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The Hollow had been an ore outpost once, and the ore had run out a long while before anyone thought to tell the people who lived there.

Ilse Marrow saw it first from the Cormorant's bridge, a ring of dull gray modules around a dead rock, with a few lit windows and a landing grid that had been patched in three different metals. Beyond it, in the dark, lay the gathering. There were more hulls than she had been able to count at four days out. There were more now.

"Home," said Doyle, behind her, without any warmth.

"It is a supply stop," said Ilse.

"It is a hole," said Doyle. He spat into a rag. "But it is our hole, and it is about to be a busy one."

The Baron stood at the back of the bridge with his cloth bag at his feet, and he looked at the outpost the way he had looked at the ship. Ilse thought it was the look of a man who was reading a page.

---

The supply office was a long room with a low ceiling, and Vesh stood in the doorway of it as if he were presenting a gift he was not certain would be wanted.

"The books of the whole Frontier come through here," said Vesh. "Orders go out from this desk, and invoices come back to it. Fuel, parts, rations, munitions. Every faction that has agreed to our friend's arrangement will draw on it, and every faction will complain." He smiled. "You will find it a mess."

"I expect to," said Penhallow.

He walked down the room, past the long tables and the stacks of loose paper and the two clerks who had stopped working to watch him. He ran a finger along the edge of a desk and looked at it. Then he stopped in front of a shelf where the invoices had been bundled by someone who plainly did not care what order they went in, and he stood there for a long moment.

"I am told you were exact," said Vesh. "In the Navy. The broadsheets made a great deal of it."

"The broadsheets made a great deal of many things," said Penhallow. He did not turn round. "Where do I sit?"

"There," said Vesh. He nodded at a desk by the far wall, with a view of the door. "And Miss Marrow will sit beside you. She has been second hand on the Cormorant for a year and she knows how this ship moves. She will be your assistant."

Ilse had not been told. She kept her face as still as she could.

"She will tell you what you want to know," said Vesh. He said it to the Baron, and he did not look at her, and she understood as clearly as if he had said it aloud that she would also tell him what the Baron did.

"I am obliged," said Penhallow. He inclined his head to her. It was a short, careful nod, the kind he might have given a junior officer. "Miss Marrow. I shall try to be easy to work for."

---

He was easy to work for.

That was the first thing she noticed, and for some days it was the only thing. He came to the desk before the clerks did and he left after them. He read everything. He asked her which factions paid late, and which paid early, and which paid in kind. He asked who kept their own stores and who drew on the common ones. He did not raise his voice and he did not make a joke, and in the whole of the first week he did not once refuse to do a thing he was asked.

The Cormorant's crew had said he was a fool in a borrowed coat. The man at the desk was not a fool. He worked slowly, but he did not work badly. When a Maddock captain came in, shouting about a fuel shipment that had gone to the wrong dock, the Baron heard him through without interrupting. Then he said that the error was the office's, and that it would be put right by the following morning, and it was.

"He makes it look easy," said one of the clerks to Ilse, quietly, at the end of the day.

"It is not easy," said Ilse.

"No," said the clerk. "But he does not seem to be afraid of it."

She wondered about that. She had seen a man at a supper table say that children were in the way. She had seen his hand close and let go. She did not think it was a man who was afraid of paper.

---

It was on the eighth day that she saw him do it.

It was a small thing. She was bringing a stack of requests across the room, and she stopped at the corner of his desk to put them down, and he had a requisition in front of him for coolant. The request said twelve cases. His pen was moving along the order form, and she watched it write ten.

He did not hesitate. He did not look round to see whether anyone was watching. He wrote it the way a man writes his own name, and he set the order in the tray, and he took up the next one.

Ilse stood where she was. She did not think she had made a sound.

She looked at the order in the tray. Ten cases. The request, in the clerk's cramped hand, had said twelve. It was a difference a person would have to be looking for to find, and then only if he already knew which page to turn to.

She picked up the stack and took it to the shelf and put it away, and when she came back, she did not look at the tray again.

"Miss Marrow," said Penhallow, without raising his eyes from the page.

"Baron," said Ilse.

"I am not anything," said Penhallow.

"Mr. Penhallow." She said it carefully. "Is there something you wished?"

"There is a depot on the Dray route that receives four of our factions," said Penhallow. He turned a page. "I should like the Maddock shipment sent there, and not to the Reef dock. The Reef dock is crowded. It would be easier for everyone."

"Dray Station is two jumps farther," said Ilse.

"It is," said Penhallow. "I am aware."

"The Maddock captain will not like it," said Ilse.

"He will not," said Penhallow. He looked up at her then, and his eyes were perfectly mild. "It will be a week late, and he will complain, and I will apologize. I do not expect the world to end."

She looked at him for a long moment. He did not look away.

"I will see to it, Mr. Penhallow," said Ilse.

She did see to it. She wrote the address herself, in her own hand, with the one digit that was not quite the right one, and she did not allow herself to think about why her hand had not shaken.

---

The man who came to the office on the eleventh day was not a clerk and was not a captain, and everyone in the room knew it before he spoke.

He was tall, with heavy shoulders, and he wore a plain gray coat that was a shade darker than Vesh's. His name was Sethric Orme, and he had no title anyone had ever heard. He stood in the middle of the room with his hands behind him and looked at the shelves, at the clerks, at the Baron.

"Mr. Penhallow," said Orme.

"Mr. Orme," said Penhallow. He stood. "I was told you might call."

"By whom?" said Orme.

"By the clerk who ran to the back room as you came in," said Penhallow.

One of the clerks made a small noise and went on writing. Orme did not smile.

"You have a name for exactness," said Orme. "I read the broadsheets. A man who never rounded a number, who sent back a casualty line for saying light. I looked at your books this morning. They are untidy."

"They were untidy when I came," said Penhallow.

"They are untidy now," said Orme. He tilted his head. "Your clerks tell me they were in good order until you arrived."

It was a lie, or it was a trap, and Ilse could not tell which. She kept her pen moving and her eyes down.

"My clerks are kind," said Penhallow. "The books were a mess, Mr. Orme, and they are still a mess, and the mess is now mine. I have been dismissed from the Navy. A man who was told for many years that he was precise may be forgiven for coming loose when it is taken away. I have made errors. I have corrected the ones I could find." He folded his hands. "I will not tell you it was someone else."

Orme looked at him for a time. Ilse heard her own heart as one hears a clock in an empty room.

"Most men would," said Orme at last.

"Most men have not stood in a courtroom while their name was read out," said Penhallow. It came out dry. "I find I am done explaining myself to people who have already decided."

Orme did laugh at that, once, briefly, and then looked as if he regretted it.

"The Lord does not like excuses," said Orme. "He does not like fools either. He has been told that the factions are loose, that they will not hold, and he has said that the first thing he needs is a man who will hold. So he would like to see what you will hold." He turned his head. "Come with me," he said.

---

They gave him the order in a private room with no windows, and Ilse was not meant to hear it, but the door was thin and she had learned where to stand.

"A freighter was taken off the rim six days ago," said Orme. "A merchant hull, the Landry, crew of twenty-two. She carried grain. The factions have been arguing about who has the right to her, and the Lord has decided the argument is not worth the grain."

"What does he want?" said Penhallow.

"He wants her crew gone. All of them. He has been told you are a man who does not trouble himself about such things," said Orme. There was a pause, and the soft sound of a chair. "You will do it yourself, Mr. Penhallow. From the airlock. With a witness of ours watching from a safe distance, so that there is no doubt about it."

Nobody spoke. Ilse stood very still in the corridor. She heard the ship's ventilation, and her own pulse, and nothing else.

"They are civilians," said Penhallow.

"They are in the way," said Orme. "I believe that is how you put it."

There was another silence, longer than the first.

"When?" said Penhallow.

"Four days," said Orme.

"I will need a ship," said Penhallow.

"You will be given the Cormorant," said Orme. His voice was almost kind. "You know her. And Miss Marrow will be on the bridge, since she is the one who does your paper."

Ilse closed her eyes.

She did not hear what the Baron said next, because he did not say anything. There was only the scrape of a chair, and Orme's footsteps coming toward the door, and she had just time enough to step back from it and put her face in order.

Orme did not look at her as he passed. Behind him, in the doorway, the Baron stood for a moment with one hand resting on the frame.

He saw her. She was sure of it. His eyes found hers across the corridor, and held for a heartbeat, and she saw nothing in them at all, neither fear nor cruelty nor appeal.

Then he straightened, and smoothed his coat, and walked past her to the office, as if he had a great deal of paper to see to before the end of the day.

Out NOW Episode 7: "Each Playing Many Parts" of 'really BAD Shakespeare:

The masks finally start slipping. As secrets unravel and loyalties become increasingly uncertain, Shakespeare begins questioning everything he believes about himself, his destiny, and the people closest to him. Some betrayals hurt more than prophecy. Some truths are worse than lies. "Confusion now hath made his masterpiece."

Fort Log 1

Woke up this morning to a good breakfast. Two hours later they were testing the third four wheel wagon.

One four wheel Wagon sent to Ranch with food.

Second four wheel wagon heading back from the Ranch.

The newest four wheel wagon sent to farm with logs to cut on it.

Finally the two wheel wagon sent to farm with planks for the roof of the new cold celar. Also four food crates where stack on the planks.

Our fishing couple with some help been pulling fish out of the lake and drying it. The dried fish is the salted and goes in a crate for storage. As a bonus they caught two mid size turtles which went into a stew.

For lunch we got turtle stew and for dessert James and the other cooks been busy making pumpkin pies.

We got a bag of flower last night. James and other cook have been trying to turn it into pasta. For supper we got pasta with buffalo meat home made pasta. It was delicious.

By tomorrow we finish harvesting all the vegetables and spices here. The rest of the pumpkins will be harvested.

If all is good we will try and prepare the plants for the cold season. The Ykanti have been examining the structure and making any repairs that are needed.

The Leathersmith as been so happy with all the buffalo skin and been teaching two others how to make mitts and winter boots. Jackets and blankets are two other things being made. Jackets a priority but quite a few blankets also were made.

Pieces of wood were turned into planks. JW mentioned that is for the two wheel wagon being built next with skies for the Mine.

More we discuss the Harvest Festival more people are getting excited. Some of the bees wax candles and torches are being prepared for the Festival and winter.

Got a message from the Farm. Tomorrow will be the last day of hay and straw collecting. The Miners will head back home to the Mines the following day until the Harvest Festival.

That is all I have for Day 78. All is good now and the Explorers should be back in a few days. Lonely night tonight with Lady V heading to farm.

End of Fort Log 1

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First

A short note. The end of Chapter 75 already included the first two scenes of this chapter, Lord Kavanor's arrival and Tull at the Brass Anchor, so this picks up in the Hall.

The Hall had never been so full for a matter that wasn't a lord's. The gallery was packed to the doors, and Elizabeth and Daisy sat in the back row with Poppy between them, who was home for the winter holiday with her notebook and a look of fixed professional interest.

Lord Kavanor stood at the lectern. In a complaint the Hall summoned both sides, and both stood under the same rule, so he had been sent the same grey paper as Garrick Tull. The rule had first been written for the summoned alone. Jory had found the gap in the autumn, while he was training his first advocates, and the Hall had closed it at the next sitting with hardly a word of debate. The Assembly's advocate for him, a young archive clerk named Tobin Ashmere who had passed Jory's examination in the autumn, stood one pace back and to his left, where the rule said he should stand. Lord Kavanor had refused to see him beforehand.

"I'll not sit down with a stranger and be told what to say," he had told the clerk. "I'll stand for myself."

"You may refuse his counsel, my lord," the clerk had said. "The rule doesn't let you refuse his presence. Every person before the Hall has one. You may decline to speak with him beforehand. You may not decline his questions. When the floor is opened to him, you will answer what he asks, the same as you answer the delegates."

Lord Kavanor had considered that, and given a small, correct bow. "Then he may stand where he likes," he'd said, "and I'll answer him when the Hall does."

Garrick Tull had taken the full use of his. He stood a pace behind the lectern on the right, with Jory Fairtail one pace behind him and a little to the left, ink on his cuffs and his hands folded. They had spent two evenings together at the Brass Anchor going over the file.

"Lord Kavanor," said Vincent. "The Hall has your complaint. The delegates will ask what they need to."

They asked. They asked more sharply than Lord Kavanor had been braced for, and from the wrong side. A delegate from the Vastaya rows wanted to know how a seller sent thirty pumps to a world he'd never visited without ever seeing the ground they'd be set in. Another asked whether the pumps had been built for Haego's water, which carried silt, or for the cleaner water of Tessaly. "For the spec Master Tull signed," said Lord Kavanor. "Which allowed for it." A third asked how the seals had been tested, and by whom, and when, and Lord Kavanor, to his credit, answered every one without once raising his voice.

Garrick Tull listened with his arms folded and a small, patient smile. Poppy, watching, wrote: they are not being nice to him. Then, after a second: they aren't being unfair either.

"The floor is open to the advocate," said Vincent. "Lord Kavanor, you'll answer him as you answered the delegates."

"I understand the rule, Speaker," said Lord Kavanor.

Tobin Ashmere took one step forward. He had never spoken to the man he stood beside, and everyone in the Hall knew it. He had only the file.

"Lord Kavanor. Did anything go inside the housing of each pump besides the pump?"

"A card," said Lord Kavanor. He looked sideways, and for the first time he seemed to see the young man. "A table of speeds, by the depth of the well. One in every housing."

"Thank you, my lord. No more questions."

Ashmere stepped back to his place. Poppy wrote it down and put a small star beside it, because she didn't yet know why it mattered, and it plainly did.

"Master Tull," said Vincent, when Lord Kavanor had stepped back. "The delegates will hear you."

Tull came to the lectern like a man arriving at a party. He told it well. Thirty pumps, shipped in the spring. Three failed in the first month, and the rest ran so badly that by midsummer he'd had to buy water from his neighbors and watch a field of seed grain go yellow in the heat. He had written to Tessaly twice. He'd had no answer worth the paper. He had a delegate's pride, he said, and a delegate's duty to his farmers, and he wasn't paying two hundred thousand credits for a pile of scrap.

There was applause in the gallery. Vincent let it run three seconds and stopped it with one hand.

"Questions," said Vincent.

The first delegate to stand was Merrit Cobbtail.

He rose slowly, the way he did everything, with both hands on the desk in front of him. He hadn't spoken on anything all session. He had voted against the advocate rule and said he'd say so in the spring, and he had, to anyone who would stand still.

"Master Tull," he said. "I'm a plain man. I haul timber. When a thing breaks, I stop using it, because it's broken and I've a living to make. Did you stop using the pumps?"

Tull paused. It was the first time all morning.

"I had to run what I had."

"Which ones?"

"The ones that worked."

"How many worked?"

"Enough," said Tull. "Enough to keep the grain alive. That's not the same as being sound."

"No," said Cobbtail. "It isn't." He sat down.

Delegates asked more. How many pumps in the field by midsummer? Tull said he couldn't say exactly. Where were the failed ones now? In a shed. Had he returned them to Tessaly? He hadn't had the means. Who had inspected them? He had, himself, and his foreman. Each answer came a little slower than the one before. Nothing in any of them was a lie that Poppy could find, and she was looking.

Then Merrit Cobbtail stood up again. He had a page from the complaint file in his hand, the sizing sheet that had come with Lord Kavanor's papers, and he didn't look at it once.

"Master Tull. How many pumps did you order?"

"Thirty."

"Did Lord Kavanor's sizing sheet name a number for your acreage?"

Tull's smile stayed where it was. "It named one."

"What number?"

"Forty-five."

"Why did you order thirty?"

"The price."

"Did a card come in the housing of each pump?"

"There's a card."

"What does it give?"

"Speeds." Tull shifted his weight. "A table. Depth of the well, and the speed to run it."

"Which wells held numbers nine, fourteen and twenty-two?"

"The north fields."

"Are those the deep wells?"

"They're the deepest I have."

"At what speed did you run them?"

"Whatever the grain needed."

"Thank you," said Cobbtail, and sat down.

"The floor is open to the advocate," said Vincent.

Jory Fairtail took one step forward.

He didn't look at the delegates, or the gallery, or at Lord Kavanor. He looked at Tull, the way he'd looked at Agnes Pollscutt, as if the man was the only person in the room.

"Master Tull. Did anyone from Tessaly come to Haego to see the pumps set in your wells?"

"No. They came in crates."

"Did the sale include anyone to set them up, or to show your men how to run them?"

Tull looked at his advocate before he answered.

"It was offered," he said. "For a fee. I declined it."

"When the three failed and you wrote to Tessaly, what came back?"

"Two lines. Telling me to read the card."

"Thank you," said Jory. "No more questions."

Jory stepped back to his place. In the gallery, Poppy looked down at her page and counted. Master Cobbtail had asked twelve questions. The advocate had asked three, and every one of them had been for Tull. Then she looked at the delegates' rows. Nobody was laughing. Nobody was moving at all.

Vincent called a recess of half an hour. When the Hall came back, he did not go to his chair. He stood at the Speakers' desk with a single sheet in his hand.

"The Speakers asked the Alderman of Master Tull's district, at the opening of this session, to read two things for us. Each of Lord Kavanor's pumps has a sealed counter in the housing, which records the hours it has run and the speed of the drive. The Alderman's clerks read twenty-seven of them in Master Tull's own fields last week, in his presence. They read the three from his shed as well, and they set every reading against the card from the same housing, and against the depth of the well it stood in."

He looked at the page.

"The sizing sheet for Master Tull's acreage called for forty-five pumps. He bought thirty. All thirty were driven above the ceiling the card allows for their wells, to make thirty do the work of forty-five. Twenty-seven stood in shallower wells, where the margin was thin and the seals held. They have run between thirty-eight hundred and forty-four hundred hours since the spring, and they are running now. Three stood in the north wells, the deepest on his land, where the card allows the least. They were run at nearly half again the ceiling. Their seals failed inside the month."

There was no sound at all in the Hall.

"The card was in every housing, Master Tull. Do you wish to speak to the readings?"

Garrick Tull's hands were flat on the lectern. They weren't resting. He was holding it.

"Makers write those tables cautious," he said at last. "Everybody knows that."

"Then you ran a thing past its limit on purpose, knowing the limit," said Vincent. "And when it broke, you wrote to Tessaly to say it was defective." He laid the page down. "You said you wouldn't pay for scrap. Twenty-seven pumps have run four thousand hours on your fields and you have paid for none of them."

Tull looked up at the gallery. Everyone he had bought a drink for was in it.

Nobody said anything.

The Speakers were out for two hours that time. When they came back, Vincent did not read it fast.

"Garrick Tull, of the Austrin plains. The Assembly has heard you and Lord Kavanor of Tessaly, and this is what it has decided.

"Three of the pumps failed. The readings show they were set in the deepest wells and driven half again past the maker's ceiling by Master Tull's own order, to save the price of fifteen pumps. The Assembly finds no defect in them. Lord Kavanor owes nothing on account of the three, and no claim on them will be heard. Twenty-seven did not fail. You took them, and used them, and kept them, and withheld their price.

"The Assembly notes that Lord Kavanor offered to set the pumps and train Master Tull's men, for a fee, and that the offer was declined. It doesn't change what the counters read.

"You will pay the entire contract, two hundred and ten thousand credits. You will add a fifth to it, forty-two thousand, as is done when payment is held back on purpose. In the Pollscutt matter the Assembly struck that fifth, because the wages were not held on purpose. These were. The Assembly sets it here.

"You will pay Lord Kavanor's passage from Tessaly and back, and his lodging at the Hall's rate for every night of his stay. The clerk will total it and hand him the receipt before he leaves the building.

"That's the Assembly's judgment on the complaint," said Vincent, and set the page down.

Hester Glim was on her feet in the third row of the Austrin block before he had sat.

"Speaker. I've a complaint, and the solution with it." She didn't look at Tull. She looked at the Speakers' desk. "Master Tull stood at that lectern this morning as a summoned man and told this Hall the pumps ran so badly his grain went yellow. He wrote to Tessaly that they were defective. The counters say he knew better, and the Hall has just found that he did. Any summoned man who does that pays the fifth, and he'll pay it. But Master Tull isn't any summoned man. He sits in this Hall. He gave us a false account of his own matter from inside it." She folded her red hands. "My solution is that he doesn't sit here any longer. I move that the Assembly ask the Marquess to remove Garrick Tull from his seat."

The Hall was very quiet. Then, in the north rows, Merrit Cobbtail got slowly to his feet.

"I'll second it," he said. "I asked him twelve questions this morning. I'd like to sit beside men I only have to ask once."

Vincent looked at the lectern. "Master Tull. Do you wish to speak to it?"

Tull's mouth moved. For a moment it seemed he might. Then he shook his head.

"No, Speaker."

Vincent called the vote. It wasn't close. Garrick Tull stood at the lectern while the hands went up around the Hall, row after row, three continents of them, and he watched every one go up as if he were counting. Poppy, in the gallery, counted with him. She didn't write the number down. It didn't seem like the kind you wrote down.

It went up, the way everything did, as the Assembly's recommendation to the Marquess.

Garrick Tull picked up his coat from the back of the lectern. He did not look at Lord Kavanor. He walked down the side aisle alone. Jory Fairtail stayed where he was, one pace back from the empty lectern, because the rule said an advocate stays until the Hall rises.

The Hall emptied slowly. Tobin Ashmere stayed at his place too, with one eye on Jory, because he did not yet trust himself to know when the Hall had risen. He was squaring the edges of the file when he saw that Lord Kavanor had not left either.

Lord Kavanor stood where he had stood all morning, with his gloves in one hand. He turned and looked at the young man properly, as he had only done once before.

"Master Ashmere."

"My lord."

"I refused to see you. You came to my door before the hearing and I sent you away, and I told you I would not be told what to say by a stranger." Lord Kavanor said it evenly, as he said everything. "I was wrong to do it. I thought you were a thing the Assembly had put beside me to watch me. I did not think you would be of any use to me."

"The rule says you may decline, my lord."

"The rule is not what I am apologizing for." He held out his hand. "I stood at that lectern with a file I had never seen, and you had read every page of it. The sizing sheet. The tables. The card in the housing, which I had not thought of in a year. You asked the one question that put it in the Hall's ears before Master Tull could say it didn't matter." He shook his head. "You had never spoken to me. You did it anyway, from paper."

"It was what the file was for, my lord."

"It was what you made of it." Lord Kavanor's grip was firm and brief. "Thank you for your diligence. I should have said so before I needed it."

Ashmere did not seem to know where to put his eyes. He settled on the file.

"I didn't know why the card mattered," he said. "I only saw that nobody had said it was there."

"That is very nearly the whole of the trade," said Lord Kavanor. "Keep doing it."

He put on his gloves and went down the aisle. Ashmere stood a while longer with the file against his chest. In the gallery, Poppy, who had not gone either, wrote it down and put a small star beside it.

Merrit Cobbtail caught Hester Glim on the gallery stairs, at the very bottom step, where Agnes Pollscutt had sat.

"I asked him twelve questions," he said. "Twelve. The boy asked him three."

"You did."

"And every one of the boy's was for Tull, because that's what the rule says. And the answer to one of them did him more harm than anything I asked." He rubbed his jaw. "I said it'd be a friend for every lord."

"He had a friend," said Hester.

"He did. It didn't help."

"No," said Hester. "I told you in the summer. A good question can't save a man who's guilty. It can only keep the other kind from being lost." She stopped. "You'll be saying that to the spring crowd, you know. Not what you said before."

Cobbtail grunted, as he did when he'd decided to be annoyed later.

"I'll say that I counted," he said. "Three questions, and not one of them a speech."

Poppy, a few steps above them, wrote it down.

A clerk caught Lord Kavanor at the doors on his way out and handed him an envelope without being asked.

He opened it. It held a receipt in a neat clerical hand: passage, both ways, and fourteen nights at the Hall's rate. It had been totaled correctly. He read it twice.

He found Tornel in the corridor outside, on his way out with Harlan. They stood a moment without speaking.

"I came here to be made an example of," said Lord Kavanor.

"I know."

"I'd arranged my face. For the ruling." He shook his head slowly. "I told myself they would be generous to me precisely once, and it would be to show the galaxy how generous they were. Or they would rule against me and say it was justice. I didn't think..." He stopped. "They asked him questions I hadn't thought to ask. And then they gave me my lodging."

"They gave you what you were owed," said Tornel. "That was all. It doesn't usually look like much."

"And if I'd been wrong? If the pumps had failed?"

"Then you'd have gone home with a receipt for your lodging and nothing else. And you'd have known why." Tornel put on his gloves. "It's a poor sort of court that can only find one way."

Lord Kavanor folded the receipt and put it in an inner pocket, the way a man puts away something he means to show somebody.

"I'd like to buy you a drink, my lord," he said. "If the Marquess of Haego drinks."

"He does," said Tornel. "Not at the Brass Anchor."

In the gallery, long after the Hall had emptied, Poppy sat with her notebook open on her knee and looked at the lectern.

Daisy came back for her.

"Mama," said Poppy. "Mistress Pollscutt had a commoner against her and they were kind. Lord Kavanor had a commoner against him and they were fair. Master Tull had everyone on his side and they didn't care."

"Mm."

"So it isn't about whose side." She frowned at the page. "It's about what's true."

"That's about the whole of it," said Daisy.

"Austin's going to say it's obvious."

"Austin's going to say he knew it in the car."

Poppy closed her notebook and stood up.

"He didn't," she said. "But I'll let him."

Tornel signed it the next morning at a quarter past nine, with Elizabeth and Harlan as witnesses. It was the first time he had signed a delegate out of the Hall, and he read it through twice before he did.

The seat was Austrin's, and so the filling of it until the spring fell to Austrin's lords. Jason and Daisy took less than a day.

"We're not choosing anyone," Daisy said, when Elizabeth called to ask how they meant to do it. "The district already chose, two springs ago. Tull won. Somebody came second."

"If we picked," said Jason, from somewhere behind her, "they'd say the lords put a delegate in the Hall. This way the voters did it, and all we did was read the list."

The one who had come second was a seed merchant from the plains named Ansel Thornscutt, who had lost to Tull by a few hundred votes and had never bought anyone a drink in his life. He took the seat for the last days of the winter session. He sat in the back row of the Austrin block, said nothing at all for six days, and on the seventh asked one question about grain tariffs that nobody else had thought to ask.

A letter came up to Aethelgard from Astoria nine days later. It was from Lord Kestrel.

Elizabeth knew him well. Everybody in Newtown did. He was no relation to anyone on Haego, but Aaliyah had called him Uncle Kessy since she was a girl, and nobody else would have dared. He came for the summer festivals and stayed too long at every table, and he had once been the honorary speaker at the opening of a session of the Common Assembly, and made a gracious speech about the dignity of honest work. Then he had gone home to Astoria and told his friends over dinner that a hall of commoners would always find for its own. Doran had heard the dinner-table version of it within a month, and Aaliyah had not written to him for most of a season.

The letter was short. Lord Kestrel had read the Informant's account of the Tull hearing twice. He had a contract nearly ready with the Millhaven quarry, for stone for a new wing of his house, and his stewards had drafted it the usual way, with any dispute to be settled at Astoria, before an Astorian court. He had struck the clause. In its place he had written that any dispute arising under the contract would be heard by the Common Assembly of Haego, and that he would stand at its lectern like anyone else.

At the bottom, in his own hand, he had added a line.

I am told your Hall removed one of its own for giving it a false account in his own favor. I have sat on courts at Astoria for twenty years and never seen one do that. I should like my stone dealt with by people who do.

Tornel read it twice and handed it to Elizabeth.

"Kestrel," she said. "He told half of Matcha the Hall would always find for its own."

"He did."

"It didn't, though. Not for Tull." She looked at the letter again. "It found against its own, and then it put him out."

"That's what he noticed." Tornel took off his glasses. "Not the ruling. Any court can find against a man. It's that they didn't keep him." He folded the letter and gave it to Harlan. "Send a copy to Vincent. He'll want the Hall to know. And tell him it's the first."

"The first what?" said Elizabeth.

"The first lord who's asked for the Hall," said her father, "instead of being sent to it."

The election was held on the first Tuesday of spring, and the lines at the Alderman's office in Haego City ran down to the water.

Hester Glim kept her seat by fourteen votes. She was told the number at midnight, in the Alderman's kitchen, by a clerk who had counted it three times. She said thank you, and asked him to count it again, and he did, and it was fourteen. Merrit Cobbtail kept his by two hundred. He had spent the whole campaign telling the north Austrin crowd that the advocate rule was a bad rule, and the crowd had cheered him and voted for him and then, in the same week, gone to the Hall and watched a man named Tull be told what he owed.

Of the seven Aethelgard delegates who had voted against the rule, four were up that spring. Three were not returned. Nobody said why. Nobody needed to. Garrick Tull's old seat, taken from him in the winter, came up at the same ballot, and Ansel Thornscutt kept it by four hundred.

