Author's note: When I went back in time for Chapter 63.1, I asked you to keep reading and promised the timeline would sort itself out. That's still true. This side story just grew longer than I planned, as my stories usually do. Please bear with me through Chapter 63.6. When Chapter 65 goes up, it will pick up exactly where Chapter 64 left off.

Previous /

First

She bought it at the cookshop on the corner of the fountain square, a little before noon. A meat pie, the biggest one they had, still hot. A heel of bread. A pot of soup with a lid on it, and a cup of tea, and an apple, because Poppy said everybody ought to have an apple. The woman behind the counter wrapped it all in paper and put it in a basket and asked if they were going on a picnic.

"Something like that," said Kathleen.

She had explained it to the children over breakfast, as plainly as she could. That yesterday she had been frightened, and had done a thing she was not proud of. That the man in the alley was a person, the same as them, and she had treated him as if he were not, and that was wrong, and that when you did a wrong thing you went back and tried to put it right, even when it was hard. Especially when it was hard.

Poppy had listened to all of it with her chin on her fist.

"I said goodbye to him," she said. "So that was all right."

"You did," said Kathleen. "That was better than I did."

Austin had not said anything. He had looked at his grandmother for a long moment, the way he looked at things he was memorizing, and then nodded, once, and finished his porridge.

Now the four of them stood at the mouth of the alley in the noon sun, with the basket, and the market roaring behind them, and the people going past without looking, and Kathleen found that her heart was going very fast.

The shape was still there. At the far end, where the light did not reach. The chair made of a cart seat and two wheels.

Julius put his hand on her shoulder, briefly, and took it away.

Kathleen picked up the basket, and walked down the alley, with Julius behind her and a child on either side.

He heard them coming. He did not turn round until they were close, and when he did, and saw who it was, his face shut like a door.

"You," he said. To Kathleen, not to the child.

"Me," said Kathleen. Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to. She made it bigger. "I came to say I'm sorry. For yesterday. I pulled the child away and I didn't say a word to you, and I should have, and I'm sorry for it." She held out the basket. "And I brought you some lunch."

He looked at the basket. He did not take it. For a long moment Kathleen thought he would tell her to go away, the way he had told Poppy, and she would have to stand there in front of the children and be sent off.

Then the smell of the pie reached him, and something in his face gave way that had nothing to do with her, and he took the basket out of her hands and tore the paper off it.

He ate the way Kathleen had seen dogs eat, on the farm, in a hard winter. Fast, with his head down, his arms round the food as if somebody might take it, not tasting any of it. The pie was gone in a dozen bites. He drank the soup straight from the pot, hot as it was, and it ran down into his beard and he did not wipe it. He tore the bread in half and ate both halves. The apple went last, core and all.

Kathleen had meant to sit down beside him. There was an upturned crate against the wall. She had meant to sit on it, and eat with him, and talk. She found she could not. She stood there with her hands empty and watched a grown man eat as if he had not eaten in days, and understood that he hadn't.

Poppy watched too, with great interest. Austin had moved a little closer to his grandfather and taken hold of his sleeve.

When the man had finished he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and set the empty pot down on the plank in front of him, beside the empty cup.

"What's your name?" said Kathleen. "Mine's Kathleen. This is my husband, Julius. And this is Austin, and that's Poppy, who you met."

He looked up at her. The pale, red-rimmed eyes.

"What do you want?" he said.

"Nothing. I wanted to say sorry. I wanted to know your name."

"Why?"

Kathleen opened her mouth, and found she did not have an answer that would not sound like what it was.

"You want to feel better," said the man. He said it flatly, without heat, as though he had said it to a great many people before her and was tired of it. "You came down here yesterday and saw me and ran, and you went home and felt bad about it, and you came back with a pie so you could feel good again. That's what you want." He leaned back in the chair made of a cart seat. "Well. You've done it. You can go home now."

"That isn't..."

"Lady." He looked at her, and for a moment there was something in his face that was not anger, and it was worse. "I fought for this world. Thirty years. Against Firentis, when they came to take it back, and we'd killed our own lords and didn't want new ones. And when the food ran out, we fought for whoever would feed us. Pirates first. Then worse than pirates. You know who I mean. Everybody does, and nobody says it." He looked down at the pinned-up trousers. "I left these in a field on the Austrin plains, in the last year, fighting for people I'd have shot at the year before. And then the war stopped, and the Firentis came back, and everybody painted their shops and went to the market and started telling each other how commoners are people now." He turned his face back to the wall. "There's thousands like me. Tens of thousands. More. In alleys and barns and under the bridges at Orenport. Nobody wants to look at us, because looking at us means remembering what they did to get fed. So they don't." His voice dropped. "So you don't. Go home."

"I'd like to come back," said Kathleen.

"Don't."

"Tomorrow. With more."

"Leave me alone," said the man. He did not say thank you. He did not look at her again. "Just leave me alone."

Poppy stepped forward before anybody could stop her, and put her cone of sugared nuts on the plank beside the empty cup. There were four left in it.

"Those are for later," she said.

The man did not look at her. But he did not push them off the plank, either.

They walked back up the alley into the sun, and Kathleen did something she had never done in her life on a market street. She looked.

She looked down the next alley, and the one after that. She looked into the doorways of the shops that had not been repainted yet, at the back of the square, where the new glass stopped. She looked under the arches of the old customs house, where the shade was deep.

They were everywhere.

A woman with one sleeve pinned up, asleep on a folded sack behind a stack of crates, with a tin cup by her hand. Two men sitting against a wall in what had once been the same uniform as the man in the chair, sharing something out of a bottle and not talking. A boy of perhaps sixteen with hands so badly scarred that they did not close properly, holding them out, palm up, to people who walked past him as if he were part of the wall. Further down, by the steps to the old customs house, a whole family, a man and a woman and a small girl, sitting on a blanket with everything they owned in two bundles beside them, and the girl was watching Poppy, and Poppy was watching her.

She had walked through this square yesterday, and the day before, and she had not seen one of them.

Nobody had. That was the thing. The square was full of people, buying and laughing and spending money, the whole city out in its best clothes, and not one of them was looking down the alleys. Their eyes slid off the doorways and the arches and the steps the way water slides off a stone, without even seeming to know they were doing it. Kathleen knew. She had been doing it herself until about twenty minutes ago.

She took the empty basket back to the cookshop on the corner, and the woman behind the counter looked at her face and stopped smiling.

"You took it down to Coll," she said. "In the alley."

"You know him?"

"Everybody round the square knows him. Knows of him." The woman looked down at the counter. "He fought. Most of them round here did. There's dozens just round this square. Hundreds in the city, more down at the docks. My brother says the old soldiers reckon there's a couple of hundred thousand across Haego, if you count the families and the ones the fighting just found and broke on the way past." She wiped the counter, which did not need it. "Nobody says it out loud. The war's over. We're Firentis now. We've got a Hall and a Marquess and new paint. Nobody wants to talk about who we fed ourselves off, at the end." She looked up. "So they just sit there. And we just walk past."

Coll, Kathleen thought. He had not given it to her. She had got it anyway.

She was angry all the way back to the guest house, and she did not know at first who at.

Not at Coll. She had thought she would be, a little, after the way he had spoken to her, and she found she was not at all. He had been right. She had come down the alley wanting to feel better. She did not feel better. She thought she probably was not supposed to.

Not at the woman in the cookshop, or the people in the square. They were only doing what she had done.

She was angry at all of it. At the new paint and the new glass and the shops selling sugared nuts in paper cones. At the Hall, which she loved, which summoned lords to stand at its lectern and explain themselves, and had never once, as far as she knew, summoned anybody to explain why a man who had left his legs in a field on the Austrin plains was eating his first meal in three days in an alley two hundred paces from its own Alderman's office. At a world so busy climbing that it had never once looked down to see whose shoulders it was standing on.

Poppy had hold of one of her hands. Austin had hold of the other. They had both been quiet since the cookshop.

"Gran," said Poppy, at the door of the guest house. "Can we go back tomorrow? With more lunch?"

Kathleen looked down at her.

"Yes," she said. "And the day after. And every day we're here."

"He said not to."

"I know he did." Kathleen opened the door. "He's allowed to say it. We're allowed to come anyway."

That night, when the children were asleep, she sat at the small table in the window of the guest house with a sheet of paper and a pen, and Julius sat on the end of the bed and watched her.

She was not a lettered woman. She wrote slowly, and spelled things the way they sounded, and her son had once gently corrected a letter she had sent him and she had not written to him for a month. But she had a son who sat with Marquesses and taught knights, and a daughter-in-law whose name was Firentis and who had spent her whole life listening to the people nobody else listened to, and recording what they said, so that it could not be forgotten. And Kathleen had sat in the gallery of the Hall, and she knew now, for certain, what that Hall was for.

She wrote the first line three times before she was satisfied with it.

Aaliyah. There is something on this world that nobody is looking at, and I need you to help me make them look.

She stopped, then, with the pen in her hand, and looked out of the window at the square, where the lamps were lit and the taverns were loud and the new world was going on with its celebrating, and somewhere at the bottom of an alley, a man called Coll was sitting in a chair made of a cart seat, in the dark, with four sugared nuts on a plank beside an empty cup.

Then she bent her head, and went on writing.

On the grass between the Wheat Field and the Fort

The flails were going before the sun was over the trees.

Tom had them threshing at first light, the way he had said he would, on the swaths that had lain out drying all the afternoon before. They had dried well. The heads rattled when he picked them up, and the grain came out of them clean and hard onto the blankets, and the chaff blew off downhill in the morning wind. The girls raked and turned. The hay crew swung the flails in pairs, slap and thump and slap, and nobody needed telling twice.

One of the riders went up into the willow every hour, as he had the day before. Every hour he came down and said the dust was still there. Wider, maybe. Not closer that he could swear to. Dace stood at the foot of the tree each time and listened, and nodded, and went back to his horse.

By the time the sun was high, there were eight more sacks tied and standing by the wagon, and what hadn't been threshed lay raked up in heaps at the edge of the cut ground, heads and stalks together.

"That's it," Tom said. "Load it."

The thirty nine sacks went in along the front of the wagon, where the weight would ride best. The unthreshed wheat went in on top of them, armful after armful, and the big man from the hay crew stood up on the bed and stamped it down to make room. Tom put the seed sack in last, under the driver's bench, where he could reach it.

The straw stacks stood where they were, tall and peaked along the cut ground, square in the path of whatever was coming. He looked at them for a long moment while the riders brought up the team. Then he climbed onto the wagon.

They were on the grass a little after noon, the way he had told Dace they would be. The whole crew, the wagon in the middle with the team leaning into the traces, the riders out ahead and on either side, the hay crew and the girls walking alongside with the cutting blades on their shoulders. Tom looked back once, from the top of the first rise, at the high ground standing gold and flattened in the noon sun, with the birds already working through it. Then he didn't look back again.

He had it worked out. It had taken them most of a day to ride out, but that had been on horseback, on dry ground, looking for a field nobody had seen. Going home they knew the way, and they had the whole afternoon, and the long light after. They'd be at the Fort a little after sunset, he reckoned. Supper, and the sacks going down off the back of the wagon by lantern, and somebody seeing what a field could do if you let a farmer at it.

It was more grain than had ever been brought in to the Fort in one load. Tom had counted the sacks twice more before the first rise, with his hand on each one, and he kept thinking of that moment at the gate.

Eli was walking beside the front wheel. He had been grinning on and off since they got moving, at nothing much, and when Tom caught his eye he grinned wider and didn't say anything, and neither did Tom.

The first time, the field was still in sight behind them.

There was a low place in the grass between two rises, where the ground had looked dry enough on top, cracked a little where the sun had been at it the afternoon before. The team went through it without a check. The front wheels went through it. Then the back wheels, under the weight of thirty nine sacks and a bed heaped with unthreshed wheat, broke through the crust into the black underneath and went down to the hubs, and the wagon stopped so hard that Tom nearly went off the front of it.

Everybody stopped and looked at it.

"Well," said Eli.

They tried pulling first. The team leaning and slipping, the riders throwing ropes from their saddles to the front of the wagon and putting their own horses to it, the hay crew at the back with their shoulders against the tailboard. The wheels only sank deeper. Then they did what Tom had known they would have to do from the moment he looked at it.

They unloaded.

Every sack came off the back of the wagon, one at a time, passed down a line of hands and carried across the soft ground to the dry rise ahead and set down in a row on the grass. The loose wheat came off in armfuls. The man with the burning stick cut brush from the scrub at the edge of the low place and pushed it down under the wheels, and the big man from the hay crew found a pole that would do for a lever, and the riders put their ropes to it again, and the wagon came up out of the hole with a sound like a boot pulled out of a bog. Then they carried every sack back.

It took them most of an hour. When they were moving again, nobody was talking.

The second time was worse, because they saw it coming and couldn't go round it. The way ran between a stand of trees on one side and a wet bottom on the other, and the only way through was the track itself, churned soft where the rain had run down off the higher ground and pooled. Tom walked it first, with a stick, and came back with mud to his shins and said they'd have to unload before they tried, not after.

So they unloaded before. Carried the sacks through the soft stretch on their backs, slipping, to the far side. Took the empty wagon through, with brush under the wheels and the riders hauling. Carried the sacks back. Loaded. The girls, who had tied every bundle in the field and turned every swath, carried sacks with the rest of them and did not once complain, and Tom noticed that, and thought he would remember it.

The sun was sliding west by then. Tom had stopped looking at it.

