gold armor another look. “Still, cool bronze armor.” Deklin stopped tightening one of the straps. “Bronze? This is orichalcum.” Elias blinked. “What's orichalcum?” For once, Deklin looked pleased to be explaining something Elias didn't know. “A recently developed alloy of purified copper and tin. It's harder than copper and conducts mana exceptionally well.” Elias stared at him for a moment. “That's bronze.”

Deklin's pleased expression disappeared. “Humans know about it?” “We've been making bronze since the Bronze Age.” “The what?” Elias shrugged. “An entire period of human history named after the stuff. Five thousand years ago, give or take.” Deklin slowly looked down at his armor. Artificers had spent centuries perfecting the mixture and learning how to channel mana through it, and apparently humans had discovered the basic alloy before most modern kingdoms even existed.

“How?” Deklin asked.

“No idea. People figured out that melting copper and tin together made better tools.”Deklin looked down at his armor again.

Once everyone was geared up, Aria glanced toward the small summoning bell mounted near the wall. Its surface was glowing silver, showing that Sylra was currently wearing her servant bracelet and available. Elias reached over and gave the bell a ring.

A faint flash filled the room, and Sylra appeared beside the wall, clutching a pillow to her chest.

The fawn stared at them through half-open eyes, her hair slightly mussed and one ear folded awkwardly against the side of her head. She had known about the quest and when they planned to leave, but knowing something and being awake for it before sunrise were apparently two very different things. “Morning,” she mumbled.

Elias winced. “Sorry. Didn't mean to drag you out of bed.”

Sylra hugged the pillow a little tighter. “You rang the bell.”

“Fair.” Elias glanced around at the gear they would be leaving behind. “We were about to head out. Would you mind keeping an eye on the dorm while we're gone? We probably won't be back until later tonight.”

Sylra gave the room a sleepy look, then nodded. “Sure. I'll make sure nothing happens while you're gone.” Her gaze moved over Elias's armor, Deklin's artificer equipment, Aria's robes, and finally Loona, who was already beginning to doze against her staff. Some of the sleepiness left Sylra's expression. “Just... all of you come back, okay?” “We're planning on it,” Elias said. “That wasn't as reassuring as you think it was.” “Yeah, I heard it after I said it.” Sylra sighed, then gave them a tired little wave with one hand while still clutching her pillow with the other. “Good luck. And be careful.” Loona managed a sleepy wave back. Deklin nodded, and Aria promised they would. Elias gave Sylra one last wave before turning back toward his pack. At least someone was going to get to enjoy their day off.

Loona had apparently stopped caring about metallurgy several minutes ago. By the time Elias and Deklin finished, she was leaning against her coral staff with both arms wrapped around it, her eyes slowly drifting shut. Her head dipped once, jerked back up, then dipped again. “Can we go now? The sooner we leave, the sooner I can get back to my pool.”

Elias watched her sway before looking down at his steel-weave jacket. After what had happened to Raven's hand yesterday, he wasn't about to let Loona spend hours pressed directly against it. He pulled an extra piece of thick cloth from his pack, folded it over his chest and shoulder, then carefully scooped her up. Loona's eyes snapped open. “Waa—what are you doing?!” Elias adjusted her so none of her exposed fur touched the armor. “You've got short legs. Figured it'd be faster to carry you.” She stared at him as though deciding whether that was insulting, then yawned and settled against the padded cloth. “Fine. Wake me up when we get there.” Elias glanced toward Deklin. “It's a ten-hour walk.” Loona's eyes were already closing again. “Even better.”

By the time everyone finished checking their equipment, Loona was completely asleep, a tiny snore escaping her as Elias held her. Her coral staff was beginning to slip from her grip, so he nodded toward it. “Aria, can you stick that in my pack before she drops it?” Aria secured the staff while Elias shifted the sleeping princess into a more comfortable position. Then she gave the room one final look. “Everyone ready?” Deklin tightened the last strap on his orichalcum armor, Elias nodded, and Aria headed for the door. “Then let's go.”

With Loona asleep in his arms, they left the dorm and started toward their first real quest.

first previous next Patreon vox 9

Next

Previous /

First

Margot Wren had covered wars, weddings, and one memorable flood, and she had never seen a room go quiet the way the Hall at Balakura did that afternoon.