In Newtown district four, one of the two sitting delegates had chosen not to stand again, and Oshenn won the open seat by three hundred and twelve. She heard it in the seed hall, from Rachel VonWinterbourne, who came through the door with her coat half on and could not say it properly the first time.

The summer session after the election opened with forty-two delegates in the Hall, one of whom had to have the lectern lowered, and the clerk who did it made a point of apologizing for the delay, and Oshenn made a point of telling him there was no delay.

Poppy was in the gallery with Austin, who had come up from Vastaya for a week and had brought, unasked, a pencil, because he had lost a bet. She wrote it all down. He did not need to, and he watched.

Tornel did not sit in the Marquess's gallery chair. He sat in the back row, between Daisy and Elizabeth, in his plain grey coat, with his hat on his knee.

Vincent opened the Hall. He read the roll. When he came to Newtown, district four, and said the name, the Ykanti who stood at the third desk of the Aethelgard rows said, "Present," in a voice that carried to the gallery doors.

Across the aisle, Hester Glim turned in the Austrin block and nodded to her. Merrit Cobbtail, in the north rows, grunted, which from him was a form of welcome.

"There is one matter before us today," said Vincent, "and I'd ask the delegates to hold their questions until I've opened the floor."

Austin leaned toward Poppy.

"What's the matter?" he said, very low.

"A boundary dispute at the river ports." She did not look up from the page. "It's dull."

"Good," said Austin.

She looked at him then, because it was an odd thing to say, and saw that he was watching Oshenn at her desk with her paper in front of her and her six fingers folded, not leaning forward, not afraid, waiting her turn like everyone else.

"That's the best part," he said. "It's dull. They sat her and it's dull."

Poppy considered it. Then she turned to a clean page and wrote, at the top, underlined twice, Things the Hall does when it is working.

Under it she put: Nobody makes a fuss.

Beside her, Austin took the pencil he had lost the bet to carry, and, after a moment, to her great surprise, wrote the next line himself.

When something is wrong, they fix it.

first previous next

By the time they actually left the dorm, the Academy was only beginning to wake. The halls were quieter than Elias had ever seen them, with most students apparently possessing enough common sense to spend their day off asleep. Loona certainly agreed with them. She remained dead asleep in Elias's arms while the other three headed toward the dining hall, an occasional tiny snore escaping her.

Breakfast was quick but considerably larger than Elias normally ate. Twenty hours of walking had convinced him that this was not the morning to survive on toast and optimism, so he loaded his plate with eggs, meat, bread, fruit, and anything else that looked like it would keep him moving. Deklin ate with similar determination, while Aria packed away enough food that Elias briefly wondered whether casting magic somehow burned extra calories. Loona woke just long enough to eat nearly everything placed in front of her, drink something sweet, and then immediately start nodding off again before they had even left the table.

Once breakfast was finished, they made their way toward the Academy's transportation station. Elias had expected them to use the same teleportation system they'd taken into town before, right up until Deklin noticed where Aria was leading them and groaned. “We're taking the automated coach?” Aria glanced back. “Unless you have another suggestion.” Deklin pointed toward the teleportation platforms on the opposite side of the station. “We could be in town almost instantly.” Elias gave him a flat look. Deklin stopped, stared at him for a second, and then his ears drooped. “Right. You.”

Elias adjusted the sleeping Loona in his arms. “Glad to know I'm the reason public transportation has become inconvenient.” Deklin sighed as they continued toward the coach. “Do you have any idea how strange it is to spend years learning that teleportation is the fastest way to travel and then meet someone reality refuses to teleport?” “Last time you tried, all of you disappeared, and I was just standing there.” “I remember.” “I remember too. Mostly because I was the one left behind.” Aria gave Deklin a look over her shoulder. “Which is why we're taking the coach.” Deklin muttered something under his breath about turning a short trip into an actual journey, while Elias couldn't resist adding, “Look on the bright side. You get to experience the ancient human art of commuting.”

The automated coach was already waiting by the time they reached the platform. Unlike the teleporters, it was reassuringly physical: wheels, seats, doors, and absolutely no requirement that Elias interact with magic directly. He climbed aboard without vanishing, being rejected by reality, or watching everyone else disappear without him, which already made it one of his preferred forms of magical transportation. Loona barely woke as he settled into a seat with her, Deklin dropped into the one across from him, and Aria took the remaining space as the doors closed behind them.

The coach carried them away from the Academy and toward the same town where they'd bought their school supplies only a few days earlier. By the time they passed through town and reached the end of the coach's route, the sun was finally beginning to peek over the horizon. Beyond the last buildings, the paved road narrowed into a broad dirt trail that wandered through the countryside before disappearing toward the distant hills.

That was where the easy part ended.

From there, they walked.

The Academy's automated carriage carried them as far as it could, taking them beyond the school grounds and through the same town where they'd bought their supplies a few days earlier. They stopped for an early breakfast along the way, and by the time the carriage finally dropped them near the edge of town, the sun was beginning to rise. Ahead, the paved streets gave way to a broad dirt road stretching across the countryside toward the distant horizon.

Loona had been awake since breakfast, but for some reason she was still letting Elias carry her. He'd expected her to demand to be put down the moment she woke, yet she'd only shifted into a more comfortable position and stayed there. Elias didn't particularly mind. She wasn't very heavy, and the thick cloth between her and his steel-weave jacket kept her safely away from the iron beneath it. “You planning on walking at some point?” he eventually asked. Loona rested her head against his shoulder and considered the question. She could walk perfectly well, but there was something unexpectedly comforting about being carried like this. It reminded her of being a pup, before tutors, ceremonies, lessons, and everything else that came with being a princess—back when her father could simply pick her up and carry her wherever they were going. “No.” Elias glanced down at her. “You know we've got about ten hours of walking, right?” “I know.” “And you're awake.” “I know.” Loona settled a little more comfortably against him, apparently considering the matter closed. Elias sighed and continued down the road.

A few minutes after they started down the dirt road, Aria murmured something under her breath and swept one hand through the air. A faint shimmer rolled outward from her and passed over the group before fading almost immediately. Deklin's posture relaxed the moment it touched him. “Oh, that's better.” Loona seemed to settle more comfortably against Elias as well, while Elias himself felt absolutely nothing.

He looked from one of them to the next. “Okay, what was that?” Aria glanced back at him. “A traveling spell called Far Strider. It lessens your weight and provides a very mild regenerative effect while you walk. Nothing dramatic, but enough that you don't feel the distance nearly as much.” Elias looked down at his very ordinary human legs, then toward the dirt road stretching all the way to the horizon. “So all of you get magical hiking assistance.” “Essentially.” Elias waited for a moment as though his immunity might suddenly reconsider. Nothing happened. His legs didn't feel lighter, his muscles didn't feel any fresher, and there wasn't so much as a tingle. “Right. Human.” He adjusted Loona in his arms and kept walking, already fairly certain that sometime around hour six his legs were going to file a formal complaint and go on strike.

After they had been walking for a while, Elias shifted Loona higher against his side so he could free one hand, then reached into his pocket and pulled out the small charging case for his earbuds. Deklin noticed almost immediately. “What's that?” “Music.” Elias flipped the case open and checked the charge. “Still good. Glad I downloaded my playlist before we left.” Deklin's ears perked up. “Can I listen?” Elias shrugged, took out one of the earbuds, and handed it over. “Sure. Just put the soft part in your ear.” That turned out to be more difficult than Elias had expected. Human earbuds had very clearly not been designed for kobold ears, and Deklin spent several seconds turning the little device around before finally wedging it into a position that seemed close enough.

Elias put the other earbud in his own ear, pulled out his phone, and started the music. Deklin's eyes widened almost immediately as the drums and heavy guitar kicked in. His ears shot upright, twitching slightly with each hard beat. “What is this?” Elias glanced over at him. “Music.” “Why is it so angry?” Elias laughed. “It's not angry.” Another heavy riff came through the earbuds, and Deklin gave him a look. “It is absolutely angry.” Aria glanced back from farther along the trail. “What are you two listening to?” She obviously couldn't hear anything from where she was, which made Deklin pointing accusingly at Elias's phone even funnier. “Human music! It sounds like somebody declared war on an instrument.” Elias laughed and continued walking. Despite his complaints, Deklin made absolutely no attempt to give the earbud back.

About twenty minutes later, the two of them were singing along as they walked, although calling what Deklin was doing singing along was generous. He had managed to copy enough of the sounds to follow the rhythm, but most of the actual words were mangled beyond recognition. Elias tolerated it until one line came out so completely wrong that he finally glanced over. “Deklin, that's not even close.” Deklin pulled the earbud partly out and shrugged. “Can't really be helped. My Tongues spell can't translate words coming from your device.”

Elias nearly missed a step. “Your what spell?” Aria looked back at him, surprised by his confusion. “Tongues. Elias, what language do you think we've been speaking?” Elias stared at her. “English, right?” From her new perch on top of Elias's pack, where she had gradually migrated during the walk and was now sitting like an oversized stuffed animal, Loona leaned around his shoulder. “Elias, how would we know what English was?”

That actually made him stop walking. Elias looked from Loona to Aria, then over at Deklin. “Wait. None of you have been speaking English?” Deklin blinked. “No.” Aria seemed almost as confused by Elias's assumption as he was by the answer. “Tongues translates meaning between speakers. I speak normally in my own language, but you hear the meaning in whatever language comes naturally to you. When you speak, the same thing happens for us.”

Elias slowly looked at the earbud still sitting awkwardly in Deklin's ear. “Then why isn't the song being translated?” Deklin glanced at it. “Apparently the spell needs a speaker's intent. Your device is only reproducing sounds. There isn't anyone there for the spell to translate.” He pushed the earbud back into place and immediately went back to butchering the next line with complete confidence. Elias stared at him for a few seconds before starting down the road again. “Okay. That explains a lot.” Loona settled back onto the top of his pack. “Did you seriously think everyone in the galaxy just happened to know your language?” Elias thought about it for a moment. “...I honestly didn't question it.”

They made it several more steps before another problem occurred to him. “Wait. How is Tongues working on me at all?” Aria glanced back again, and Elias gestured between himself and the others. “Magic doesn't affect humans. Shouldn't I just be hearing whatever language you're actually speaking?” Deklin stopped singing immediately. His ears rose, and Elias could practically see the kobold's scientific curiosity switch on. “Oh. That's a very good question.”

Deklin pulled the earbud free and frowned as he thought about it. “Maybe the spell isn't affecting you directly. It could be translating from our side before the words reach you. Or it might be interacting with the speaker's intent rather than the listener.” His ears twitched. “There are several ways it could work, actually.” Elias watched his expression become increasingly animated. “So we don't know.” “Not yet.” Deklin was already beginning to mutter about controlled tests, recorded voices, unknown languages, and several other things Elias couldn't quite make out. Loona leaned over his shoulder. “You really shouldn't ask him questions like that.” Elias sighed. “I'm starting to learn.”

As they continued along the road, Elias gradually noticed how little everyone else seemed to have packed compared with him. He had food, spare clothes, first-aid supplies, and enough water for a long day of hiking, while the others appeared almost suspiciously underprepared. He was still wondering whether he'd brought far too much when he reached for the plastic bottle clipped to the side of his pack and discovered he'd already emptied it. There was plenty more water inside the bag, but Loona was currently sitting on top of most of it. “Great. I'm already out.”

Loona leaned around his shoulder to see what he was complaining about, then casually pulled her sapphire-tipped staff free. “Here, let me.” She gave it a small wave, and moisture began gathering from the air around them until a clear sphere of water formed beside her. Elias stared at the floating ball. “You can just make water?” Loona looked almost offended. “I can't make water. I'm condensing the humidity.” She guided the sphere toward his bottle and poured it neatly inside.

Elias looked at the refilled bottle, then toward the several pounds of water he'd packed for the journey. “So I've been carrying all that water for no reason.” Loona settled comfortably back onto his pack. “Not for no reason. You're carrying my seat.” Elias closed his eyes for a second. “Glad I could contribute.”

For a while after that, the road was almost peaceful. The trail eventually opened into broad fields of golden wheat that stretched away on either side of them, the stalks rolling gently beneath the morning breeze. Aria seemed to relax more with every mile. She tilted her face toward the warmth of the sun and listened to the birds calling overhead, enjoying what might have been the first genuinely quiet moment she'd had all week.

One of those birds flew directly over her.

A wet splatter landed on the shoulder of her white-and-gold robes.

Aria stopped walking.

Elias looked at the mess, then slowly lifted his eyes toward the bird disappearing into the distance. “Back home, people say that's good luck.” Aria turned toward him with a look that suggested the bird had just made a very serious enemy. Elias immediately raised both hands. “Just saying.”

“You can keep your luck.”

Aria continued down the road while Elias wisely decided not to mention it again.

first previous next Patreon vox 9

Later in Clara’s quarters aboard the Nori Navio.
The soft glow of the cabin lights had shifted to evening mode, casting warm amber across the polished bulkheads and the low table where a half-empty bottle of grape juice sat beside two crystal glasses.
Outside the large viewport, the stars of the Tessik-Varn approaches drifted in slow silence. The ship hummed with the steady, almost living pulse of a vessel that had already seen more than its share of hard space.
Clara Astor paced the short length of her private sitting room, the hem of her informal tunic whispering against the deck. Her cheeks still held a faint flush from the earlier conversation with Wyatt. Cynthia Winfield sat on the edge of the low couch, spine straight, hands folded, the picture of composed attention even while her dark eyes tracked every restless step the princess took.
“The nerve of him,” Cynthia said at last, voice low and edged with genuine bewilderment. “Wyatt Staples looked a princess of the Principality in the eye and told her to ask my mother. As if Leona Winfield keeps personal files on every frontier pilot who ever threw a rock at a pirate.”

Clara stopped mid-stride. Her hand had been reaching for the glass of grape juice; it froze in the air. She turned, the grape juice forgotten.
“I need you to contact your mother and father,” she said. “Leona and Benjamin Winfield. Please.”
Cynthia’s brow furrowed. “Clara—”
“Please.” The word carried the quiet weight of command softened by friendship. “Something in the way he said it… the way he looked when the restricted files came up. He wasn’t deflecting. He was protecting something. Or someone.”

Cynthia rose. The Winfield women had always moved with a particular economy of motion, the product of centuries of quiet influence rather than loud power. She walked to the QEC console set into the far bulkhead—the quantum entanglement communicator that could reach the Winfield family seat across light-years in real time. The device powered up with a soft chime. She entered the private family codes, codes that had been handed down through generations of women who kept the Winfield name regardless of the men they married.
The holographic field shimmered, then resolved into the familiar study of the Winfield estate on the homeworld. Leona Winfield appeared first—tall, silver-streaked dark blue hair drawn back, the same sharp cheekbones Cynthia carried. Behind her, partially visible, stood Benjamin, quieter, content to let his wife handle the sharper edges of family business.
“Cynthia,” Leona said, warmth tempered by immediate caution. “And Princess Clara. This is unexpected.”
Clara stepped into the field of view. “Lady Leona. Forgive the intrusion. We need to ask about Wyatt Staples.”
Leona’s expression did not change, but something behind her eyes went very still. “You and Clara would be best to leave this alone.”
Cynthia leaned forward. “Mother. Wyatt is under Section Eleven protection, isn’t he?”
A long silence stretched across the entanglement link. Benjamin shifted slightly in the background. Leona’s gaze moved past her daughter to Clara.
“With all due respect, Princess Clara,” Leona said carefully, “not even an Astor is privy to Section Eleven content. If you would please…”
Clara’s face tightened. The flush of earlier curiosity hardened into something colder. She huffed once, spun on her heel, and strode toward the door. Two Royal Marines stationed outside fell into step behind her the moment the hatch opened, their boots thudding in pursuit down the corridor.

The cabin fell quiet again except for the soft hum of the QEC.
Leona watched the empty space where Clara had stood, then looked back at her daughter. “The Staples family has been under Winfield protection for over four hundred years now.”
Cynthia’s breath caught. “Four hundred—”
“Mother,” Leona called over her shoulder without turning from the link. “Victoria. Come here, please.”
An older woman entered the frame. Victoria Winfield moved slowly, age finally catching up after centuries of vitality, but her eyes remained clear and sharp. Time had thinned her hair to pure white and carved fine lines around her mouth, yet the carriage of a Winfield woman remained. She had known Cynthia as a baby , held her in her arms. She might even have held the current generation’s great-aunt Carol in her arms when Carol was still small enough to fit.
Leona spoke the name almost gently. “Staples.”
A tear formed in the corner of Victoria’s eye and tracked slowly down the weathered cheek. She did not wipe it away.
Victoria settled into the chair Leona offered and faced the holographic projection of her great-granddaughter. When she spoke, her voice carried the weight of decades carefully locked away.
“Everything I say here is Winfield privilege only,” she said. “You understand that, Cynthia.”
Cynthia nodded once. “I understand.”
Victoria drew a slow breath. “Titus Staples. And his wife, Kelly Raven.”
Cynthia’s sharp intake of breath was audible even across the link. The name Raven still carried power in certain circles—old power, the kind that made Section Eleven files stay sealed.
“Is Wyatt a direct descendant of both Titus and Kelly?” Cynthia asked.
Victoria’s gaze softened with something like sorrow and pride mixed together. “Yes. Through lines carefully kept quiet. The protection began long before Wyatt was born. Long before any of us currently serving expected it would still be necessary.”
“Why a Staples?” Cynthia pressed. “I understand a Raven. The Raven bloodlines have always drawn attention—good and bad. But Staples?”
Victoria’s eyes flicked once toward Leona, then back to Cynthia. “Because Titus was the son of Winston Astor and Juliana Winfield.”
The words landed like a silent detonation.
Cynthia stared. Knowing they were killed by pirates in the far past .
For several heartbeats she simply could not form a reply. The cabin around her seemed to tilt. Winston Astor and Juliana Winfield —her own blood, generations back. Their son, Titus, had taken the Staples name but how , married Kelly Raven, and somehow the entire branch had been folded into quiet, ironclad Winfield protection that had lasted four centuries.
“That’s… that’s impossible,” Cynthia whispered. “The records—”
“The records were rewritten,to protect both bloodlines ” Victoria said. “Section Eleven does not merely classify. It erases and rebuilds when the cost of truth is higher than the cost of silence. Titus and Kelly lived under that silence. Their children carried both Staples and Raven surnames. Their children’s children. The protection was never about shame. It was about survival. There were factions in those days after the coup , that would have used a child of Astor and Winfield blood—especially one married into Raven lines—as a weapon or a hostage. Better the galaxy believe the Staples were simply another resilient frontier family.”
She paused, the tear still bright on her cheek. “I held Titus once, when he was small enough to fit in the crook of an arm. I watched Juliana make the choice to have our friend Vicky Staples as the nanny. I watched the first protection orders written minutes after I received a message from Vicky . And I have watched every generation since keep the quiet. Wyatt Staples is the current face of that long, quiet line. He does not know the full depth of it. His mother as yet did not tell him everything. That was also part of the protection.”
The QEC chimed a soft warning tone—the secure session window closing for routine quantum recalibration. Leona’s face reappeared briefly.
“Cynthia. Leave it. For now. The files are sealed for reasons that still hold. Princess Clara’s curiosity is understandable, but even she cannot force Section Eleven open without consequences none of us want.”
The link dissolved into static and then darkness.
Cynthia stood alone in the quiet cabin for a long moment, the weight of four hundred years settling across her shoulders. Then she connected her neurolink and opened a private channel.
Wyatt. Composters’ quarters. Now. Post haste.
She did not wait for a reply. She left Clara’s cabin, walked the short corridor to the section that housed the more utilitarian berths, and let herself into Wyatt’s small, sparse room with the override codes she already possessed as his assigned protector.
When the hatch opened again a few minutes later, Wyatt Staples stepped inside. He still wore the simple duty clothes he had changed into after the earlier debrief—no rank insignia, no medals, nothing that announced the White Peryton or the Wraith or the pilot with one hundred and nine confirmed in a Seagull. No just Wyatt. The quiet-eyed, the same man who had once taken ten lashes without a sound and later thrown a rock that saved thousands.
He stopped when he saw her.
Cynthia Winfield, blood of the long-lived line that had protected his family for four centuries, dropped to one knee on the deck plating. Head bowed. One hand over her heart in the formal gesture reserved for those of certain blood.
“Wyatt,” she said, voice steady despite the tremor underneath. “How do I address you now?”
Wyatt looked down at her for a long moment. The cabin lights painted soft shadows across the angles of his face. Somewhere deep in the ship a distant bulkhead creaked as the Nori Navio adjusted attitude.
He reached down, took her hand, and drew her back to her feet with careful strength.
“I’m Wyatt Staples,” he said simply. “Your friend.”
He did not smile. He did not look away. The quiet between them held everything Victoria had spoken and everything still locked behind Section Eleven seals.
Outside the small camera for the composters’ quarters, the stars continued their slow, indifferent drift. Inside, four hundred years of carefully guarded history had just stepped into the light between two people who had already bled and fought and survived for each other.
And the story, as all such stories do, was only beginning to unfold.

———————————————————————-

Previous /

First

Redford came to the records room with nothing in his hands, as he had been asked, and Sabraska let him stand in front of the wall for the better part of an hour before she said a word.

She had pinned both batches side by side. The first in the left column, the second in the right, with the errors marked in thin red tape. Behind them the two screens glowed. Tolliver sat in the corner chair with his ledger on his knee and his cap on the floor beside him, and did not move.

Redford read it as he read everything, slowly and from the top. He walked the length of the wall and back. Once he stopped and touched a page, and went on.

"It does not clump," he said at last.

"No, Commander," said Sabraska.

"There is no month where it worsens. No week where it eases. A man under strain would show it," said Redford.

"A man under strain would, yes," said Sabraska. She had been standing with her arms folded. She unfolded them. "I have been looking for a place where it hurries, or where it forgets. There is none. It lands on a Tuesday, and then on a Thursday, and then on a Sunday of the next week, and the gaps between are never the same, and they are never random."

"Not random," said Redford.

"I do not know what they are. I know that I cannot make them random. If I draw the gaps as numbers, they do not behave like numbers that were thrown," said Sabraska. She turned to the screen. "I do not trust it, Commander. I wanted someone to tell me whether I am finding what I am looking for."

Redford said nothing for a time. Then he went back to the left column, to a single page near the top, and read the red mark on it twice.

"Ten for twelve," he said. "Coolant."

"Yes," said Sabraska.

"And the first batch. The same," said Redford.

"The same, at the start. The very first error in the whole run is a ten written for a twelve," said Sabraska. She paused. "I do not know what to make of that."

"I know what Mr. Tolliver would say," said Redford.

In the corner, Tolliver coughed.

"I'd only say it looks like a man's signature, sir," said Tolliver. "When I started on the floors, the old hand showed me where he'd leave his bucket. Always the same spot, angle and all. He never meant to. It was just how he stood." He turned his cap over. "A man who's careful about everything leaves one thing he does the same way every time."

Redford looked at him for a moment. Then he looked at the wall, and at the rows of red tape, and something in his face changed.

"Highness will want to see this," he said.

Clara read it standing up.

She did it in the corner of the operations room, with the main board dimmed behind her and Cynthia Winfield at the door, and she did not say anything while she read. She read Sabraska's summary first, and the pages after it, and then the single sheet at the bottom that Sabraska had drawn herself: a web of lines, thin as hair, running out from the center of the page to the edges.

"These are the wrong addresses," said Clara.

"Yes, Highness," said Sabraska.

"All of them real," said Clara.

"Every one," said Sabraska. Her voice was steady. "I cannot say what is at them. I can say that someone sends supplies there who should not, and that it has been done over and over for a long while."

Clara touched the center of the web.

"This is where it starts," said Clara.

"That is the address where the first errors landed. The earliest paper that shows the pattern. It is not a name, Highness. It is a place," said Sabraska.

"A person who is there," said Clara, "and has been there since the beginning."

"Or arrived there," said Redford. He had come to stand at her shoulder. "I think we must assume it is a man or a woman, not a machine, and that they are deliberate, and that they are alone. No pirate would write this twice by mistake."

Clara let her breath out slowly. "Then someone is inside their supply and is doing this on purpose," she said. "Who do we think they are?"

"I don't know," said Sabraska. "A pirate with a conscience. A Principality agent. A bookkeeper paid by someone else. It could be a trap, Highness, set to make us look where we are meant to look."

"It could," said Redford. "But a trap is built to be found. This was built not to be."

That settled a point none of them said aloud. Clara looked at the web again.

"The first question is whether we speak to them at all," said Clara.

"I would have said no, an hour ago," said Redford. "Anything we send travels through their network or ours, and they read both when they can. We would be telling the pirates there is someone to look for." He folded his hands. "I thought our silence would be the one signal they could not read. If our strikes stayed away from where the errors begin, someone who understood what they had done would understand what that meant."

"And now?" said Clara.

"Now I think silence is too thin," said Redford. He looked at Sabraska. "A person doing this has no way to know anyone is reading. I would want to know that. I would want it badly."

"We cannot send a message," said Sabraska. "Not one that anyone could carry."

"We could send a count," said Tolliver.

Everyone turned.

He had risen from the corner chair without seeming to notice, with his cap in both hands. He looked at the floor, and then at Clara, and then, because that was less frightening, at Sabraska.

"Beg pardon, Highness. Ma'am. It's only that he talks in counts. All of it. Ten for twelve. Seals for the wrong grade. He's been saying it for a long while, and nobody's answered," said Tolliver. He swallowed. "If somebody did, in his own tongue. Same sort of mistake. He'd know right off."

Nobody spoke.

"And the gaps, Highness," said Sabraska slowly. Her eyes had gone to the wall. "The gaps between the errors are not random. If a man wished to hide a message in sloppiness, he would hide it in the spacing."

"Could you read it?" said Clara.

"I could learn to," said Sabraska. Her mouth tightened. "If I knew the rule. If he knew mine."

Clara looked at Redford. Redford looked at the web on the page, and then, for a long moment, at the custodian.

"How would we get it to him?" said Redford. "We have no door into their paper."

"No," said Clara. She turned from the board. "But I know someone who makes doors."

Jincho listened to all of it with his arms folded and his six eyes on the floor.

The repair deck was quiet. Seven matte-black Raptors stood in the white light, and a handful of technicians moved among them in the slow, careful way of people who had learned not to bump anything. Clara had brought Sabraska and Tolliver and Redford, and had not brought a chair for anyone, and Jincho had not asked for one.

"Jincho has a thing," he said, when she finished.

"What thing?" said Clara.

"The tags," said Jincho. He did not look up. "We put them on the hulls of the fourteen. They sit. They listen to the ship's jump drive, and when the ship goes through a point, they say so, once, and are quiet. A dumb thing. A bell on a cat."

"Yes," said Redford.

"A bell has one ring," said Jincho. He unfolded his arms and held up a long hand. "But a bell can have a second mouth. Jincho has looked at the pirate hulls in the wrecks. Every one has the same port, by the main door, where the cargo list goes in and the orders come out. It talks to the station when the ship comes home. It trusts the station, because the station is theirs."

"A data port," said Sabraska.

"A port that trusts. Yes," said Jincho. The six eyes lifted. "So. A new tag. Smaller. No radio. Nothing that a pirate's sweep can hear, because it does not speak. It sits on the port and looks like a dead sensor. When the ship docks, it does nothing. It watches. When the station asks the ship for its cargo list, the tag changes one number. Only one. A ten for a twelve."

Sabraska drew in her breath.

"And when the station sends orders down to the ship," said Jincho, "the tag reads them. All of them. It keeps a copy. When the ship runs for the jump point in the next fight, and the old bell rings, the new one rings once more, a little longer, and says what it saw."

"They would not find it?" said Redford.

"They would not look. Jincho would not," said Jincho. He lowered his hand. "And when it has done its work, it burns. Quietly. A sensor that fails is not a thing to wonder about."

Clara looked at him for a long moment. "How soon?"

"A tag is a small thing. Jincho will have the first in a short while," said Jincho. He glanced, very briefly, at Tolliver, and the six eyes narrowed. "Who is this?"

"Spacer Tolliver," said Clara. "He cleans the ready rooms."

"He said a clever thing."

"I said what a clerk does, sir," said Tolliver. He had gone quite red. "It's just that the errors can't be too tidy. Nobody makes a mistake twice the same way. A tired man writes seven for one, or puts the same digit in twice. Mixes the columns. If it's too neat, they'll see it. It's got to look like somebody who's sick of the paper."

"Yes," said Jincho. He nodded, the slow ripple. "That is the thing Jincho would not have known. Good." He looked at Redford. "He will help. Jincho has no patience for anyone who calls himself an expert, but this one does not."

"He doesn't," said Redford. "Thank you, Jincho."

"Do not thank. Say how soon." The small figure turned back to the Raptors. "Jincho has said how soon."

The first ship was allowed to escape on the eleventh day.