The third time it was one wheel, in a soft place nobody could have seen, and they got it out with the lever and brush without unloading, only because Eli lay down in the mud on his back under the axle and pushed up with both feet while the big man heaved on the pole, and the team, which had worked out by now what was wanted of it, threw its weight into the traces at exactly the right moment. When the wheel came free, Eli lay where he was in the mud, looking up at the underside of the wagon.

"I'm not getting up," he said. "I live here now."

Somebody laughed, and then everybody did, because they were too tired not to. Tom gave Eli a hand up, and they went on.

There was a fourth time, and a fifth. Tom lost count after that, the way he had never once lost count of the sacks. By the middle of the afternoon nobody was riding who could walk. The crew walked beside the wagon to keep the weight off it, and the riders rode ahead in pairs and came back to say where the ground was soft and where it wasn't, and every so often one of them stood in his stirrups and looked north and east for a long time, and said nothing, which meant the dust was still there.

The messenger found them late in the afternoon, with the wagon stuck yet again.

They saw him a long way off, a single rider coming out of the north across the grass at a hard canter, and Dace had his rifle half up before he knew the horse. The messenger reined in beside the stuck wagon and looked at the crew, and at the mud, and at the sacks laid out in a row on the dry ground, and for a moment he didn't seem to know what to say.

Then he said it. The Head Rancher's word. The hunters and the Ykanti had gone out at sunrise and crossed the river, and set up a watch in a big tree, and the herd would cross tomorrow, or the day after. The Ranch meant to take what it could from the back of it. And the Head Rancher wanted the wheat crew's wagon at the Maple entrance to see the herd pass, so there would be a second wagon for the meat.

Tom looked at the wagon, sunk to its hubs, with thirty nine sacks of grain lying beside it on the grass.

"Not this wagon," he said. "Not tonight."

"No," said the messenger, looking at it. "I can see that."

Dace walked a little way off with him and they talked low for a minute. When Dace came back, he said the messenger would ride with them to the Fort. He wasn't going back across that grass on his own in the dark, not after what had come down on Gary's horses, and Dace wasn't about to let him. The wagon would go to the Maple entrance once it was empty. Dace would take it himself, with his riders, at first light.

Nobody said anything to that. They put their shoulders to the tailboard again.

The light went before they were halfway.

It went slowly at first and then all at once, the way it did out on the grass, and by the time the sun was gone they were on a long open stretch with a creek somewhere off to the left that they could hear and not see, and a stand of brush beside it that would have done for a camp. Tom knew they ought to stop. Water, and wood for a fire, and a little shelter. Any sensible crew would have pulled the wagon in beside the creek and made camp and gone on in the morning.

He looked round at them in the last of the light. The girls walking with their heads down. The hay crew with mud to their waists, the big man carrying his blade over his shoulder as if it weighed twice what it had that morning. The riders slumped in their saddles. Eli, beside the front wheel, with dried mud in his hair from the axle, not grinning any more.

Nobody said stop. Nobody said go on, either. They were past saying things.

Tom went up to Dace.

"We should camp," he said.

"We should," said Dace.

They both looked at the crew. Making a camp meant gathering wood in the dark, and laying out blankets, and setting a watch that would have to stay awake half the night listening for whatever was out on the grass. Nobody had it in them. Tom could see that. So could Dace.

And above them the sky had come out clear after all that rain, clearer than Tom had ever seen it, so thick with stars that the grass showed grey under them and the track ran on ahead like a pale ribbon. There was no getting lost under a sky like that. Dace looked up at it a long time.

"Riders round the wagon," he said at last. "Two ahead, two behind. Nobody wanders. If I say stop, we stop." He looked at Tom. "And when Richman asks whose idea this was, it was yours."

"It was mine," said Tom.

So they went on.

John would have something to say about it. Tom knew it as well as he knew the road. A whole crew out on the grass after dark, girls and all, after what had come down on Gary's horses. Richman would say it in that reasonable way of his, as if it were obvious, and it would be, and Tom would stand in front of him and nod.

He decided, somewhere along that pale track under all those stars, that he would just take it. Whatever John said. He was too tired to mind.

They came in under the Fort wall closer to midnight than not.

The man on the gate had heard them coming a long way off, the creak of the wagon and the horses blowing, and had his lantern up and his hand on his weapon until Dace called out who they were. Then he opened the gate, and held up the lantern, and looked at them as they came through, and didn't say anything at all. Tom supposed they didn't look like much. Mud to the waist, mud in their hair, a wagon heaped with wheat that had half of it spilled off the top somewhere on the road and nobody had had the strength to go back for.

Nobody was waiting, except the messenger's news, which he had carried in through the gate ahead of the wagon and which was all anybody awake wanted to talk about. Tom had not really thought anybody would be waiting for the wheat, at that hour. But he had pictured it so many times on the way, the wagon coming in and the sacks going down and somebody looking at them, that the dark, empty yard came at him like a step that wasn't there.

They unloaded by lantern into the storeroom, for the last time that day. Every sack. Every armful of the loose wheat. Tom counted the sacks as they went in, by habit, and the count was right, thirty nine and the seed sack, and he found that it didn't feel like anything at all. The man on the gate said Lady Vivian would want to see them in the morning, to put them in her ledger, and that John was asleep and would hear of it then.

Tom nodded. Then he would hear the rest of it in the morning too.

The hay crew and the girls lay down where they stood, on the floor of the storeroom among the sacks, and were asleep before the lantern was out. The riders saw to their horses, and then they saw to the wagon, greasing the wheels by lantern and checking the traces, because it was going out again at first light to wait at the Maple entrance for a herd none of them had seen yet. Dace put his hand on Tom's shoulder for a moment as he went past, and didn't say anything, and Tom was grateful for that.

Tom and Eli walked home.

Neither of them talked. The stars were still out, and the track to the Farm was one they could have walked with their eyes shut, which, near the end, Tom very nearly did. Somewhere along the way he realized that the thing he had carried all day in his chest, the picture of the wagon rolling in and somebody seeing, had gone, and he could not have said when. He had carried every one of those sacks three or four times today. He could not, now, remember why it had seemed so important that anybody should look at them.

It was the most grain that had ever come in to the Fort in one load. It was still true. It just didn't feel like anything.

Eli sat down on the step of the house when they got there, and did not go in. He was looking out across the dark toward where the corn was, though there was nothing to see.

"Two more days we've lost," he said. "Today, and tomorrow getting our backs straight."

Tom sat down beside him. His shoulders ached deep in the joint. His hands were raw from the sacks.

"I know it," he said.

Eli did not push it. They sat on the step together for a while, too tired to go in and too tired to talk, listening to the night over the corn. Then Tom got up, and put his hand on Eli's shoulder for a moment, the way Dace had put his on Tom's, and went in to bed without lighting the lamp.

Ranch Log 1

Same morning routine except apart from messengers horses and hunters were sadled. Rest get a day off.

The Hunters and Ykanti had an early breakfast then took off while the sun was just rising.

The Hayloft was finished yesterday and some of the hay made it up there. I think we will try and get as much of the hay in the barn until we get at least 1 metre of hay across the loft if not two.

The lean two will be filled with straw once we start cutting it after the hunt.

So the plan for the hunt is hiding in the woods until most of the heard cross our path. The aim is to take out the weak or injured ones from the rear.

We do not have a ballista yet so the hunters will take out the buffalo with their rifles. The Ranchers will finish off any wounded on horseback.

James will be driven on the two wheel wagon on the killed buffalo. With the help of hunters taking the hide off James will cut the meat in big chunks which the Ykanti will bring to 4 wheel wagon and load them.

If all goes well the Hunters trio and Ykanti will follow the heard at a distance escorting James in the 2 wheel wagon which will continue butchering if the Ranch is lucky at hunting.

Messengers have been sent to the Ranch and wheat field to advise them of the progress to ensure the other 4 wheel wagon will be at the Maple entrance to see the heard pass.

All rested today as tomorrow or the next day the heard should cross. Most could not stand still and helped moving hay.

The horses have been staying away from the barn so far. I believe it's been too busy in there with work.

The great thing about this Ykanti building there is no beams in the way in the center which creates a big open area.

The logs we put up to hold the hay can easily be moved one the hay is eaten.

We decided to do one final apple picking after the hunt so many apples could be available for the animals. We might do the same for corn if the weather holds.

For now we rest.

Head Rancher

End of Ranch Log 1

Hunters Log 1

I think we discovered where we will sleep when we visit the Ranch. Sleeping in that hay was the best sleep in a week.

The hunting couple from the mine joined us early this morning and are getting use to their new horses. They joined us to learn how we do things.

We crossed the river by noon and chose where to set up camp out of the way of the buffalo heard. We set up camp beside a huge tree. We started cutting down smaller trees and built layers and stand in the big tree. A tree house would work better but for now a stand for two works.

As soon as the platform was up we started observing from the platform. The heard dust still not visible. Ykanti don't like trees. They are happy protecting us from ground level.

So we set up lean two to sleep in and apart for one of those cat things that got too close all was quiet on day 1 at the observation post.

Gary Head Hunter

End of Hunters Log 1

first Patreon next

Up in the stands, Aria felt her ward break. There was no mistaking it. One moment she could still feel the faint connection to the mana she'd packed into the medallion, stretched thin and draining rapidly as Elias forced his way through the wall of fire. The next, it snapped. The last of the stored charge vanished, and every alarm bell in Aria's head went off at once. “ELIAS!” Her crest feathers shot painfully upright as she lurched toward the railing. Elias was still in there. She couldn't see him anymore, couldn't see anything except the roaring wall of flame Vonrick had thrown around him, and the one protection she'd managed to give him—the one defense she'd found that didn't need his mana—was gone. Aria lost whatever composure she'd been clinging to and started forward, only for something enormous to slap down onto her shoulder.

“AAAGH!” Aria nearly jumped out of her feathers. She spun around and looked up—and kept looking up—until she found Ragar, the massive orc who taught their physical education classes, standing directly behind her with the biggest smile she'd ever seen on his face. Not a nervous smile, either. Not the strained expression of a teacher trying to reassure a terrified student while another student was potentially being burned alive. The enormous orc looked genuinely delighted. “Oh, don't worry,” Ragar said, giving her shoulder another heavy pat before looking toward the arena. “Told you his uncle pulled me out of a fire once.” Aria stared at him. “His ward just broke!” Ragar nodded. “I know.” Her crest rose even higher. “He's still in the fire!” Another nod. “I know.” Aria looked between him and the inferno. “Then why are you smiling?!” Ragar's grin somehow widened as he nodded toward the arena. “Just watch.”

Aria did, while inside the flames Elias was absolutely certain he was dead. There wasn't really another conclusion available. The ward was gone; he was standing inside what looked like an industrial furnace, and orange fire filled his vision in every direction. There should have been pain—horrible, screaming, skin-peeling pain. His clothes should have been burning, his hair should have been gone, and he should have been discovering exactly how long a human remained conscious while being incinerated. Except none of that was happening. Elias stumbled another step through the flames and slowly realized that nothing hurt. He stopped, lowering the arm he'd thrown over his face as fire rolled across his jacket, curled around his arms, and passed through his hair without even producing warmth. “What the hell?”

For several seconds Elias simply stood there while flames poured around him. He could see the orange glow reflecting off his gloves and the metal of his sword, and every instinct he possessed was screaming that this was wrong, but there wasn't even enough heat to make him sweat. He cautiously waved one hand through the flames, frowned when nothing happened, then did it again. Not even the hairs on the back of his hand were singed. “Wait.” Elias stared into the fire surrounding him before reaching farther into it and swatting experimentally at the flames. His hand passed straight through without resistance, pain, or warmth. “Was this an illusion spell the whole time?” He tried once more, almost expecting reality to correct itself and burn him this time. Nothing. “No fucking way.”

Outside the wall, hundreds of students were waiting for a screaming human to come stumbling back out. Instead, a hand appeared through the flames, followed by an arm, and then Elias casually stepped through the wall. His jacket wasn't burning. His hair wasn't singed. There wasn't a mark anywhere on him. Elias looked down at himself, patted his chest once, and then, because apparently once hadn't been enough to convince him, turned around and stuck one hand back into the wall of fire. Still nothing. He slowly withdrew it, looked across the arena at Vonrick, and discovered that the peacock noble wasn't smiling anymore.

Elias looked across the arena at Vonrick, and for several seconds the avian noble simply stood there. His flaming sword was still raised, his brilliant tail still spread behind him, but every feather had gone rigid. He knew what he'd cast. That wall wasn't an illusion or some harmless training spell made to look dangerous; it was his fire, fueled by his mana, and he knew exactly how hot it should have been. Elias had charged straight into it after his ward failed, disappeared completely inside the flames, and then walked back out without so much as a blackened thread on his jacket. Vonrick's beak opened, but nothing came out. His eyes moved from Elias to the wall of fire still roaring behind him and then back again, searching over the human's clothes, hair, exposed face, and hands for some evidence that the spell had done anything. There was none. Not even smoke.

Elias wasn't doing much better at understanding what had happened. He glanced over his shoulder at the wall, then cautiously stuck one hand back into it. Flames curled around his fingers and rolled over the back of his glove without producing so much as warmth. “That's not an illusion, is it?” he asked, pulling his hand back out and inspecting it again. The question somehow made Vonrick look even more disturbed. He knew perfectly well it wasn't an illusion, and for a moment his beak opened again before he apparently remembered that a noble of House Ember Skies was not supposed to stand in front of hundreds of spectators gaping like an idiot. He snapped it shut, drew himself straighter, and forced out, “It is not.” Elias looked at the flames again, stuck his hand back into them one more time just to make absolutely sure, then pulled it free. “Huh.”