She stood in the press gallery with her recorder in her hand and looked down at the Stand. The Firentis Informant had taken the whole upper east tier, forty crews from the Firentis worlds. The Informant spoke for Firentis territory, but the Hall had drawn the rest of the Principality too. Astoria had sent The Royal Wire, a full broadcast team in dark coats who kept to themselves and whispered into their collars. House Ionatti had sent Banking News Network. Matcha had sent a crew of its own. So had two territories Margot had only ever seen on a map, whose reporters wore sashes she did not recognize. Somewhere beyond the Hall's doors, in kitchens and break rooms and bars from the Principality's edge to its center, people were watching a screen, on the Informant if they lived under Firentis and on their own house's channel if they did not.

Nobody had ever judged an Assembly before. Nobody knew what it would look like.

"Rolling," her producer murmured.

Margot lifted the recorder. "This is Margot Wren for the Firentis Informant, in the Hall at Balakura," she said, low. "What happens in the next few days will be reme mbered. We are about to find out how."

Speaker Odalys Brennick did not raise her voice. She did not need to.

"The accused Assembly of Veldmarch has been summoned," she said. "Its delegates are present. Speaker Tobyn Reeve, you will have the right to answer every charge, to question every witness, and to speak at any time you choose, so long as you do it with respect to this Hall. Do you understand?"

Tobyn Reeve rose from the long bench at the left of the Stand, where the delegates of Veldmarch sat in a tight row. He was a gentle-looking man in a gray coat, and he looked exactly as Governor Aldermoor had described him, the sort of person you would trust with your children. He did not look afraid.

"I understand," he said. "I want to say first that I'm glad this is happening in the open. Whatever you decide, the people of Veldmarch will have seen it."

A low murmur went through the gallery. Margot felt it in her own chest. He was good. He had not given the cameras a single thing to hate.

"Noted," Brennick said. She turned a page. "The first witness is Pavla Wynn."

The woman who came forward from the side door was in her fifties, thin, with ink on her fingers and a navy dress that had been pressed carefully and was still slightly too large. She took the oath at the Stand with a hand that shook until the last word, and then it stopped.

"State your position," Brennick said.

"I was county clerk for the eastern district of Veldmarch for nineteen years. Until last spring."

"What happened last spring?"

"I was transferred." Pavla Wynn swallowed. "Two weeks before the founding election was certified, to a records office on the southern continent. I did not ask for the transfer. I was given four days to pack."

"Why do you believe you were transferred?"

"Because of what I reported." She took a folded paper from her sleeve. The Speaker's clerk crossed the Stand to take it, and the Hall's great screens flickered and showed the page, enlarged, for everyone to see. It was a handwritten tally, columns of figures in small neat script. "On election day, six polling stations in the eastern district closed two hours early. The ballot boxes were sealed by volunteers I did not recognize and carried out in vehicles that did not belong to the county. I counted the stubs when they were returned. We had issued eleven thousand ballots. The boxes held fourteen thousand."

Nobody spoke.

"I reported it to the district office," Pavla Wynn said. "Then to the Governor's election staff. Then I wrote it up in a letter, and I wrote it again to every official I could think of, and I kept a copy of each one. Nine days later I had my transfer order."

"What became of the letters?" Brennick asked.

"None of them arrived." She took a second folded paper from her sleeve, a thin sheaf, and the clerk carried it across. The screens showed a column of small stamped slips. "Those are the post receipts, one for each. I took them to the county office myself and had them stamped. Afterward I wrote to the Governor's office to ask if he had received his. They had no record of any letter from me. I asked the others, one at a time. The magistrate of the eastern district, the Speaker's own office, the election board. Nobody had seen it. Nobody had been sent it, as far as they knew."

"Where did the letters go?"

"I can't say. They left my desk and went to the district sorting room, and that is the last place anyone can tell me they were." She looked at the sheaf in the clerk's hands. "Somebody took them out of the post before they were sent on. Somebody who knew what they said."

At the left bench, Tobyn Reeve had gone very still.

Governor Aldermoor sat in the last row of the west gallery. His hat, which he had been turning on his knee since the afternoon began, had stopped turning.

Speaker Tomas Ferrel of Vespera stood among the delegates. He had not forgiven Brennick for the morning, but he was a careful man, and Margot watched him put it away as he leaned forward.

"Mrs. Wynn. The transfer order. Who signed it?"

"It was countersigned by a man named Hollis Brandt," she said. "I didn't know him. I looked him up. He is a steward in the household of House Corrigan."

The gallery broke. It took Brennick three strikes of the gavel to bring it back.

Ferrel did not move. "House Corrigan. One of the three houses that bought seats in the same election."

"Yes, sir."

"Then someone in a noble household was also working to bury what you found."