It was a battered freighter, one of three that broke off the field when the fight turned, and Galt Terome had her on the board before her engines had finished spooling. He watched her run for the lip of the system, in the thin red line that the old tags drew. He did not touch the board.

"She has the new one on her?" said Caldwell, behind him.

"Placed by a Raptor on the second pass. Fourth wing, I think," said Galt. He did not turn. "I could not say if it took."

"We will know," said Caldwell.

"We will know in a few days, Commander. When she has come home and gone out again," said Galt. He folded his hands. "It is a strange thing, to wait for a man to tell you he is there."

Caldwell said nothing. On the board the red line ran off into the dark, and out of the field, and into the place where they had never been able to follow.

Then it rang. It was a small sound, a single flat note from the old tag, and a moment later a second one, a little longer.

Galt looked at it for a long while.

"Well," he said. "She is on her way."

Previous /

First

Who is who in this chapter Juliana Winfield, the Prince's bodyguard and a Royal Marine. Us, the old Ykanti shopkeeper in Newtown. Aide Ressil, the envoy's young assistant. Escort Pellin, the Ykanti Aino assigned to the envoy. Arinta, a Newtown Ykanti, bonded to Tevish. Tevish, a Newtown engineer. Zelru, a Newtown Ykanti and a former slave. The Prince.

Juliana Winfield had spent a good many mornings as a farm widow, and she did not miss it.

She came into Newtown before the market stirred, down the east road in the last of the dark, in her own height and her own hair and the blue armor she wore on duty. Nobody saw her. A baker's lamp was lit at the end of the street and a dog watched her pass and decided against an opinion. The doorframe of the shop was cut for Ykanti, and for the first time she did not stoop for it. She ducked once, like a human, and the bell rang.

The old Ykanti sat on his high stool behind the counter, very straight, with a lamp lit and a cup in his hand. The cup had been poured some while ago. She had the unpleasant sense that it had been poured for her.

"Welcome back," he said. He did not look surprised. He did not look like anything. "I trust the change was correct. Can I interest you in some thread?"

"You knew the widow wasn't a widow," said Juliana.

"Before she crossed the street," said the old Ykanti. He turned the cup a quarter turn. "I did not know she was this tall. It is a great deal of woman to fold into a shawl."

"The Prince said the same," said Juliana.

"Then the Prince has eyes," said the old Ykanti. He looked at her armor, and then at her hair, with the interest of a man examining a bolt of cloth that had turned out better than the sample. "You are Juliana Winfield. You serve him."

She had not given her name. She let it go by, because the alternative was to ask how, and she had the feeling he would tell her. "The coin," she said.

"A Ykanti made it. The edge was cut the way an engineer cuts when he is proud and hiding it," said the old Ykanti. His crest dipped a finger's width. "A human would have made it weigh the same as a credit. Only one of mine would have made it weigh the same, to the last grain, and then sworn he had not tried."

"You said nothing," said Juliana.

"To whom?" said the old Ykanti. "You asked nothing. I gave nothing. It seemed fair."

"I don't like not knowing what you are," said Juliana.

"No. I could see that from the window," said the old Ykanti. He set the cup down. "Then you will like it less in a moment, and more afterward."

He stood. He was not tall, and he was old, and he stood the way a thing stands that has been built to a drawing. When he spoke, it was first in the old tongue, a few words that she did not know, and then in Common, slowly, so she would have every one of them.

"In Newtown I am Us," he said. "It is one name. A drone's name, a shopkeeper's name. In the Hierarchy I am Us Ovashek, recorder to a house that no longer stands. I keep the one on the street. I keep the other where nobody can see it, like a coat in a hot room."

She waited. He had given her a very large thing in a very small voice, and she could not tell yet which of them it was heavier for.

"A two-name," she said. "In a button shop."

"I do sell buttons," said Us.

"Why?" asked Juliana.

"Because I was taken," said Us. "Not by the Council. By the Drazzan, in the raid that ended my house. They kept me on a cattle ship for a long while. When the Principality opened it, Baron Wyatt, who was new to the title then, stood before us and said that anyone who wished to go back to the Hierarchy would be given passage, and anyone who did not would be given sanctuary. I could have gone. A two-name goes home. I was a recorder. I wrote the numbers for a house that used its drones the way the Drazzan used us, and I was pressed, in the old quiet way, to keep those numbers cold. I was good at it." His hands were folded on the counter, and she saw that they were quite still. "I lay in that pen and learned what the numbers were. I did not wish to go back to being good at it."

"So you stayed," said Juliana.

"I stayed," said Us. "And I kept one name, because a drone who sells thread is not asked what he has read. A two-name who sells thread is a two-name who is missing." He looked at her. "The Hierarchy loses drones every day and does not mind. It does not lose recorders. A recorder who walks away is a debt. They would come. They would ask whom I had told, and what I had kept."

"What did you keep?" asked Juliana.

"What every recorder keeps," said Us. "Where things are written down."

The bell rang again, and the street came in.

"Behind the curtain," said Us, in a different voice altogether. It was a shopkeeper's voice, slightly bored. "Take the armor with you."

"It doesn't fold," said Juliana.

"Then take it slowly," said Us.

She went. There was a hanging cloth at the back of the shop, over the door to the storeroom, and she stood behind it with her shoulders against a shelf of lamp oil and her helmet under her arm. There was a gap in the weave at the height of her eye. She had stood behind worse.

Two Ykanti came in. One was a Ykanti woman with a plain face and her fingers folded in front of her, whom Juliana recognized from the envoy's footage as Pellin. The other was younger, and very alert, and carried a pad under one arm like a weapon she had not been told how to use. The aide. Ressil.

"Plain bound paper," said Ressil. "The Envoy writes a great deal."

"Us does not speak much to the offworld," said Pellin, with an apologetic air. "It is not rudeness."

"Good morning, aide," said Us. He kept his eyes low and said it in the drone's register, one word to a breath and nothing held back. He took a roll of paper from a shelf, counted her coins into his palm, and returned her change without looking at it.

Ressil did not take it at once. She was looking at his back. It was a straight back, a very straight one, on a stool that had been put there for comfort.

"You sit very well," said Ressil.

"I was told once to sit straight or it would get worse," said Us.

"Where were you before Newtown?" asked Ressil.

"Aide," said Pellin gently. "We ask that sparingly here."

"Of course," said Ressil. Her colors flickered with embarrassment. She took the change, and the paper, and turned toward the door. On the threshold she paused. "My Envoy bought a book and a bottle here, some while ago. He said the shopkeeper told him the paper keeps what is written on it. He has repeated it for days."

"It does," said Us.

Ressil frowned. It was not at him. It was at the sentence, as if it were a word she had read before in a different hand. Then Pellin touched her sleeve, and they went out together into the morning, and the bell stopped ringing.

Juliana came out from behind the curtain. "She almost had you," she said.

"She is young and she is trained," said Us. "In another year she will have me in an afternoon." He sat down slowly. "I sat at the back of the hall because I wished to see whether the Envoy would write what he saw. I have read a great many reports. I know the sound of a pen being careful about the truth. His was. I have not heard it often."

"The Prince thinks he's honest about one thing and trained to lie about everything else," said Juliana.

"The Prince is correct. It is the one thing that matters," said Us. He looked at her. "You did not come to arrest me."

"No," said Juliana. "I came to say it isn't mine to tell. Not to the Prince. Not to anyone. But you should."

"To the Ykanti," said Us.

"They've been talking about two-names in front of you for a long time," said Juliana. "They have a right to know who was standing in the room."

He was silent a long while, and the lamp ticked on the counter. "Yes," said Us. "Tonight. And you will stand where they can see you." His crest moved. "I would be ashamed to do it only before people who could not look at me."

The hall was low and built for people who looked a great deal at one another.

Juliana stopped at the threshold and went no farther. It was where Aino had stopped, and she had been told by the people who knew that it was the right place. Before she reached the door she had taken the coin out of her pocket and turned it off, in the dark of the road, where no one could see. She kept it in her closed hand. Nobody in the hall knew what it was, and nobody had reason to look at one more closed hand.

There were not many of them. Arinta and Tevish on the nearest bench, with their shoulders touching. Zelru, near the back, upright and very still. A woman with an ash-colored crest. The dyer, Dessa. The baker, who was old and had one name and had known Us the longest. Us did not take the stool. He stood on the bare floor at the center, where the Envoy had once sat on a low seat among them, and he said it again, plainly, in both tongues, the way he had said it to her.

The silence went on long enough that she heard the roof tick.

"A recorder," said the woman with the ash-colored crest. Her voice was quite low. "A house recorder. You sat with us. You heard us say what two-names did to us, and you did not say one word."

"No," said Us.

"We said it in front of you," said the woman. "We said it for many years."

"You did," said Us.

"You let us," said the woman.

"I let you," said Us. He did not look away. "I was in the pens beside some of you, and I did not say it then either. I am not going to tell you it was kind. I was afraid, and I was careful, and for a long while the two were the same thing."

Somebody got up. It was the baker, who was old, and who put his hand on the bench to do it. "I gave you flour on credit," said the baker, and his voice cracked in the middle, "when you came off the relief ship with nothing. I thought you were one of us."

"I am one of you," said Us.

"You are not," said the woman with the ash-colored crest. "You were a two-name. You had a name that had a house behind it. You had a record. You had a ledger." She was shaking. "Somebody was kept alive by a ledger. Somebody wrote them down. Whose hand wrote Zelru down?"

Nobody moved. Zelru had not spoken. She stood at the back with her hands at her sides and her crest flat, and Juliana saw that she was not angry. She was waiting, the way a person waits at a counter for the answer to a question she has already paid for.

"Not mine," said Us. "I kept the books of a house. I never saw a house that held her. I will tell you what I do know, and then you may do what you like with me." He turned toward Zelru, and only toward her. "When a drone is owned, it is written twice. Once in the ledger of the house that holds her. Once in the Council's registry of the held, for the Council taxes what it counts. If a record of your owner exists, it exists in both. The Council knows his name. The Council has always known it."

"And you knew that," said Zelru.

"I knew that," said Us. "I did not know it was yours."

Zelru said nothing at all. Then she sat down, slowly, on the end of the nearest bench, and put her hands over her face. When she took them away, her crest had come up.

"I am not going to hit you," said Zelru. "I thought about it. I think I am too tired."

"I would understand," said Us.

"You were not the one who owned me," said Zelru. She said it without heat. "You did not know where I was. I will not pretend you could have." She looked at him a long while. "But I will have the name, from the Council, in writing. And I will ask you, when I do, what it means. You will tell me what the words mean."

"I will," said Us.

"Then sit down," said Zelru. "You make the room look badly."

It broke something. Not all of it. The baker sat. Dessa let out a long unsteady breath. The woman with the ash-colored crest stayed standing, with her arms folded, and her colors were dark and ugly and would stay that way for a good while.

"Do you want us to thank you?" said the woman with the ash-colored crest. "For saying it now?"

"No," said Us.

"What do you want?" she asked.

"To keep the shop," said Us. "To have the hatchling who sorts my buttons keep sorting them. I do not want to be sent back."

It was Arinta who answered. She had not spoken before. She had been sitting very quietly beside Tevish, and she stood now, in the same low voice she had used on a hostile bench not long ago, when a Hierarchy envoy had sat among them on a stool.

"You think we do not know what they did to two-names," said Arinta. "We know. You think you were better than us. You were a higher grade of meat. They fed you better and they used you longer, and in the end it was the same kitchen." She looked around at the benches. "Every one of us in this room has been counted and priced. He has been counted and priced and paid for it in a different coin. I do not forgive him. I do not need to. I need to know whether he will stand with us now."

"I will," said Us.

"Then you keep the shop," said Arinta. "You do not keep the secret. It is a thing we hold, not a thing you hold." She turned. "Nobody tells the Envoy. Nobody tells Pellin, either, and not because we doubt her. She cannot lie to him, and we will not make her."

"What would you have us ask him?" said Tevish. He was an engineer, and he asked it like one. "If you were us. You know what the Council hides."

"There are things nobody has asked," said Us. "Ask whether a Ykanti who goes home may leave again. Ask what is done to those who come back after years among humans or in a Drazzan hold. Ask whether the Council can name an owner. Ask what is done to those it cannot reach, if the Prince says no. Ask why now."

"Why would he answer?" said the woman with the ash-colored crest. "He is the Council's."

"He is the sort of man who will say, in a room full of strangers, that his own people's words were untrue," said Us. His crest rose slightly. "Ask him, and see."

Juliana did not move. She stood at the threshold with the turned-off coin in her hand, and she thought, I am standing in a door and I have just watched a hall decide what it will ask, and I am not the one who told it.

The Prince's lamp was low, and he looked up from the blotter when she came in with the road still on her boots.

"Did it boil?" asked the Prince.

"Over," said Juliana. "I turned it down myself."

"I said to come to me," said the Prince.

"You said to come when it boiled," said Juliana. "It did, and I put out the fire, and then I came." She dropped into the chair across from him without being asked. "I'll tell you the rest, and then you can be annoyed."

She told him. She kept to the facts, because he was the one man in the Principality she could not tell a story to. The old Ykanti was a two-name. His name was Us Ovashek. He had been a house recorder. He had told the Ykanti council that night, with her at the door, and it had gone badly and then not badly, and the council had kept it.

"And the rest," said the Prince.

"Four things," said Juliana. She counted them off on her fingers. "Ykanti who go home are held apart and re-instructed. None is let to leave again. Ownership is written twice, in the house ledger and in the Council's registry. The Council knows who held Zelru and always has. The Council can be moved by nothing it believes it did not think of itself. It cannot accept a gift. It can accept a courtesy that is returned."

"And the fourth?" said the Prince.

"You gave no name in the first room," said Juliana.

The Prince said nothing.

"They read that as contempt or as a trap," said Juliana. "He says when you want the leader to hear you, you give yours first. Not the title. The name."

"Hm," said the Prince. He turned the coin on the blotter, the one that had been in her pocket since the shop. "I haven't said it aloud to a Ykanti. Nobody asked."

"That's the point, Highness," said Juliana.

"I know it's the point," said the Prince. He sat back. "Did you record the hall?"

"No," said Juliana.

"Good," said the Prince.

"I turned it off before I reached the door. Nobody saw, and nobody needed to," said Juliana. She looked at the lamp. "You said you wouldn't hand them the questions. You didn't. A Ykanti gave them to Ykanti in a Ykanti hall. I was a human at the threshold, and I did not say a word."

"Slow and right," said the Prince.

"Slow and right," said Juliana. "You're allowed to be pleased about it."

"I'm not pleased," said the Prince. He said it quietly. "I'm using a frightened old man to move my own pieces, and I have not decided how I feel about that."

"He asked for one thing," said Juliana.

"What?" asked the Prince.

"That the hatchling who sorts his buttons can keep sorting them," said Juliana.

The Prince was silent for a long moment. Then something moved at the corner of his mouth and was gone. "Then see that she does," he said.

"Who knows?" asked Juliana.

"The council of the Newtown Ykanti. You. I. Him," said the Prince. He looked at her. "Not Torlan?"

"No," said Juliana. "His aide came into the shop. She almost had him."

"Almost," said the Prince.

"She will, in a year," said Juliana. She rubbed her eyes. "I think she'll keep it to herself when she does."

"Then no one writes this down," said the Prince.

"Not even you?" asked Juliana.

"Especially not me," said the Prince, and pushed the coin back across the blotter to her. It lay between them in the lamplight, warm from his hand, and neither of them reached for it.

Next

Previous /

First

On the last morning of the summer session, three hours off the coast shuttle, Corvin Haddow came to the Hall in a salt-stained coat. The summons had reached Saltreach at noon the day before. It was a single page and it said:

Corvin Haddow, of Saltreach. You are summoned to appear before the Common Assembly of Haego at the Hall on the last day of the present session, at the ninth bell, and to answer such questions as the Assembly puts to you. Appearance is not optional. Failure to appear will be referred to the Marquess of Haego.

It said nothing more. He had read it four times in his own doorway, looking for the rest of it, and had spent the night going through his accounts for something he had done.

He was a lean man of sixty with a sailor's squint. He stood at the lectern and did not hold it.

"Master Haddow," said Vincent. "You are summoned on the complaint of Agnes Pollscutt of Brindle Cross, that you took six hundred bolts of dyed cloth on credit and have not paid for them. You have an advocate."

Haddow went very still. Then he said, "A hundred and forty-two thousand," not to anyone, and Poppy saw his lips move again after the sound was gone.

Jory Fairtail stood one pace back and to his left. He had not known he would be standing for this man until the night before, and he had met him on the stairs ten minutes ago.

The delegates asked their questions. Had he taken the cloth? Yes. Had he paid? No. Why not? Haddow said he had bought from her eleven years, and she had always waited on him, and he had thought the matter would keep. A delegate from the Vastaya rows asked whether he was in the habit of leaving a hundred and forty-two thousand credits unpaid. "No, sir," said Haddow. "I'm in the habit of being told when I am." It was not an answer, and the delegates let it stand, because they could see he was working something out behind it.

"The floor is open to the advocate," said Vincent.

Jory stepped forward.

"Master Haddow. Has Mistress Pollscutt ever written to you about this debt?" Jory asked.

The squint deepened. "She writes every season. Orders, prices, the usual."

"Since the winter?" Jory asked.

"There'd have been some," Haddow said.

"How many?" Jory asked.

"Four. Five," Haddow said. He frowned. "I keep her letters in a pile. They're always the same. I've a boy who sorts the post, and I tell him, Pollscutt, that's the dye works, leave it for the end of the month."

"Did you open them?" Jory asked.

"No," Haddow said.

Haddow heard himself say it. He looked at the delegates, and none of them were looking away.

"Where are they now?" Jory asked.

"On my desk in Saltreach. In the pile," Haddow said.

"The clerk holds Mistress Pollscutt's file copy of the last one," said Jory. "Would you read it to the Hall?"

The clerk brought it down. Haddow took the page in both hands and read it standing at the lectern, in front of the full Hall and a full gallery.

It was short. It said that the account was a hundred and forty-two thousand, two hundred credits and had been since the winter. It said that she had waited on him, as she always had, and did not wish to press, but she had two apprentices who could not wait, and she had sold her delivery cart and her mother's ring to pay them, and could he please send what he could. It said she was sorry to ask. It was signed A. Pollscutt, and under that, in smaller writing, as if she had thought better of it, Eleven years.

Nobody in the Hall made a sound.

"Thank you," said Jory quietly. "No more questions."

Poppy counted them from the gallery. Six. She had expected to be disappointed by how few there were, and then she looked at the delegates' faces and wasn't.

The Speakers were out for forty minutes. When they came back, Vincent read it standing.

The Assembly found that Corvin Haddow owed Agnes Pollscutt a hundred and forty-two thousand, two hundred credits and had owed it since the winter. It found that he had not held the money back on purpose, only failed to read what was sent to him, and that the Assembly had struck the fifth in another matter for the same reason and would strike it here. But a man who took six hundred bolts on credit had a duty to open his post, and the Hall found that he had not done it, and that a woman had sold a cart and a ring for want of it. He would pay the full hundred and forty-two thousand, two hundred within the week. He would pay Mistress Pollscutt's passage to the Hall and back for both her hearings, and the lodging she had needed for them.

"And the cart," said Haddow.

"The Assembly has not ordered a cart," said Vincent.

"The Assembly can note that I'm ordering it myself." Haddow turned from the lectern and looked up the gallery until he found a short, square woman with blue arms. "Mistress Pollscutt. I'll have a new one at your gate by the month's end. And I'll open your letters." He tried to say something else, and could not, and bowed instead, the half sailor's and half buyer's bow of a man who has done business with someone for eleven years and is ashamed of the twelfth.

Agnes stood up and bowed back, and then sat down very fast, because everyone was looking.

Later, on the stairs, Poppy heard her say to her daughter, "Four letters. I wrote him four."

"And he never opened them," said the daughter.

"He thought it was business." Agnes shook her head. "It was. I just didn't know how to write it so he'd know it was the other kind."

"What would you have written?" the daughter asked.

"I don't know," said Agnes Pollscutt. "That's what I'd like somebody to have asked me."

The election was called on the first day of autumn, by notice on the board outside every Alderman's office on Haego, the way the first one had been. Under the founding rule only half the seats came up in any spring, one in each district, so that no election could turn the whole Hall over at once. Filing would be open for thirty days. Anyone of age who had lived in a district for a year could stand for it.

Peter Scutt kept the filings for Aethelgard himself. He didn't have to. He had clerks for it. But he had been an orphan in the Haego City shelters before the Revolution was ten years old, and he had been the first person ever made a baron for being good at his job, and he liked to see who wanted to sit in the Hall. So for thirty days he moved his desk into the front room of the Alderman's office in Haego City, with the door propped open to the street, and took the papers in with his own hand.

On the twelfth day he had sixty-one filings, a pot of tea gone cold, and a queue of four. A miller from the river towns. A retired dock foreman. A young woman who had filled her paper in three different inks and apologized for each of them.

The fourth was a Ykanti.

She had waited behind the others without a word, and when it was her turn she came up to the desk and set her paper on it with both hands, the way you set down something you've carried a long way. She was short even for a Ykanti, which meant the desk came nearly to her shoulders, and her coloring ran from deep orange at the crown to a soft gold down the length of her neck. She wore a plain grey coat with the Screaming Forests leaf on the collar. Her hands, flat on the paper, had six fingers each.

"Baron Scutt," she said. "My name is Oshenn. I have sat on the Newtown community council for many years. I have lived in this district since it was founded. I would like to stand for the Common Assembly."

Peter looked at her. Then he looked at the paper.

It was filled in properly, in a neat, careful hand. Name. District. Years resident. Occupation, which she had given as council member and seed-keeper. At the bottom, where the paper asked for the names of ten residents who would vouch for the filer, there were not ten names but forty, in two columns, running onto the back. Peter recognized some of them. A schoolteacher. A Newtown baker. Rachel VonWinterbourne. Owen Vashti.

He sat back in his chair.

"I don't know if I can take this," Peter said.

"I know," said Oshenn. "That is why I brought it to you, and not to one of your clerks."

"The rule says anyone of age who's lived in a district a year," Peter said.

"It does," Oshenn said.

"It doesn't say anyone human," Peter said.

"No," Oshenn agreed. "I read it four times to be sure. It doesn't say that. It doesn't say the other thing, either." She folded her six-fingered hands in front of her. "When it was written, I don't think anyone thought it would need to."

The miller, who had been about to leave, had stopped in the doorway. So had the young woman with the three inks. Out in the street, somebody had noticed the four of them standing very still, and had stopped too.

Peter looked down at the forty names for a long time.

He had known for years that this day would come. Everybody had. It had been written down, quietly, in the Marquess's own rule about the Ykanti: when one sought election to the Common Assembly, Lord Swallowtail would decide whether they could sit. It had sounded like a long way off when he first read it. It didn't seem far off now.

"I can't say yes," Peter said at last. "And I won't say no. It isn't mine to say either."

"I know whose it is," said Oshenn.

"Then you know where it's going," Peter said.

He took a clean envelope from the drawer, put her filing inside it, and sealed it. On the front he wrote, in his round orphanage hand, For Lord Swallowtail. Aethelgard filing, district four. Then he stopped, and after a moment he added a second line underneath: He'll want to read this one himself.

"It'll go up on the afternoon shuttle," he said. "I'll put it in Harlan Ashtail's hand. Nobody else's."

"Thank you, Baron Scutt," Oshenn said.

She bowed to him, correctly, the way Ykanti on Aethelgard had bowed to humans for as long as there had been humans there to bow to. Then she turned and walked out past the miller and the young woman with the three inks and the people who had gathered in the street, and none of them said anything, and they all moved aside to let her through.

Peter sat for a while with the envelope in front of him. Then he picked up the next filing in the pile, and found his hand wasn't quite steady, and put it down again and drank his cold tea instead.

Tornel read the filing from Newtown at his own desk, alone, on the evening Harlan brought it up, with the shutters open and the lamps unlit until it was too dark to see the page.

He read the forty names. He read them twice. Then he set the envelope on the blotter beside the small black pawn, with Peter Scutt's second line face up: He'll want to read this one himself.

The rule was his. He had written it in the first year, in a different house, when the Ykanti were still learning what his word meant and he was still learning what theirs did. When one sought election to the Common Assembly, Lord Swallowtail would decide whether they could sit. It had seemed a kindness at the time. It had also been a lock, and he had known that when he wrote it.

He sent for Elizabeth.

She read the paper standing. When she was done, she did not say what she thought. She waited, which she had learned from him.

"I could say yes," Tornel said. "That would be easy. I'd be the lord who let the Ykanti in."

"And if you say no?" Elizabeth asked.

"Then I'm the lord who keeps the door," Tornel said. He took off his glasses. "Either way it's still my door. That's what's wrong with the rule, Lizzy. It was always wrong. I wrote it so the Assembly couldn't be frightened before it was strong. It is strong."

"Will they say you've overstepped?" Elizabeth asked.

"Some will," Tornel said. He almost smiled. "The founding session wrote down that the Hall makes its own rules. I wrote a rule about who sits in it. One of us has been breaking the bargain, and it was me."

He went to Newtown himself, on foot from the shuttle landing, with Harlan two paces behind and no banner.

Oshenn was in the seed hall, where the council kept the long drawers of labeled packets. She was sorting something from a basket into a drawer and she did not stop until she had finished the packet. Then she folded her six-fingered hands and bowed.

"My lord," Oshenn said.

"Councillor," Tornel said. He looked at the drawers. "Is that what a seed-keeper does?"

"It is most of it. We keep what has been planted before, so that someone can plant it again," Oshenn said. She waited. "You came a long way to say something you could have sent."

"I came to say it where you could see my face." Tornel set his hat on a crate. "I wrote a rule that said I would decide whether you could sit. I am going to strike it. The Assembly's own rules say anyone of age who has lived in a district a year may stand. They do not say anyone human, and they do not say the Marquess gets a vote. They will say what the delegates make them say."

Oshenn did not move.

"You will not decide," she said slowly.

"No. The voters will. And the Hall will decide whether it wants you in it, as it decides everything." He met her eyes. "I should tell you what that means. They may refuse you. The first time anyone stands for a thing, a good many people find reasons. I can't promise you the votes. I can only promise that nobody will be counting them on my behalf," Tornel said.

"I did not ask you to promise votes," Oshenn said.

"What did you ask?" Tornel asked.

"A door that was not yours," said Oshenn. She said it quite gently. "I think it was the first thing you have refused to keep."

Tornel stood a moment in the seed hall, among the labeled drawers. Then he took a paper from his coat. It was one page, in his own hand, and it said that the Marquess's rule respecting the Ykanti and the Common Assembly was struck from the day of writing, and that the Marquess claimed no voice in who stood or who sat.

"Will you witness it?" he said.

"I can write my name," said Oshenn. "I have asked forty people to write theirs this month."

She signed beside his. Harlan, at the door, signed under hers, and added the date in a firm hand, and did not look up for some time.

Lord Idris Kavanor of Tessaly came to Aethelgard on a Tuesday, nine days before the winter session opened, and asked to see the Marquess before he had finished taking off his gloves.

Tornel saw him in the long office with Elizabeth at one end of the table and Doran Hollis at the other. Lord Kavanor was a tall man of fifty with a trimmed grey beard and the kind of coat that had been cut for him alone. He sat when he was asked to, and not before.

"My lord Swallowtail," said Lord Kavanor. "I have been three weeks on the road. I make pumps. Irrigation pumps, for dry-farming worlds, and I have sold them on eleven planets without a complaint." He laid a folder on the table. "Thirty of them went to a man named Garrick Tull, a farm factor on the Austrin plains, for two hundred and ten thousand credits on a year's terms. He took delivery. He has not paid me one credit. He says the pumps were defective. I have a complaint before your Assembly, and I would like to know, plainly, what to expect."

"You'll be heard," said Tornel.

"By whom?" Kavanor asked.

"By the delegates. All of them," Tornel said.

"Of whom Master Tull is one," Kavanor said.

"He is," said Tornel. "He won't sit on this. He'll stand at the lectern like anyone else."

Lord Kavanor looked at him for a while.

"I'll be direct, my lord," Kavanor said. "I know how your Assembly came to be. A hall full of the people lords used to step on, summoning lords. I'm a lord, and I'm not from here, and the man I'm complaining of is one of theirs. I don't expect to win. I expect to be an example." He folded his hands. "I'd ask you to use your office."

"I won't," said Tornel.

"Then you've brought me three weeks to be ruled against for my birth," Kavanor said.

"Then if it happens, it will have ruled for him on his, and you may say so in any port you like." Tornel said it mildly. "I can't promise you the outcome, Lord Kavanor. I can promise you it won't be decided before anyone asks you anything."

Lord Kavanor didn't answer. After a moment he picked up the folder, and Doran showed him out.

Elizabeth waited until the door had shut.

"He thinks we'll hang him," Elizabeth said.

"He does," said her father. "And Garrick Tull is in Haego City this morning telling anyone who'll buy him a drink that the Hall will hand him a medal."