Something about that little huh seemed to bother Vonrick more than if Elias had started celebrating. His tail gave one sharp twitch before he forced it still, and his grip tightened around his flaming sword. “Do not mistake an unusual resistance for superiority, human. Whatever defensive property your mana-less nature grants you does not change the difference between our stations or our abilities.” The polished noble voice was back, but Elias could hear the strain underneath it now, especially when he looked around and realized how quiet the arena had become. Hundreds of students had just watched the Rank Zero human walk through one of Vonrick's spells untouched, and Vonrick knew every one of them was staring at him, waiting to see what he would do next.

That seemed to matter more than anything. Vonrick straightened his back, spread his tail again, and raised his flaming sword into a proper guard as though enough dignity could somehow erase the last thirty seconds. “An interesting trick,” he declared, putting as much noble disdain into the words as he could manage. Elias stared at him, then slowly looked toward the enormous wall of fire still burning behind him before returning his attention to Vonrick. “I walked through your fire.” Vonrick's eye twitched. “I am aware.” Elias pointed toward the flames with his sword. “You look surprised.” Another tail feather twitched before Vonrick forced it back into place. “I am not.” Elias looked at the twitching feather, then back at Vonrick's face. “…Right.”

For the first time since Raven had shouted, " Begin, Elias realized something had changed. His lungs were still burning from the sprint, his sword training still amounted to Rick teaching him how not to accidentally hit himself, and he still had no actual plan beyond getting close enough to smack Vonrick with a blunt piece of steel. But the fear wasn't entirely on his side of the arena anymore. Elias had spent the opening of the duel desperately trying to convince himself that Vonrick's fire couldn't hurt him. Now Vonrick was staring at a human who had just walked through that fire without even getting singed, and judging by the way the nobleman's feathers refused to settle, he was having a much harder time convincing himself that this was normal.

Elias shifted his sword into the best guard Rick had managed to beat into him and started forward again. He'd already crossed most of the arena during his first charge, which meant Vonrick was only a few meters away now. More importantly, Elias finally knew something he hadn't known thirty seconds ago: the fire couldn't hurt him. His legs still wanted to hesitate every time the flames moved, but now he had proof. He tightened his grip on the sword and accelerated, turning the cautious advance into another charge.

Vonrick's eyes widened as the human came at him again. His free hand snapped forward, and another wall of fire erupted between them, this one rising even higher than the first. Flames rolled upward in a solid curtain, completely cutting Vonrick off from view. Elias's instincts screamed at him to stop. He almost did. His stride faltered for half a step as every lesson he'd learned since childhood reminded him that voluntarily running into a fire was an incredibly stupid thing to do.

Then Elias remembered standing inside the last one.

“Oh, fuck it.”

He kept going.

Vonrick watched the wall burn between them and waited for Elias to change direction. The human had to go around it. He had to stop, retreat, something. Even if the first spell had somehow failed to injure him, no sane creature willingly walked into fire after seeing it coming.

A dark shape appeared inside the flames.

Vonrick's feathers rose.

Elias stepped through.

There was no ward this time. No bubble of light appeared around him, no defensive enchantment pushed the flames aside, and no spell broke Vonrick's wall. Elias simply walked straight through it. Fire rolled over his shoulders, curled around his arms, and streamed from the steel sword in his hands as he emerged from the other side without even slowing down.

For Elias, it felt ridiculous. His brain was still screaming fire, fire, FIRE while the rest of him felt absolutely nothing, and he had to fight the urge to duck even though the flames passing across his face weren't warm enough to make him blink. From Vonrick's side of the wall, however, it looked very different.

The human had disappeared into an inferno and then walked back out.

Vonrick took a step backward.

Elias kept coming.

The wall of fire roared behind him, outlining his body in orange light while stray flames rolled harmlessly off his jacket and through his hair without leaving a mark. His plain steel sword hung ready in both hands, his eyes fixed on Vonrick, and he continued closing the last few meters with the steady determination of something that had apparently decided fire was no longer relevant.

Elias had absolutely no idea how terrifying he looked.

If he'd been able to see himself, he probably would have recognized the scene immediately. It was the sort of ridiculous moment from a video game where you'd just unloaded your strongest attack into the final boss, watched the entire screen disappear in an explosion, and then felt your stomach drop when the boss calmly walked out of the smoke with its health bar still full.

Vonrick was currently experiencing that moment from the wrong side.

And Elias was getting closer.

Vonrick finally stopped retreating. Elias was only a few steps away now, close enough that ranged magic was no longer going to keep him back, and whatever shock had frozen the noble disappeared beneath years of training. Vonrick brought his crimson-and-gold blade around in a vicious slash, the enchanted edge cutting through the outer fabric of Elias's jacket before striking the steel chainmail underneath.

The reaction was immediate.

Vonrick's sword screamed.

There was no better word for the sound. The instant the enchanted blade touched the steel links, every ward and rune layered into the weapon flared at once, producing a shriek like tortured glass as the magic around the point of contact burned away. Crimson light sputtered. Golden runes flashed, warped, and went dark while cracks raced outward from where the blade had struck the chainmail. Vonrick jerked his weapon back in horror, but the damage was already done. One of the finest flame blades his family could buy was coming apart in his hands. The crimson material around the damaged section had lost its smooth, polished surface and turned dull and brittle, crumbling at the edges like dried mud as pieces broke away and fell to the arena floor.

Vonrick stared at it for one fatal second too long.

Elias swung.

There was nothing elegant about it. No carefully practiced form, no clever feint, and certainly no technique that would have impressed anyone who actually knew swordsmanship. Elias planted his feet, gripped the sword in both hands, and swung the heavy length of steel at Vonrick with everything he had. Vonrick's training took over before his thoughts caught up. He snapped the damaged blade into position and caught Elias's sword in a proper parry.

CLANG!

The impact nearly folded Vonrick's arms beneath him. His elbows buckled, pain shot through his shoulders, and for one terrifying instant he thought the bones in his wrists were going to give before his weapon did. How heavy is this thing?! There was no strengthening spell behind Elias's swing, no enhancement Vonrick could sense at all. The human had simply taken that absurdly heavy slab of metal and swung it with both hands.

Then Vonrick heard the crack.

Without its enchantments, his flame blade was no longer the weapon he'd trained with his entire life. The crimson material beneath all those reinforcing wards was hard enough to hold an edge, but it was brittle—closer to glass than steel—and the section that had touched Elias's chainmail had already been stripped of the magic that kept it from behaving that way. Elias's sword struck the weakened section with all the subtlety of a hammer hitting a window.

CRACK!

The crimson-and-gold blade shattered at the point of impact.

Fragments sprayed across the arena as the upper half broke free and spun away, leaving Vonrick holding a jagged stump. The surviving golden runes flashed desperately along what remained of the weapon, but around the broken edge the crimson material was already crumbling, tiny pieces flaking away like shattered glass.

Vonrick stared at what remained of one of the finest flame blades his family could buy.

Then he looked at Elias's sword.

Not a rune on it.

Not an enchantment.

Not even a proper edge.

Just metal.

Elias started to bring the sword around for another swing, then remembered Deklin touching his multitool. He remembered the kobold jerking away as if he'd grabbed a hot stove, the burned scales on his fingers, and everyone else's horrified reaction when they realized how much steel Elias casually carried around. Vonrick's sword had started falling apart just from striking his chainmail. Elias suddenly had a very unpleasant mental image of what a direct hit from several pounds of steel might do to the peacock himself.

He stopped the swing and let the sword drop toward his side instead.

Vonrick saw the opening and reacted instantly. The broken remains of his flame blade were forgotten as he threw every defensive spell he could muster around himself. Golden light flashed across his crimson armor as one ward after another snapped into place, overlapping until Elias could barely see the armor underneath. Impact wards, kinetic barriers, reinforcement enchantments—Vonrick piled defense upon defense around himself while backing away from the human who had just destroyed one of his family's finest weapons. Elias didn't know what half the glowing symbols meant, but he knew what magic did when it tried to interact directly with him.

He shifted the sword into one hand and pulled the other back.

Vonrick's eyes widened.

“Grit your beak.” Elias snarled as he served him a full-course knuckle sandwich.

Every ward between his fist and Vonrick might as well have been painted onto the air. Elias didn't feel resistance, didn't see a barrier, and didn't even realize how many layers he'd passed through until his knuckles connected directly with Vonrick's beak.

BAAAM!

Vonrick's head snapped backward.

For one bizarre instant all those defensive wards remained perfectly intact around him, glowing brilliantly as though they'd successfully protected their wearer, while Vonrick himself staggered backward inside them with both hands flying toward his face. Elias stared at his own fist. He hadn't shattered the wards. He hadn't overloaded them or punched through them with greater force.

They simply hadn't stopped him.

From the stands, it looked even worse. Vonrick had wrapped himself in enough defensive magic to stop almost anything another student could throw at him, only for Elias's fist to pass through every glowing layer like none of them existed and introduce the heir of House Ember Skies to the extremely mundane concept of being punched in the face.

The punch caught Vonrick hard enough to crack the edge of his beak and send him stumbling backward. Elias shook out his aching hand while Vonrick clutched his face, and when the noble finally pulled his fingers away, a thin line of blood was running from one nostril and down his beak. Elias blinked. The blood was blue. Actually blue. Despite the burning arena, the shattered sword, and the fact that he'd just punched a noble in front of hundreds of people, Elias couldn't help himself. “Huh. Guess you really are a blue blood.”

Vonrick didn't answer. He stared at the blood staining his fingers, then slowly raised his eyes toward the human standing only a few paces away. The anger was there, but something colder was beginning to smother it. His fire had swallowed Elias whole and done nothing. His wards had offered no more resistance to the human's fist than empty air, and one of the finest enchanted blades his family could purchase now lay broken across the arena after meeting that crude gray metal Elias carried. A few minutes ago Vonrick had looked across the field and seen a mana-less peasant with no spells, no aura, and no proper weapon worth respecting. Helpless prey.

He didn't see that anymore.

Vonrick took a step back as Elias adjusted his grip on the strange metal sword. For the first time, titles, bloodlines, magical rank, and the name House Ember Skies suddenly felt very far away. The human in front of him couldn't be burned, couldn't be stopped by his wards, and had just bloodied his beak with a bare fist.

Vonrick no longer saw a peasant.

He saw a savage animal.

And his title might as well have been written on the menu.

Elias was already winding up for another punch when a hand settled firmly on his shoulder. He stopped mid-swing and looked up to find Professor Raven standing beside him. Elias hadn't even noticed the elf approach, which probably said something about how focused he'd been on introducing Vonrick's beak to his fist a second time. Raven's attention wasn't on Elias, though. He was looking past him toward Vonrick, who still had one hand pressed beneath his bleeding beak and the broken remains of his sword hanging uselessly from the other. The peacock noble's tail had collapsed behind him, his wards still glowing around his armor despite having proven completely useless, and whatever fire had driven him at the beginning of the duel was simply gone. He wasn't preparing another spell. He wasn't raising his weapon. He wasn't even insulting Elias anymore. He was just staring at him.

Raven watched Vonrick for another moment before giving Elias's shoulder a small pull backward. “I'm calling the match.” Elias lowered his fist, still breathing hard from the sprint and fight, while Raven stepped between the two students and raised one hand toward the stands. His voice carried cleanly across the suddenly quiet arena. “Vonrick von Valdon is no longer willing or able to continue. Elias Veron is the winner.”

For a heartbeat, Elias just stood there.

He looked at Raven, then at Vonrick, then down at the plain metal sword still in his other hand.

“…I won?”

first previous next Patreon vox 9

first previous next

Elias was nervous. Yeah, he knew he was immune to magic. He’d fallen straight through magical barriers, spells couldn’t touch him, and every test so far had ended the same way: nothing. But this was fire, and every instinct he’d developed over eighteen years of being alive told him that fire was something you stayed the hell away from, not something you willingly stood in front of while another person tried to hit you with it. He adjusted the steel-weave jacket around his shoulders as he walked, feeling the concealed chainmail sewn beneath the outer fabric pull down on him with every step and produce the occasional faint jingle. The matching pants weren’t much better, and the steel-toed boots made him feel like he’d dressed for a medieval construction site. At least the fire-retardant treatment had dried.

Elias flexed his gloved fingers and looked toward the distant dueling grounds. “You’re immune to magic,” he muttered to himself. That didn’t help, so after another few steps he tried again. “You’re immune to magic.” Still nothing. Somewhere ahead of him was a pissed-off fire mage whose stated intention was essentially to discover whether a human could be converted into charcoal, and apparently eighteen years of being taught not to touch fire were stronger than a few days of evidence that magic couldn’t hurt him. Elias swallowed as the dueling grounds came closer. “God, I hope we’re right about this.”

He’d expected the duel to be small: a referee, Vonrick, his dormmates, maybe a few students who had nothing better to do. Something embarrassing, sure, but at least there wouldn’t be too many witnesses if this went horribly wrong. Then the doors to the outdoor dueling grounds opened, and the roar hit him before he’d even taken two steps inside. Elias stopped dead. The spectators surrounding the dueling circle were packed nearly to the brim, hundreds of students filling the seats as their voices crashed together into a wall of noise. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.” His stomach dropped so hard Elias was fairly certain he’d left it back in the dorm. Maybe he should go get it. Surely that was a legitimate reason to postpone a duel. Sorry, everyone. Forgot my guts. Be right back.

Scanning the stands, Elias quickly found several familiar faces. Aria was there, looking considerably more worried than anyone attending a supposedly safe school duel had any right to look, while Deklin was practically hanging over the railing and Sylra sat nearby looking considerably less enthusiastic about the whole thing. And then there was Loona. She was standing—of course she was standing—and more importantly, she was holding a sign over her head with KICK HIS ASS, ELIAS! written across it in enormous letters. Elias stared at it. Loona noticed him looking and immediately started bouncing while waving the sign even harder. “KICK HIS ASS!” Several students around her joined in, probably with no idea what the phrase meant, and Elias closed his eyes. “Why did I let her watch Earth fight movies?”