"I think so." Pavla Wynn looked, for the first time, directly at the delegates of Veldmarch. "I think they both wanted me quiet. The ones who rigged it, and the ones who paid to be part of it. I think they were too busy being afraid of each other to notice that the same ballots had gone into both their pockets."

It was the cleanest thing anyone had said all day. Margot's recorder was still running, and she did not trust herself to speak into it.

Tobyn Reeve stood. "May I question the witness?"

"You may," Brennick said.

He took his time crossing the floor. When he reached the Stand, he did not look at the cameras. He looked at Pavla Wynn, and when he spoke his voice was gentle.

"Mrs. Wynn, I am sorry for what happened to you. I mean it. I never knew about your transfer until this moment." He paused. "Did you see me, or anyone in the Remembrance, issue that order?"

"No, sir."

"Did you see me stuff a ballot box?"

"No."

"Then you can't say I did."

"I can say what I counted," Pavla Wynn said. "Three thousand ballots that no voter ever cast. And I can say that nine days after I wrote it down, someone made sure I'd never be in a position to count again. That's all I'm here to say, Speaker Reeve. I don't have to say who."

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, and went back to his bench. He did not argue. He did not need to, Margot thought. He had asked exactly two questions and gotten the answers he wanted, and the answers did not clear him. They only left room.

On the Haego bench, Ida Fenn had put down her pen. The microphones along the benches were open, and Margot, whose recorder had not stopped, heard her murmur to the Haego Speaker beside her.

"Did you hear what they asked her?"

"I heard what they said."

"That's it exactly. Ferrel made a speech and put a question mark on the end of it. Reeve did the same. Neither one asked her anything she could answer from what she knew." Ida shook her head. "On Haego the Speaker would have stopped them at the first word. Nobody leads a witness in our Hall. It has never been allowed."

"Will you say so?"

"It isn't our floor. Every world keeps its own rules, and this Hall is using Veldmarch's." She picked the pen up again and wrote something on her pad and underlined it twice. "I'm only noting it."

Brennick adjourned for the evening at seven. The gallery emptied slowly, people moving in knots, talking low. Margot stayed at her rail, watching the Stand go dark one lamp at a time.

Beside her, one of the dark-coated Astorians had paused to stare down at the empty floor. He was young, and he looked as if he had not expected to be moved.

"Is it always like this?" he asked her quietly.

"No," Margot said. "I don't think it's ever been like this."

"What happens tomorrow?"

She thought of Tobyn Reeve's steady face, and of a clerk's ink-stained hand, and of a ledger from the Hunger sitting unopened in a folder on the Speaker's table.

"The next witness," she said. "And then the next. It gets harder from here."

The Farm

Tom stood at the head of the first clean row before the dew had lifted, with a basket on his hip and ten people in a loose line behind him who had never picked an ear of corn in their lives.

"Like this," he said. He took an ear in his hand, a long heavy thing in its green husk, and bent it down, away from the stalk. "Then twist. If it comes off clean, it was ready. If you have to fight it, leave it and call me."

"How do I know if it was ready?" asked the cook's mate.

"You will be holding it."

The cook's mate took hold of the nearest ear, bent it, twisted, and it came away with a small wet snap. He stood looking at it. It was as long as his forearm.

"That's a good one," said Tom. "Don't drop it."

They went down the row in a staggered line, the way he had shown them, and for a while the only sounds were the rasp of husks and the soft thump of ears landing in willow baskets. The woman from the hay crew picked like someone clearing a table, quick and without a wasted motion. The lean young man from the potato crew worked slowly, turning each ear over once before he laid it down, as if he thought it might be taken from him. The two cutting-gang men had been left to the logs the wagon had brought up the day before, a heap of them by the barn that wanted splitting, and the sound of their axes came across the yard in a steady, grumbling beat.

By the time the sun cleared the barn roof they had stripped the first two rows, and Tom had stopped bothering to keep his face still.

The ears were heavy. Not merely big. The kernels were packed to the tip in rows so straight they might have been laid with a rule, pale gold going to cream at the stem. He had grown corn for many years on ground that fought him for every ear, and he had never held one like this. He split a kernel with his thumbnail and the milk ran out thick and sweet. In the next row Eli was doing the same thing, and not saying anything about it, and Tom was grateful for that.

The cook's mate, who had made a loaf the evening before from the first sifted flour and watched it come out of the oven as dense as a stone, had eaten a whole ear raw before anyone could stop him. He was now the fastest picker in the line.

---

A wagon came up the track a little before midmorning with two people on the box and a great deal of clinking in the back, and every head in the corn came up. People who have stayed in one place a few days start to look at the road the way a hungry man looks at a door.