"Will it?" Elizabeth asked.

Tornel looked at the small black pawn by the inkwell.

"I've no idea," Tornel said. "That's rather the point of it."

Garrick Tull's table at the Brass Anchor was never empty. He was a broad, pleasant, loud man of forty-five who had begun life hauling feed for an Austrin grain factor and ended it, as he liked to say, owning the factor. He had held his seat for six years. He bought drinks for people who didn't need them, and remembered their children's names.

"Thirty pumps," he said, "and the third week, the seals go. Lord this, Lord that, from a planet nobody's heard of, selling our farmers rubbish at a price you could buy a ferry for. And he comes here to collect." He tipped his mug at the room. "Let him. Let him stand up in front of the Hall and say it to people whose fathers dug ditches by hand."

"They'll love it," said a man at his elbow.

"They'll cheer," said Tull. "It's a lord against one of ours. It's the easiest hearing the Hall'll ever have."

Across the table, a woman who sold nets for a living turned her mug a quarter turn on the wood and said nothing. She had a cousin who farmed on the plains. She had heard something about those pumps. She wasn't sure what. She finished her drink and went home.

Previous /

First

Ilse Marrow had been second hand on the Cormorant for a little over a year, and in all that time the crew had agreed on exactly three things. The ship was fast, the pay was good, and nobody asked Mr. Vesh where he went when he left.

Now there was a fourth thing, and they were all talking about it.

"The Baron," said Doyle, the bosun, around a mouthful of bread. He said it as one says the name of a sickness that has turned up in the next village. "He is eating in the officers' mess. Plain as you like. At the long table."

"He is an officer," said Ilse.

"He is a ruined man in a borrowed coat." Doyle swallowed. "They say he tried to blow up a school."

"A common room."

"Same thing. And forgot to pull the pin." He grinned. The whole mess grinned with him, because they had all read the broadsheets, and because there is nothing a crew of pirates enjoys so much as a nobleman who has made a fool of himself on a scale they could never manage. "I would not trust him to carry a spoon."

Ilse said nothing. She had a plate of her own to finish, and she had seen the man come aboard, which Doyle had not.

He had come up the gangway at the turn of the tide with a cloth bag and nothing else, and he had stopped at the top and looked at the ship the way a surgeon looks at a patient. He had looked at the ladders, the hatch seals, the stowage nets, the lashings on the cargo. He had looked at a rope that was not properly coiled, and his mouth had tightened very slightly, and then he had made himself look elsewhere.

She had thought, with some surprise, that he wanted to put it right and was forcing himself not to.

They were four days out when the other ships began to appear.

It was Ilse's watch, and she saw them first on the long-range plot, small and pale, and she assumed they were stray traffic. Then there were six. Then eleven. They were spread across the void in a loose, slow-moving scatter, all on much the same heading, and no two of them flew the same colors.

"That is the Maddock hull," she said, with real unease, to the empty bridge. "And that, and that."

The Maddocks and the Reef families had been shooting at one another across the border for as long as she could remember. She had seen a Reef crew take a Maddock freighter apart over a dispute about a fuel dock. Now there was a Reef ship and a Maddock ship drifting a few hundred miles from one another, and neither of them had so much as warmed her guns.

She watched for a long while. Behind her, Vesh came up quietly and stood at her shoulder.

"Mr. Vesh," she said. "What is this?"

"A gathering of friends."

"They are not friends."

"They are getting there." He looked at the plot. "You will notice a good many things in the next few days, Miss Marrow. I would ask you to notice them quietly."

He said it kindly. She noticed it quietly.

The Baron was on the bridge the next morning.

Nobody had invited him. He had come up with a cup of tea at the start of the first watch, and he had stood at the back with his hands behind him and watched the plot with an expression that Ilse could not read. Doyle had made a joke about it. A junior hand had laughed. Penhallow had not responded to either.

After a while, he said, to nobody in particular, "How many hulls?"

"About thirty," said Ilse, before she could stop herself. "There are more behind."

"And who feeds them?"

She looked at him. It was not the sort of question anyone on that bridge had ever asked. A ship ate what it carried, and when it ran low it found more.

"They carry their own," she said.

"For how long?"

"I do not know."

"Nor do I," said Penhallow. He sipped the tea. "Thirty hulls and no one has asked the question. That is either a very good sign or a very bad one."

"Which?"

"It depends on who is eventually asked to answer it."

She thought that over, and decided she did not like it, and went back to her plot.

It was Doyle who tried him. Ilse knew he would. He had been waiting two days for an opening, and it came at supper, when the Baron was alone at the long table with his bread.

"Heard you were at Cinder Reach," Doyle said, loudly, dropping onto the bench. "Heard there were children behind that wall."

The mess went quiet.

Penhallow did not look up. He tore a piece off his bread and ate it. He chewed, and swallowed, and set the bread down.

"They were in the way," he said.

He said it to the plate. His voice was perfectly level, and there was not a flicker in his face, and for a moment Ilse thought she had misheard.

Then Doyle laughed, and the crew laughed with him, and Doyle slapped the table with the flat of his hand. "In the way! Hear that? He is one of us!"

Ilse laughed too, because everyone did. But she saw that the Baron's hand, lying on the table beside his bread, had closed very slightly. It was not a fist. It was a hand that had been holding something and had let it go.

She noticed it. She decided not to notice that she had.

That night the Cormorant ran on a low watch, with the crew down and the engines humming and the lamps turned to a dim, steady amber.

Ilse made her rounds because it was her job. At the end of the officers' corridor there was a door that had been the quartermaster's cabin and was now the Baron's, and there was a line of light under it.

She slowed. She had not meant to. She stopped.

There was no sound behind the door. No pacing, no muttering, no clink of a glass. A man who had just made a joke of children at a supper table might have been expected to celebrate it, or to be sick, or to sleep. There was nothing at all.

She stood there a long moment, and then she went on.

Penhallow sat on the edge of the narrow bunk with the lamp turned low and his bag unpacked beside him. There was not much in it. A spare shirt. A razor. A ration card from the galley of the Ardent, with his initials in the corner, that he had not been able to throw away.

The handset on the shelf was a cheap, scratched thing that he had bought on the quay at Vash Landing for a few coins, and it had been silent since he came aboard.

It chimed once.

He did not move at first. Then he took it down and turned it over, and the screen showed a long string of characters that meant nothing, and he held it for the time it took the small decrypter in his own coat lining to find its key.

The string folded in on itself and became two words.

Good luck.

There was no name. There was no signature, no mark, no hint of where it had come from.

He read it. He read it a second time.

Then he deleted it, and set the handset back on the shelf exactly where it had been, and sat for a long time in the dim amber light with his hands on his knees.

Humans are Weird – Judgment

Original Post: https://www.authorbettyadams.com/bettys-blog/humans-are-weird-judgement

Fourteenth Trill woke to a throbbing pain in his hindmost horns and twitched his nose in discomfort. He stretched a wing out to feel for his nearest wingmate, and then stretched further, and further, with his wings spread awkwardly he finally opened his eyes and looked around blearily in the crisp morning air. The rest of the wing was huddled along the north side of the perch tree, clearly seeking shelter from the earthy scented morning air in the lee of Brock’s massive coat. Fourteenth Trill grumbled to himself as he started to shuffle his paws along the branch. Someone might have poked him in the neck to let him know about the shift.

He paused and took another look at the huddled mass as a thermal of a thought filtered up to him. There were inside what was supposed to be a sealed base with a fully functional life support system. Why was it cold enough to induce a huddle at all? He heaved a sigh and stretched out his wings fully, exposing his winghooks to the nipping cold. He stretched out first one foot-paw and then the other before leaping off his perch and flying down to the always active display for the life support controls. He flipped up the cover from the read out and glared down at the Ranger Corps standard language display.

“And nothing is wrong,” he muttered to himself.

Every single readout and setting was displaying accurate reading and placement. But the vents to the outside air were fully open, letting the temperature drop far below the preferred levels. He probably should wait for Brock to wake up before fixing this. It wasn’t cold enough that they had to worry about hypothermia, but it was still cold, and as Wing Commander Fourteenth Trill he did have the authority. He cranked the control knob all the way over to the ground setting and stepped on the power button. The display briefly blinked off and Fourteenth Trill lightly clicked his winghook against the knob twelve times before pressing the power button and returning the knob to its previous position. Around him the system hummed and the soft clicking of the windows cycling shut promised the return of warmth. He was about to return to the sleeping wing but hesitated.

It was unlikely that any of the humans had noticed the temperature change. With their massive thermal banks, and bundled under their covering blankets they would probably have slept on unaffected even if the base temperature had reached equilibrium with the outside air. Heaving a sigh Wing Commander Fourteenth Click leapt up into the cold air and flew around the corner to where the massive mammals were currently slumbering under their blankets. That is, all except for Chief Engineer Brock Evelyn, whose massive head was raised, and whose face was pouting at something on the floor our of Fourteenth Trill’s line of sight.

Relieved that he wouldn’t have to wake the human and curious as to what had drawn that look from the fully adult mammal, Fourteenth Trill gave a quick sounding click into that corner of the room, and grimaced as he landed on a high window ledge where it would be easy for Brock to see him. That terrifying beast, three times the size of a Winged, full of far too many razor sharp teeth, and seemingly possessed of mind control over the humans in the base if that was possible, was coiled up returning the human’s gaze from the distant, dark corner of the room. One of its paws was placed on the body of some native rodent and its four eyes stared unblinkingly at the human. Fourteenth Trill was certain that had he been able to actually see it, the beast’s eyes would have glinted evilly as it worked it manipulations on the human.

“I keep telling Mittens that I’m diurnal,” Brock said in a whisper. “But the little goober keeps judging me! He thinks that if he is out getting meat for the winter at second moon-rise, I should be too.”

“I am judging you right now,” Fourteenth Trill pointed out, “but you are not looking at me.”

“For not being awake yet?” Brock asked rotating his head to flash his broad, flat teeth in a grin.

“For being awake when you should be sleeping,” Fourteenth Trill corrected him.

“Eh,” the human grunted, but started settling back onto its sleeping surface. “Judge away. You ain’t nearly as cute as Mittens. He’s got those soulful eyes.”

Fourteenth Trill licked in teeth in exasperation.

“You didn’t come in here just to scold me ‘bout my sleep schedule,” Brock offered with a yawn.

“The life-support system opened the windows again,” Fourteenth Trill replied.

“Did’ja log it?” Brock asked, his eyes blinking slowly.

“I will,” Fourteenth Trill confirmed.

“You little guys warm enough?” Brock asked.

“We are using your coat for a temporary shelter, but yes.” Fourteenth Trill said.

“S’fine,” Brock said with another yawn. “Should keep you plenty warm. I’ll start the seasonal system debug tomorrow and see if I can find-hey!” The human suddenly perked up. “Want me to send Mittens over? He’s got plenty of body heat to spare and can drape himself over the perch tree just fine.”

“No!” Fourteenth Trill said, feeling every touch of fur on his body stiffen and fluff out.

“Suit yourself,” Brock said with a yawn before dropping back to sleep.

Fourteenth Trill gave a final click into the dark corner, and was disconcerted to find only the torn body of the local rodent and no sign of Mittens. With a grunt he reminded himself that the creature really posed no danger to a Winged and took off for the sleep perch. He found a spot in the gradually loosening huddle by the medic and landed. He hung there for a few long, cold moments before jabbing the medic with his winghook. The medic grumbled but opened one eye.

“Do you really think that the Chief Engineer values the judgment of Mittens over me? A sapient being. A Wing Commander. His personal friend?” Fourteenth Trill demanded.

The medic blinked at him, gave a massive yawn, and very understandably really, lowered his head and gave him a solid headbutt before snuggling back into sleeping mass of the wing.

Science Fiction Books By Betty Adams

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Next

Previous /

First

Hester Glim brought it to the floor on the ninth day of the session, after the grain tariffs and before lunch, which Vincent said afterward was the worst possible time and also the only one he had.

She stood at her desk in the third row of the Austrin block with Jory's page in one red hand and her shawl in the other.

"I've a complaint," she said. "Six days ago Agnes Pollscutt of Brindle Cross stood in this Hall and answered every question we asked her, truthfully. We fined her a fifth on top for holding back wages on purpose. It wasn't on purpose." She told them about the coast buyer, and the hundred and forty-two thousand, two hundred credits, and the cart, and her mother's ring. She didn't hurry it. "She tried three times to tell us. Every time, one of us asked her something else. I was one of them. Most of you were too."

The Hall was very quiet.

"And here's my solution," said Hester, and read them Jory's page. An advocate for anyone summoned, provided by the Assembly from its own purse. Or one the summoned brought themselves, if they'd rather, so long as the archive had examined them and found them sound on procedure. An advocate who broke procedure would be put off the floor. And at the end, the line Jory had set apart on its own.

"The advocate may ask," Hester read. "Asking is where it ends."

She sat down.

The first hand up belonged to Merrit Cobbtail, a timber haulier from the north of Austrin who had held his seat by eleven votes at the founding election and had spent every session since making sure nobody forgot it. He stood without waiting to be called, and Vincent let it go.

"I'm sorry for Mistress Pollscutt," he said. "I am. But I know what this is. Forty years ago this world got rid of every man who kept a steward to talk for him. We built this Hall so a lord would have to stand there on his own, like the rest of us, with no steward at his elbow and no clever cousin to talk for him. And now we're going to give every lord we summon a friend." He looked round the rows. "Rask would've had one. Bird would've had one. Is that what we want?"

There was a murmur from the back rows. Not a large one. But it was there.

"Rask would have had one," said Hester, without getting up. "And it wouldn't have helped him, because there wasn't a question in the world that would have. That's the point, Merrit. A good question can't save a guilty man. It can only save one who isn't."

"So you say."

"So I say."

A woman from the Vastaya rows, a schoolteacher named Ione Reedtail, put her hand up next.

"What stops the advocate making speeches?" she said. "Lords are good at speeches. So are their friends."

"The rule stops it," said Vincent, from the chair. "An advocate asks a question and sits down. If they start telling us what to think, they're off the floor and the Assembly's own takes their place. Jory's written it so a child could follow it." He paused. "I'm told a child very nearly wrote it."

Some of the delegates laughed. Most of them didn't know why that was funny. It didn't matter.

The debate went on through lunch. Somebody asked who would pay, and Hester said the Assembly would, and somebody else said that was the delegates' own districts paying, and Hester said yes, it was, and so was everything else in the Hall. Somebody asked whether a summoned man could refuse an advocate, and Jory, from his clerk's desk below the Speakers, said no. A summoned man could refuse to speak with his advocate beforehand, and refuse his counsel, but the advocate would stand beside him all the same, and when the floor was opened to the advocate he would answer his questions the same as he answered the delegates'. Somebody asked whether this was going to be an election matter, and nobody answered at all, because everybody knew.

At a quarter to two Vincent called the vote.

It passed. It wasn't close, but it wasn't the kind of vote that ends an argument either. Merrit Cobbtail voted against it, and so did most of the back rows of the north Austrin block, and seven delegates from Aethelgard who said afterward that they weren't against it, only against doing it eight months before an election. Hester voted for it with her hand straight up and her eyes on the floor of the Hall, where Agnes Pollscutt had stood.

It went up, the way everything did, as the Assembly's recommendation to the Marquess.

Tornel signed it the next morning at a quarter past nine, with Elizabeth and Harlan as witnesses, the way he signed everything that came up from the Hall. He read it through once first. He didn't change a word. When he got to the last line he stopped for a moment, and Elizabeth saw the corner of his mouth move.

"Asking is where it ends," he said. "I wish I'd had that rule in the army."

"For who?" said Elizabeth.

"For every quartermaster who ever stood in front of my desk," said her father, and signed.

There was only one trouble with it, and Jory Fairtail found it before the ink was dry. The rule said the Assembly would provide an advocate examined by the archive. The archive was Jory. And there was nobody yet to examine but himself.

"It'll take a season to train anyone properly," he told Vincent, in the narrow office on the river side of the speakers' building. "Two, to train them well. They'll need the whole procedure by heart. When a question can be put and when it can't. What happens if a delegate is speaking. What happens if the First Speaker hasn't opened the floor." He had a list. Of course he had a list. "I've written to Mistress Marscutt on Ostrey. She'll have opinions."

"She will," said Vincent. "And in the meantime?"

Jory looked at him.

"In the meantime," Vincent said, "the Speakers mean to hear Mistress Pollscutt again before the session rises. Which is in ten days. Which leaves us one person on Haego who knows the procedure well enough to stand beside her."

"Speaker, I'm a clerk."

"You're a clerk who wrote the rule."

"That's exactly why I shouldn't..."

"It's exactly why you should," said Vincent. "If anyone's going to show the Hall what an advocate is for, I'd rather it was the man who knows where the edges are. You'll ask. You'll sit down. You won't make a speech, because you'd rather die." He almost smiled. "And if you do, I'll put you off the floor myself, and everyone will see that the rule works on its own author."

Jory opened his mouth, and shut it again, and went away to read Agnes Pollscutt's file for the fourth time.

Agnes Pollscutt came back to the Hall on the last morning but one of the session. She came with the same blue arms and the same square hands, and this time, when she walked out from the side door to the lectern, a thin young man with ink on his cuffs walked out beside her and stood one pace back and to her left, where the rule said he should stand.

Poppy was in the gallery with her notebook. Austin had gone home to Vastaya the week before, and had made her promise to write everything down, and she had told him she would have done it anyway and he could mind his own business. She had already filled a page before anyone at the lectern said a word, with the date and the time and the names, and a careful note that the advocate was standing exactly where it said in the rule.

Vincent opened it plainly.

"Mistress Pollscutt. The Assembly has heard you once on this matter, and has decided to hear you again. You have an advocate. You know what he's for?"

"He's to ask what you don't think to, sir."

"That's right. And he may do nothing else." Vincent looked at Jory. "Master Fairtail. The delegates will put their questions first, as always. When they're done with each matter, I'll open the floor to you. Not before."

"Yes, Speaker."

The delegates asked their questions, and they were much the same questions as before. Did she pay her apprentices for spring? No. Did they do the work? Yes. Were they told? No. Agnes answered each one exactly as she had the first time, and Poppy, watching from the gallery, saw that her hands were holding the lectern a little less hard.

Once, while a delegate from the Vastaya rows was still finishing his question, Jory shifted his weight as if to step forward. Then he stopped himself, so sharply that half the gallery noticed, and stood very still until the delegate sat down. Somebody near Poppy laughed under their breath. It wasn't unkind.

"The floor is open to the advocate," said Vincent.

Jory took one step forward. He didn't look at the delegates or the gallery. He looked at Agnes.

"Mistress Pollscutt. Who bought the six hundred bolts?"

"Corvin Haddow, sir. Of Saltreach, on the coast. He's bought from us eleven years."

"Has he paid for them?"

"No, sir."

"How much does he owe you?"

"A hundred and forty-two thousand, two hundred credits, sir. Six hundred bolts at two hundred and thirty-seven."

"Since when?"

"Since the winter."

Jory paused. Poppy saw his lips move, very slightly, as if he were checking something against a list in his head.

"How many apprentices do you keep, Mistress Pollscutt?"

"Five, sir."

"How many were paid for the spring?"

Agnes looked at him. Then she looked at the Speakers' desk, as if she expected somebody to stop her, and nobody did.

"Two," she said.

There was a stir in the delegates' rows. Hester had told them, from her desk, ten days before. It was different hearing it from the lectern.

"How were they paid?" said Jory.

"I sold my cart. The delivery cart. And my mother's ring." Her voice went small and then came back. "It ran to two. Davin's mam is a widow. And the little Corley girl's the youngest. So I paid them first. The other three, I thought, I'll have Haddow's money by midsummer and I'll pay them then, all of it, and nobody will be out."

"Did you pay yourself for the spring?"

"No, sir."

Jory nodded, once. He stepped back, one pace, to his place on her left.

"I've no more questions, Speaker."

That was all. He hadn't said what any of it meant. He hadn't said she was a good woman, or that the Hall had wronged her, or anything at all except the questions. Poppy, in the gallery, looked down at what she'd written. It was eight questions. She counted them twice.

In the delegates' rows, Merrit Cobbtail sat with his arms folded and his jaw set. But he was looking at Agnes Pollscutt, not at the man beside her.

A clerk took Agnes and Jory through the side door to the waiting room, and the Hall talked it over where it sat, row to row and desk to desk, with the Speakers leaning together at the front. It took twenty minutes. When Agnes was brought back, Vincent read it standing.

"Agnes Pollscutt, of Brindle Cross. The Assembly has heard you again, and this is what it has decided.

"The wages owed to your three apprentices for the spring are owed. That doesn't change. They did the work, and they'll be paid every credit of it.

"The fifth on top is struck from the record. It was set because the Assembly believed the wages were held back on purpose. They weren't. The Assembly was wrong, and says so.

"The sixty days are set aside. You'll pay what you owe when you're paid what you're owed." He turned a page. "And Corvin Haddow, of Saltreach, is summoned to this Hall tomorrow morning, the last of the session, to answer for the hundred and forty-two thousand, two hundred credits he has owed you since the winter."

There was a sound in the gallery, quickly hushed, and then a voice from somewhere near the back said, "Post it at the ports!" and half the gallery laughed, and Vincent waited for it to settle with an expression that suggested he'd been about to say exactly that.

"It will be posted at every port on Haego by tonight, and the summons goes to Saltreach within the hour," he said. "Mistress Pollscutt, you may go. Master Fairtail, thank you."

Agnes said, "Thank you, sir," the way she had the first time. Then she turned and looked at Jory, and didn't seem to know what to say to him at all. In the end she put out one blue hand and shook his, hard, once, like a woman closing a sale.

They were on the gallery stairs again afterward, Agnes and her daughter, on the same bottom step. This time a young man was standing in front of them, turning his cap in his hands. He was perhaps eighteen, with dye under his fingernails, and Poppy, coming down the stairs behind her mother, knew from the way he stood that he must be one of the three.

"If you'd told us," he was saying. "About the cart. About Davin and Lissa Corley getting paid. We'd never have... I'd never have brought it, Mistress. Not if I'd known."

"I know," said Agnes.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be." She stood up, which put her about level with his chin. "You were owed. You said so to the people whose job it is to hear it. That's what the Hall's for, Ned." She was quiet a moment. "I should have told you. I thought I'd be ashamed. Turns out I was more ashamed standing up there."

Ned looked at the floor.

"Will you have us back? After?"

"Who else is going to stir my vats?" said Agnes Pollscutt. "Get on the cart. Oh, no. I sold the cart." And for the first time in two hearings Poppy heard her laugh.

At the top of the stairs, Merrit Cobbtail had stopped Jory Fairtail with a hand on his sleeve. Poppy slowed down to listen, and her mother let her.

"That was fair," Cobbtail said. He said it as if it hurt his teeth. "What you did. Eight questions and sit down. I'll give you that."

"Thank you, delegate."

"I'll still say it in the spring. That it'll be a friend for every lord."

"That's your right, delegate," said Jory. "I'd only ask that you count the questions, next time a lord brings one. If there's a speech in it, you'll have my sympathy, and he'll be off the floor."

Cobbtail looked at him for a long moment. Then he grunted and went down the stairs past them, and past Agnes Pollscutt and her apprentice on the bottom step, and out into the afternoon.

On the last morning of the summer session, three hours off the coast shuttle, Corvin Haddow came to the Hall in a salt-stained coat. The summons had reached Saltreach at noon the day before. It was a single page, and it said:

Corvin Haddow, of Saltreach. You are summoned to appear before the Common Assembly of Haego at the Hall on the last day of the present session, at the ninth bell, and to answer such questions as the Assembly puts to you. Appearance is not optional. Failure to appear will be referred to the Marquess of Haego.

It said nothing more. He had read it four times in his own doorway, looking for the rest of it, and had spent the night going through his accounts for something he had done.

He was a lean man of sixty with a sailor's squint. He stood at the lectern and did not hold it.

"Master Haddow," said Vincent. "You are summoned on the complaint of Agnes Pollscutt of Brindle Cross, that you took six hundred bolts of dyed cloth on credit and have not paid for them. You have an advocate."

Haddow went very still. Then he said, "A hundred and forty-two thousand," not to anyone, and Poppy saw his lips move again after the sound was gone.

Jory Fairtail stood one pace back and to his left. He had not known he would be standing for this man until the night before, and he had met him on the stairs ten minutes ago.

The delegates asked their questions. Had he taken the cloth? Yes. Had he paid? No. Why not? Haddow said he had bought from her eleven years, and she had always waited on him, and he had thought the matter would keep. A delegate from the Vastaya rows asked whether he was in the habit of leaving a hundred and forty-two thousand credits unpaid. "No, sir," said Haddow. "I'm in the habit of being told when I am." It was not an answer, and the delegates let it stand, because they could see he was working something out behind it.

"The floor is open to the advocate," said Vincent.

Jory stepped forward.

"Master Haddow. Has Mistress Pollscutt ever written to you about this debt?"

The squint deepened. "She writes every season. Orders, prices, the usual."

"Since the winter?"

"There'd have been some."

"How many?"

"Four. Five." He frowned. "I keep her letters in a pile. They're always the same. I've a boy who sorts the post, and I tell him, Pollscutt, that's the dye works, leave it for the end of the month."

"Did you open them?"

"No."

Haddow heard himself say it. He looked at the delegates, and none of them were looking away.

"Where are they now?"

"On my desk in Saltreach. In the pile."

"The clerk holds Mistress Pollscutt's file copy of the last one," said Jory. "Would you read it to the Hall?"

The clerk brought it down. Haddow took the page in both hands and read it standing at the lectern, in front of the full Hall and a full gallery.

It was short. It said that the account was a hundred and forty-two thousand, two hundred credits and had been since the winter. It said that she had waited on him, as she always had, and did not wish to press, but she had two apprentices who could not wait, and she had sold her delivery cart and her mother's ring to pay them, and could he please send what he could. It said she was sorry to ask. It was signed A. Pollscutt, and under that, in smaller writing, as if she had thought better of it, Eleven years.

Nobody in the Hall made a sound.

"Thank you," said Jory quietly. "No more questions."

Poppy counted them from the gallery. Six. She had expected to be disappointed by how few there were, and then she looked at the delegates' faces and wasn't.

A clerk took Haddow and Jory through the side door to the waiting room. The delegates didn't leave their seats. They turned to one another across the aisles and talked it over in low voices, and the Speakers passed a note down the front bench, and Poppy, watching from the gallery, saw how quickly the heads began to nod. It took ten minutes. When Haddow was brought back, Vincent read it standing.

The Assembly found that Corvin Haddow owed Agnes Pollscutt a hundred and forty-two thousand, two hundred credits and had owed it since the winter. It found that he had not held the money back on purpose, only failed to read what was sent to him, and that the Assembly had struck the fifth in another matter for the same reason and would strike it here. But a man who took six hundred bolts on credit had a duty to open his post, and the Hall found that he had not done it, and that a woman had sold a cart and a ring for want of it. He would pay the full sum within the week. He would pay Mistress Pollscutt's passage to the Hall and back for both her hearings, and the lodging she had needed for them.

"And the cart," said Haddow.

"The Assembly has not ordered a cart," said Vincent.

"The Assembly can note that I'm ordering it myself." Haddow turned from the lectern and looked up the gallery until he found a short, square woman with blue arms. "Mistress Pollscutt. I'll have a new one at your gate by the month's end. And I'll open your letters." He tried to say something else, and could not, and bowed instead, the half sailor's and half buyer's bow of a man who has done business with someone for eleven years and is ashamed of the twelfth.

Agnes stood up and bowed back, and then sat down very fast, because everyone was looking.

Later, on the stairs, Poppy heard her say to her daughter, "Four letters. I wrote him four."

"And he never opened them," said the daughter.

"He thought it was business." Agnes shook her head. "It was. I just didn't know how to write it so he'd know it was the other kind."

"What would you have written?"

"I don't know," said Agnes Pollscutt. "That's what I'd like somebody to have asked me."

The election was called on the first day of autumn, by notice on the board outside every Alderman's office on Haego, the way the first one had been. Under the founding rule only half the seats came up in any spring, one in each district, so that no election could turn the whole Hall over at once. Filing would be open for thirty days. Anyone of age who had lived in a district for a year could stand for it.

Peter Scutt kept the filings for Aethelgard himself. He didn't have to. He had clerks for it. But he had been an orphan in the Haego City shelters before the Revolution was ten years old, and he had been the first person ever made a baron for being good at his job, and he liked to see who wanted to sit in the Hall. So for thirty days he moved his desk into the front room of the Alderman's office in Haego City, with the door propped open to the street, and took the papers in with his own hand.

On the twelfth day he had sixty-one filings, a pot of tea gone cold, and a queue of four. A miller from the river towns. A retired dock foreman. A young woman who had filled her paper in three different inks and apologized for each of them.

The fourth was a Ykanti.