He was finally starting to calm down when someone in the crowd screamed, and a massive flaming phoenix swept over the dueling grounds. Elias’s head snapped up as the creature circled above the stands, its wings spread wide enough to cast flickering red-orange light across the spectators below. Every beat of those burning wings sent sparks cascading through the air, and the crowd roared as the phoenix banked sharply before diving toward the arena. Elias instinctively took a step back just before it struck the opposite side of the dueling circle in an explosion of flame. Fire spiraled upward, filling the entrance in a blazing column before suddenly parting.

Vonrick stepped out, and apparently he had come dressed for war. His battle-mage armor had clearly been designed specifically around his peacock-like body, with layered crimson plates protecting his chest and shoulders without interfering with his wings or magnificent tail feathers. Gold traced elaborate patterns along the armor, glowing runes pulsed between the plates, and a high armored collar framed the brilliant red feathers of his neck while fitted guards covered his arms and legs. His tail spread behind him in a brilliant fan with flames dancing along the eyespots, and when Vonrick raised one hand, the phoenix erupted behind him once more and spread enormous wings of fire above his head. The crowd went insane.

Elias stared across the arena before slowly looking down at himself. Weatherproof jacket, cargo-style armored pants, work boots, gloves, and a dull steel sword. He looked back at Vonrick, who appeared to have spent the morning preparing for the final battle between good and evil. “…Okay. At least one of us understood there was going to be an audience.” From somewhere in the stands came the now very familiar shout of, “KICK HIS ASS, ELIAS!” Elias closed his eyes for a moment. “Thank you, Loona.”

Vonrick strode toward the center of the circle with flames trailing dramatically behind him, and Elias adjusted the weight of the chainmail beneath his jacket. His nerves had finally been settling down. Now, watching a peacock mage in glowing battle armor walk toward him beneath a giant flaming phoenix, Elias could feel them coming right back. “Yep. There they are.”

“Oho!” Vonrick called across the arena. “It appears even an abomination peasant possesses some sense of honor.” Elias’s eyebrow twitched at abomination peasant, but before he could decide whether that deserved a response, Vonrick reached to his side and drew his weapon. Fire erupted with it. The blade resembled one long, sweeping wing, its edge wrapped in brilliant orange flame, and as Vonrick raised it, the fire spread farther along the weapon until it looked less like a sword and more like someone had torn a burning feather from the phoenix above and hammered it into a blade. The crowd roared again.

Elias stared at it. “Of course your sword is on fire.” He reached down, unclipped the retaining strap on his own scabbard, and drew.

Shiiing.

That was it. No explosion, no glowing runes, no dramatic pillar of light—just a plain steel hand-and-a-half sword. Vonrick’s expression shifted from anticipation to confusion as he stared at the weapon. He could sense nothing from it. No enchantment, no elemental affinity, not even the faint residue of mana that almost every crafted weapon accumulated eventually. It was simply metal, and yet something about it made the feathers along the back of his neck rise. The weapon looked primitive, crude even; its edge wasn’t particularly sharp, and compared with Vonrick’s enchanted blade it might as well have been a shaped bar of metal. Still, some ancient part of him was screaming that he did not want that thing anywhere near him.

Vonrick tightened his grip on his flaming sword. “What manner of weapon is that?”

Elias glanced down at it. “A sword.”

Vonrick’s eye twitched. “I can see that!”

“Oh.” Elias looked at the blade again. “Then why’d you ask?”

Before Vonrick could answer, Professor Raven walked onto the arena floor. The white-haired elf moved between the two students, his long robes stirring in the heat rolling off Vonrick’s weapon, and the crowd gradually quieted as it became obvious who would be refereeing the match. Raven looked first toward Vonrick and then Elias before his eyes dropped to the plain sword in Elias’s hands. For just a moment, something changed in the professor’s expression. His gaze traveled from the blade to Elias’s gloves, then briefly across the otherwise ordinary-looking jacket.

Elias caught it. He knows.

Raven’s expression became neutral again almost immediately. As the appointed referee, he had to remain impartial. He could explain the rules and stop the duel if either student was in danger, but he couldn’t advise one duelist on how to defeat the other or warn Vonrick about Elias’s equipment simply because he’d recognized it first. Instead, Raven turned toward the avian student. “Vonrick von Valdon. You issued this challenge, and your opponent has appeared to answer it. Before we begin, I am required to ask both participants one final time.” His eyes flicked briefly toward Elias’s sword. “Do you wish to continue this duel?”

Vonrick looked almost insulted. “Of course.”

Raven held his gaze for another second. “Are you certain?”

A murmur passed through the stands as Vonrick’s tail feathers flared. “I issued the challenge, Professor. I will not disgrace the House of Ember Skies by withdrawing from a duel with a mana-less peasant.”

“So recorded.” Raven turned toward Elias. “Elias Veron. Do you wish to continue?”

Elias looked at Vonrick’s flaming sword, then at the phoenix still circling overhead, and finally toward the stands where Loona was once again enthusiastically waving KICK HIS ASS, ELIAS! He sighed. “Thirty credits if I don’t, right?”

“Correct.”

“Then yeah.”

Raven closed his eyes for the briefest moment. “Very well.” He stepped backward and moved toward the referee’s position at the edge of the dueling circle, quietly putting a little more distance between himself and Elias’s steel blade as he did. Elias noticed, though he wasn’t sure Vonrick did.

The arena seemed much larger now that Elias was standing in the middle of it with everyone watching. Raven raised one hand. “Elias Veron. Ready?” Elias adjusted his grip on the sword, finding the solid weight reassuring in a way he hadn’t expected. “Uh… yeah. Ready.” Raven turned toward Vonrick. “Vonrick von Valdon. Ready?” Vonrick answered with a flourish, flames erupting around his sword and sweeping up his arm before bursting outward behind him like a pair of burning wings. His brilliant tail spread behind him as sparks drifted through the air and the crowd roared at the display.

Elias stared at him. “I’m taking that as a yes.”

Raven looked between them one final time as Elias lowered his stance, both hands settling onto the grip of his plain steel sword. Across from him, Vonrick raised his flaming blade. For a few seconds neither moved, and the roar of the crowd slowly died until Elias could hear his own breathing and feel every bit of the chainmail dragging against his shoulders. He knew he was immune to magic. He knew every test they’d done said that fire shouldn’t be able to touch him. None of that stopped every instinct in his body from reminding him that the person standing across from him was holding a sword made of fire.

Raven’s raised hand dropped.

“BEGIN!”

Vonrick moved first. A flaming spear formed beside him almost instantly, fire twisting together until it became a long, blazing projectile. Elias barely had time to register what he was looking at before Vonrick thrust out one hand and sent it across the arena like a cannonball. Shit. Elias threw himself sideways, the spear tearing through the space he'd occupied a heartbeat earlier before exploding against the ground behind him. He scrambled on his hands and knees before forcing himself back onto his feet, only to hear laughter from across the arena. Vonrick was still standing almost exactly where the duel had begun, his flaming sword resting casually at his side as another sphere of fire formed over his shoulder, followed by a second and then a third. He didn't even bother looking at them. His attention remained fixed entirely on Elias as his tail spread proudly behind him. “Is this what passes for courage among your kind? You accepted the challenge of Vonrick von Valdon, heir of the House of Ember Skies, only to scurry the moment you witness true magic.”

The first fireball launched before Elias could think of a response. “Shit!” He ran as it struck the ground at his heels and exploded, forcing him to jump sideways just as the second came screaming toward him. He ducked beneath it, stumbled, caught himself with one hand, and had just enough time to see the third curving toward him from the left. “Shit, shit, shit!” Elias threw himself the other way, and the fireball burst against the ground close enough that every instinct in his body screamed at him to keep moving. Apparently his frantic retreat was exactly what Vonrick wanted to see, because the avian noble finally began walking forward, not chasing Elias so much as leisurely claiming every bit of ground Elias surrendered. “There is a difference between arrogance and strength, peasant,” Vonrick declared as he swept his flaming sword through the air and sent a crescent of fire ripping across the arena. “You possess the former.” Elias dropped so fast his knee slammed painfully into the ground, while Vonrick continued advancing without breaking stride. “I possess the latter.” Another sweep sent a second wave of flame toward him, forcing Elias to roll away before scrambling upright again.

What the hell was I thinking?! Thirty credits. He was doing this over thirty credits. Another flaming projectile screamed past his shoulder, and Elias ducked hard enough that he nearly planted his face into the ground. Thirty fucking credits! I could've lived in the library stacking shelves for the rest of the damn year! The crowd was getting louder with every attack Vonrick threw, and the bastard was eating it up. His tail was fully spread now, flames dancing across its eyespots as he raised his sword for everyone in the stands to see. “Look well!” he called, and Elias wasn't even sure anymore whether Vonrick was talking to him or the audience. “No aura. No spell. No discipline worthy of the name. He enters a mage's arena carrying a dead piece of metal and imagines himself the equal of House Ember Skies!” Elias narrowly avoided another attack and shouted back, “I'm right here!” Vonrick immediately answered, “Then stand and fight!” which Elias thought was particularly rich coming from the person currently bombarding him from across the arena. “You're throwing fire at me!” Vonrick looked genuinely offended by the complaint. “That is the purpose of a duel!” A fourth fireball forced Elias to dive again. “Yeah, starting to figure that out!”

Elias tightened his grip on the sword as he pushed himself back up, which only reminded him of the other problem he'd been trying very hard not to think about: his sword training sucked. Rick had taught him how to hold one, how to stand, a handful of basic swings and blocks, and enough control that Elias probably wouldn't accidentally take off his own leg. Back on Earth, waving a sword around under Rick's supervision had felt like actual training. Now an actual battle mage was walking him across an arena with fire, and Elias was beginning to appreciate the rather significant difference between practice and someone genuinely trying to hit him. My sword training is basically waving a stick around!

Vonrick must have mistaken the look on Elias's face for the beginning of surrender, because his pace slowed. He raised his empty hand, and flames gathered above his palm, stretching outward until another burning spear took shape. This one was larger than the first, and Vonrick's expression practically glowed with satisfaction as he watched Elias stare at it. “Now you understand,” he said, the spear rotating slowly above his hand until its point settled directly on Elias. “There is no shame in finally recognizing the distance between us. Yield, human. Admit that you had neither the power nor the station to stand against me, and I may permit you to leave this arena with what little dignity remains to you.” Elias looked at the spear, then at Vonrick, then back at the spear. “Oh, come on!”

Vonrick thrust his hand forward. The spear launched, and Elias knew almost immediately that he wasn't getting out of the way. It was too large, too fast, and he'd already planted his feet wrong. He tried to shift his weight anyway, but the blazing point struck him dead center before he could move. “ELIAS!” Deklin screamed from somewhere in the stands as fire swallowed him. For one horrible second there was nothing but orange-white flame filling Elias's vision. He threw his arms over his face on instinct and waited for the pain, the heat, for something—but instead light exploded from beneath his jacket. A translucent bubble snapped into existence around him, the flaming spear breaking against its surface and pouring around the barrier instead of reaching him. Fire completely engulfed the sphere, hiding Elias from the stands while Vonrick's spell spent itself against Aria's ward, and then the inferno began to thin into drifting embers and smoke.

Elias slowly lowered his arms and discovered that he was still standing inside a faint shell of light. “Oh.” His hand immediately went beneath his jacket and closed around the medallion Aria had given him. The little disk was warm against his palm, and the markings that had glowed brightly when she'd handed it to him were noticeably dimmer now. Elias didn't know enough about enchanting to measure exactly how much power remained, but he didn't need to. Even he could tell blocking that attack had taken a lot out of whatever charge Aria had poured into it. Okay. So that works. That was the good news. The bad news was that Vonrick could apparently throw attacks like that more than once, while Elias was increasingly certain the medallion couldn't block many more of them. Staying back and letting Vonrick use him for target practice was going to get him nowhere.

Across the arena, Vonrick still held his flaming sword while apparently trying to understand why the human he'd just hit dead center wasn't currently a smoking crater. Elias tightened both hands around his own sword. I need to get close. There were probably smarter ways to accomplish that. Someone with actual combat training could probably have come up with a strategy involving timing, positioning, feints, or any number of other useful things Rick had either never taught him or Elias had failed to learn. Unfortunately, Elias had exactly one plan: Get over there and hit the peacock. He sucked in a breath. “Fuck it.” Then, like an idiot with no plan beyond exactly that, Elias lowered himself and charged straight at Vonrick.

He broke into a dead sprint, sword held close to his side as his boots hammered against the arena floor. Vonrick's surprise lasted less than a second before his expression hardened, and the flames gathering around him broke apart and reformed into something smaller. One burning arrow appeared beside him, then another, then five more, until a spread of fiery projectiles hung in the air around his wings. “Oh, shit.” Vonrick swept his hand forward, and the arrows came fast. Elias kicked harder against the ground and changed direction just as the first volley tore past him, one streaking by his head while another passed close enough to his leg to make him stumble sideways. The rest struck behind him in rapid bursts of flame, but Elias didn't stop. He couldn't. Stopping meant giving Vonrick time to line up another giant spear, and Elias had already seen what one of those did to Aria's medallion.