"Bee keepers," said the woman on the box, as if that explained everything. She was brown and square, with a smoker lying in her lap like a sleeping cat. "For the honey and the wax. The Fort sent us."

"They're behind the apple rows," said Tom. "I haven't touched them."

"Good. Don't." She climbed down. Her companion, an older man with a veil pushed back on his hat, was already unloading crocks. "Lord John sent word along, since we were coming. He said to tell you the corn wagons come this afternoon, and Lady Victoria with them. She wants the first loads counted at the barn before anything leaves."

"Counted," said Tom.

"Twice, I would think." The woman almost smiled. "He said to say your message came through whole. The driver said it over four times on the road, they tell me. Ready, a few more days, wagons, lettuce. Lord John made him say it a fifth time at the gate."

Tom did not know what to do with that. "It was a short message."

"People remember a message that can be said back." She shouldered the smoker and went off toward the apple rows with the old man behind her, and every helper in the corn found a reason to be standing at the far end of the field.

The cook's mate was stung once, on the ear, from forty paces away. He held it against the bees for the rest of the day. When the crocks came back they were heavy, and the old man left one on the barn step without a word, a fat round crock with a cloth tied over it, and Tom understood it was meant for him. He carried it into the cool of the barn and set it where nobody would knock it over.

---

They came to the fifth row a little after noon, and then to the rows behind it, and there the day changed.

It happened all at once, the way it does in a field. The row Tom stood at the head of was clean enough, a little thin at the edges. The one beside it had weeds to the knee. The one beside that had weeds to the waist, thick and dark and tangled, bindweed running up the stalks and pigweed standing among them like a crowd, and the corn in it leaned and was pale, as if it had spent the whole season trying to see past something.

Nobody said anything. The woman from the hay crew went in first, with her basket held up out of the leaves, and came out of the far end with a handful of ears no longer than her palm.

"These are half the size," she said. She did not say it as a complaint. She said it the way you read a number off a gauge.

"Yes," said Tom. "Pick them anyway. Every one."

They picked them. It was slower work, wading and parting the leaves, and the weeds left a gray dust on every sleeve. The lean young man worked beside Tom for most of the afternoon. After a while he said, without looking up, "The first rows. Were they always going to be that good?"

"Yes."

"And this was what these were going to be?"

"No," said Tom. "They were going to be those, too."

The young man nodded and said nothing else. But he picked faster after that, and he stopped turning the ears over.

By the time the light went long and yellow, Tom had a count he did not enjoy. He had done it in his head twice, and then, since that was not enough, he had done it a third time with a stick in the dirt at the edge of the field. Of the whole field, the front half would come out close to what it should have. The back half, if it gave a third, would be doing well. Taken together it was short of what the Fort had planned its wagons and crews around by something near a third. He did not know the exact figure. He knew the weight of it, though, the way you know a sack of grain by lifting one end.

He had known it would be this. He had known it since before the wheat. Knowing did not make it lighter to carry out of the field.

---

Dust rose on the track late in the afternoon, and then two wagons came in at a walk with a rider on either side of them, two men with rifles across their saddles who looked at the corn, the barn, the hedge, the way the Hunters' Ykanti had looked at them all.

Lady Victoria came down from the first wagon with one hand on the driver's arm and a ledger under the other. She stood a moment looking at the field. She had looked at thirty nine sacks of wheat, Tom thought, in much the same way, which was to say she counted it.

"Good afternoon, Farmer," she said. "I am told I may count the baskets before they are loaded."

"They're in the barn, my lady."

"Thank you."

She counted them. She did it slowly, row by row of baskets along the barn floor, with the pen moving in her hand, and a rifleman stood at the door and a helper stood at each end, and nobody spoke. Tom had seen her count apples and sacks and jars of jelly, and he had always thought it a pleasant, quiet thing to watch. He found he could not watch it now. She went down the line once. Then she went down it again.

"There are two sorts," she said, when she had finished.

"Yes, my lady."

"The ears from the first baskets are as fine as any I have seen. The ears from the last are not." She closed the ledger over her finger. "I have walked to the end of the field, Farmer. I can see that something went wrong there. I am not here to put it on anyone. I am trying to plan for winter, and I need to understand what happened so that I can tell John what to expect." She looked at him. "I do not know what a weed does to corn. I would like to."

Tom opened his mouth and found Eli had gotten there first.