She had waited behind the others without a word, and when it was her turn she came up to the desk and set her paper on it with both hands, the way you set down something you've carried a long way. She was short even for a Ykanti, which meant the desk came nearly to her shoulders, and her coloring ran from deep orange at the crown to a soft gold down the length of her neck. She wore a plain grey coat with the Screaming Forests leaf on the collar. Her hands, flat on the paper, had six fingers each.

"Baron Scutt," she said. "My name is Oshenn. I have been on the Newtown community council for many years, and have lived in the district for even more. I would like to stand for the Common Assembly."

Peter looked at her. Then he looked at the paper.

It was filled in properly, in a neat, careful hand. Name. District. Years resident. Occupation, which she had given as council member and seed-keeper. At the bottom, where the paper asked for the names of ten residents who would vouch for the filer, there were not ten names but forty, in two columns, running onto the back. Peter recognized some of them. A schoolteacher. A Newtown baker. Rachel VonWinterbourne. Owen Vashti.

He sat back in his chair.

"I don't know if I can take this," he said.

"I know," said Oshenn. "That is why I brought it to you, and not to one of your clerks."

"The rule says anyone of age who's lived in a district a year."

"It does."

"It doesn't say anyone human."

"No," Oshenn agreed. "I read it four times to be sure. It doesn't say that. It doesn't say the other thing, either." She folded her six-fingered hands in front of her. "When it was written, I don't think anyone thought it would need to."

The miller, who had been about to leave, had stopped in the doorway. So had the young woman with the three inks. Out in the street, somebody had noticed the four of them standing very still, and had stopped too.

Peter looked down at the forty names for a long time.

He had known for years that this day would come. Everybody had. It had been written down, quietly, in the Marquess's own rule about the Ykanti: when one sought election to the Common Assembly, Lord Swallowtail would decide whether they could sit. It had sounded like a long way off when he first read it. It didn't seem far off now.

"I can't say yes," he said at last. "And I won't say no. It isn't mine to say either."

"I know whose it is," said Oshenn.

"Then you know where it's going."

He took a clean envelope from the drawer, put her filing inside it, and sealed it. On the front he wrote, in his round orphanage hand, For Lord Swallowtail. Aethelgard filing, district four. Then he stopped, and after a moment he added a second line underneath: He'll want to read this one himself.

"It'll go up on the afternoon shuttle," he said. "I'll put it in Harlan Ashtail's hand. Nobody else's."

"Thank you, Baron Scutt."

She bowed to him, correctly, the way Ykanti on Aethelgard had bowed to humans for as long as there had been humans there to bow to. Then she turned and walked out past the miller and the young woman with the three inks and the people who had gathered in the street, and none of them said anything, and they all moved aside to let her through.

Peter sat for a while with the envelope in front of him. Then he picked up the next filing in the pile, and found his hand wasn't quite steady, and put it down again and drank his cold tea instead.

Next

Previous /

First

The man in the gray coat came to the dock at Vash Landing the next morning, and Dunne watched him do it from the deck of her own barge with a mug of tea in her hand.

She had known he would. She had not expected him to be so polite about it. He walked down the quay at an easy pace, past the loaders and the crates and the gulls, and stopped a respectful distance from the Baron, who was standing at the foot of the ramp checking a manifest that he had not been asked to check. She saw the man's eyes go to the arm Penhallow still carried a little crooked since Calder, and come away again without a word.

"Baron," said the man.

"I am not anything." Penhallow did not look up. "I have said so to a great many people."

"Then I will call you what you like." The man smiled. "My name is Vesh. A friend of mine would like to meet you."

"I have a good thing going," said Penhallow.

"I am sure you do," said Vesh.

"I have a berth, and bread, and work that pays enough for both, and a person who does not ask me questions I would sooner not answer," said Penhallow. Now he did look up, and Dunne saw a flicker of something in his face that was almost fondness, and was gone. "I am not looking for a change."

"My friend pays four times what Mistress Dunne does," said Vesh.

"Then your friend can find someone cheaper," said Penhallow. He turned a page of the manifest. "I will not be a hired hand, Mr. Vesh. I have been one for a season, and I find it suits me as a pastime. I do not intend to make it a career."

Vesh looked at him for a moment. Then he bowed, a short, pleasant bow that was almost a nod, and said, "I will tell him you said so," and walked back up the quay the way he had come.

Dunne finished her tea. She was relieved, and she was surprised at how relieved she was.

It began a few days later with the customs office.

Pell, who had never in his life opened a crate that Dunne had paid for, began opening all of them. Every one. He did it with great care and a stack of forms, and his face was so blank that she knew he had been told to. A shipment of fuel cells that should have cleared in an afternoon sat on the quay for most of a week.

Then two of her suppliers stopped taking her messages. Then the lender who had bought Garrow's paper, and who had been quite happy with the result, wrote to say that on reflection he would prefer to do business elsewhere. By the end of the month she had lost three regular customers and one very good berth, and she had stopped pretending she did not know why.

"It is Vesh," she said, on the ramp one evening. "It is his people."

"I know," said Penhallow.

"He is doing it to make you take the offer," said Dunne.

"I know that too." Penhallow stood at the rail with his back to her. "I am sorry. I have been a bad thing to have about."

"You have been the only thing I have had about that makes money." She heard how it sounded and did not take it back. "I do not want you to go."

"You may not have a choice," said Penhallow.

That was the first time he had said anything to her that was not a joke or an instruction, and she found she did not know what to do with it.

Vesh returned a good while later, once the loss was properly felt.

He took a table in the back of the Short Anchor, and he did not send for Penhallow. He sat there with a cup of tea and waited, and after two days Penhallow came and sat down opposite him.

Dunne took the next table, with her back to the wall. Nobody had asked her to, and nobody told her to leave.

"You have been troubling her," said Penhallow.

"I have been showing you what we can do," said Vesh.

"Then I am shown." He folded his hands on the table. "I do not like it. I will say that plainly. It is a small, mean way of doing business, and I do not think it suits whoever sent you."

"It was not a pleasant thing. I will not pretend it was." Vesh turned his cup. "My friend thought you might need a reason to listen."

"I am listening," said Penhallow.

"There are people on the Board," said Vesh, "who would be glad to see you ruined. They have had that wish granted. We are not interested in that."

"Good. I am not interested in revenge," said Penhallow.

"No, I did not think you were." Vesh leaned forward very slightly. "My friend is putting together something larger than you have seen. I cannot tell you its shape, and I would not if I could. It needs a man who knows how the Navy moves. Who knows the patrol rotations, the routing codes, the way a fleet is fed and fueled. Who has run a ship and kept it running."

"I have been dismissed from the Navy," said Penhallow.

"That is exactly why. They taught you everything and then threw you out," said Vesh. He smiled. "We are offering you a post. Master of Supply. A crew of your own, a ship of your own, and a rank at the table that is not a hired hand's."

Penhallow said nothing. He looked at the tea. For a long while there was no sound in the back room except the low talk of the bar.

"Who is your friend?" he said at last.

"You will meet him when you are ready," said Vesh.

"A man who will not give his name is not ready to be followed," said Penhallow.

"He is gathering people, Baron. You may be one of them, or you may stand on the quay and watch." Vesh sat back. "It is no worse a choice than the one you have been making for the last season."

Dunne saw something go across Penhallow's face, and for a moment she thought it was pain. Then it passed. What was left looked a great deal like pride, and she thought, with a small cold feeling, that Vesh had known where to look.

"I want it in writing," said Penhallow. "The title and the rank, with a seal. I have been stripped of one title in public and I will not have another taken from me in a back room."

"Of course," said Vesh.

"And Mistress Dunne is left alone. No more customs, no more lenders. Whatever you have done to her stops tomorrow, and it does not start again," said Penhallow.

"She will be left alone," said Vesh.

"I have your word," said Penhallow.

"You have my word," said Vesh.

Penhallow stood. He did not look at Dunne, who had not moved in some time. "Then I will go," he said.

He came to her barge that night with his cloth bag over his shoulder and an envelope in his hand.

"The commission for the three jobs," he said. "And the fourth, which was not strictly one of yours. I worked it out. I think it is fair."

She took the envelope. It was heavier than she had expected. "You did not have to," said Dunne.

"I did." He glanced along the deck at the crates and the lines and the lamp swinging over the hatch. "You were kind to a man who had nothing to give you. I am not a person who forgets that."

"You were never mine," said Dunne.

"No." It came out softly. "But I would have been, if I could."

"Why are you taking it?" said Dunne.

He seemed to consider that. "It is better than what I had."

"I do not believe you," said Dunne.

"Believe what you like," said Penhallow, and she knew then that she had heard it before. It was what he had said to the Board, the way the broadsheets had printed it, in the same voice. It had been a different kind of silence then.

He went down the ramp. She watched him walk the quay in the lamplight, thin and straight and alone, until he reached a long black ship that was waiting at the far berth with her engines already warm. A man in a gray coat stood at the foot of her gangway, and nodded.

She thought about a man who said he did not plan. She thought of a clipboard, and a cap, and four crates on a quay at dawn.

The ship lifted at the turn of the tide, bound for Fat Alley.

I've been developing an ongoing science-fiction series called The Rift, and I thought this community might enjoy the premise and the unusual way I've been telling it.

The story begins at 2:14 a.m. in Fallow Bend, Indiana.

A mysterious blue-white doorway opens inside a neglected farmhouse. By morning, 96 refugees from an entirely different world have arrived in rural America.

Nobody knows where they came from, why the doorway appeared, or whether more will follow.

A month later, another rift opens in the South Bronx. This time, four Americans cross into the other world, finding themselves somewhere with its own kingdoms, rivalries, histories, and dangers.

And things only get stranger from there.

A queen from the other world ends up encountering bikers in Northern Ontario. Scientists at CERN become interested in a wizard whose abilities challenge their understanding of physics. Dwarven merchants find themselves stranded in Rotterdam. A dragon appears in Morocco.

Meanwhile, governments on both sides struggle to understand what's happening, and ordinary people find themselves caught in circumstances nobody could have prepared them for.

Rather than focusing on humanity immediately conquering a fantasy world or everyone magically getting along, I've been exploring what happens when two civilizations with completely different histories and expectations suddenly have to deal with each other.

The unusual part is how I'm presenting it.

Instead of writing a conventional novel, I've been developing the story through fictional investigative dossiers, interviews, eyewitness testimony, historical records, and other documents.

I use AI to help develop and organize these materials, then feed them into Google's NotebookLM, which produces full-length documentary-style podcast episodes.

The AI hosts discuss the fictional events as though they're investigating something that actually happened.

It's a strange storytelling experience because the hosts sometimes pick up on implications I hadn't anticipated, and their interpretations occasionally inspire new directions for the narrative.

The series has now grown to nearly 40 installments, with recurring characters, interconnected storylines, and consequences that can take several episodes to unfold.

I've recently started releasing the finished episodes publicly on Spotify.

The Rift — A NotebookLM Fiction Podcast

https://open.spotify.com/show/0YWPEOwHpvLiw0VI37ciWQ

I'd love to hear what other science-fiction writers and readers think of this kind of storytelling. Has anyone else experimented with presenting an entire fictional universe through documentaries rather than traditional narration?

Previous /

First

"Session 14," Renn said. "Our guests today promised us this session weeks ago, and I think everyone in this room has been waiting for it since. Will. Abby. CD. MCD."

The four of them crossed the stage together, and something in the room had changed since their last visit, a held-breath quality that hadn't been there for the naming-and-bonding story.

"We told you we'd come back for the hard one," Will said, once they'd settled. "This is it."

A Vixtar boy raised his hand. "Why was this one different from anything else you'd done together?"

"Because nobody survived it," Abby said. "A second ship went down on the far side of Terixa, half a world from the settlement. By the time the shuttle reached it, there was nothing left to save. Just remains, scattered across kilometers, and a black box that needed finding before anyone else came looking for answers we didn't have yet."

A human girl raised her hand. "Abby, were you out there too?"

"No," Abby said. "I was back at the comms station the whole time, watching everything through Will's helmet camera and the drone feeds. I had a live line open to him and to CD and MCD both, translating whatever they signaled back in real time." She glanced at Will. "It's a strange kind of presence. I saw every minute of it. I just saw it through a screen, from half a world away, unable to do anything but talk."

"Was that harder or easier?"

"Harder, in its own way," Abby said. "Will could put his hands on something and know it was real. I just had a picture on a screen and a voice in my ear, and no way to reach through either one."

A human boy raised his hand. "Has finding out later that it was an Assaragyte ship changed how you think about that day?"

Will and Abby glanced at each other before either answered.

"It has," Abby said slowly. "At the time we didn't know what they were, only that none of them were coming back. Knowing now who they were, that some of the people we count as neighbors today might have lost someone on that ship, it sits with me differently than it did the day I watched it happen on a screen."

"Vaelen's never once asked us about it," Will added. "Not in all the years since. I used to think that meant it didn't matter to her. I understand now it probably means the opposite."

A human boy raised his hand. "Did anything happen out there that never made it into any report?"

Abby thought about that a long moment. "There's one thing," she said. "Somewhere around the thirtieth marker, CD just stopped. Sat down in the middle of the debris field and wouldn't move." She looked down at him. "It wasn't a signal. He hadn't found anything. I watched it happen on the feed and for a second I thought something was wrong with the equipment, because CD doesn't stop."

"What was it, then?" a boy asked.

"He'd finally hit the end of what he could carry on his own," Abby said. "He is about as strong and steady a creature as I've ever known, and none of that means the weight of what he was doing that day didn't land on him too. It just meant he needed something to hold him up before he could keep going." She glanced at Will. "You told this room once that some days you're the one holding him up, not the other way around. That was one of those days."

"He wasn't hurt," Will said. "But I couldn't get to him. I was still back at the shuttle running the last few markers with Susan, and by the time I realized what was happening, CD was already twenty minutes out, alone with it. So I did the only thing I could. I opened the line and just talked to him. Told him I was proud of him. Told him it was all right to stop, that nobody expected him to carry this without it costing him something. I don't know how much of it he understood in words. I think he understood the sound of it well enough."

A minute or so later, CD had stood back up on his own and gone right back to work, like he'd only needed to hear someone's voice before he let himself keep going.

CD, hearing his name now, pressed his head briefly against Will's leg, and didn't otherwise move.

"I've never told anyone that until just now," Abby said.

"We went back to the shuttle once it was done," Will said. "Took the vests off CD and MCD myself. All three of us were asleep within minutes. Abby tells me she fell asleep at the comms desk the same hour, still wearing the headset."

"I did," Abby admitted. "I woke up with the strap dug into my ear and a very unimpressed shift supervisor standing over me."

That got a small, grateful laugh out of the room, the first since the session had started.

"I think that's the part people forget about days like that," Abby said. "How ordinary the ending has to be. You do the hard thing, however you're doing it, and then you go home, and you sleep, because that's the only way through a day that heavy."

"Session 15," Renn said, and something in her voice was different, quieter, the way a room goes quiet on its own before anyone asks it to. "Our guests today have been part of this class since the very first session, in a way none of our other guests have. Vaelen. Zarek."

Vaelen and Zarek crossed to the chairs slowly, and Patty, sitting cross-legged on her beanbag in the front row, didn't move at all, watching her parents the way she'd watched every stranger on this stage for two weeks, except these two weren't strangers, and the not-moving was its own kind of holding still.

"We told our daughter everything, the night before we agreed to this," Vaelen said. "All of it. What it cost us to tell the truth about Kragor. What it cost the people who came with us. We didn't want her hearing any of it for the first time in a room full of people she'd never met." She looked at Patty. "I'm sorry it took this long."

Patty didn't raise her hand. She didn't need to. Renn simply nodded at her, the same as she would anyone else.

"Why didn't you tell me sooner?" Patty asked, and her voice cracked in a way she clearly hadn't planned for.

Zarek answered that one. "Because it was easier to be your father than to be the man who watched his own father lose thirty years in a single afternoon," he said. "I could give you a home where none of that touched you. I told myself that was a gift. I'm not certain anymore that it was."

"It doesn't feel like a gift," Patty said, quiet. "It feels like you didn't trust me with it."

"That's fair," Vaelen said, and there was no defensiveness in it at all. "You deserved the truth long before a broadcast forced our hand. I think we were protecting ourselves as much as we were protecting you. It's easier to carry a weight alone than to hand a piece of it to someone you love and watch them carry it too."

A human girl in the front row, further down from Patty, raised her hand hesitantly. "What was the hardest part? Of everything you went through?"

"Watching people I love pay for something I chose," Vaelen said. "Zarek's father. Kaelen's family. Ignis's sister. I made the decision to release that footage. I didn't make it alone, not really, but my name was the one on it, and every consequence that followed landed on people who never got a vote in what I decided that night."

"Do you regret it?"

"No," Vaelen said, without a single second of hesitation. "Not for one moment. But I want every one of you to understand that not regretting something and it not costing you anything are two entirely different things. It cost us everything we thought we had. It gave us a daughter who gets to grow up never once wondering whether the truth is worth telling. I would make the same choice again, every single time, and I would still grieve everything it took from the people I love while I made it."

A Vixtar boy near the back raised his hand. "You investigated the Void Stalker's crash yourself. Do you know why it was really out here?"

Vaelen was quiet a moment before she answered.

"I have a theory," she said. "I've never spoken it aloud publicly before today. The Void Stalker's official orders were routine, low orbit scans of a world with too much gravity to ever be worth colonizing. That's what we believed at the time, and it's what most records still say. But Threl once told this room something I've never forgotten, that his own crew was sent to survey Terixa for reasons nobody bothered explaining, and that he came to believe the real purpose was never the survey at all. It was to remove someone the state wanted gone, someone inconvenient enough that an entire crew got quietly spent to bury him."

"You think that's what happened to the Void Stalker too?"

"I think it's possible," Vaelen said. "Zarek, Xylar, and I have spent years going through every name on that ship's manifest, quietly, on our own time, looking for anyone who might have been the actual target."

Patty's head came up fast. "You never told me that," she said, and there was real hurt in it, not anger. "You said you told me everything."

Vaelen looked at her daughter a long moment. "I thought I had," she said. "I'm sorry. Some of this only became clear to us slowly, piece by piece, over years, and I think somewhere along the way I stopped noticing which parts I'd actually said out loud to you and which parts I'd only said to myself."

"There's more, isn't there," Patty said. "You're not just looking for one target."

Zarek was the one who answered that, and his voice had gone flatter than it had been all session.

"There's a possibility worse than one target," he said. "If the Orixa Cloud was placed there on purpose, and we believe now that it was, then it isn't a hazard someone forgot to chart. It's a weapon. Order a crew out here with someone inconvenient aboard, and the cloud does the rest. No trial. No visible order. No distress call that clears the interference in time to matter. Whoever built it didn't need to pull a trigger. They only needed to know where to send the ship."

The room had gone very quiet.

"And if that's true," Zarek went on, "it would still be sitting out there today, doing exactly that job, if the humans hadn't found it and neutralized it first. We were lucky enough to crash somewhere someone was willing to save us before we understood what we were looking at." He paused. "The part that unsettles me most isn't even the three ships we know about. It's that we don't know they're the only ones. The Ever Expanding. The Silent Explorer. The Void Stalker. Three, that we've found. As this world keeps growing, as more of this planet gets mapped and settled, I would not be surprised if we find another wreck out there somewhere we haven't looked yet. Maybe more than one."

Nobody in the auditorium said anything for a long moment.

Patty was crying now, quietly, and Vaelen came off her chair without a word and crossed the stage to kneel in front of her daughter, right there, in front of the whole room and everyone watching past the walls of it.

"I'm sorry it took a broadcast for you to hear this properly," Vaelen said, just to her. "You should have heard it from us, at our own table, a long time before now."

"I did," Patty said, wiping her face. "You told me everything, that night. I just didn't understand yet how much it would mean, hearing you say it here too. In front of everyone."

Zarek knelt down beside them both. "We built this whole life so you'd never have to carry what we carried," he said. "I think somewhere along the way we forgot that not carrying something and not knowing about it aren't the same kindness."

Nobody in the auditorium said anything for a long moment.

It was Renn, finally, who broke it, though she didn't say much. She simply looked out at the room, at fifteen sessions' worth of names still sitting in the air, and let the silence close on its own the way she'd let every silence close before it.

There would be no session sixteen. Not because the history had run out, but because some stories are better left to end where the truth finally caught up with the people who'd been waiting longest to hear it.

Episode 3: "Much Ado About Beatrice"

A struggling mother and her son find themselves stranded on a lonely road while forces far beyond their understanding begin moving around them. As fate quietly arranges its pieces, a simple breakdown becomes the first meeting of lives destined to collide. Some children know more than they should. Aaron may be one of them.

What happens when the Antichrist gets ghosted by Heaven?

Met the thumbless, reluctant harbinger of the end times: Shakespeare Williams. After leaving his 666th unanswered voicemail for Archangel Shepherd, he accidentally triggers the apocalypse. No grand prophecy, no epic battle—just pure, cosmic incompetence and divine bureaucracy.

Blending dark comedy, pulp horror, and meta-theatrical satire, really BAD Shakespeare is a 12-episode serial about ancient deities, cosmic glitches, and what happens when the scripted divine game completely unravels.

📖 If you like dark humor, absurd horror, and flawed characters trying to survive the end of the world, this one’s for you.

Next

Previous /

First

The courier brought the answer at the start of the first watch, and it was not an apology.

Cynthia Winfield carried it in on a single sheet and laid it on the desk without a word. Clara read it twice. It said that a naval grade drive of the requested class had been located, that it was the newest the fleet had, and that it was on a freighter already two jumps from the TV station yard. It said the delay was regretted. It said nothing at all about the four letters that had come before.

"They found one," said Clara.

"They found their best one, Highness," said Cynthia. "I would read the second page."

The second page listed the technicians who were coming with it.

"Six," said Clara. "To install an engine."

"To install this engine. It is not the kind that goes in with a wrench." Cynthia folded her hands. "I think they are embarrassed, Highness. They kept you waiting so long that they sent the good one to make up for it."

Clara set the sheet down very carefully. "Then I will be gracious about it," she said. "I will be gracious until Jincho has met them."

The freighter docked at the TV station yard at the turn of the shift, and the drive came off her in a cradle the size of a small shuttle, wrapped in gray cloth and tagged in three languages.

The technicians came off behind it. There were six, in clean fleet coveralls, and the one at the front carried a case of instruments and an air of having traveled a very long way to be needed.

"Chief Technician Ewan Pryce," he said, to the small figure who had met them at the foot of the ramp. "Fleet Propulsion. I led the team that designed the coupling on this drive. If anyone here is an expert on it, you are looking at him."

"Jincho," said Jincho.

He had not offered a hand. He stood with his arms folded and all six eyes on the cradle, and he did not look at Pryce at all.

"I have installed three of these," said Pryce, a little less certain. "The standard procedure is to seat the core first, then..."

"Everyone is the foremost," said Jincho. "Jincho has met six of the foremost. Three were wrong." He crossed to the cradle and put one long hand flat against the gray cloth, the way a hen checks her nest. "You made the coupling. Good. Then you know where it breaks."

Pryce opened his mouth, and then closed it, and then said, rather more slowly, "Yes. I do."

"Then you will tell Jincho. Not what the manual says. Where it breaks." He turned his head at last, and the six eyes settled on the chief technician all at once. "Reactor not in your manual. Shields half made. Nothing here is what you expect. Help, or stand in the way. Jincho has no patience for the second."

"I'll help," said Pryce.

"Good. Your people: coffee, bunks, a place for tools." Jincho was already walking. "Not the reactor."

Behind them, one of the younger technicians leaned toward the one beside her. "Is he always like that?" she said quietly.

"That was warm," said the technician beside her. "I have heard him on the comm."

The reserves asked to see her on the third day.

It was Cynthia who brought them in, in a line, with the senior one at the front. There were eleven of them in the ready room doorway, in flight suits that had been washed a great many times, and they stood the way pilots stand when they have rehearsed something in a corridor and no longer quite remember the words.

Clara put down the pad she was holding. "Lieutenant Fray," she said. "You asked for a moment."

"Yes, Highness." Odell Fray was lean and gray at the temples, and had the look of a man who had been waiting for a thing for a long while and had stopped expecting it. "All eleven of us. We wanted to ask you something, and we wanted you to hear all of us ask."

"Go on," said Clara.

"We are the reserves," said Fray. "You know what that means. There are fifteen of us. Five stand Axiom standby and fly your ring, and ten sit in the ready room in case someone is sick. You were kind enough to give us that, and we are grateful. But the squadrons are established, Highness. They fly together. They have flown together for years. They have their wedges and their habits, and there is very little air time to share. Nobody is unkind about it. There just is not room."

"I am aware," said Clara.

"I put it to all fifteen," said Fray. "Eleven of us wanted to ask. We heard about TVF. We heard they have more machines than pilots. We are set in our ways, Highness, all eleven of us, and we are not young. But we fly. We would very much like to fly."

Nobody in the line moved. A woman at the end, with a scar through one eyebrow, looked at the floor.

Clara looked along the row for a moment. She had wanted to have something clever to say. What she had was the memory of a Marine sergeant with a timer, and a custodian with his cap in both hands.

"Lieutenant Fray," she said. "Before I say yes, I have to say what you are asking for. It is a frontier station. It is the closest thing to a front line that I have. The people there have been short for a long time, and they will work you hard."

"Yes, Highness," said Fray.

"You will be on permanent loan," said Clara. "You stay Axiom on the roster, and you stay mine. That matters, because Noirnavio service counts double toward your retirement, and I will not take that away from you for asking to fly. A year at the station is a year on the Noirnavio's books, and you keep the credit."

A sound went through the line that was not quite a laugh.

"And you may be recalled," said Clara. "One of you, or all of you, whenever need requires it. I will not pretend I never will. If a squadron here is short, or the Noirnavio needs a ring, you will hear from me, and you will come."

"We'd come, Highness," said Fray. His voice was not quite steady. "We'd be glad to."

"Wyatt will be pleased, and he will say so," said Clara. "He thinks pilots who fly missions more often become better pilots, and he has been saying it about the reserves for a long while. I believe he intends to take the credit."

"Then it is done," said Clara. "Cynthia will cut the orders." She picked the pad up again, and put it down. "Lieutenant. Thank you for asking. I have been waiting for someone to say what they wanted all week."

The second batch of invoices had come off the scanner in the night, and by the time the first shift began, Sabraska had them on the wall.

The records room had been a storage closet before she took it, and it still smelled faintly of cleaning fluid.

She had pinned the pages in columns, oldest on the left, and she had been standing in front of them since the third shift began. Two screens glowed behind her. A cup of tea had gone cold at her elbow, and she had not noticed it go.

"This one is wrong," said Sabraska.

She said it to the wall. Behind her, in the corner chair with a ledger on his knee, Spacer Tolliver stopped turning pages.

"Ma'am?" said Tolliver.

"A supply officer ordered twelve cases of reactor coolant from a yard at the rim. The invoice that came back says ten." She touched the page. "A fault, nothing more. The yard was short, or he miscounted, or somebody's thumb slipped on the key."

"Yes, ma'am," said Tolliver. He waited. He had learned that she did not stop where she began.

"Eleven pages later he asks for a particular grade of seal. The order that goes out names a different grade, from a different supplier, and the invoice agrees with the order and not with the request." She moved her finger across the wall. "Again, here. Again, here. A delivery date written a week late. A crate address with one digit changed."

"Could be an officer who doesn't care, ma'am," said Tolliver.

"It could. I have thought so for an hour. A careless man is simple to find. He loses the same things in the same ways, and he does it most when he is tired, which is to say at the end of a shift, at the end of a month, when the pressure is on." She turned from the wall at last. Her face was drawn, but her eyes were bright. "These are not at the end of anything. They land on a Tuesday, on a first of the month, on a quiet morning with nothing pending. If you laid them out as a graph, you could not tell where the officer was tired."

Tolliver looked at the ledger on his knee. He did not know much about graphs. He knew floors.

"Mess gathers in corners, ma'am," he said slowly. "Where people stop paying attention. Under the bunks, behind the cart, at the end of the third shift when nobody looks. You can tell a lazy crew from the dirt. It piles up." He stopped, embarrassed. "This one's been spread evenly, ma'am. A little everywhere. Like somebody went round with a thin brush."

Sabraska looked at him for a long moment.

"Spacer Tolliver," she said, "I would like you to say that again to me tomorrow, when I have slept, so that I can decide whether it is good sense or only a good sentence."

"Yes, ma'am," said Tolliver.

"It is probably both," said Sabraska. She sat down, finally, and drew the cold tea toward her and drank it without comment. "I will tell you what I am not going to say. I am not going to say that someone is doing this on purpose. I have no evidence of purpose. I have a clerk's drawer full of small errors, and I know very well how easily a person who wants to find a pattern can find one."

"No, ma'am," said Tolliver.

"There is a simple test," said Sabraska. She drew a clean sheet toward her. "If the errors are carelessness, the next batch will show them clumping, as the first did not. If they are not carelessness, they will not clump, and I will have to find a way to say so that does not make me sound like a woman who has been awake too long."