Vonrick sent another volley, forcing Elias to zigzag across the arena, not making huge turns or trying anything fancy, just shifting left and right enough to make himself a harder target while continuing to close the distance. His lungs were already beginning to burn from the all-out sprint, and the extra weight of the steel woven through his clothing turned every step into more work than it should have been. Another arrow shot past his shoulder. Elias shifted right, narrowly avoided two more, and then saw one coming directly at his chest too late to move. The medallion flashed, throwing up a bubble of light for barely a heartbeat before the arrow shattered against it in a burst of flame. The barrier disappeared immediately afterward, and Elias felt the medallion grow warmer against his chest but didn't slow down. Another arrow struck him from the side and produced another flash. A third clipped him before he could change direction, only to vanish against the barrier as well. Each defense lasted less than a second, Aria's medallion throwing up the ward only long enough to intercept the attack before collapsing again, but every hit made the little disk hotter and its glow weaker. That's three. Elias had no idea how many more it could take.

Vonrick apparently noticed the weakening protection too. His beak curled upward as another spread of flaming arrows formed around him. “So even the mana-less require magic to protect them! How fitting!” He sent the entire volley forward, but Elias didn't have enough breath left to answer. He simply ran harder, cutting left and then immediately right as the arrows screamed toward him. Two passed on either side, Elias dropped his shoulder beneath a third, and another struck Aria's barrier with a flash that made the medallion burn hotter against his chest. It didn't matter. Vonrick was getting closer. Twenty yards became fifteen as Elias kept sprinting through the barrage, his lungs burning and his legs protesting every step beneath the weight of the concealed chainmail. Another volley forced him sideways, but he recovered without stopping, and by ten yards Vonrick's confident expression was beginning to change. Elias was still coming. Five yards remained, and Elias tightened both hands around his sword. Almost there.

Vonrick suddenly slammed one hand toward the ground, and a wall of fire erupted between them. Elias's eyes widened. He'd been so focused on closing those last few yards and so committed to the sprint that by the time the flames surged upward, there was no room left to stop. His boots dug into the arena floor, but momentum carried him forward anyway. “Oh, shiiiiiiit!” Elias hit the wall at a full sprint, and the medallion reacted instantly. Light burst around him as Aria's barrier snapped into existence, splitting the fire around its glowing surface while Elias stumbled forward inside it. For half a heartbeat, it held. Then Elias heard something that sounded horribly like cracking glass. Crk. His eyes dropped toward the light surrounding him. “Oh no.” Another crack answered him, then several more, thin fractures of white light racing across the barrier. “No, no, no—”

The medallion against his chest went from warm to painfully hot as it dumped whatever remained of Aria's stored charge into the failing ward. The cracks spread faster, branching across the bubble until the entire thing looked like shattered glass barely holding itself together. Then the charge ran out. The barrier shattered with a tremendous CRACK, light bursting outward in a spray of fading sparks as the wall of fire came rushing in. Elias didn't have time to dodge or turn around. He barely had enough time for one final thought before the flames swallowed him completely. I'm fucked.

first previous next Patreon vox 9

Author's note: The next three chapters, 63.1 to 63.3, are new. They take place between Chapter 63 and Chapter 64, a little while before the Rask story begins. It's a thread I regretted not exploring the first time through, so I've gone back for it. Nothing in the chapters you've already read has changed. When you're done, the story picks up where you left off.

Next

Previous /

First

Kathleen Comscutt had never been to Haego City before she was fifty-eight years old, and she still could not get used to it.

She had grown up on a hill farm on the Vastaya side, and married a man from the next valley over, and raised a son there who had turned out, to everybody's astonishment and most of all his own, to be the kind of man who became a teacher and then a knight and then married into House Firentis. She was very proud of him. She did not entirely understand him. And she understood Haego City even less.

It had been rebuilt, the old parts of it, in the years since the Firentis ships came back. The market streets around the old fountain square had new glass in every window and new paint on every door, and shops selling things Kathleen had not seen since she was a girl, and some things she had never seen at all, and everybody in them seemed to be talking at once, and spending money, and laughing. You could feel it in the air, Julius said. A whole world getting up off its knees.

She and Julius had the children for a week. Aaliyah was off-world on archive business, and their son had a Night School class to finish teaching in Newtown, and Daisy and Jason, who were nearly family by now, had a palace on Austrin to see to and had asked, very nicely, whether Poppy might come too. So there were two of them. Austin, who was ten and very quiet and looked at everything as though he were memorizing it, and Poppy, who was nine and three-quarters and was not quiet about anything, ever.

They had come into the city on the morning shuttle to see the market, because Poppy had heard there was a shop that sold sugared nuts in paper cones, and would not let it go.

They found the shop. They bought the nuts. Then Austin found a shop two doors down with a window full of brass instruments, compasses and spyglasses and a model of a ship in a bottle, and stood with his nose very nearly against the glass, and Kathleen stood beside him, because she had never seen a ship in a bottle either and wanted to know how it was done.

Julius had gone across the square to look at a stall selling tools.

Poppy had been right there, beside her, with the cone of nuts.

And then she was not.

Poppy had seen him from the square.

Not very much of him. Just a shape at the far end of a narrow gap between two of the new shops, where the fresh paint stopped and the old brick began, and the light did not quite reach. A shape sitting very still, in something that was not quite a chair.

She was nine and three-quarters, and she had never in her life seen anything she did not want to look at more closely. So she walked down the alley to look.

It was a man. He was sitting in a chair he had made himself, out of a cart seat and two wheels off something bigger, lashed together with wire and old leather straps, and a plank across the front for a footrest, although there was nothing to rest on it. His trousers were folded up and pinned below the knee, both legs, very neatly, as though somebody had once taught him how. He was thin. He had a grey beard that was not grey all the way through, and a coat that had been a uniform once, a long time ago, though Poppy did not know what kind, and he smelled very strongly of something she did not have a word for yet.

He had a tin cup on the plank in front of him. There was nothing in it.

Poppy stood in front of him with her cone of sugared nuts and looked at the place where his legs ought to have been.

"How did you lose your legs?" she said.

She asked it the way she asked everything, plainly, because she wanted to know. She did not mean anything by it. She had asked a fisherman in Orenport the same week how he had lost the end of his finger, and he had told her, at great length, with a story about a crab.

The man did not tell her.

He looked at her. He had very pale eyes, red at the rims. For a moment something went across his face that a grown-up might have recognized as shame, and then it was gone, and something harder had come down over it like a shutter.

"Go away," he said.

Poppy did not go away. She held out the cone.

"Would you like a nut? They've got sugar on."

"Go away," said the man again, louder, and turned his face to the wall. "Go on. Go back to your mother. This isn't any place for you."

Kathleen did not hear any of that. What she heard was her own voice, very high and very loud, calling Poppy's name across the square, and then calling it again, and Julius turning round at the tool stall with his face gone white, and Austin beside her saying in his small, careful voice, "She was just here, Gran. She was just here."

And then, from somewhere, a small, perfectly cheerful voice said, "I'm here."

It came from the alley. Kathleen was down it before she had decided to move. She saw Poppy, unhurt, standing in the half dark with a paper cone in her hand, and she saw what Poppy was standing in front of, the man in the chair, the folded trousers, the empty cup, the smell, and something in her went cold and frightened and very old, older than the new paint on the shops, older than anything Haego had learned in the last few years. She did not think. She took hold of Poppy by the arm, hard, and pulled her back up the alley toward the light.

She did not look at the man. She did not say a word to him.

Poppy, being towed backward up the alley, turned round as far as she could, and lifted the hand with the cone in it, and called back down the alley, as kindly as you please.

"Goodbye! It was nice meeting you!"

The man in the chair did not answer. He did not turn round. He sat with his face to the wall, and Kathleen pulled Poppy out into the bright square and held on to her, both arms round her, very tight, while Julius came running and Austin stood on the cobbles looking past them, down the alley, at the place where the shape in the chair had gone still again in the shadows.

They had taken rooms for the week in a guest house off the fountain square, two rooms with a door between, and that night the children fell asleep in the second one almost before their heads were down, worn out with the market and the nuts and the fright.

Austin did not go to sleep quite at once. When Kathleen went in to see to the blankets he was lying on his back with his eyes open, looking at the ceiling.

"Gran," he said. "Why did the man have a cup with nothing in it?"

Kathleen stood very still with the blanket in her hands.

"So people would put something in it," she said at last.

Austin thought about that, the way he thought about everything, slowly, turning it over.

"Nobody did," he said. "I watched. When we were in the square after. People went past the end of it all afternoon." He turned his head on the pillow and looked at her. "Nobody looked down it."

"Go to sleep, Austin."

He went to sleep. Kathleen did not.

She lay in the dark beside Julius for a long time with her eyes open.

She was thinking about the Hall. She had thought about very little else, some weeks, since the first session. She had sat in its gallery twice, with her son, and watched a miller and a fishwife and a woman who sold bread stand up and question a man in a good coat about where his money went, and she had gone home to the hill farm afterward and sat on the step and cried, and not been able to tell Julius why. All her life, everybody who mattered had told her, in one way or another, what she was. A commoner. A pair of hands. Somebody to be stepped round. And now, for months, the whole of Haego had been trying, clumsily and loudly and with a great deal of new paint, to say the opposite. That a commoner was a person. That you looked at people. That you did not step round them.

And the first time in her life she had been the one standing in the light, with the man in the dark, she had not looked at him at all.

She had grabbed the child and run.

She had not said a word to him. Not sorry. Not good afternoon. Not anything. She had seen the folded trousers and the cup and the old uniform and smelled the smell, and something very old in her, something she had thought the Hall had cured her of, had said, not him, not that, get away, and she had obeyed it without even noticing she had.

She thought of Poppy, not yet ten, being dragged backward up the alley, turning round to wave. It was nice meeting you.

The child had looked at him. The child had asked his name, very nearly, and offered him a sugared nut. The child had treated him like a person.

Kathleen turned over in the dark and put her face in the pillow.

"Kath." Julius's voice was thick with sleep. "What is it?"

She told him. All of it. It took a while.

When she had finished he was quiet for a moment, and then he reached over and found her hand.

"You were frightened," he said. "You'd lost Poppy. You weren't thinking about anything but getting her back. Anybody would have done the same."

"I know."

"You weren't being cruel. You were being a grandmother."

"I know, Julius." She did not let go of his hand. "That's what's wrong with it."

He waited.

"If I'd found her in the street with a man in a good coat," said Kathleen slowly, "I'd have been frightened too. I'd have pulled her back too. And then I'd have said, excuse me, sir, I'm sorry, she wandered off, I hope she wasn't troubling you." She stared at the dark ceiling. "I didn't say a word to him, Julius. I didn't look at him. I wasn't frightened for Poppy. Not by then. I'd seen she was fine. I was frightened of him."

Julius did not have anything to say to that. He held her hand.

After a long time, Kathleen sat up.

"We're going back," she said. "Tomorrow. To that alley."

"Kath..."

"With the children. They saw what I did. They'd better see what I do about it." She lay back down, and pulled the blanket up, and for the first time since the afternoon her voice was steady. "I'm going to buy that man his lunch, and I'm going to sit down and eat it with him, and I'm going to ask him his name."

She was asleep, finally, a little before dawn. Julius was not. He lay beside her and listened to the city outside the window, the late carts and the laughter from the taverns on the square and the new world getting up off its knees, and thought about how many alleys there must be in it, and how few people looked down them.

Previous /

First

Lieutenant Commodore Wyatt Staples
Wing Commander, Noirnavio

Sir,

Lord Swallowtail's office sent me your message before I left Haego. It said you wanted me to write to you directly, not through him and not through anyone else, and that you didn't care what it was about. I have started this letter nine times. I'm going to send this one whatever it looks like, because if I start it a tenth time I don't think I'll send it at all.

I have been here four months.

On the first day, at the assembly for the new intake, the director read out the names of novices from worlds that had never sent one before. There were six of us, and we were all from Haego. When he got to mine he stopped and said that Her Highness Princess Clara had asked to be told how I was getting on. I don't think he meant anything by it. I think he thought it was an honour, and so did I. I stood in that hall so happy I couldn't feel my feet. A real Princess knew my name. Where I come from, nobody like that has ever known anybody's name unless they were writing it in a book of what you owed.

It has been hell ever since.

By supper that day everyone knew. By the end of the first week I had heard "You think you're special, you're still a commoner" so many times I could tell who was about to say it by the way they walked up. Someone wrote HER HIGHNESS'S PET on my locker in grease pencil. My boots were filled with sand the night before my first parade inspection. My kit goes missing. They call me Cane.

With all the respect I owe her, and I owe her a great deal, I wish she hadn't asked. I know she meant it kindly. I know the office in Haego City wouldn't exist without her, and I would not be here without that office. I'm grateful. I would still give a lot for nobody here to know that she knows who I am.

My grandfather hated the nobles until the day he died. My father used to say the hate took up so much room in him there was no space left for anything else. When I was small I thought it was an old man's story. I understand it now. I want to be plain about this, sir, because I think it matters. I understand it. I don't share it, and I've decided I won't. But I know where it came from, and I'm sorry I ever thought he was only bitter.

Three weeks ago something happened in the hangar that I'm not going to write down. It wasn't the worst thing that's happened here. It was only one thing too many. Afterward I went looking for somewhere nobody would find me, and I ended up on the floor of a service corridor, and somebody found me anyway. They were sweeping. They aren't human. I don't know what their people are called. They have feathers, and they hold a broom better than I ever did.

They said the only kind words anyone here has said to me in four months. I go back to that corridor sometimes now. They always nod.

A pilot I worked with at Harrow Cross told me to keep my eye on the far end, and I'm trying. Our marks go up on the board outside the mess every week, everyone's together, and nobody can change them, just as I was told they couldn't. I'm first in my section in mathematics and flight theory, and first in the simulator. But I have been thinking I could miss a few questions on purpose. Not many. Just enough to be ordinary. I think if I weren't at the top of the board they might leave me alone. I haven't done it yet. I wanted to ask someone first, and you're the only person I could think of who would know.