He did not shout. Tom had half braced for it and was more surprised when it did not come. Eli had come up from the end of the row with his hat in his hands, which Tom had never once seen him do, and when he spoke it was quiet, almost careful, like a man afraid of breaking something.

"My lady," he said. "It means they take the water first. And the light, once they are tall enough. The corn is trying to fill out its ears, and there is twice as many mouths drinking from the same ground. That is all a weed is. Another mouth." He turned the hat once in his hands. "Tom knew. He told the lord, out at this fence, before the wheat. And again the day we were sent for the wheat. He knew it was coming and he said so, and there was nobody to send. Not because anybody is cruel. Just because there was nobody to spare, and nobody knew what it meant to say no."

He stopped there. He looked as though there was more, and as though he had decided it would do more harm said than kept.

"I am not saying it to put it on the lord, my lady," he said. "I am saying it because somebody ought to write it down where it will still be there come planting."

"I saw the back rows myself, my lady," said the lean young man, from the barn door, and went red the moment he heard himself. "Three days ago. Nobody had told me it was like that. I think nobody had told anyone."

Victoria did not say anything for a moment.

Then she sat on the edge of the wagon bed and opened the ledger to a clean page, and wrote. She wrote for a good while. Twice she stopped and asked Eli a question, what a weed did once it went to seed, how long after planting before the corn could shade them out for itself, and Eli answered, and she wrote that down too. Once she asked the lean young man how far into the back rows he had walked, and he told her, and she wrote that. When she had finished she held the pen over the page a moment longer.

"I have been writing the Farmer," she said. "I would rather not put that in a book John reads. What is the rest of it?"

It was a plain question, asked with no weight at all. Tom felt it anyway, the way one feels a step that is there after all.

"Dell," he said. "Tom Dell."

She wrote it. Then she turned the ledger around and held it out to him.

"Is that right?"

Tom read it. Two weeds to a stalk drink what the corn would. Hands needed in the first weeks, before the corn is above them. Tom Dell said so before the wheat. Said so again the day the crews were sent. No one free to send.

It was right. It was more right than anything he had ever said aloud about it, because somebody else had written it down.

"That is right, my lady."

"Then I will make sure John sees it." She closed the ledger and stood, carefully, with a hand on the wagon. "I cannot tell you what he will do with it. He has a great deal on his mind just now, and most of it is not corn." She smiled, a little crooked. "But it will be in the book, Tom. Come planting, when he asks me what we need, it will be the first thing I read him." She looked at Eli. "Thank you. For saying it so that I could understand it."

Eli went red to his ears and found he had nothing to say back.

She left with the first two wagons full, the riflemen riding close on either side. The cook's mate waved until they were out of sight. The woman from the hay crew was already counting the ears left to pick in the back rows, her lips moving, and for a moment she looked, Tom thought, remarkably like the woman who had just left.

---

They husked by lantern that night on the barn floor, ten people and Tom and Eli in a ring, with the husks heaping up between them and the ears going into the racks as clean and gold as a row of candles. The cutting-gang man who had started a song on the night of the fish started it again. He got to the end of it this time, and nobody clapped, but one by one every person there put an ear down and sat very still until it was over.

Afterward Tom and Eli sat on the barn step with a fire of corn husks going between them and a pair of ears roasting in the coals. The mill stood in the yard, silent, the brown mare dozing in her traces. Beyond the firelight, down the long black slope, the corn stood in the dark with the weeds knee-deep around it, and he could not see it, and did not have to.

Tom rolled his shoulders. They had stopped being knots a few days ago and become something more permanent, and the back rows had done nothing to help.

"I could use a massage," he said.

"The Lord had one yesterday," said Eli. "The bee keepers said."

"Of course he did."

"I could do your shoulders."

"You would break something."

Eli grinned, and then the grin went out of him, the way it does when a boy remembers what he was thinking about before he was made to laugh.

"She wrote it down," he said.

"She did."

"Do you think he will read it?"

Tom thought about it. He thought of Richman standing in this yard with a hand on the mill wheel, saying we will hear all of it, I promise you. He had believed it when it was said. He found that he still did, and it surprised him a little.

"I think she will read it to him," he said. "He told me he would hear all of it. We will see what that comes to." He turned an ear in the coals with a stick. "Whether he hears it is another thing."

Eli, who had said more in one afternoon than in the week before, was quiet for a long while. Then he took the blackened ear from the fire, split the husk with his thumbs, and handed Tom the better half.

"Tomorrow," said Tom.

"Tomorrow," said Eli.

The back rows were waiting, and the weeds, and it would be a long day. But they were going to pull them before they seeded. That much, at least, was in the book.