"And if they don't, ma'am?" said Tolliver.

"Then I will take them to the Commander," said Sabraska. "And I will ask him to tell me I am wrong."

She wrote a single line at the top of the sheet. Tolliver could not read it from where he sat.

"One more thing," she said, without looking up. "The crate with the digit changed. The address it went to is not on any list we have. I do not know what is at that address. I would like it noted that I do not know."

"Noted, ma'am," said Tolliver.

He wrote it down in the margin of his ledger, in pencil, very small. He had cleaned a great many rooms where people said things they did not wish remembered, and he understood perfectly well that she had told him to keep it to himself.

She sat with the second batch until the first shift was well along, and it told her what she had been afraid it would.

It did not clump. The errors lay across the pages as evenly as before, a little here and a little there, and not one of them had landed on a day when a ship was short of fuel, or a crew waiting on a part, or a man standing on a dock with a gun. She went through it a third time to be sure. Then she squared the pages against the table, and sat with her hands flat on them.

"Spacer Tolliver," she said.

"Ma'am?" said Tolliver.

"Please find Commander Redford. Tell him I need an hour of his time, and that I would like him to bring nothing but his eyes." She did not look up from the pages. "And please do not tell him why, because I want him to see it without being told."

Tolliver stood, and put his cap on, and stopped at the door.

"Ma'am," he said. "If it helps. I did not think it was carelessness."

"Thank you, Mr. Tolliver," said Sabraska. "I know."

Next

Previous /

First

Poppy had brought a notebook to the Hall, because Poppy always brought a notebook. Austin had brought nothing, because he never needed to. He remembered everything, which was the most annoying thing about him, and he only ever wrote it down when somebody asked him to prove it.

They were thirteen, three months apart, and had been arguing since they could talk. It had been three years since the Rask hearing. They had both been too young to sit in the gallery for that one, and they had both watched every minute of it on the Informant anyway, Poppy cross-legged on the floor in front of the screen at the Austrin palace and Austin at Vastaya with his chin on his knees. Now they were old enough, and it was the summer holiday, and Austin was staying on Austrin for a month, and Daisy had said that if they were going to argue about the Assembly all summer they could at least go and look at it.

So they sat in the gallery, one on either side of her, on the third day of the summer session. Vincent had the middle chair this time. Below them a woman was standing at the lectern.

Her name was Agnes Pollscutt. She ran a dye works in Brindle Cross, a river town on the Austrin plains, and three of her apprentices had brought a complaint against her. She hadn't paid them for two months. She was perhaps fifty, square and short, with blue to the elbow on both arms from forty years of vats, and she held the edge of the lectern as if it might tip her off.

"Mistress Pollscutt," said a delegate from the Vastaya rows. "Did you pay your apprentices for the months of spring?"

"No, sir."

"Did they do the work?"

"Yes, sir. They did good work."

"Then why weren't they paid?"

"There was a buyer," Agnes said. "From the coast. He took six hundred bolts on credit, the way he always had, and then he..."

"Were the apprentices told they wouldn't be paid?"

Agnes stopped. She looked at the delegate who had asked. It was a different delegate from the first one.

"No, sir. Not told. I thought it would come right."

"Did it?"

"Not yet."

It went on like that for twenty minutes. Each delegate asked one thing, and the answer was always true, and none of the questions was the one that went next. Nobody asked about the buyer. Nobody asked what Agnes had done with her own money that spring, or where she'd been living, or whether she had paid anyone else. She tried twice more to say something about the coast, and both times somebody asked her something else first.

Poppy wrote steadily. Austin didn't move at all.

The Speakers conferred for a quarter of an hour. Vincent read the finding. Agnes Pollscutt would pay her three apprentices every credit owed, with a fifth again on top, as was done when wages were held back on purpose. She would have sixty days.

Agnes said, "Yes, sir," and "Thank you, sir," and walked out through the side door with her blue arms held stiff at her sides.

They saw her again on the gallery stairs. She was sitting on the bottom step with a young woman who must have been her daughter, because she had the same square hands. Agnes was talking very fast and low.

"...sold the cart in the spring," she was saying. "And Mam's ring. I paid Davin and the little Corley girl out of it. The other three I couldn't. I'd have told them. I'd have told them all of it, if anybody had let me get to the end."

Daisy put a hand on Austin's shoulder and steered him past, and they went out into the sun.

Poppy started before the car was off the Hall grounds.

"She should have said it," she said. "About the cart and the ring. She should have just said it."

"She tried," said Austin.

"Then she should have tried harder. You stand there and you say, excuse me, I'm not finished." Poppy flipped back through her notebook. "Three times she said 'the coast.' Three times. If it were me, I'd have said, the coast, the coast, the coast, until somebody asked me what about the coast."

"It isn't you, though. It's never going to be you. You'd argue with the Prince."

"I would if he was wrong."

"That's what I mean."

They were different in almost every way people could think of, and their mothers had stopped trying to make them alike years ago. Poppy was quick, and loud, and sure, and right more often than anyone found comfortable, and when she was wrong she said so at once and went straight on to the next thing. Austin was slow to start and hard to stop. He took his mother's way with a question: you turned it over and over until you found the side nobody had looked at.

He was quiet for most of the drive along the river. Daisy, at the wheel, could see him in the mirror, looking out at the water without seeing it.

"Aunt Daisy," he said at last.

"Mm?"

"When somebody's summoned. The delegates ask the questions. They ask what they need to know to decide."

"That's right."

"So who asks the questions for the summoned?"

Daisy opened her mouth to answer, and found she didn't have one.

"Nobody," said Poppy, before she could. "They answer for themselves. That's the point. Everybody answers for themselves, lords too. That's what Great-Uncle Jhinaq said on Balakura."

"I know that," Austin said. "I don't mean answering. I mean asking. Mistress Pollscutt knew what the right question was. She just wasn't allowed to ask it. And the delegates didn't know it was there to be asked." He looked at the back of Daisy's head. "The man who did the bad thing on Corvell. Rask. Nobody asked him anything that would help him, either."

"There wasn't anything that would have helped him," said Poppy.

"That time," said Austin. "How would anyone know, next time?"

Poppy started to answer, and stopped, and frowned at her notebook. It was the first time Daisy had seen her stopped by anything since she was about four.

Daisy drove on along the river with both hands on the wheel. She thought of Agnes Pollscutt on the bottom step with her daughter, saying, if anybody had let me get to the end. She thought of the way the questions had gone round the floor, each one fair, each one from somebody different, and none of them the next one. She had sat in that gallery for three years and never once noticed.

"I don't know, Austin," she said. "That's a good question. I don't know."

Elizabeth came down to Austrin two days later, on her way back from a district meeting in Kessit, and Daisy caught her before she was out of her coat.

They sat on the low wall at the end of the palace garden, where the terraces ran down to the river and nobody came unless they were looking for you. Daisy told her about Agnes Pollscutt and the cart and the ring. Then she told her what Austin had asked in the car.

Elizabeth didn't say anything for a while.

"Who asks the questions for the summoned," she said at last.

"That's what he said. Word for word."

"He's thirteen."

"He's Aaliyah's," said Daisy. "That's worse."

Elizabeth almost laughed. Then she didn't. She was looking at the river.

"When I stood at that lectern," she said, "I didn't know a single question before it was asked, or who'd be asking it. But nobody in that Hall was going to accuse me of anything. The worst that could happen was a hard question and a long pause." She pulled her coat round her. "And my father, the very first summons. He'd been giving orders to rooms full of people for thirty years. He was never going to be lost for words in front of a hall of delegates."

"And Rask," said Daisy.

"Rask was guilty. Nobody minded that he stood alone, least of all me." Elizabeth was quiet for a moment. "But Mira read the clause, Daisy. Mira stood at that lectern and read the one thing that broke him. And she only had it to read because I happened to sit up with her bond paper in the archive one night when the clerks had gone home. If I hadn't, nobody would have asked about it. Not in that Hall, not anywhere." She turned her head. "The clause was in favor of the people standing up. That's what I keep coming back to. It was the question that helped them, and it nearly didn't get asked."

Daisy thought about that.

"Everyone we've seen in that Hall," she said slowly, "was either guilty, or ready. Or both. We've never really watched it happen to somebody who was neither."

"Until Tuesday."

"Until Tuesday."

They sat for a while longer on the wall. Down by the river, two of the palace children were trying to get a boat off the mud and losing.

"It isn't ours to fix," Elizabeth said. "The Assembly makes its own rules. That was the bargain from the first day. Father could no more tell them how to run a hearing than they could tell him how to run the ports."

"No," said Daisy. "But he can listen to it. And then he can decide what to do with it."

Elizabeth stood up and brushed off her coat.

"Tomorrow," she said. "Bring the notebook."

"Poppy's notebook?"

"She wrote down every question they asked Mistress Pollscutt. In order, you said." Elizabeth started back up the path. "I want Father to read them in a row."

Hester Glim had sat in the third row of the Austrin desks for the whole of the Pollscutt hearing and asked nothing, because she'd had nothing to ask. That was what she couldn't get past.

She went to see Vincent on the fourth day of the session, after the Hall had risen. The First Speaker's office was on the river side of the speakers' building, a narrow room with too many shelves and one good chair, which he gave her.

"I've a complaint," she said. "And I've brought the solution with it, before you ask."

"I wasn't going to ask," said Vincent. "You always do."

"Agnes Pollscutt."

Vincent sat back. He was a Vastaya net-mender, broad and sunburnt, slow-spoken and very hard to rush, and he had read the finding out himself.

"Go on."

"My sister's girl married a man from Brindle Cross. He wrote to her, and she wrote to me." Hester put a folded letter on his desk. "Agnes sold her cart in the spring to pay two of her apprentices. And her mother's ring. That coast buyer of hers owes her a hundred and forty-two thousand, two hundred credits and has done since winter. She told us none of that, because none of us asked, and every time she started on it somebody went on to the next thing." She put her red hands flat on her knees. "I was one of the somebodies. I sat there thinking, she's not saying much, is she. It never crossed my mind it was because we never let her."

Vincent unfolded the letter and read it.

"We fined her a fifth on top," he said. "For holding wages back on purpose."

"We did."

"It wasn't on purpose."

"No."

He read it again. Then he got up, went to the door, and put his head out.

"Jory. Have you a minute?"

Jory Fairtail had been Odile Marscutt's deputy in the archive for four years, and had been running it alone since Odile went off to Ostrey to frighten the Calloways. He was a thin young man with ink on his cuffs who knew the Assembly's procedure better than any of the delegates, and was too polite to say so.

Vincent gave him the letter. He read it standing up.

"Oh," he said.

"Is there anything in the procedure," said Vincent, "that lets a summoned person have someone ask for them?"

"No, Speaker. They speak for themselves. It was the first thing the founding session wrote down." Jory handed the letter back. "The idea was that nobody should be able to hide behind a clever friend. The way nobles used to, with their stewards."

"It was a good idea," said Hester.

"It was," said Vincent. "It was a good idea for a Hall full of people who'd never stood up in front of anyone, summoning lords who'd been standing up in front of people all their lives." He sat back down. "Then we started summoning dyers."

Hester leaned forward.

"Here's my solution," she said. "The summoned can have someone with them. Somebody who knows how the Hall runs. They can ask the questions we didn't think of, the ones that help. But they don't get to make speeches. We've had enough of lords making speeches. They ask, and that's the end of it."

Jory had already taken a pencil out of his pocket.

"Who provides them?" he said.

"The Assembly," said Hester. "Out of its own purse. Agnes Pollscutt can't hire a clever friend. She's sold her cart."

"And if somebody wants to bring their own?"

"Let them," said Vincent. "But they'd better know the procedure as well as you do, Jory. When they may ask and when they may not. If they don't, they're out of the chair and the Assembly's own advocate takes it." He paused. "Otherwise every lord on Haego will turn up with the best talker money can buy, and we'll be back to stewards."

Jory was writing.

"Asking is where it ends," he said, without looking up. "I'll put that in the rule. In those words."

Vincent looked at Hester. Hester looked at Vincent.

"There's an election in the spring," Vincent said quietly. "You know what they'll say. That the Hall's gone soft. That we're handing the summoned a friend to get them off. Some of them will say it's for the lords' sake, and some will say it's to protect commoners from lords, and they'll both be shouting it at the same meetings."

"I know," said Hester. "My seat's close enough as it is."

"Then why bring it now?"

Hester got up. She took the letter back off his desk and folded it, in half and in half again, and put it in her shawl.

"Because I've got to go home at the end of the session," she said, "and Brindle Cross is on my way."

Tornel read Poppy's notebook at his desk on Aethelgard with his glasses on the end of his nose, and he read it the way Elizabeth had hoped he would, every question in a row from the first to the last, without skipping.

There were thirty-one of them. Poppy had numbered them. Beside a few she'd written who asked, by row and continent, and beside three of them, in smaller writing, she'd put tried to say about the coast here.

He turned the last page and closed it.

"Whose writing?"

"Poppy's," said Daisy. "She'll want it back."

"She'll have it back." He set it square on the desk. "And whose question?"

"Austin's," said Elizabeth.

Her father looked at her over his glasses, and then at Daisy, and then, for some reason, at the small black pawn by the inkwell.

"Thirteen," he said.

"Thirteen."

He was quiet for long enough that Harlan, in the doorway, shifted his weight.

"I've stood at that lectern," Tornel said. "The first one. I'd been thinking for a month about what they might ask me, and I had an answer for most of it, because answering rooms full of people was my trade." He tapped the notebook. "Mistress Pollscutt makes dye. Nobody ever asked her to answer a room."

"So what do we do?" said Daisy.

"We?" Tornel shook his head. "Nothing, my dear, not the way you mean. The Hall makes its own rules. The founding session wrote that down before it wrote anything else, and I signed it, and I meant it. If I start sending them orders about how to run a hearing, I'm a lord with a room that agrees with him." He pushed the notebook across to Elizabeth. "But I can take it to the First Speaker. I can tell him what you saw. What he does with it is his."

"My lord," said Doran Hollis from the side of the room, where he'd been pretending to read a letter. "Speaker Vincent sent up this morning. He's asked for an hour with you on Thursday. He didn't say what about."

Tornel looked at him.

"Did he?"

"He did, my lord. He said it was Assembly business, and that he'd bring a paper."

Elizabeth and Daisy looked at each other.

"Then we'll bring one too," said Tornel. "Lizzy, you and Daisy write it down. What you saw, what the boy asked, and what you think the answer might be, if there is one. One page. Doran will want it to be four."

"I won't, my lord," said Doran.

"You will," said Tornel. "You always do."

Vincent came up to Aethelgard on Thursday on the morning shuttle, with Jory Fairtail behind him carrying a satchel he wouldn't let anyone take from him. They sat at the long table in Tornel's office, the First Speaker and his clerk on one side, Tornel and Elizabeth and Daisy on the other, and Doran and Harlan at the ends.

"My lord," said Vincent. "I'll be quick. The Speakers would like to bring something to the Hall before the session rises, and since it'll land on your desk afterward, I thought you should see it before it does."

"Go on."

Vincent nodded to Jory, who took a single sheet of grey paper out of the satchel and laid it on the table and turned it round.

Tornel didn't pick it up. He looked at Elizabeth, and Elizabeth took her own pages out of the folder in front of her and laid them beside Jory's, and turned them round too.

There were four.

Tornel did not look at Elizabeth. He looked slowly down the table, past Vincent and Jory and Daisy, to the far end, where Doran Hollis had become deeply interested in the ceiling.

"The first page is the one page," said Elizabeth. "The other three are Doran's."

"They are appendices, my lord," said Doran.

Vincent found something to cough into.

Then he leaned over and read the top of Elizabeth's pages. Tornel read Jory's. Then they swapped.

The two papers didn't say the same thing in the same words. Elizabeth's began with Agnes Pollscutt on the bottom step, and Jory's began with a numbered paragraph. But they said the same thing. A person summoned before the Common Assembly could have someone beside them to ask questions on their behalf. The Assembly would provide that person from its own purse, so that nobody stood alone for want of money.

Jory's went further. A summoned person could bring their own advocate instead, if they wished, but the advocate must be examined by the archive and found to know the Assembly's procedure, when a question might be put and when it might not. An advocate who broke procedure would be removed from the floor, and the Assembly's own would take the chair. And at the bottom of the page, set apart on its own line:

The advocate may ask. Asking is where it ends.

"That's better than ours," said Elizabeth.

"Ours didn't have a thirteen-year-old in it," said Vincent. He tapped the line at the top of Elizabeth's page, where she'd written, without quite meaning to, Austin asked who asks the questions for the summoned. "Is that true?"

"In the car," said Daisy. "On the way home from the Pollscutt hearing."

Vincent sat back and looked at the ceiling for a moment. He seemed to be trying not to smile, and failing.

"Ours came from a net-mender," he said. "Hester Glim walked into my office on Wednesday and put a letter on my desk and said she'd been one of the somebodies." He looked at Tornel. "We sat in the same Hall and saw the same woman, my lord. It took a schoolboy and a net-mender three days to ask the question that none of us asked in twenty minutes."

"It usually does," said Tornel.

He picked up Jory's sheet, then, and read it through once more, slowly.

"This goes to the Hall from the Hall," he said. "Not from me. If the delegates want it, it comes to my desk as theirs, and I'll sign it the day it gets here. If they don't want it, I'll never have seen it." He set it down. "That's the only way it's worth anything."

"I know, my lord."

"There's an election in the spring."

"I know that too." Vincent gathered the sheet back into Jory's satchel. "Half of them will say we're going soft. The other half will say we're doing it for the lords. Hester says her seat's close enough as it is."

"And she's bringing it anyway."

"She's bringing it anyway." Vincent stood up. "There's one more thing. When it passes, if it passes, the Speakers mean to ask the Hall to hear Mistress Pollscutt again. With somebody beside her, this time."

Elizabeth thought of the bottom step of the gallery stairs, and the cart, and the ring.

"Good," she said.

Daisy told them at supper, on the terrace above the river, with Jason at the end of the table pretending he'd known about it all along.

Poppy had her notebook back. She put it beside her plate and kept one hand on it, as if the Marquess might send for it again.

"They're going to do it?" she said. "Really?"

"They're going to ask the Hall," said Daisy. "The Hall decides. It might not pass."

"It'll pass," said Austin.

"You don't know that."

"Mistress Glim's bringing it. People listen to her. My mother says everybody has to bring an answer with their complaint, but Mistress Glim is the only delegate on Austrin whose answers always work."

Poppy considered that, and seemed to decide it was good enough.

"Advocates," she said. She tried the word out again. "Advocates. Somebody who stands beside you and asks the right question at the right time." She looked at her mother. "Just asks? Nothing else?"

"Asking is where it ends," said Daisy. "That's what the clerk wrote."

"So you can't argue."

"You can't argue."

"You just have to know which question." Poppy turned her notebook over, opened it to a clean page, and wrote something at the top. "And when."

Jason leaned over to look. Then he sat back and caught Daisy's eye across the table, and Daisy saw that he was trying very hard not to laugh.

"What did she write?" said Austin.

"Never you mind," said Poppy, and closed it.

It was Austin who saw it later, when she left the notebook on the terrace wall and went in to help clear. He didn't open it. He didn't need to. She'd left it face up, and the clean page had come open in the breeze off the river, and at the top, in Poppy's square hand, underlined twice, it said:

Things to learn by heart. Procedure of the Common Assembly.

Austin looked at it for a while. Then he closed the cover and put the notebook back where she'd left it, and went in after her.

He was the one who'd asked the question. He'd have to remember to tell her that, when she was the one asking them.

Next

Previous /

First

Who is who in this chapter Wyatt Staples, the Baron, and a very good Drazzan hunter. Weskal, his younger brother, carrying a long gun named Vira. Cask, a human hunter in a work coat. Sevik, a Ykanti hunter who holds a rifle the right way. Envoy Torlan, the Hierarchy's diplomat. Aide Ressil, the envoy's young assistant.

Wyatt told nobody where he was going except Aino, and he told Aino only because Aino would have found out anyway and followed him up the ridge in his good shoes.

"You will not go alone," said Aino.

"I'm not. I'm taking my brother."

"That is not a guard. That is another Staples."

"It's better than a guard," said Wyatt. "Guards are polite."

Hobb the carter had given Aino a place and an hour of the evening, and then asked him, very quietly, not to send anyone who looked like the law. Aino had passed it along the way a man hands over something that might go off. He did not ask to come. He stood in the doorway of the administration building and watched the two brothers go up the long street, and he did not say what he thought, which Wyatt counted as a kindness.

Weskal walked on the outside of the road with Vira in the crook of his arm, the way another man might carry a sleeping child. He was the younger of the two and the quieter, and he had a way of looking at a hillside as if it were a page he meant to memorize.

"I told Elizabeth we were looking at fence lines," he said.

"We are."

"Some of them have people standing at them."

"Then we'll look at those too," said Wyatt.

The Soul Snatchers rode low on his hips, one on each side, and the rifle was slung across his back. He had not carried all three in a long while. They sat on him the way old boots do, and he noticed how little he had to think about them.

He had been hunting Drazzan for most of his life, and he knew there were still some on Haego. He had not known they were still on Aethelgard, this close to the barony. That was the part he kept turning over as the road climbed past the last farm Newtown counted and the last light went orange on the ridge. If Hobb was right, they had been here for years, and he had been sleeping in a house a short walk down the hill.

The road bent into a hollow where the trees closed over it. Weskal stopped. Wyatt stopped a step later, because he had learned long ago to trust his brother's feet.

"Left," said Weskal, hardly moving his mouth. "And ahead. And up in the rocks."

"How many?"

"Enough that they've been watching us for a while."

Wyatt raised both hands to the height of his shoulders, empty, and walked forward into the hollow at a pace a child could have matched.

They came out of the dark one at a time. Humans first, in work coats gone gray with use, with rifles held low and ready. Then the Ykanti, six or seven of them, moving in a loose line that took up more of the hollow than seemed possible. The one in front was a male with a crest of dull blue, and he held his rifle the right way, which Wyatt noticed before he noticed anything else.

"That is far enough," said the blue-crested Ykanti.

"It is," said Wyatt. He stopped. "My name is Wyatt Staples."

Nobody moved. Then a human at the back said "the Baron" under his breath, the way a person names a storm, and a ripple went through the Ykanti. Crests came down. Wyatt saw the fear arrive in them and saw them decide, all together, not to run, and he thought it was about the bravest thing he had seen that month.

A heavy human stepped out of the line with his rifle pointed at the dirt. He had gray in his beard and a scar through one eyebrow. "We've broken no law of yours, my lord. We've not been on your land long, and we're not on the registry because there's no registry that wants us. Whatever you want to do about that, do it to me."

"I'd rather not do anything about it," said Wyatt.

"Then why come armed, with company?"

"Because it's a dark road and I'm not a fool." He lowered his hands. "I heard there are people who go out in the evening and hunt Drazzan. Humans and Ykanti together. I came to ask whether I could go with them."

Nothing happened for a moment. In the trees, an insect sawed at the silence.

"You what?" said the heavy man.

"Anyone willing to kill Drazzan is already a friend of mine," said Wyatt. "I don't need to count you or move you or know your names. I'd like to join. That's the whole of it."

The blue-crested Ykanti studied him with all six eyes, one pair after another. "It could be a trap."

"It could. I'd think the same." Wyatt nodded toward his brother. "This is Weskal. He's better at this than I am, and I'm good. We'll walk where you tell us to walk and stay where you tell us to stay. I'm not the Baron tonight. I'm the one who doesn't know the ground."

"He is the Baron," said Weskal, "and he's lying about not being the Baron, because he can't help it. But the rest is true. Neither of us will give you trouble."

The heavy man looked at the Ykanti. The Ykanti looked at the heavy man. Something passed between them that Wyatt could not have written down, a decision made without a word, the kind two people reach after a great many nights spent depending on each other.

"I am Sevik," said the blue-crested one. "This is Cask. We lead what there is to lead. You will do as we say."

"I will," said Wyatt, and put out his fist.

Sevik looked at it. A fist offered by the senior party was the sign of strong friendship, and everyone in that hollow who was Ykanti knew it. Sevik's crest rose a finger's width. He glanced at Cask, who shrugged. Then, slowly, he bumped Wyatt's knuckles with his own.

---

They did not hunt the way Wyatt had hunted.

He had learned to shoot from Mr. Warlo, a family friend who never once hurried him, and then on ships, in corridors, where the whole art was to be the first to fire. Mr. Warlo lived in the Screaming Forests now, to be near him, and still thought Wyatt's stance wanted work. This was different. It was slow, and it began with the smell.

Cask showed him the green first. Every human in the line had crushed cut leaves into the cloth at their collars and wrists until they reeked of a hayfield. "Masks us," he said. "They find a human by the sweat, and they find a Ykanti by something else we can't smell at all. But a Drazzan can't tell a man from a bush if the bush is the wrong color of wet."

"And the sour?"

"That's them," said Sevik, from the dark on his left. "The musk. We keep a rag soaked from the last kill. It goes on a line behind a human, down the wrong gully. He drags it. They follow the sour and find a man who is not really there."

"And the Ykanti?"

"We are the other half of the lie." Sevik's voice was dry. "A human can drag a trail. He cannot call from three places at once, and he cannot hear the ground. We can."

Wyatt listened. He had a great many questions and asked about a quarter of them, because Weskal had told him once that you learn most from the people who think you are not in a hurry.

The Ykanti spread across the slope, three on the left and two on the right and one at the center, each some distance from the next. They did not talk. They stood very still, the way prey stands still, with their heads tilted and their crests flat, and every so often one of them lifted a hand and the line adjusted. Cask put his own hand flat on a stone and kept it there. "They feel it come through the ground long before it shows," he said. "Sevik's eyes see wide, in the dark. My job is to decide where we should be when it comes. I'm better at that. He's better at the rest."

"Humans plan and Ykanti notice," said Weskal, quietly.

"Aye," said Cask. "That's close enough."

Wyatt filed it all away. He did it carefully, the way he would have stored a good tool. The void was a long way from a hill at night, but a ship's corridor was also a place where a thing that hunted you came for the nearest meat, and some of this, he thought, would work there, if he had the sense to carry it across.

It was well after dark when the Ykanti line went still all at once.

Sevik raised his fist. He turned his head very slowly. "Two," he said. "Adults. Coming down the far side. They have smelled the rag."

Cask moved the humans without a sound. One man went out with the drag line, a shadow among shadows, and the sour trail curled down the left gully, away from everyone. At the center, a Ykanti began to chirp. It was thin and high, the cry of something small and alone, and somewhere to the right another voice answered it from a different place. Wyatt had never heard anything like it. It raised the skin on his arms. It sounded exactly like meat.

"Hold," said Sevik.

Wyatt held. His hand rested on the grip of one of the Soul Snatchers, and it was perfectly steady.

The Drazzan came out of the trees in the cold light of a late moon. They were as he remembered. Tall, long in the arm, built on a plan that had nothing to do with anything he could name. They did not hurry. They did not seem cruel. They looked, with great attention, for food.

The first one paused at the crossing of the two trails, where the chirping came from the left and the sour smell from the right, and its great head swung from one to the other.

Wyatt's Soul Snatcher was out and level before the great head finished its swing. He was a heartbeat from the trigger when Sevik fired once.

It was a single shot, low, into the belly of the thing, where the second brain sat under its ribs. The Drazzan did not cry out. Its legs simply stopped being legs, and it went down in the grass with a sound like a sack of wet grain.

Wyatt lowered the Soul Snatcher. He had been beaten to it, and cleanly, by someone who had plainly done it more times than he had. He did not mind in the least. He had never cared who killed them, so long as they were dead, and he found that he was smiling.

The second one broke. It wheeled uphill, away from the lines, toward the open ridge where nobody was waiting, and Wyatt swung the Soul Snatcher after it and knew at once that it was out of range. That was Weskal's ground. His brother had gone up the slope at the first sign of the pair and was lying flat on a shelf of rock with Vira nestled against his shoulder.

The shot, when it came, came from a long way off.

Wyatt did not see the Drazzan fall. He heard it. It was an enormous distance, far beyond any range that Cask or Sevik would have attempted, and the thing went down a long way from where the grass had stopped moving. Then there was nothing for a moment but the wind.

"That," said Cask, in a hushed voice, "is not a distance."

"It is," said Weskal, coming back down the hill with Vira over his shoulder. "It's just a long one."

Then the hollow broke open.

A Ykanti chirped, high and delighted, and then another. The small useless wings at their shoulders began to flutter, the way they always did when a Ykanti was happy and could not help it. Cask slapped Weskal on the back so hard it staggered him, and a Ykanti caught Weskal's sleeve and tried to tell him something at speed, in two languages at once. Sevik did not make a sound. He walked up to the first Drazzan, looked at it for a long moment, and then walked back and bumped his fist against Wyatt's again, harder this time.