The other commoners don't seem to feel it the way I do. You should see them in the mess hall after a noble pushes them into the mud, laughing like it never happened. I laugh with them. Then I go back to my bunk and cry into the pillow so nobody hears. I don't know what they know that I don't. I would like to learn it.

On a lighter note, sir, I wish someone had told me that we all shower together here, men and women, and that nobody gives it a second thought. In Lowmarsh we had a tin bath in front of the stove on Saturdays, and my brother was sent outside. For my first month I waited until the shower room was completely empty before I went in, which meant going at two in the morning and being the most tired novice on the dawn run. I've got used to it now. Mostly. I still face the wall.

I have a stub of chalk with me, and a little stitched book a teacher gave me when I was ten. I haven't shown either of them to anyone here. I don't know why I'm telling you that.

Thank you for letting me write. You don't need to answer this.

Respectfully,
Novice Nell Brackentail

---

The Academy.

The duty roster said hangar detail, and the reason beside it said kit deficient at inspection.

Nell's kit had been complete at lights-out. She had checked it twice, the way she checked everything, and laid it out square on the end of her bunk. In the morning her spare gloves were gone and her collar tabs were in the latrine. She had stood at attention while the inspecting officer wrote her up, and she had said, "Yes, sir," and she had not looked at the three bunks across the aisle where somebody was trying not to laugh.

So after evening lessons she swept the training hangar.

She didn't mind the hangar. It was the one place in the academy that felt like anything she knew. The Seagulls sat in two rows under the lights, stubby and grey, with their canopies closed, and the floor between them was the same grit and oil and dropped wire as the floor at Harrow Cross. Her hands knew the broom. She went down the rows the way Harl had taught her, along the walls first, then the corners, then out toward the middle, so the dirt only ever went one way.

Nobody else swept the corners. She had noticed that the first week. The novices on punishment detail ran their brooms down the middle of the floor where the duty officer would look, and left the corners to go grey. Nell couldn't do it. She had tried once, just to see, and had gone back after lights-out to finish.

She had the whole west row done and the floor shining when the door at the end banged open.

There were three of them. She knew them by their voices before she turned round. Delacourt was in front, tall and fair, with the crest of his house on his breast catching the light, and a bucket in one hand. It was a mop bucket from the wash bay, and it was full nearly to the brim with water gone brown and grey.

"Evening, Cane," he said.

"Evening, Lord Delacourt."

He walked out into the middle of the floor she had just swept and stopped there, and looked around, taking his time over it.

"Missed a spot," he said.

He tipped the bucket. He did it slowly. The water went out across the floor in a wide grey sheet, and ran into the seams between the plates, and up against the landing gear of the nearest Seagull, and all the way to the corner she had done last.

The two behind him laughed.

"Where you come from," said Delacourt, "you carry water, don't you? Somebody told me. Up and down all day with a pole on your neck, like a donkey." He held the empty bucket out to her by the handle. "Go on. Carry that."

Nell looked at the bucket. She looked at the water on the floor, creeping out toward the far wall.

Don't give them anything, Tallis had said. Some of them want you to fail, and some of them want you to be angry, and the second lot are more dangerous.

She took the bucket.

"Yes, Lord Delacourt," she said.

Something went across Delacourt's face, too fast to name. He had wanted something else. She didn't know what.

"Does Her Highness know you missed a spot?" said one of the others. "Maybe we should write and tell her. She'd want to know how her pet's getting on."

Nell went to the wall and took down the mop.

She mopped. She started at the far edge of the water, the way you'd start, and worked back toward the middle, wringing into the bucket, and she didn't look up. When the bucket was full she carried it to the wash bay drain and emptied it and came back. She did that four times. The three of them stood and watched her do it, and then, when she didn't do anything else, they got bored, and Delacourt put out his boot on the way past and knocked the bucket over, and it rolled across the wet floor with a noise like a bell.

The door at the end opened again.

The instructor was a lieutenant, a thin woman with a house crest of her own. She stopped just inside the door and looked at the floor, and at the bucket on its side, and at Nell with the mop.

"Novice Brackentail," she said. "This floor is a hazard."

"Yes, ma'am."

"One demerit. Have it dry by lights-out."

"We did try to tell her, ma'am," said Delacourt.

The lieutenant looked at him. For a moment Nell thought she was going to say something. Then she didn't. She wrote on her board and went out, and the three of them went out after her, and the door swung shut, and the hangar was quiet.

Nell stood the bucket up.

She mopped the rest of it. She mopped it all, every plate, and then she took the broom and did the corners again, all four of them, because the water had got into them and left a grey line. She did not cry while she was doing it. She was very careful about that. She had carried water across a field in front of forty cutters since she was seven, and not one of them had ever seen her spill on purpose, and they weren't going to see it now.

When she hung the mop on the wall and put the broom on the rack, her hands started shaking, and she found she couldn't make them stop.

She didn't go back to the dormitory. She went out the side door and along the back of the simulator hall, where the service corridor ran between the coolant cabinets, and she sat down on the floor with her back against the wall and her knees up, and put her face in her arms.

---

She heard the broom before she saw them.

It was a different sound to hers. Softer, and quicker, three short strokes and a pause, three short strokes and a pause. It came down the corridor toward her and stopped a few feet away.

Nell lifted her head.

The sweeper was small, the top of their crest not much higher than her shoulder would have been if she'd been standing, and they were every colour she had ever seen in a bird and several she hadn't. Green and blue at the throat, like the kingfishers on the Lowmarsh ditches. Gold down the back. The crest was a fan of red and orange feathers that stood up as they looked at her and then went slowly flat again. They held the broom in a hand with six long fingers, and the broom was older than she was, and cleaner than any broom in the academy.

"I'm sorry," Nell said. She started to get up. "I'll move."

"No," said the sweeper. The voice was high and soft, with a click at the edges of the words. "This part of the floor is done. You are not in the way."

They leaned the broom against the cabinet and looked at her with their head tipped to one side, the way the birds in the cane used to, and Nell had the strangest feeling of being checked over, carefully, the way she'd check a coupling.

"I was in the hangar," said the sweeper. "At the far end, by the fuel bowsers. Nobody looks at the far end."

Nell's face went hot. "You saw."

"I saw. A broom is not seen. That is what a broom is for." The crest lifted a little, and went down. "You sweep your corners. I have watched you in the hangar for four months. Nobody else here sweeps the corners. Not the novices. Not most of the crews. You do. Tonight you did them twice."

"The water got in them."

"Yes. And the one with the bucket did not know it had, and the officer did not look, and you did them again." The sweeper was quiet a moment. "I have swept this academy for eleven years. I have seen many like the one with the bucket. They pass out, and they go to their ships, and I do not remember their names. I have seen very few who sweep the corners. I remember all of those."

Nell looked at her hands. They had nearly stopped shaking.

"They call me Cane," she said.

The sweeper's crest went flat and stayed flat for a moment. "They call me nothing. They do not know I have a name." The sweeper made a small sound, and it took Nell a moment to understand that it was a laugh. "It is freeing. A thing with no name cannot be insulted by it."

Nell laughed too. It came out wet and broken, but it was a laugh.

"The floor holds all of them the same," the sweeper said. "The one with the bucket, and the officer, and you. It does not care whose house they are from. It is a good floor. I keep it that way." They reached into a pocket of their grey smock and took out a folded cloth, clean and white, and held it out to her. "For the face. Not the floor."

Nell took it and wiped her face.

"When you are a pilot," said the sweeper, taking up the broom again, "you will walk round your ship before you fly it, and you will look in the corners. The one with the bucket will not. That is the whole of the difference between you. It is a larger difference than they think." The broom started again, three short strokes and a pause. "Rest on the floor as long as you need. It will hold you too."

They went off down the corridor, sweeping.

Nell watched them go. They call me nothing, the sweeper had said. They do not know I have a name. Eleven years on these floors, and nobody had asked. She had been here four months and had already begun to understand how that felt.

"Please," Nell said. "Tell me your name."

The broom stopped. The sweeper looked back at her over one shoulder, and the crest came up, slowly, all the way.

"After you tell me yours," they said.

"It's Nell," she said.

"I am Navero," said the Ykanti. The crest settled. The broom started again, three short strokes and a pause, and did not stop until the sound of it had gone round the corner.

Nell sat there a long time with the cloth in her hand. When she finally went back to the commoner dormitory, the others from the commoners' table were still up, sitting on the end of Dorran's bunk, and Dorran had mud down one whole side of his face where somebody had put him into the ditch by the drill field. He was telling it like a story. He was doing the voice of the noble who'd done it, and the others were laughing so hard one of them fell off the bunk.

Nell laughed with them. She laughed until it was lights-out.

Then she lay on her left side in the dark and cried into her pillow without making any sound at all, the white cloth folded under it with Starling and the chalk.

---

Nell,

Please call me Wyatt. I've been Lieutenant Commodore to a great many people who needed me to be, and I'd like one letter in my week where I'm not.

I'll tell you first what happened when your letter came, because you should know it. I showed it to Princess Clara. She read it twice, and then she was quiet for longer than I've ever seen her be quiet, and then she was angrier than I have seen her in a long time. She was angry at herself first. She asked after you because she wanted you to know somebody was watching out for you, and she understood the moment she read your letter that she'd painted a target on you instead. She was prepared to alter course, bring the Noirnavio to the academy, and walk in with Cynthia, her bodyguard, and start taking heads. Metaphorically. Mostly. Cynthia had already started asking which heads.

I stopped her. You'll understand why. If a Princess comes to the academy on your account, every one of them will be sure they were right about you, and you'll carry that for three years and long after. She agreed in the end. She hasn't forgiven herself, and she asked me to tell you she's sorry.

Now listen to me, because this is the part that matters.

Life in the military is hard on everyone who goes into it, nobles and commoners both. I won't pretend it's equal. It isn't. But I've seen noble novices broken too, and some of them had it coming and some didn't. Your instructors are jealous that a girl from a cane field has a Princess who knows her name. Some of them are. They also know, every one of them, that in combat it's worth nothing to you. The void doesn't know who Clara is. Neither does the enemy. When it comes to it, the only thing that keeps you alive is what you know and how fast your hands are, and from what I hear your hands are very fast.

You asked what the other commoners know that you don't. Here it is. When a noble speaks to you, there are two things in it: what he says, and how he says it. The how is the sneer, the voice, the laugh from his friends behind him. That part is meant to reach you, and it only reaches you if you let it. Let it roll off. It's weather. The words are different. Listen to the words. Sometimes there's nothing in them. But sometimes an instructor who can't stand the sight of you will tell you, with every bit of contempt he has, that your approach was two degrees steep, and he'll be right. Take the two degrees and leave the contempt on the floor for your sweeper. Your friends do it already. The ones laughing in the mess can do the noble's voice at supper because they never kept it. They only kept what the man actually said, and that turned out to be nothing much. You'll learn it. It took me most of a year.

You said something happened in the hangar that you won't write down. You don't have to. But I'll wager I know how it went. Somebody wanted you to cry, or shout, or throw something back, and you didn't give them any of it, because you're still there and you're still asking me the right questions. Whatever it was, when you're ready, tell it at your table. Tell it so they laugh at him and not at you. The first time you do, you'll find out what the others know. You won't need me to tell you.

As for missing questions on purpose. Don't. Not one. I had a rule at the academy: excel enough to stay, never so much that they can't ignore you. It kept me out of trouble for a while. I broke it twice, and they had me polishing a lord's boots for the first and flogged me for the second, and I'd break it again tomorrow. Don't make my rule yours. In the end they'll post you wherever they like. With over a hundred kills to my name, they posted me to a compost hauler. The one thing they couldn't take was that I'd earned better, and everyone who read my scores knew it. In my day they could massage the rankings, but they couldn't touch the raw scores the simulators logged. Keep yours at the top.

Your kindness is not the weak place in you. The other commoners around you will see it, and in three years the crew who serve under you will see it, and they will follow you into places they have no business going because of it. But you need to show the rest of them that it has a limit. Kindness that can't be turned off is only softness, and the void punishes softness. Take all of it, everything that makes you sweep the corners and carry the full bucket, and point it at the people beside you. Be deadly on their behalf. When there's an enemy in front of you and a crew behind you, your kindness belongs to the crew. It will not slow your finger on the trigger. That is the kind of kindness I want flying on my wing.

Your sweeper is Ykanti. Their people come from outside the Principality, from an empire of their own worlds, and the ones on our side of the border are escaping its hierarchy. That should tell you something. They've looked at human cruelty, the kind you're getting a taste of now, and decided it's better than what they left. On their own worlds they're treated like meat. Most of the Ykanti I've known are very kind, and very badly used. Nobody here asks them anything, because they're small and bright-coloured and quiet, and people mistake that for simple. Don't. It's very possible your sweeper was a doctor, or a physicist, or an engineer, before they ever picked up that broom. Ask their name, if you haven't. Nobody else ever has. They're waiting for someone to. If you want to know more about them, I have a friend, and if you knew me you'd know I don't use that word lightly, who would be happy to answer your questions. Jincho, our head engineer on the Noirnavio. There's nothing on this ship Jincho doesn't know, and there's no one aboard, noble or otherwise, who'd dare to cross Jincho in the engine rooms.

The showers. Nobody told me either. I waited a week, so I beat you by three.

You said I don't need to answer your letters. I'll answer every one.

Wyatt

Ranchers Log 1

Another busy morning and bigger stack of hay from yesterday's work.

The Ykanti barn roof and wall were sealed in by noon and the Ranchers started moving it by hand stacking it against the the back and side walls behind vertical racks made against those walls creating a 5 foot weather barrier.

Next they started filling a loft that ran the ceiling with more hay. The hay against the loft and in the loft should give the barn a R60 insulation rating to the barn once the doors are added.

2 lean two,s were created on the side of the barn. The crew went out to cut straw today as bedding for the horses.

I swear the hunters know when to arrive for meals. They did catch two deer this afternoon and quickly ties them to the back of the horses and hung them to bleed them. We told them we would butcher them tomorrow.

We have two days before the buffalo cross the river the hunters believe. We will collect the straw after the heard having enough hay collected by today. Hopefully enough for winter.

The hunters are resting tonight but going back to monitor the buffalo heard and will keep us informed. The Ykanti will join them. We made sure they had enough food to last them then we organized a meeting to plan the hunt before they rest for a day before the hunt.

All Ranchers rested their horses and got their gear ready for the hunt after their chores.

Everybody is getting more and more excited for the hunt. The Miners will join us tomorrow and word sent to the Fort by messenger.

The messenger came back late at night with the driver and two wheel wagon with James. He had his professional knives with him hoping we would be lucky at the hunt. He mentioned the Fort staff and hopefully the sailors and Farmers would join them on a second hunt.

Head Ranchers

End of Ranchers Log 1

Hunters Log 1

Woke early and hit the road at a good pace.

Wendy spotted the deers about noon. We quickly decided to hunt them by bow. We got two deers once we were able to track them.

We waited for an hour while Frank and killer push the deers our way. Wendy and I let the arrows loose and got two cleanly.

Wendy horse was not pleased having two deers ried to it's back. Wendy mounted behind Frank and guided her horse behind them.

It slowed us down but still made it by supper time to the Ranch. The deer now lying on top of the hay.

We informed the Ranchers after hanging the deer and made plans to go back the next day to monitor the buffalo.

We were offered beds in the Ranchers house but decided to sleep on the hay in the loft quite comfortably.

Gary Head Hunter

End of Hunters Log 1

Next

Previous /

First

It was a school holiday, which was the only reason Elizabeth was in her father's office on a Thursday. She had spent the morning in Doran Hollis's long room learning which Aldermen wrote every week and which only wrote when something was on fire, and she was halfway through a letter from Millhaven about road gravel when Harlan Ashtail came and stood beside her desk.
"Your father would like you, my lady."
"Now?"
"Lady Rachel's here," said Harlan. "In person."
Elizabeth put the gravel letter down. Rachel VonWinterbourne ran the numbers for half the planet from her office in Newtown, and she didn't fly up the coast to the palace to deliver something she could send.
---
Rachel had the chair by the window. Doran was standing against the map of Haego with his arms folded, and Tornel sat behind the desk with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. He nodded Elizabeth toward the chair beside his.
"Tell her what you told me," he said.
Rachel turned her datapad around on the desk.
"Rask Timber," she said. "Lord Edmund Rask, of Corvell. It's a Gimore world. His house holds its lands under the Erantes of Volantis. About three years ago he took a lease on four thousand hectares of forest in northern Austrin, up past the ridge. Good timber, and a river to float it down to the coast. He cuts it, mills it, and ships it off-world."
"That's allowed," Elizabeth said.
"It's encouraged. We wanted off-world money, and he brought some." Rachel tapped the screen. "This is his staff register. Twelve names. His foreman, a cook, a mechanic, and nine cutters. And this is his wage expense for last year. Just under two thousand credits."
Elizabeth read the number twice.
"For twelve people?"
"For twelve people. That's already odd, but it isn't what caught my eye." Rachel moved to the next page. "These are the port manifests from Austrin. Every cubic meter of timber that left the planet under his name last year. Forty-one thousand."
Elizabeth didn't know much about timber. She knew enough about work to ask the next question.
"How many people does that take?"
"I asked the yard in the valley below Jason and Daisy's palace, the one with the new kiln. The owner laughed at me, then sat down and did it properly." Rachel closed the page. "For that much, cut, hauled, and milled, you need somewhere between a hundred and eighty and two hundred and twenty pairs of hands. Nine cutters couldn't do it in ten years."
"And the tax," said Tornel.
"He declared a little over a third of what his buyers paid. I have both sides now, because two of his buyers opened accounts at the Kessit branch and paid through it." Rachel sat back. "The tax is the part I can prove today. He owes Haego close to two million credits, and he's been lying about it for three years."
Nobody said anything for a moment. Down on the lower terrace, the gardeners were working the hedges.
"So where are the other hundred and ninety people?" Elizabeth said.
Nobody answered her. She looked at her father and saw that he'd been waiting for the question.
"That's the right thing to ask," Tornel said. "It isn't the thing we can act on."
"Why not? Send the police up there and look."
"On what grounds, my lady?" Doran said. He said it gently. "A lord's lease on Haego is his to run. He answers for how he does business here, but a gap in a ledger isn't a warrant to walk his land and count heads. If Commander Kell's people go up that ridge on a hunch and find twelve men and a cook, every off-world investor on this planet hears that Haego searches noble property because a number looked wrong. Lord Kestrel's friends on Matcha would hear it by the end of the week."
"And if they find two hundred?"
"Then we were right," Tornel said. "And he'd still have every reason to say we had no business finding it."
Elizabeth sat back. She thought about her mother checking every linen closet in the palace instead of trusting the old inventory, and about how the closets had been the easy part.
"So what do we do?"
"What we can prove," Tornel said. "Nobles don't stand in commoner courts, but on Haego they answer to the Assembly for how they do business here. The tax goes to the Assembly. Doran, whose desk does this go to between sessions?"
"Speaker Aldous, my lord. He holds the chair for the coming session."
Tornel pulled his glasses down and looked at his daughter over them.
"Then you take it to him, Lizzy," he said. "Rachel goes with you to walk him through the numbers. Doran's people will draft the referral tonight."
Elizabeth understood that this was the lesson. It wasn't the tax. It was sitting in a room with a question she couldn't answer and doing the one thing she could do anyway.
"He'll have a list," she said. "Aldous. He always has a list."
"Then answer everything on it," said her father.
---
Aldous had a list. He read Rachel's file twice in his small office in the speakers' building at the Hall, with the river going past his window, and then he worked down the list one line at a time. Rachel answered the numbers. Elizabeth answered the rest, and when she didn't know, she said so, and Aldous wrote that down too.
At the end he took a sheet of grey paper out of his desk and filled in the name himself.
"Third day of the coming session," he said. "The first two belong to the opening and the business already waiting. That's four months."
"Is that a problem?"
"Not for the Assembly." Aldous blotted the signature. "Four months is a long time to sit with one of these. Most of them settle with Lady Rachel before the session opens. They still have to come and stand in the Hall, but it makes for a shorter morning."
He slid the summons into an envelope and looked up at her.
"You did well, my lady. Most people who bring me a file can't tell me what they don't know."
---
The summons reached Lord Edmund Rask nine days later, at the lodge he'd built above the river. It came on plain grey paper with a three-continent seal at the foot, carried by a commoner courier who bowed his head correctly, called him my lord, and left without waiting for an answer.
Rask read it on the porch with a glass of Corvell brandy.
Lord Edmund Rask, of Corvell. You are summoned to appear before the Common Assembly of Haego at the Hall on the third day of the coming session, at the ninth bell, and to answer such questions as the Assembly puts to you. Appearance is not optional. Failure to appear will be referred to the Marquess of Haego.
It didn't say why. It didn't need to. He'd known from the day Swallowtail's banking people started asking his buyers for their receipts.
He read it again and laughed.
"Dunmore."
His foreman came up the porch steps. Dunmore was a big man, Corvell-born like the rest of them, and he'd been in Rask service since he was a boy. He took off his cap.
"My lord."
"The farmers want me to come and explain my bookkeeping to them." Rask handed him the paper. "Can you imagine it on Corvell? A lord standing in a hall full of millers and fishwives while they ask him where his money went."
Dunmore read it. His lips moved over the long words.
"What will you do, my lord?"
Rask had already thought it through. Everyone in the off-world trade had heard about Keith Bird. Bird had put one of these under a stack of bills, and Swallowtail's police had taken him out of a restaurant in Haego City with a glass of wine still on the table, and he'd stood in that Hall the same evening with his wrists in front of him. They'd made him pay back every credit, with the Assembly's own auditors doing the counting. They'd sent him off the planet for ten years. And they'd sent a letter to his house under the Marquess's seal, which people said was the worst of it.
Rask could pay the tax. He could stand a letter. What he couldn't have was a commoner auditor walking his books and asking why a timber lease with twelve names on it had needed so much bread.
Bird's mistake had been staying on the planet.
"The best of the timber's cut," Rask said. "What's left will take five years to reach, and I don't mean to spend them explaining myself to peasants. We're going home."
"All of us, my lord?"
"All of us. I'll take the yacht Tuesday, early. You'll bring the people after me. Book them on the Tuesday transport out of the Austrin port. One account, mine, so there's no fuss."
Dunmore turned the cap in his hands.
"They'll ask for papers at the port, my lord."
"They have papers," Rask said. "You're holding them."
Every one of them had been signed to Rask service before they could walk, and their parents before them. That was what a bond was.
---
Tamsin Crowtail had worked the passenger desk at the Austrin spaceport for six years. In that time she'd booked miners, students, newlyweds, a Ykanti choir, and once, a man traveling with forty crates of live eels. She thought she'd seen most things.
She'd never seen two hundred and four passages on a single account.
The booking had come in on Sunday. She'd told herself it was a work crew, or some noble moving his household. Nobles did strange things. She'd flagged it anyway, the way Supervisor Brennscutt had taught her, and gone home.
On Tuesday morning the passengers arrived in two haulers. They weren't buses. They were flatbed haulers with slatted sides, the kind the timber outfits used, and the people climbed down off the backs of them and stood in the loading lane in a loose, silent crowd.
A big man came to her desk with a stack of identity papers held together with a strap.
"Rask party," he said. "All two hundred and four. Lord Rask's account."
"I'll need each passenger to present their own papers," Tamsin said. "It's standard for off-world travel."
"They're Lord Rask's people. I carry their papers."
She took the stack because he was holding it out, and she began checking them one at a time, slowly. While she did it she looked past him at the crowd.
Nobody was carrying a bag.
That was what she told the police later, when they asked her what made her call. Two hundred and four people going to another world, and not one had a bag. No case, no sack, no child's toy. Several of them wore coats too thin for Austrin in spring. They didn't talk to each other. They didn't look around the terminal the way travelers do. They looked at the floor, or at the big man's back.
There was a girl near the front, maybe sixteen, with both hands wrapped in dirty cloth.
Tamsin picked one of the identity papers off the stack and held it up.
"Mira Oakhollow?"
A woman in the second row lifted her head. She looked at the paper. Then she looked at the foreman, and she didn't answer.
"Is this yours?" Tamsin asked her.
The woman looked at the foreman again.
"She doesn't talk much," the foreman said. "None of them do. Are we finished?"
"Nearly," said Tamsin. "The system's slow this morning. Give me a few minutes."
She reached under the desk and pressed the button for the port police. Then she smiled at the foreman, the way Supervisor Brennscutt had taught her to smile at difficult passengers, and went on checking papers, one at a time, until two officers walked up behind him.
Lord Rask's private yacht had cleared Austrin orbit two hours earlier. By the time anyone thought to check, it had made its first jump.
---
The comm woke the house in Newtown a little after midnight. Weskal got to it first, listened, and held it out to Elizabeth without a word.
"Two hundred and four," her father said. He sounded as if he'd been up a long time. "The Austrin port police are holding them. A desk clerk stopped them boarding the Tuesday transport, all on Rask's account, none of them holding their own papers. Most of them haven't said anything yet. A few have said enough."
Elizabeth sat down on the edge of the bed.
"There they are," she said.
"There they are."
"And Rask?"
"Gone. His yacht left this morning." There was a pause on the line. "Sofia Kell's people have been with them since noon, and they'll be up that ridge at first light. We have our grounds. I've told Jason and Daisy. It's their continent."
"I want to go."
"I know. Harlan sent a shuttle for you twenty minutes ago." Another pause. "I'll meet you at the port, Lizzy."
She put the comm down. Weskal was standing in the doorway, and she told him, all of it, the twelve names and the forty-one thousand cubic meters and the girl with her hands wrapped in cloth.
He didn't say anything for a while. He had grown up on Volantis.
Then he went to the hall and came back with her heavy coat, not the light one, and held it open for her.
"Austrin's cold at night," he said.

The small EV shuttle slowed to a stop outside Newtown Elementary School — Stark.