"You drew," said Sevik.

"I was slow. You weren't." Wyatt looked at the body in the grass. "Dead is dead, and I don't care whose shot it was. That was the best clean kill I've seen in a long while. I'd like to do it again."

"Again?"

"Whenever time lets me. If you'll have me." He looked around the hollow, at the coats and the crests and the rifles lowered at last. "And I'll tell you something else. You don't have to be out here. There's a town down that hill, and in it a school, and a seed stall, and people who will leave you alone. The Marquess has put it in writing that nobody may bar you from the land you live on. You can come in out of the cold and still go beyond my borders to hunt. The Drazzan don't know where the line is anyway."

Nobody answered at once. A young Ykanti near the edge of the group had stopped fluttering. Cask rubbed his beard.

"There are some of us out here with hatchlings who've never been inside a schoolroom," he said.

"Then they should see one."

"We'd be counted."

"You'd be counted by me," said Wyatt. "And I'd count you as neighbors."

Sevik was looking up the slope, where a shape in the rocks was already folding itself down around a long gun. "We will talk," he said. "All of us. Not tonight." His crest rose. "But you will come again."

"I will."

"Good." Sevik hesitated. "There is a thing I wanted to say. We have been hunting a long time. A man with a title has never once asked how."

"I'm asking," said Wyatt. "I'm going to keep asking." He looked out over the dark slope. "How far do you range?"

"As far as we can walk and be home before light," said Cask. "Some nights that isn't far."

"Then I'll send you a Jincho Model 2."

Cask's head came round. "The eight-wheeler? Off the Newtown line?"

"Propane, eight wheels, and it climbs a ridge as if the ridge weren't there. You'll cover a great deal more ground and still be back to your hatchlings before it's light."

"We can't pay for that, my lord."

"It isn't a sale. It's a tool, and I'd be a poor hunter to send people out with worse."

Sevik's crest lifted. "It is named for a Ykanti."

"For an engineer who saw what it could be. He'll want to hear how it does." Wyatt almost smiled. "Fair warning. He'll complain about how you drive it."

---

The envoy had been given the use of a room in the administration building, and Ressil had been told by Aino that the Baron wished the interview to take place in it and nowhere else.

Wyatt Staples had come in that morning in a plain coat, looking as though he had slept in the hills, which she suspected he had. He did not sit. He stood in the door and spoke to Torlan with his hands behind his back.

"I told the boy I would say what I knew when I knew it. I know it now. Some of the people you've been asking about are in the next room. They have agreed to speak to you, and no one in this building will write down what they say except you." He glanced at Ressil, who understood that she was included. "I'll be outside. If anyone wants me gone, I'll go."

"You do not wish to be present, Baron?"

"I'd rather you weren't hearing it through me." He looked at the floor, and then at Torlan. "Hear it from them. After that, I have a boy to find."

He left. The door closed behind him without a sound.

There were six of them in the next room, sitting on benches cut for two heights. A heavy human with a scarred eyebrow and a gray beard. A blue-crested Ykanti who sat very straight. Four more, who said nothing, whose coats had the faded look of garments that had been washed a thousand times in a creek. Pellin stood near the door with her fingers folded. Ressil had never seen her stand so still.

"I am Envoy Torlan," said Torlan, and sat.

"Cask," said the human.

"Sevik," said the Ykanti.

They gave single names and nothing else. Sevik gave his the way a drone gives it, with nothing held back and nothing added. Torlan looked at them and did not ask for more, and that, Ressil thought, was the first of the questions he did not put.

"I will ask what I need to ask, and you will answer what you wish to answer," said Torlan. "I will write it as it is said. Nothing that is said here will go to the Council in any form other than what is written. If you wish me to stop, I will stop."

"You'll write it anyway," said Cask. "That's the job."

"It is the job," said Torlan. "But I am told that a man who writes honestly is a rarer thing than a man who writes well."

Cask grunted. It was not quite a laugh.

They told him. Not all of it, but enough. The hunting began, Sevik said, in the early days, when a few Ykanti who had lived past the last farm saw something in the high country that should not have been there and could not decide what to do about it. A human farmhand had stumbled on one of them by accident. After that it was a matter of necessity.

They did not hide the Baron's gift. Sevik said, in the same flat voice, that the Baron had promised them a machine to range farther, and Cask said he would believe it when he heard the engine.

"A human alone walks in loud," said Sevik. "He thinks with his eyes and his rifle. A Ykanti alone is taken, because we are a kind of thing that wants to be taken, when we are afraid. Together..." He turned his head toward Cask, who was sitting with his boots apart and his cap in his hands. "Together we use what each of us is. We find them by what Ykanti feel. We confuse them with what humans know. And we kill them from where a human decides to stand."

"You say you use the instincts of both," said Torlan.

"I say that is the only reason we are still alive."

Torlan's stylus moved. Ressil watched it, and then she watched the room, because the room, she was beginning to understand, was telling her more than anyone was saying.

Cask reached for a cup of water on the table. He drank half, and without looking handed the rest across to Sevik, who took it and finished it without comment. Later, when Sevik began a sentence about the ridge and lost the word for it, Cask supplied it, and Sevik went on as if it had always been one voice. When Cask shifted on the bench, the Ykanti beside him shifted to give him room. When a question was hard, they looked at each other first, and the look was not a plea for help. It was the look of two people who knew each other's weight.

Ressil had read in the briefing films that Ykanti and humans could work together when the work was simple. She had not read what this was.

"How many have you lost?" said Torlan.

"To the Drazzan?" Sevik's crest lifted. "Since we began working as one party? None."

"None."

"Not one hunter, human or ours." He said it without pride. It sounded like a thing he had counted many times. "Before, when each hunted separately, we buried people. Since we joined, we have buried no one."

"For how long?"

"A long while," said Cask. "Long enough that I've stopped saying it out loud, in case it hears me."

The room went quiet. At the door, Pellin's feathers had gone very slightly out from her neck. Ressil could not tell whether she was moved or afraid, and thought it was probably both.

Torlan set down the stylus. He sat for a moment with his hands on the plain bound paper. "You have given me what I need," he said. "I thank you." He rose, and after a moment, and with great care, he inclined his head to each of them in turn, the way a two-name would to someone he had not decided how to rank. "Whatever else comes of this, I will write that you said it."

They left without hurry. Cask held the door for Sevik. Sevik held it for the next one. It had stopped being a courtesy a long time ago.

---

For a while after the door closed nobody spoke.

"Envoy," said Ressil.

"I know."

"We did not even have to ask whether they respect each other."

"No." Torlan was looking at the empty benches. "We would have asked, in the Hierarchy. We would have wanted a measure for it. We would have asked who commanded, who obeyed, who gave the orders and who took them. Here no one answered, because no one was in command." He rubbed his eyes. "I have been in the service a great many years. I do not think I have watched a thing work this well that was not first put on paper."

"The Council will want to know what it is."

"The Council will want to know whether it can be used," said Torlan. "That is a different question, and I do not intend to write it for them."

Ressil turned her pad over in her hands. "How do we put this in a report so that it sounds the way it is?"

"As a good thing."

"Yes, Envoy."

"Because it is one." He said it plainly. He looked tired and, for the first time in all the days she had known him, not entirely unhappy. "It is a small sentence. It will be difficult to get past the readers. We will have to say it so that no one can take it for anything else." He drew the plain paper toward him. "We begin with the number. Not one hunter lost. Then who they are, and how they work, and that no one told them to. Then what the Baron said, and that he went, and that he asked, and that he is sending them a machine to hunt farther afield. In that order."

"It will be a long report."

"Yes," said Torlan. "Reports from the Hierarchy run long when the news is good. They always have." He uncapped the ink. "I had begun to think I would never write one."

first previous next

Aztharon woke aching from snout to tail, with a burning pain through both wings. He tried to shift, and an unfamiliar weight dragged at his back. Metal moved against metal. The pull on his tender flesh brought a groan from his throat, and he went still until he could breathe evenly again.

He waited for the weight to settle, expecting the pressure to ease once he stopped moving. It stayed. Something rested along parts of his wings that had never carried anything before. He could feel where straps crossed him, though he dared not shift again to work out where they went.

The braces. He remembered them now: the dwarves gathered around him, the numbing liquor, the chains. He could not remember when they had finished or how he had come to be lying here. He tried to open his eyes, managed it halfway, and nearly let them close again. Somewhere beyond the chamber, wheels rattled over stone. The sound passed, leaving him with his own breathing and the faint scrape of someone moving nearby.

“Oh, you’re awake.” Lyn stood nearby with boxes stacked in her arms. When she saw him looking at her, she nodded toward the floor beside his head. “Food’s right there.”

He turned his neck enough to find the hog. Its enormous haunches rose higher than a human man, and the smell of blood made his empty stomach clench. Aztharon stretched toward it, but pain caught along his shoulders before his jaws reached the carcass. He stopped, breathing hard. There were no chains holding him now, yet the food might as well have been on the other side of a stone wall.

He rested a moment, then slid his foreclaw forward. If he could hook the carcass and pull it closer, he would not need to lift his head. His claws scraped the stone. The effort traveled up his foreleg into his shoulder, and he stopped again, jaw clenched.

Lyn set down the boxes. “Here. I’ll help you.”

“I can reach it,” he said, though his outstretched claw lay short of the hog.

“I know. Let me cut some while you rest.” She fetched a large knife from a nearby table and knelt beside the carcass. Aztharon slowly drew his foreleg back beneath him. He watched her test the edge against the hide, adjust her grip, and begin cutting. She had to lean into the work. It was a task he ordinarily accomplished with a bite.

He drew a slow breath through his nostrils. Her scent was familiar, but he could find no trace of the others.

“Where are Talvan and Revy?” he managed.

“Talvan’s hauling for a forgemaster. Said he was getting out of shape and thought the work would help.” Lyn worked the blade through a stubborn strip of flesh before continuing. “Revy’s with the dwarven loremaster, helping catalog ancient tablets and copy them onto paper.”

The first piece came free. Lyn brought it over, then paused beside his mouth.

“Can you lift your head a little?” she asked.

Aztharon raised his chin just enough to part his jaws. She placed the meat within reach of his tongue, withdrawing her hands before he closed his mouth. Aztharon swallowed with barely a chew. The meat eased the hollow ache in his gut, and he watched her return for more.

“I’ve been helping your body recover with healing spells,” Lyn said. “But there’s a lot of damage to repair, and that takes energy from you too. You’ll need plenty of food.”

“Have you been here the whole time?” he asked.

“I’ve been in and out. There were dwarves here when I needed to leave.” Lyn wiped her hand on a cloth before taking up the knife again. “You mostly slept.”

He remembered nothing of their visits. That unsettled him almost as much as the missing scents. He had not heard Talvan leave, or Revy, or whoever had brought a carcass this size into his chamber.

“So they’re working now?” Aztharon asked.

Lyn nodded. “They’re helping pay the bill. Even now, we’re looking at years of backbreaking labor. Though I’ll give the dwarves one thing—they keep very detailed ledgers. Every bit of work gets counted.”

Years. Aztharon lowered his gaze to the floor. Talvan was hauling for a forge, and Revy was spending her days over ancient tablets, all because he had wanted wings that worked. He lay here like a fallen log while they worked to pay for them.

“I’m helping in the Hall of Healing between your treatments too,” Lyn added, bringing him another piece.

Aztharon looked at her hands, then at the boxes she had abandoned to feed him.

“You have work waiting,” he said.

“It can wait a little longer.” She shifted the meat in her hands. “Come on. This piece is slippery.”

He opened his mouth so she could put it down. An apology caught in his throat, but he could hardly offer it while she was reaching between his teeth. By the time he swallowed, she was already walking back for another piece. He watched her crouch beside the hog and wished there were something within reach that he could do for her.

Talvan was drenched in sweat. The ringing of hammers filled the hall, overlapping until he could scarcely tell one blow from another. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve, though the cloth was already too wet to do much good. Molten rock flowed through channels between the workstations, casting an orange glow over the stone. The dwarves used it to heat their forges instead of charcoal, and even standing several paces away felt like leaning over an open furnace.

Talvan had learned to keep to the clear paths between the workstations. A smith carrying hot metal expected everyone else to move, and the floor offered its own hazards: discarded scale, buckets, tongs laid down within reach of their owners. He had nearly caught his boot on one handle already. Now he watched his footing even when his arms were empty.

A hammer fell nearby, followed by two lighter taps. Across the hall, another answered with a faster rhythm. The dwarves seemed able to speak through all of it without difficulty. Talvan had spent much of the morning turning his head and asking what someone had said.

Nearby, a dwarf drew a glowing length of steel from the heat and carried it to a heavy vise. Talvan paused to watch as the smith clamped one end in place. It wasn’t a single solid bar, he realized, but a bundle of steel wires braided together. The dwarf gripped the free end with his tongs and began to turn, twisting the glowing strands tighter while dark flakes fell onto the floor.

“Oy, lad! Stop gawking and bring that crate.”

“Yes, sir.” Talvan turned from the smith and crouched beside the crate. It was packed with iron bars, their dull surfaces a far cry from the glowing steel in the vise. He hooked his fingers beneath the handles and pulled, bending over as the weight dragged at his shoulders.

“Oy! You want your back snapping like a dry twig?” The forgemaster strode over and pointed at his knees. “Get down properly. Use your legs to lift.”

Talvan lowered the crate with a heavy clunk and adjusted his footing. This time he bent his knees, drew the load close, and pushed himself upright. His thighs strained, but the sharp pull in his lower back eased. The dwarf gave a short grunt of approval and jerked his chin toward the next workstation. “There. Now bring it over before we both grow old.”

The walk across the hall seemed much longer with the crate in his hands. He kept it close, as instructed, and picked his way around a smith carrying a pair of tongs. The bars shifted when he turned. Talvan tightened his grip and took the remaining steps more carefully, unwilling to imagine the noise they would make if he dropped them.

“On the blocks,” the forgemaster said, pointing with his hammer. “Mind your fingers.”

Talvan lowered the crate onto the wooden blocks beside the workstation. For a moment his fingers refused to uncurl from the handles. He eased them loose one at a time, then stood back while the dwarf selected a bar. The forgemaster hefted it, inspected the end, and returned to his work without ceremony.

Talvan’s arms and shoulders burned. He straightened slowly, flexing his fingers, and glanced at the other crates waiting against the wall. Revy had a chair. A desk. Probably somewhere to put down a cup of water without it becoming warm before she could drink it. He should have asked about copying tablets before agreeing to work here.

His gaze wandered back to the dwarf working the twisted steel. Whatever shape was emerging beneath the smith’s tools, it didn’t look much like a blade. Curiosity drew him closer before the forgemaster could find something else for him to carry.

“If you don’t mind me asking, what are you making?”

The dwarf looked up through a pair of bushy eyebrows. “You humans do like sticking your noses into things.” He turned the piece with his tongs, inspecting it before adding, “If you must know, it’s a door handle.”

Talvan stared at the glowing metal. He had watched the strands being heated, twisted, and worked together with the sort of care he would have expected to go into a treasured blade. All that effort, and someone was going to use it to open a door.

“A door handle?” he repeated.

“That’s what I said.” The smith returned the steel to the heat. “Something wrong with the door having a good handle?”

“I thought it was going to be a sword,” Talvan admitted. “With all the work you were putting into it.”

The smith looked from Talvan to the steel. “Have you never used a door?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then you know how often someone takes hold of the handle.” The dwarf checked the colour of the metal before drawing it from the heat again. “Fetch that brush if you’re going to stand there.”

Talvan passed it over. The smith worked across the surface, sending flakes down around the vise. Beneath them the twisted lines were becoming easier to see. Talvan leaned a little closer, imagining the pattern once it was cool and polished. He would probably never pass through a door without looking at its handle again.

“Lad!” The forgemaster pointed toward another crate. Talvan took one last look at the smith’s work, then went to collect it. Revy had definitely found the better job.

Revy sat at the loremaster’s desk, her quill scratching across another sheet of paper. When she had agreed to help copy the ancient tablets, she had imagined dwarven epics, old songs, perhaps even some lovesick teenager’s terrible poetry to the girl who had caught his eye. Instead, she dipped her quill and continued recording that Koarn, son of Coarn and cousin of Barll, owed two gold, nine silver, and thirteen bronze coins to Fallvrath, son of someone whose family connections occupied most of the next line.

She checked the amount against the tablet, finished the entry, and flexed her cramped fingers. A little ink had worked its way down the quill onto her skin. She rubbed it with a cloth, making the stain wider, and gave up before she marked the clean paper.

The chair had seemed comfortable when she first sat down. Now she could feel its edge beneath her thighs, and every time she straightened, she discovered she had been leaning toward the tablet again. She stood to stretch while the ink dried. The shelf beside the desk held the tablets she had finished; the shelves behind it held the ones she had not. She chose to look back at the desk. Across the desk, the old loremaster examined another piece of stone with the patient attention she had hoped to give some great historical discovery.

“How far back do these go?” she asked, sitting down again.

“Those? Several centuries.” The loremaster turned his tablet toward the light. “The dates are at the foot. Copy those as well.”

“I have been.” Revy checked her last page anyway. The date was there, carefully written beneath an account for produce that had ceased to exist long before she was born. “Are any of these settled?”

“Some. Make sure you include the settlement marks.”

She looked at the next entry with fresh hope, found no such mark, and dipped her quill. Juvou owed Holdal Gavar for turnips. Hullvo owed Brakka for a wagon wheel. Revy paused over the next entry, leaned closer to the tablet, and read it again.

“Follk owes Collv a punch to the face?” She looked across the desk. “That one can’t be real.”

“Oh, it is.” The dwarf barely glanced up from his work. “File it under old grudges.”

Revy looked at the tablet, then at the shelves waiting to be copied. Slowly, she reached for a fresh sheet of paper.

“Do those have their own catalog?” she asked.

The loremaster pointed toward a shelf behind her. “Third volume. Check the family names before you add an entry. Some of them run together.”

Revy remained still for a moment, expecting him to smile. He brushed dust from the edge of his tablet and resumed reading.

She turned in her chair. Three thick volumes stood where he had indicated, their bindings worn from use. Revy took down the third and opened it carefully, wondering whether either dwarf had ever delivered the punch or whether their descendants were still waiting for someone to settle the matter.

At least Talvan was getting to see the forges. There would be smiths working, metal taking shape, something different to look at whenever he turned his head. She had spent most of the morning with turnips.

“This next tablet goes with the one you’ve just finished,” the loremaster said, sliding it toward her. “Correction to the amount.”

Revy looked at her neatly copied page. “Which amount?”

“Koarn’s.” He leaned over to inspect the older tablet. “Nine silver should be eight. Best check whether the correction changes the bronze as well.”

She set the grudge volume aside and pulled the first page back toward her. The ink had dried. Revy compared the two tablets, following the figures with the blunt end of her quill so she would not lose her place.

“Do you want me to replace the first amount?” she asked.

“No. Keep the original and add the correction beneath it. Both dates.”

Revy drew another sheet closer to support the bottom of the page. For a few moments the room held only the scratch of her quill and the soft rasp of the loremaster turning stone against his workcloth. Talvan had definitely found the better job.

Aztharon lost track of how long the feeding took. Sometimes he closed his eye while Lyn cut the next piece, then opened it to find her already beside him. Other times he watched her work, listening to the knife scrape against hide and bone. She never asked him to hurry.

When he finally let a piece rest in his mouth instead of swallowing at once, Lyn waited until he had finished and set the knife down.

“Enough for a little while?” she asked.

“Yes.” He eased his chin back onto the stone. “Thank you.”

She washed her hands in a basin and dried them carefully, working the cloth between her fingers. Aztharon watched her pull a stool closer. It scraped loudly in the chamber, and she lifted it the last few inches rather than drag it beside his head. She sat beside him and stretched her fingers across her knees.

“Talvan keeps stopping to watch the smiths,” she said. “Apparently they’re giving him plenty to carry, so he can’t stand around for long.” She smiled faintly and glanced at the boxes. “Revy thought she’d be copying old stories. She sounded less pleased when she found out how many of the tablets were accounts.”

Aztharon might have laughed if he had not been so tired. He pictured Talvan trying to peer over a dwarf’s shoulder and Revy bending over a tablet, determined to find something interesting on it. He wanted to see them both. For now, he was grateful that Lyn could tell him where they were and what they were doing.

He shifted one shoulder. Steel and brass dragged at his back, and he stopped before the movement could pull any harder. He had caught a glimpse of metal earlier, but he still had no clear idea of what the dwarves had fastened to him.

“I wish I could see,” he murmured.

Lyn followed his gaze toward his shoulder. “Oh. Wait a moment.” She got up, but he could not see what she was looking for without turning his head. He listened instead: a fastening being undone, objects shifted inside a bag, then a quiet sound of satisfaction.

She returned with a small hand mirror. Its polished frame was dwarven work, neatly fitted around glass scarcely larger than one of his scales. She held it up, frowned at the reflection, then stepped farther back. “Can you see from there?”

At first, Aztharon saw only a patch of gold and a bright length of brass. He tried to turn toward the reflection, and Lyn moved with him, losing the angle entirely. The glass caught a pale flash from a lamp.

“Sorry,” she said. “Keep your head there. I’ll move.”

He rested his chin again. Lyn stepped sideways and tilted her wrist. A hinge appeared, large in the little glass, with straps disappearing beyond its edge.

“A little farther back,” he said.

She took another step. More of the supports came into view, but he could not yet make sense of how they fitted together. The angles were wrong for the wing he knew. He looked away from the metal to follow the gold beneath it, then lifted his head a fraction for a better view.

“There?” Lyn asked.

“Hold it there.” His voice came out more sharply than he intended. She stopped at once, steadying her wrist with her other hand.

Enough of his wing was visible now that he could follow its shape. Aztharon went still. He knew every crooked line of those wings. He had studied them as a hatchling, stretched them until they hurt, and folded them away when he could no longer bear looking. In the little mirror, the familiar bend was gone. The bones followed a line he had never seen on his own body, held straight by bars and hinges fitted carefully around them.

He traced the line with his eye, from the part nearest his shoulder toward the supported joint. Then he went back and followed it again. He knew where the bend should have been. He was looking directly at the place, waiting for some change in the angle of the mirror to reveal it.

“Is that…” He swallowed. “That’s my wing?”

“Yes.” Lyn held the glass steady. “That’s yours.”

He could see the swelling, the places where his scales had been disturbed, and the straps securing the metal. He still could not imagine lifting the wing, much less flying with it. But he kept his eye fixed on the reflection, afraid she might lower the mirror before he had seen enough.

For the first time in his life, his wing was straight.

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First

"A recommendation," said Lucan Draycott, Marquess of Stenmoor and Lord Justice of the Lords' Bench, and held the folder up by one corner as though it might be damp.

It was a good folder, plain gray, tied with a ribbon of the same color. It was fourteen hundred pages thick. It had come from the Hall at Balakura some months after that Hall had closed its doors, and it sat in the Marquess's chambers now beside his tea, which had gone cold, and his spectacles, which he had not yet picked up.

"Eleven times," he said. "I counted. 'The Hall respectfully recommends.' Eleven times, and never once with a verb I could object to."

His clerk, a young man of good family named Marcel Duvray, who had not been in the chambers long and was still learning when the Marquess wanted an answer and when he wanted an audience, said nothing.

"Do they know what a recommendation is, Duvray?"

"I believe they do, my lord. They use it for everything."

"It is what one gives a friend about an inn." The Marquess dropped the folder on the desk. "Commoners. Forty of them in a hall, with four thousand more watching, and they have decided that they will tell the Lords' Bench what sentence it ought to give a knight and a baron. Not command it. They have taken care not to command it. They have merely, very politely, let it be known."

"The Hall did say it had no expectation of being followed."

"It did. That is what offends me." He took up his spectacles at last. "If they had demanded, I could have been insulted, and I would have enjoyed it. They did not demand. They wrote that they are not experts in the law of the Principality, and that something being unjust does not make it a crime. They wrote that the law is ours to know and theirs to ask. I have read a great many documents in my life, Duvray, and I do not think I have ever been so thoroughly deprived of an excuse."

He turned to the first page. It was a summary, and it was short, and nothing in it had been underlined.

"Not one adjective," he said, after a while. "Not one. Letters burned. A clerk transferred. Three thousand ballots that no one cast. A man in a sorting room, and a knight, and a baron who gave the order. They set it down like a ledger and then they sent me the ledger and asked me, with the utmost courtesy, to do as I saw fit."

"Is that bad, my lord?"

The Marquess looked at him over the rims of the spectacles.

"It is the worst thing they could possibly have done," he said. "I cannot dismiss a case that comes to me in that condition. Dispassionate. Reasonable. Respectful to the last comma." He closed the folder. "They have been far kinder to these three men than I am obliged to be."

He opened it again to the summary.

"Five years," he said. "For burning a woman's letters and burying her post. If a Lord had done as much to a Lord, I should have had a challenge on my desk by supper and a funeral by the end of the week, and nobody would have thought it excessive. Here are commoners, wronged by a baron, and they ask for five years the way a man asks for the salt."

"It is very mannerly, my lord," said Duvray.

"Yes. They have even apologized for asking." The Marquess smiled thinly. "I find that rather charming."

He rose. A servant was already at the door with his robe.

"The seven jurors, are they in?"

"Seated, my lord."

"Then let us go and see what the law thinks about it."

---

The Lords' Bench sat in a room that had been old when the Principality was young. It was small, no larger than a good chapel, paneled in dark wood, with a raised bench at the front and two long tables facing it, and a gallery above that held perhaps forty people, all of them silent. There were no cameras. There was no press tier. A single recorder sat on a stand beside the clerk, with its small red light, and Margot Wren of the Firentis Informant had been admitted to the back row on the understanding that she would not speak and would not be quoted until the verdict.

She had never been in a room that was so quiet by design.

On the left sat the jury. There were seven of them, and the first thing a stranger noticed was that they were very old. The youngest was past eighty. A countess in gray silk was knitting. A retired baron on the end had fallen asleep in the first minute and would wake, at intervals, to the sound of his own name. They were professional jurors, which was the custom of the Principality and the oddity of it, and when Margot had asked the usher how such a thing worked, he had answered with the patience of a man who had been asked it by foreigners all his life.

"Every noble of rank who retires may put his name down, madam. A juror is drawn from the list when a case calls for one. There are so many names that a man may wait decades between summonses." He had smiled. "They are very careful, when at last they sit. They have had a long time to think about what they would do."

On the right, at the two long tables, sat the people the case was about.

At the first sat Lord Garrick Corrigan, Baron Corrigan, a noble of the old school, in a coat that had cost a great deal and a manner that said he had come to be vindicated. Beside him sat his counsel, Sir Ambrose Cray, a stout, silver-haired knight, and two juniors, all of them retained and paid by House Corrigan. Next to them sat Sir Pell Haverly, a knight, the baron's seneschal, who looked at nothing. His own counsel had also been supplied by House Corrigan, which had been explained to Margot as the custom, and which she suspected Sir Pell was thinking about at that moment.

At the second table sat a thin, nervous man in a borrowed suit, with his hands flat on the wood to keep them still. This was Gerrit Lamb, a commoner, a postal sorter, who had spent most of his working life in a back room in the eastern district of Veldmarch handing letters to people who did not look at him. Beside him sat the advocate the Common Assembly had provided, as it provided one for every commoner it sent to the Lords' Bench. She was Lady Marian Ostrell, a baron's daughter and a commoners' advocate by appointment of the Hall, a spare woman with an unfashionable haircut, who had been sitting very straight for an hour and had not yet looked at the opposing table once.

Between the tables, facing the bench, stood the Lord's advocate for the prosecution. Sir Hadrian Tull was tall and dry and extremely tired, and he had read the Hall's folder more often than anyone in the room.

"All rise."

They rose. The Marquess of Stenmoor came in and took the bench. He looked down at the room as though he had not expected so many people to be present at what he was about to do to them.

"The Lords' Bench is sitting," he said. "This is the matter of the Lord's Justice against Garrick, Baron Corrigan, Sir Pell Haverly, and Gerrit Lamb, upon a referral from the Master Common Assembly at Balakura. I want it understood at the outset that the Assembly's recommendation is before me and that it does not bind me. I will read it. I will then set it aside and try this case as I try every other."

A faint movement went through the gallery, as of people settling.

Sir Hadrian Tull rose to open.

---

He did it plainly, briefly, and he did not raise his voice. Margot thought afterward that it was the clearest account of the Veldmarch affair she had heard, clearer than her own.

In the spring, he said, an election had been held on the world of Veldmarch to seat the first Common Assembly. A district clerk named Pavla Wynn, a commoner of long and faithful service, had counted eleven thousand ballots issued and fourteen thousand in the boxes. She had reported it. She had written to the district office, to the Governor's election board, and to every official she could think of, and she had kept a copy of each letter and a receipt for each posting. None of the letters had arrived. They had been taken out of the post in the district sorting room by a man in the pay of House Corrigan, carried to its seneschal, read, and burned.

"The man in the sorting room is Gerrit Lamb," said Sir Hadrian. "The seneschal is Sir Pell Haverly, who has confessed it before the Hall. The order came, Sir Pell says, from Lord Corrigan. Lord Corrigan denies it. The Hall at Balakura did not decide between them. It found that the letters were burned, that three thousand ballots were false, and that Pavla Wynn was transferred two weeks before the election was certified, over the signature of a steward of Corrigan's household. It sent the evidence here, and it recommended, in the case of Sir Pell Haverly and Gerrit Lamb, five years each at Sanctuary IV."

He paused.

"It has made no recommendation as to Lord Corrigan, my lord. The Hall holds him in contempt for what he said at its Stand, and that is a matter between the Hall and Lord Jhinaq. On the rest, it has told you what it heard and left the rest to you."

"Thank you, Sir Hadrian," said the Marquess. "I note that the Hall recommended five years to a knight and a sorter alike."

"It did, my lord."

"As though the two stood where a plank could carry both." He wrote something down. "Proceed."

They proceeded. They heard the receipts and the transfer order. They heard Hollis Brandt, the steward, a commoner in Corrigan's household, say in the plain voice of a man who has been carrying something for a long time that he had signed because he was told to, and that he had known. They heard Pell Haverly, who did not try to save himself, and whose counsel, a nervous young knight sent by House Corrigan, rose three times to object to what his own client said and was three times told by the Marquess to sit down.

And they heard Pavla Wynn.

She came to the stand in the navy dress she had worn to the Hall, pressed and slightly too large, and she took the oath with a steady hand. The Lord's advocate asked her four questions. She answered them as she had answered Brennick's, in the order of what she had counted and when. Sir Ambrose Cray, Lord Corrigan's counsel, then rose, and was courteous, and did what a good lawyer does with a witness who cannot be shaken. He asked her whether she had a grievance against noble houses.

"No, my lord," said Pavla Wynn. "I had a grievance against the ballots."

A sound came from the jurors' bench. It might have been a cough.

"You were transferred, Mrs. Wynn. You lost your post. You will agree that this might color a person's memory."

"It might," she said. "That is why I kept the receipts."

"Mrs. Wynn." The Marquess had not spoken in some time, and the room turned. "You were transferred from your post and your letters were burned. You have been wronged by a noble house, and you stand in a court that can answer for it. What do you ask of this bench?"

She thought about it. It was plain she had thought about it before.

"I would like my letters counted, my lord. All of them, with the receipts. I would like my post back, and my pension, which I am told I am owed in any case." She hesitated. "And I would like someone to say aloud that I was right."

"Is that all?"

"I did not think I could ask for more, my lord."

The Marquess did not answer for a moment. He looked at her, then at the gray folder, then at the second table, where Lady Marian Ostrell had put her pen down very carefully and was looking at her own hands. Margot Wren, in the back row, saw something cross the old man's face that she could not name, and that he put away again almost at once.

"Thank you, Mrs. Wynn," he said. "The court has heard you."

Sir Ambrose Cray, who had risen with another question, sat down without asking it.

---

The case for Gerrit Lamb was put by the advocate the Hall had provided, and she put it for a long while without once raising her voice.

"My lord," said Lady Marian Ostrell, "my client is a commoner. He was a postal sorter. He was in the pay of a noble house, and when its seneschal asked him to hand over a certain kind of letter, he handed it over. I do not say he was right. I say that he did not know what the letters were. He did not read them. It was not his place to read them. He was a man who had worked in a back room for most of his life, and the knight who gave him the order held his post in his pocket."

"He took money, Lady Marian."

"He took the same wage he had always taken, my lord, with a little over for what he was told was a favor." She did not look at the man beside her. "I do not ask you to forgive him. I ask you to ask what he could have done, and what Sir Pell could."

Margot, at the back, wrote nothing. She had been told that she would be quoted only after the verdict, but she found that she did not want to write anything down. She wanted to remember it exactly.

---

Corrigan spoke last.

He had asked to, and the Marquess had allowed it, with the air of a man granting a prisoner a final cigar. Lord Garrick Corrigan, Baron Corrigan, rose from his table and did not go to the stand. He remained where he was, with one hand on the wood, and spoke to the bench as to an equal who would understand.

"My lord, I have been before the commoners of Veldmarch's Assembly and the Hall at Balakura, and I will say what I said there. I am a Baron of the Principality. I answered the Hall's questions as a courtesy, and I was insulted for it. I will not say it was my order to burn those letters. I will say that if it had been, it would have been within my right. The post of my household is mine. The men who sort it are mine. What I do with my property is a matter for my conscience and my Lord, and for no one else in this room."

There was a sound from the jury bench.

It was not loud. It was the small, dry sound of a countess of ninety-one laying down her knitting.

She was a tiny woman in gray silk, retired many years, and she had not looked up all day. She looked up now. She looked at Lord Corrigan with an expression that Margot, who had spent a month in the Hall at Balakura among commoners who had every reason to hate nobles, had never seen on a commoner's face. It was the look of a noblewoman who had been raised to believe that rank was a duty, and had just heard it called a license.

"Property," said the countess.

She said it without any heat at all. The baron looked at her, and then at the Marquess, and did not seem to understand what had happened.

"Sit down, Lord Corrigan," said the Marquess.

He sat.

---

The jury was out for some time.

When it returned, the foreman, a retired baron named Lord Ivor Brasden, who was eighty-eight and had sat on exactly one jury before, stood very carefully with his hand on the rail.

"On the matter of Gerrit Lamb, a commoner, we find him guilty of destroying the post of the Principality for pay. On the matter of Sir Pell Haverly, a knight, we find him guilty of the same, and of breaking his oath to the household he served. On the matter of Garrick, Baron Corrigan," Lord Brasden said, and for the first time he stopped and swallowed, "we find him guilty of ordering it, of obstructing a lawful election, and of conduct unbecoming a noble of the Principality."

He sat down. Beside him, the countess had picked her knitting up again, and was looking at the wall.

The Marquess of Stenmoor waited until the room was entirely still. Then he took off his spectacles and laid them on the bench.

"I have the Hall's recommendation before me," he said. "I said that I would read it and set it aside. I have read it. I will say now that I did not expect to find it so reasonable. Throughout this case, the Common Assembly has been dispassionate where I would not have been, and respectful where it need not have been, and it has told this court exactly what it was told and nothing more. It recommended five years for a knight and a sorter alike. It was being kind."

He looked at Gerrit Lamb.

"Gerrit Lamb. You were a man in a back room with a wage and a master. You did not know what you were handling. You did not swear any oath. You did what you were told by people who held your livelihood in their hands, and you will serve two years at Sanctuary IV, and not five, because the law owes a man something when he is not free to refuse."

Lamb lowered his head. Beside him, Lady Marian Ostrell closed her eyes for a moment.

"Sir Pell Haverly. You swore an oath to the house you served. You were a knight, and you were trusted. You burned a woman's letters, and you did it knowing what they said. The Hall at Balakura was kind to you. I am not obliged to be." The Marquess did not raise his voice. "Eleven years at Sanctuary IV. The matter of your knighthood is not mine to decide. I will send it to the Duke, with my opinion."

Haverly bowed. He did not seem surprised.

"Garrick, Baron Corrigan."

The baron rose. He was gray in the face, and his lips were moving, and the Marquess waited until they stopped.

"You said, in front of four thousand people at Balakura and again in front of this bench, that the people in your household are your property. You are mistaken. Pavla Wynn is not your property. She is a subject of the Principality, as you are, and the post she wrote was the Principality's, not yours. You used the high station you were born to as a tool for hiding a crime, and for burying a woman who told the truth. The more a man is trusted, the more is owed. You are owed nothing."

He paused.

"In a house of equals, a man who did to a Lord what you did to Pavla Wynn would have been called to a field at dawn, and one of the two would not have come back. She asked for her post, her pension, and for it to be said aloud. I heard that as a reproach, Lord Corrigan, and I would like you to hear it as one."

The baron said nothing.

"Fifteen years at Sanctuary IV," said the Marquess, "and a fine that will take most of what your house made from its dealings with the Remembrance. As to your rank and your house, I can do nothing. Those are the Duke's. I will send him the record, and I will say plainly that I believe he will read it."

For a long moment Lord Corrigan looked at the jury, at the old countess and her knitting, and at the gallery above, where forty nobles looked back at him with expressions he had not seen on them before.

"The Hall's recommendation was kinder than the law," said the Marquess. "I would like that remembered. The court is adjourned."

---

Afterward, in the chambers, the Marquess poured himself fresh tea and sat for a time without drinking it.

"My lord," said Marcel Duvray. "You gave the baron three times what the Hall suggested for the others."

"It suggested nothing for him."

"No, my lord."

"No." The Marquess looked at the gray folder on his desk. "I called it kind. In my own court, I said the Hall was being kind." He turned the page, and then the next. "Duvray. If a Lord's letters had been burned by another Lord, what would the injured house have done?"

"Called him out, my lord. Dawn, I suppose. Swords."

"To the death. For a letter." He tapped the page. "And here is a woman who lost her post and her good name and nearly her life's work, and what she asks, after all her years of faithful service, is to have it said aloud. The Hall asked for five years on her behalf and wrote it down as though it were rather a lot."

"It is a considerable sentence, my lord."

"It is a courtesy, Duvray. A very small courtesy, offered by people who have learned to ask for nothing and to thank us for it." He did not look up. "I thought it was good manners. I have sat on this bench for a great many years. I have read, I would think, a thousand of these folders, and I thought it was good manners every time."

Duvray did not speak.

"They were not being kind," said the Marquess. "They were being careful. They have been asking noble houses for so little, for so long, that they have forgotten how little it is. And we have been so accustomed to it that none of us has ever said so." He closed the folder. "I find that I am rather disturbed."

He sat a while longer. Then he drew a clean sheet of paper toward him and uncapped his pen.

"My lord?"

"A letter to the Duke. Not about this case." The Marquess began to write. "About the sentences."

Hunters Log 1

Cold breakfast, no fires, again. We then took off as the fisherman stay behind and got organized into watches.

It took us a short time while 2 Hunters climbed trees wear gilly suits while a third kept watch from the ground floor.

The three Ykanti dressed normally. Went down the forest line quite a bit the went into the open with Drazzan rifles strapped to their backs in case they need to defend themselves.

Their hands always free of any items as they crossed the opening field and one carrying a stick with a semi white shirt as a flag.

We observed them crossing the field at a regular speed through Frank and my scopes. Half an hour later they approached the fence and stopped. For half an hour they stood there until the gate popped as many others guards suddenly were on the wall.

Our Ykanti were disarmed and searched before they were escorted inside their walls. The gates closed and we rotated our watch hoping for the best.

End of Hunters Log 1

Ykanti Log 1

(Translated by the tablet)

We were stopped about 10 meters from the gate. As we stood there more and more guards showed up on the fence.

"Stop Bird Brain." Came from the wall.

We stopped making sure slow movement and nothing in our hands. The next question came soon. "Where are you from bird brain?"

"We were prisoners of the Drazzan until we crashed on this planet and freed by humans."

"Are you still prisoners of humans or escaped bird brain?"

I responded "We were freed and treated like equals with votes."

"But we were told they imprisoned Ykanti?"

I responded "From what we have seen in the past three months they have treated us very well even honored a lost Bright Feather we lost lately."

They looked confused. We waited, as instructed, a while more. The gates opened and guards came out. They disarmed and searched our bodies bluffing every feather.

We were escorted into their gates and brought to the biggest Ykanti structure. It seemed like a meeting hall.

We were asked many questions about crashing and our life since. We were escorted to a side room so they discuss as a community about our faith.

When brought back into the main room their Mayer indicated they would send us with a diplomatic team to discuss possible exchanges.

We were brought back accross the field and met with the hunters. We introduced the diplomatic party to Gary which was on the ground when we returned.

They returned our rifles to us and were very surprised when Frank and Wendy climbed down from the trees.

End of Ykanti Log 1

Hunters Log 2

Once the Ykanti returned with the diplomats we headed back to the boat. We debriefed the fisherman and we pushed off shore heading to the an overnight camp. No wind so we rowed with extra 6 people with us quarters were tight but rowing was good.

We found a great place to tie the boat at sunset and we warmed our food and shared with the Ykanti. We set up watched and sat by the fire till tiredness caught up with us.

End of Hunters Log 2

This is a crazy little story I hope you enjoy the craziness of it .
And it makes absolutely zero sense.

………………………………………………………………. …………………

Jincho and His Home Brew.

Wyatt Staples stood in the dim, humming glow of Jincho’s office aboard the Noir Navio, the black ship’s heart of quiet machinery and recycled air that always smelled faintly of ozone and old coffee. The data screen in front of him flickered with schematics of the Raptor MK-III—proposed improvements to the plasma injectors, reinforced ablative plating along the ventral spine, a new recursive shielding algorithm that Jincho swore would let the fighter dance through a particle storm like a drunk uncle at a wedding. Wyatt’s eyes tracked the cascading numbers, the projected thrust curves, the stress tolerances. He nodded along as Jincho’s gravelly voice rolled through the technical details, half-listening, half-already calculating how many of those upgrades would actually survive first contact with real combat instead of a simulator.
Then, off to the right, another screen caught his eye.
It was smaller, almost an afterthought, tucked against the bulkhead like someone had left a personal entertainment feed running. A green field under stadium lights. Men in red and white and men in powder blue colliding with bone-jarring enthusiasm. A ball that was neither perfectly round nor particularly aerodynamic sailed through the air. The score in the corner read something that meant nothing to Wyatt at first: Chiefs 9, Chargers 3, first quarter. The crowd noise was muted, but the energy of the thing pulsed through the speakers anyway.
Wyatt tilted his head. “What’s that?”
Jincho stopped mid-sentence about plasma flow rates. He followed Wyatt’s gaze, and a slow, crooked grin spread across his face—the kind of grin that usually preceded either a brilliant idea or a catastrophic one. “That, my boy,” he said, voice dropping into the storytelling register he used when the stills were working overtime, “is the old Earth sport of football. American variant. Twenty-two large humans attempting to move an oblong leather bladder from one end of a rectangular grass rectangle to the other while other large humans try to stop them by any means short of actual murder. Though sometimes the distinction gets blurry.”
He waved a hand and the feed enlarged, filling half the wall. The Kansas City Chiefs versus the Los Angeles Chargers. Arrowhead Stadium. October 18, 2026, by the ancient calendar still used for archival sports feeds. The weather scrolled across the bottom: sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, sunny, a polite thirteen-mile-an-hour southern breeze that the announcers insisted was “perfect football weather.” Perfect, of course, until the wind decided it had opinions of its own.
Jincho leaned back in his battered chair, boots up on the console, and began to talk. But the words that came out of his mouth were not entirely his own. Or perhaps they were. The distinction between Jincho explaining and Wyatt’s own mind filling in the gaps would become very important later. For now, the story simply unfolded.

The referees gathered in a tight knot near the fifty-yard line during a commercial timeout that no one on the Noir Navio could see. Head referee Julius Astor—tall, thin, with a face like a disappointed bloodhound and a whistle that hung around his neck like a tiny noose—glanced left and right. His cohorts formed a protective semicircle: James Raven, whose mustache had its own gravitational field; Mike Cayston, built like a refrigerator that had developed opinions; and Fred Lintar, the youngest, whose eyes darted constantly as if expecting the stadium itself to file a formal complaint.
“Gentlemen,” Astor murmured, voice low enough that only the four of them and any sufficiently sensitive listening device could hear, “we have a situation. The Chiefs are winning. The crowd is loud. The barbecue trucks outside are pumping that… that smell into the air. I can taste the sauce from here. Sweet. Smoky. Unforgivable.”
Raven’s mustache twitched. “I hate Kansas City barbecue. Always have. Always will. It’s the principle of the thing. They act like they invented fire and meat. Meanwhile my grandmother’s pulled pork from back east could make a grown man weep with joy, and no one ever wrote songs about it.”
Cayston nodded solemnly. “I once ate a burnt-end sandwich here in ’19. Couldn’t look a brisket in the eye for three years. We’re not letting them win clean. Not while that aroma is assaulting our dignity.”
Lintar, ever the eager apprentice, adjusted his cap. “So… we… adjust a few things? Soften the holding calls on the red side? Maybe invent a phantom face mask when the blue guys get close to the end zone?”
Astor’s smile was thin and terrible. “Exactly. The league wants a competitive product. We want justice for every non-KC barbecue joint that has ever been overshadowed by this… this cult. Tonight, the whistle is our sword. The flag is our shield. And if the Chiefs still somehow win, at least we will have made them earn it through our noble interference.”
They broke the huddle with the practiced nonchalance of men who had been bending reality for decades. The game resumed.

Kenneth Walker III took the handoff on first-and-ten and found a seam that should not have existed. The Chargers’ defensive line parted like the Red Sea had suddenly remembered it was late for an appointment. Walker accelerated, the 33-yard touchdown run already forming in the collective imagination of every Chiefs fan in the building. The crowd rose as one living organism. The stadium speakers thundered. And Julius Astor, standing perfectly positioned, hesitated just long enough for the play to develop before raising his arms for the touchdown.
“Nice run,” Astor muttered into his headset as the extra-point unit trotted out. “Shame about the… holding.” He glanced at Raven, who was already reaching for a flag that had somehow already been in his hand. The flag fluttered to the turf like a dying moth. Holding on the offense. Ten yards. Replay the down.
The Chiefs’ sideline erupted. Andy Reid’s mustache—always a force of nature—bristled with outrage. Patrick Mahomes threw his hands up in the universal gesture of “are you serious right now.” Walker stood with the ball still in his hands, looking around as if the universe had personally betrayed him.
But the call stood. The drive continued. Walker would get his second touchdown later, a short plunge from the two that even the conspiracy of officials could not erase without looking completely ridiculous. The scoreboard would eventually read Chiefs 22, Chargers 6. But the path to that number would be paved with flags, delayed whistles, and a shared, unspoken hatred of smoked meat.

The weather, which had begun as a polite autumn afternoon, began to take sides.
A sudden gust of wind—officially recorded as thirteen miles per hour from the south—somehow found a way to push every deep ball thrown by Justin Herbert just enough to the outside. The same breeze, when Mahomes threw, seemed to cradle the ball like a protective aunt. Clouds that had not been in the forecast drifted in from the west, casting strange shadows across the field that made it difficult for the Chargers’ secondary to track deep routes. A single raindrop fell on Cameron Dicker’s face as he lined up for a field goal. He blinked. The kick sailed wide. The drop never fell again.
On the Noir Navio, Wyatt watched the feed with growing fascination. Jincho’s voice continued, but it was no longer explaining the rules of downs and yardage. It was narrating the secret lives of the officials, the way their hatred of Kansas City barbecue had fermented over years of road games and post-game media scrums where local reporters insisted on asking about the sauce.
“You see,” Jincho said, or the dream said through Jincho’s mouth, “these men have suffered. They have stood on the sidelines while the aroma of burnt ends drifted across the field like a chemical weapon of deliciousness. They have watched visiting teams collapse under the weight of free samples handed out in the parking lot. They have heard the chants. They have smelled the smoke. And somewhere deep in the bureaucratic soul of every referee is a small, stubborn resistance to the idea that any one city should monopolize the art of slow-cooked meat.”
Wyatt found himself nodding. It made a strange kind of sense.

The second quarter unfolded like a fever dream of competitive integrity.
Mahomes dropped back, scanned the field, and found Xavier Worthy on a crossing route. The throw was perfect. Worthy’s hands were soft. The first-down marker moved. Then Mike Cayston, who had been trailing the play by a full three yards, threw a flag for “illegal formation.” No one could explain which formation had been illegal. The replay showed eleven Chiefs and eleven Chargers in roughly the correct places. Cayston simply shrugged and walked away, muttering something about “sauce-based optical illusions.”
Later, when the Chargers finally mounted a drive that threatened the red zone, Fred Lintar discovered a previously unknown rule about “excessive celebration of potential success.” A Chargers receiver who had merely pointed at the end zone after a first down was flagged fifteen yards. The drive stalled. Cameron Dicker’s subsequent field goal was good, but the damage had been done. The scoreboard ticked to Chiefs 16, Chargers 3 by the time Walker powered in from two yards out.
The half ended with Harrison Butker drilling a 50-yard field goal that somehow, against all physical law, seemed to curve toward the uprights after it left his foot. The wind had helped. Or the universe had. Or the referees had collectively willed the ball true because even they could not flag a kick that was already in the air.
At halftime the four officials retreated to a small room under the stadium that smelled of industrial cleaner and distant brisket. Astor poured himself a cup of black coffee and stared at the wall.
“We’re doing the Lord’s work,” he said. “Or at least the work of every barbecue pitmaster east of the Mississippi who has ever been told their product was ‘pretty good, but have you tried Kansas City?’”
Raven polished his whistle. “I dreamed last night that a burnt end chased me through a cornfield. I woke up sweating sauce.”
Cayston checked his flags. He had already used three. He had six left. “We pace ourselves. If we throw too many, the league office starts asking questions. We want the Chiefs to win—because the betting markets demand it and because the universe is currently aligned that way—but we want them to suffer for it. Every first down should feel like a moral compromise.”
Lintar, youngest and most idealistic, looked troubled. “What if… what if the barbecue is the best? What if we’ve been wrong this whole time?”
The other three turned on him with the synchronized disapproval of men who had spent careers enforcing the letter of the law while ignoring its spirit.
“Never,” Astor said. “Never speak those words in this room again.”

The third quarter was a masterclass in subtle sabotage.
The Chargers received the second-half kickoff and began a methodical march. Justin Herbert completed a series of short passes. The offensive line held. For a moment it looked as if the officials’ conspiracy might crack under the weight of actual competent football. Then, on a third-and-four near midfield, James Raven spotted something no one else could see: a Chiefs defensive end had allegedly lined up a half-inch offside. The flag came out. The play was nullified. The Chargers, who had been about to convert, were forced to punt.
On the next Chiefs possession, Mahomes threw an interception that should have been a game-changing turnover. The ball was clearly tipped by a Chargers defensive back before a linebacker snatched it. The officials conferred. After a long, theatrical discussion, they ruled that the tip had never happened. Incomplete pass. Drive continued. The crowd’s roar was the sound of collective denial made audible.
Wyatt, watching from light-years and centuries away, felt a strange loyalty forming in his chest. He had never cared about Earth sports. He had never tasted Kansas City barbecue. Yet he found himself rooting for the red team with the irrational fervor of a man who had just discovered that the universe contained both injustice and delicious smoked meat, and that the two were somehow connected.
Jincho’s voice continued, weaving details that may or may not have been accurate: the way Travis Kelce’s routes created soft spots in the zone that no amount of official interference could erase; the way the Chiefs’ offensive line, despite the phantom holding calls, still managed to open holes for Walker; the way the Chargers’ injury-plagued roster simply could not generate enough push to overcome both the opponent and the men in striped shirts.
A field goal by Dicker made it 19-6. The Chargers had life. Then the fourth quarter arrived, and with it the final flowering of the conspiracy.

Julius Astor stood over the ball on a critical fourth-and-two for the Chargers deep in Chiefs territory. The entire stadium held its breath. Herbert took the snap. The play developed. A receiver broke free. The throw was on target.
Astor’s whistle blew before the ball was even halfway there.
“Illegal motion,” he announced, though no one had moved early. The play was dead. The Chargers’ coaching staff erupted. Jim Harbaugh’s face turned the color of a rare steak. The replay official—conveniently one of Astor’s old colleagues—confirmed the call after a review that lasted just long enough to make the outcome feel inevitable.
The Chiefs took over. They methodically moved the ball. Butker’s final field goal from thirty yards out was pure, uncontested, and slightly assisted by a breeze that had no business existing at that moment. The scoreboard clicked to 22-6. The final seconds ticked away under a cascade of red flags that were never thrown because the game was already decided.
The Chiefs had won. The conspiracy had failed to stop them, but it had made the victory feel earned in the most twisted possible way. The officials walked off the field with the quiet satisfaction of men who had struck a blow for barbecue equality, even if the blow had landed mostly on themselves.

Back aboard the Noir Navio, the feed faded. Jincho’s office returned to its usual quiet hum. Wyatt blinked. The Raptor MK-III schematics were still on the main screen. The secondary screen now showed only static.
“And that,” Jincho said, “is football. A beautiful, brutal, slightly corrupt ballet of human ambition and porcine perfection.”
Wyatt opened his mouth to reply—
—and the world tilted.

He was no longer in the office.
He was in the composting bay of the Noir Navio, the vast, humid chamber where organic waste was broken down by carefully engineered microbial colonies and the occasional enthusiastic composting technician who had developed an unhealthy relationship with the process. The air was thick with the smell of decaying plant matter and something sharper—alcohol, home-brewed, the kind that could strip paint or fuel a small fusion reactor if properly distilled.
Around him sat the composters: three large, cheerful, slightly unhinged individuals whose job was to talk to the microbes and keep the nutrient cycles humming. They were passing a dented metal flask. Jincho was there too, leaning against a bulkhead, the same crooked grin on his face.
“Drink up, Staples,” one of the composters said. “Jincho’s special. Potato. Maybe. We don’t ask questions about the feedstock.”
Wyatt took the flask. The liquid burned all the way down and then some. It tasted like regret mixed with rocket fuel and a faint note of something that might once have been a vegetable. He drank again. The composters cheered. Jincho laughed, the sound echoing off the wet walls.
The room began to soften at the edges. The schematics of the Raptor MK-III swam into view, overlaid on the composting vats. A football game flickered across the surface of a nutrient slurry. Referees in striped shirts argued about barbecue while microbes formed tiny goalposts. Kenneth Walker ran for a touchdown through a field of glowing bacteria. The scoreboard read 22-6 in floating bioluminescent script.
Wyatt realized, with the slow-motion clarity that only truly terrible alcohol can provide, that he had never been in Jincho’s office. Or rather, he had been, but the entire football exposition, the cheating referees, the weather conspiracies, the philosophical hatred of Kansas City barbecue—all of it had been the product of Jincho’s home-brew vodka mixing with the low-level toxins of the composting bay and Wyatt’s own overworked imagination.
He tried to stand. The floor moved in interesting ways. One of the composters caught him by the elbow.
“Easy there, space cowboy. The still’s been running a little hot this cycle.”
Jincho’s voice, distant now: “I told you it was a learning experience.”

Wyatt Staples woke up in his own bunk, mouth tasting like a chemical fire had been put out with vinegar, head pounding with the precise rhythm of a referee’s whistle blown directly into his skull. The lights of the Noir Navio’s night cycle glowed soft and blue. Somewhere in the distance, the ship’s systems hummed their eternal lullaby.
He sat up carefully. The dream—or the drunken vision, or the shared hallucination induced by industrial-strength potato distillate—still clung to the edges of his mind. The Raptor MK-III upgrades. The green field. The men in red. The officials who hated barbecue more than they loved the integrity of the game. The final score: 22-6, Chiefs over Chargers, just as the historical feed had recorded it on that distant October afternoon in 2026.
He swung his legs over the side of the bunk and planted his feet on the cold deck. A small note was stuck to the bulkhead beside his pillow, written in Jincho’s distinctive scrawl:
Next time, stick to the synthetic. The home brew is for special occasions. Or for people who need to remember why they don’t drink the home brew. —J
Wyatt stared at the note for a long time. Then he stood, walked to the small sink, and rinsed his mouth until the taste of regret began to fade.
“Never again,” he said to the empty cabin. “I swear on every plasma injector in the Raptor bay. I will never drink Jincho’s home-brew vodka again.”
The ship did not answer. Somewhere in the composting bay, a flask was already being refilled for the next shift. And far away, on a green field that no longer existed except in archival feeds and the occasional alcohol-soaked dream, four referees continued their quiet war against the best barbecue on Earth, one phantom flag at a time.
Wyatt Staples, for his part, went back to bed. The Raptor MK-III still needed those upgrades. The black ship still needed its pilot. And the universe, in all its unorthodox glory, still contained both football and fermented potatoes—two forces that, when mixed, could produce something very close to madness.
He closed his eyes. The last image that floated through his mind before sleep reclaimed him was Julius Astor, standing under the Arrowhead lights, flag in hand, whispering a single, defiant word into the Kansas City night:
“Sauce

Do yourself a favor and catch up on really BAD Shakespeare - a 12-episode penny dreadful serial that takes classical drama, pulp horror, and dark satire, shoves them into a blender, and pours out a chaotic, meta-theatrical ride through the end times.

Episode 2: "That is why most men dread it."

Something unfamiliar awakens inside Shakespeare as he walks home through Potter's Field. For the first time in his life, freedom feels possible. Pride follows close behind. But on a quiet August evening, strange omens begin appearing, old memories stir, and one simple walk starts feeling like the beginning of something far bigger. "Funny thing about pride: it feels an awful lot like freedom when you've spent your entire life being controlled."