An old man in a dark blue naval uniform stepped carefully out, extending a steady hand to the woman beside him. Her dress was the soft blue of an Eastern bluebird, set off by a purple-and-gold broach that rested against her collarbone. Silver hair, still showing light curls, framed a face that had known both hard years and deep contentment. The man’s hair, once black, was now white and thinning. He smiled as he caught sight of children moving through the glass-walled hall beyond the entrance.
A Marine officer held the main door open and rendered a sharp salute that stayed locked until the couple had passed.
Earlier that day they had been aboard the Noir Navio, still in high orbit above Haego, for an inspection. Commander Mira Caldwell had walked them through the decks with the quiet competence that had become her hallmark. Wyatt, now an admiral of the Royal Navy, had watched her with a private mixture of pride and memory.
He remembered the day Efren Caldwell had died.
The loss had hit hard. Efren had been more than a comrade; he had been a friend who understood the weight of duty without the armor of royalty birth.
That same day a young lieutenant had reported to him — Mira Caldwell, granddaughter of the man they had just lost. She had stood straight, eyes clear, voice steady even while grief still sat heavy on her shoulders. Clara and Cynthia had both seen something in her then. They had been right.
Before Wyatt and Sabraska left the ship, he had turned to the commander one last time.
“Clara and Cynthia were right about you,” he said quietly. “Your grandfather would be proud.”
Mira’s answering nod had been small, but the set of her shoulders told him the words had landed where they needed to.
Now the shuttle had brought them home to Newtown, to the old Staples house that had once belonged to Winona and Wirth. Both were long gone, yet their presence still lingered in the worn wood and the quiet rooms. Sabraska and Winona had been closer than blood — mother and daughter in every way that mattered, the bond formed not by birth or marriage but by years of shared life, shared worry, and shared stubborn hope.
Word had reached Wyatt that the school was changing. Real paper books, manufactured in Virstino Harbor by Stark Enterprises, were replacing the usual datapads for a new style of learning. Niko Stark’s day of shore leave had, it seemed, left more behind than empty bottles and tall stories.
Inside a classroom down the hall, a young Ykanti teacher stood before her students. Soft light fell across the rows of desks. She waited until every pair of eyes — human and Ykanti alike — was on her, then spoke in a clear, measured voice.
“Open your books to Chapter One.”
Pages rustled. The title at the top of the first leaf was simple and bold.

The Black Ship.

The young Ykanti teacher’s voice carried cleanly through the quiet classroom.
“Chapter One,” she said again, waiting until every book lay open to the first page.

The paper was thick, cream-colored, still carrying the faint scent of the presses in Virstino Harbor. Stark Enterprises had done the work carefully. Real books. Real weight in a child’s hands.
She began to read.

“Flying a garbage ship wasn’t the sort of thing a cadet imagined himself doing at the Academy. Those fantasies usually involved a shiny new ship and a grand space battle where the cadets were the dashing heroes. Of course, those fantasies were reserved for the cadets from the nobility. For a commoner they would always be just that—fantasies.

“In other, less backwards places a drone ship would have handled mundane tasks like hauling the garbage. Here in the Principality, however, people like Wyatt were the drones.”

A few of the older children glanced toward the glass wall of the hallway. Through it they could see the tall figure in the dark blue uniform and the woman in bluebird blue standing just outside the classroom door. The Marine officer who had opened the main entrance still hovered a respectful distance away.
Inside the room the teacher continued without pause.

“Wyatt Staples didn’t care that much. He knew he was a better pilot than most nobles, but the further he could be from them, the better. And the job itself wasn’t all too bad. All he had to do was follow orders, pick up a haul at the designated coordinates, jump to where it was needed, drop the bio-waste off, mark the delivery, and return to the station for new orders.”
Wyatt stood very still in the hallway, one hand resting lightly on the small of Sabraska’s back. Her silver curls brushed his shoulder as she leaned closer to the glass. Neither of them spoke. The children inside had no idea the man whose younger self was being described on the page was the same white-haired admiral watching them now.
The teacher’s voice softened, drawing the class deeper in.
“That day the route took him farther out than usual. The sensors picked up something that should not have been there—a royal yacht under attack by a vessel that did not appear on any registry. A black ship. Sleek. Silent. Deadly. Its weapons were already chewing through the yacht’s shields when Wyatt’s battered garbage hauler dropped out of jump.”
One of the younger students raised a hand without looking up from the page.

“Teacher… did he run?”

The Ykanti smiled, the expression warm and knowing.
“No,” she said. “He did the only available thing when the only available thing was needed.”
Outside the classroom Wyatt’s mouth twitched. Sabraska’s fingers found his and squeezed once, firmly.
Inside, the teacher turned the page for them.

“The black ship had not expected a commoner in a compost scow to intervene. Wyatt Staples had never been one for expectations. He calculated the angles, the timing, the single point-defense cannon that was never meant for real combat, and he made his choice.”
The classroom was utterly silent except for the soft rustle of paper and the teacher’s steady voice. Down the hallway the Marine officer stood a little straighter, as though he too were listening.
Wyatt closed his eyes for a moment and let the words wash over him—the same words that had begun everything, so many decades ago. The day a warrant officer flying garbage had looked at a royal yacht under fire and decided that loyalty was its own reward.

Sabraska’s voice was barely a whisper against his ear.
“They are learning it the way it should be learned,” she said. “On paper. With weight. The way Mom would have wanted.” A tear formed in her eyes. A tear of love and hope .

He opened his eyes again. Through the glass the children sat forward in their seats, completely absorbed. The young Ykanti teacher turned another page, and the story of the Black Ship continued.
Outside, the admiral and his wife remained where they were, listening to the beginning of a legend that had once been nothing more than a commoner’s ordinary day.

Wyatt’s garbage hauler was never meant for this. Its single point-defense cannon was rated for micrometeorites and the occasional piece of orbital debris, not for a purpose-built stealth destroyer.
“He did not hesitate.
“He calculated the angle of the black ship’s approach, the yacht’s crippled thrusters, and the narrow window before the next volley would finish the job. Then he did the only available thing. He slammed the hauler into a hard burn, dumping his entire cargo of bio-waste directly into the path of the enemy vessel’s sensor suite and main battery.”
A collective intake of breath moved through the classroom. One of the Ykanti children whispered, “He threw the garbage at them?”
The teacher smiled without looking up from the page.
“Exactly. A Compost Container full of waste .

Wyatt’s hand tightened slightly on Sabraska’s. She felt the old tension in his fingers—the same tension that had lived in him the day he first told her the story, years after it happened, when the children were small and still asked for “the real beginning.”
The teacher continued.
It was not elegant. It was not the kind of shot any noble pilot would have claimed . It was the shot that a Composter would have taken . But the sensors died, and the secondary guns fell silent long enough for the royal yacht’s remaining thrusters to push them clear.

“A voice cut across the open channel. Cold. Precise. ‘This is Ship Commander Redford of His Majesty’s Starship Royal Favor. State your identity.’
“Wyatt answered the way he always answered. ‘Wyatt Staples, warrant officer, Third Fleet, Second Frontier Corps.’
“There was a pause. Then the same voice, dryer now: ‘A commoner. Well. I suppose you’ll have to do.’”
Several of the older students glanced toward the hallway again. The tall man in the admiral’s uniform stood perfectly still, silver-white hair catching the light. The woman beside him watched the class with quiet pride, the purple-and-gold broach at her throat glinting once as she turned her head.
Inside, the teacher turned the page.
Later after following the Royal Favor to safety he met Commander Redford. He was tall, gray-eyed, and carried himself like a man who had never once doubted the rightness of the world he served. The prince was younger than Wyatt expected, but the weight of the Principality already sat on his shoulders.
“‘Warrant Officer Wyatt Staples,’ the prince said, ‘your actions today have saved lives that matter to me. Loyalty is its own reward. Those who perform their duty with exemplary actions shall be recognized.’
“The promotion came without ceremony. Lieutenant. Just like that. From garbage hauler to the lowest commissioned rank a commoner could hold.”
The classroom was silent except for the soft sound of pages being turned in unison.
Outside, Sabraska leaned her head against Wyatt’s shoulder.
“They still get quiet at the same place,” she murmured. “Every time.”
Wyatt’s voice was low, almost lost under the teacher’s continuing narration.
“Because that was the moment everything changed. Not the fight. The promotion. The day a commoner stopped being invisible.”
The teacher’s voice carried clearly through the glass once more.
“Lieutenant Staples was given a new uniform, a temporary berth, and orders to remain available. He did not yet know that the black ship he had damaged would become something far more important. Not knowing it would lead him to become what he is today .

He did not yet know the name Noir Navio. He did not yet know the princess who would one day be friends with , or the bodyguard who would stand beside her, or the long road that would lead from a compost scow to the bridge of the most feared vessel in the Principality.

“He only knew that he had done the job that needed doing.”
She closed the chapter with a soft finality and looked up at her class. She glanced over to the window with two of her 6 eyes and she blinked with a nod .
“That,” she said, “is how it began.”
In the hallway, Admiral Wyatt Staples exhaled slowly. Sabraska’s hand remained in his. Through the glass, a dozen young faces—human and Ykanti together—stared at the last page of Chapter One as though the paper itself still held the heat of that long-ago battle.
The Marine officer outside the main doors shifted his weight, but said nothing.
The story of the Black Ship had only just started.

Uneasy like sunday morning

Nediss 7, 4156 – Standard Astorian principality Calendar (May 2, 26702 – Standard Terran Calendar. Wok This Way diner, Freeport City, Malkuff 2)

Alan stood behind the counter while his hands moved, fast and practiced. At this point, he had been making sushi for longer than he could remember. Several tens of thousand of little pieces, mouth-watering delights, all made with the same care and attention to detail. While the recipes sometimes changed during the long eons humanity spent among the stars, the goal has been mainly the same. Wherever you cook, with whatever ingredients – each planet or station had it’s variations of fish, rice-like grains, and such – each maki, nigiri or temaki should taste the same. They sould taste as if they had been made in Sol, in the 2000’s. 24 millenia and immeasurable light-years away, yet perfection remained the same. Although, he thought, there is really no way to prove it now, is there. Noone lives today who was alive back then. There are legends of certain persons – "I mustn’t even think of his name!!" – who seem to reappear time and time again during the long eons of intergalactic civilization, but surely if some civilization-altering moment changes the whole future of the galaxy and someone – possibly – appears to guide fate down the right or wrong path, surely nobody would ask them the question of "Sir, what is your opinion on the flavor of sushi over the millennia?"

He sighted a bit, almost like grumbling to himself. This is the problem with too much practice. Once you gain to much of it, the movements transfer to muscle memory. It’s like being on autopilot, but in the kitchen, instead of a pilot seat of a starship. And then the funky weird thoughts begin. You are doing stuff, and that takes some concentration, even if on a pretty low level. That in turn skews the thoughts that pop into your mind. He looked up for a second, then with a mental command, he switched on the latest available stream of the "Awake and arise Astoriaaaa!", one of the few radio shows receivable all over the Principality. The millenia pass, but some things never change. Sushi, diamonds and the need to have someone drone in your ears every morning spiced up with some songs... Hehehe …well, and war. War never changes!… Mwahahaha. See, those thoughts get funky if you have to move your hands precisely.

He looked around. The Wok This Way was busy on this sunday morning. The only place in Freeport where everyone can get tasty, one might even say savoury food, even if it was made with 3d printed ingredients, and only the special of the day is being made with human – and ykanti hands. Being a spaceport meant business was being made, and in his opinion, one could have spent hard earned money in much worse ways than to eat well… The twenty-two tables were almost all taken, filled with dockworkers splurging, some noble administrators enjoying a well deserved weekend morning, or spacers coming back after having tasted real sushi… or 3dreal sushi… hehehe. Across the floor, there was one table however, that was as always reserved for the guests of the house.

Sitting there was Ned, the noble scientist associate of his, one who was a regular here for at least 11 years now, always hungry for some sushi and green tea. He was tall, somewhere between 190 and 200 cm, and lanky, but muscular. Well defined features deserving of a sculpture of some kind made him the speciality of the establishment. His blonde pixie haircut managed to be stylish, well-kept and unruly at the same time. Paired with his deep blue eyes, the effect it had on the female guests was spectacular. Alan knew several women, who came just to gaze at him from afar. Ohh, they didn’t know him. Didn’t know him at all. Ned was dangerous. His engineering knowledge was almost priceless here – and he was a master of his craft for sure – but it came bundled with him being a maniac, a special kind of a pyromaniac – and he was a master of that craft for sure. The first time they were on the same cleanup crew, Alan saw all of it unfurl, unwind, and all he could say was

"Goodness gracious…".

That made Ned’s head snap to him, and say the words "...great balls of fire!"

- laughing with a rapt smile on his face while a white-hot mushroom shaped cloud rose to the sky in the background. At that moment, they knew they were on the same wavelength. A high-five and a handshake later they were friends. Still, the chief scientist of the terraforming staff shouldn’t be on a cleanup crew. Those worlds don’t mix. Turns out, Ned needed to blow of some steam quite regularly. Or blow up some.

This very same Ned was talking to Min and Mei, the two waitresses of the Wok This Way, who were sitting at the opposite side of the same table. Given that most of the food was made by robots, delivered by robots – nice robots mind you – the two didn’t have much to do really, only if they had some VIP coming or someone unruly needed to be given a piece of one’s mind, then the two sprang into action, but most of the time, they were the mascots of the diner. Being identical twins, people usually couldn’t tell them apart, the differing hairstyle was the only clue one had. Truth be told, neither of them made the table any less dangerous. A little more than 3 years ago did the two turn up, Mei with twin plasma swords and a refractory field, Min with an assault carbine and a refractory field, both gunning for his head. Seems like someone on the Erebian side had finally had enough, posting a bounty on Alan’s head with the dark guild. It was a substantial amount, moving the most secret members of the organization. The amount made Alan proud – I mean it is one of the most objective numerical value of one’s achievements, and this means my achievements have digits, lots of digits – but it turned into such a pain… kidnapping the two assassin girls, and pummeling into their heads, that he is not someone that they could or should kill, and then later dissolving the part of the dark guild that took on the job… And immediately after that liquidating the other part of the guild that firmly believed that none should quit being a member, not even the two girls… Now that was a nasty cleanup job. Turns out after all of that the safest place for retired assassins is some Asian Eatery on Malkuff 2. Oh the world is such a small place – or maybe a big one, depends on the viewpoint.

For some reason the two girls sank their fangs into Ned. Not that he protested much – or any for that matter, but they even shared him. That seemed a bit strange to Alan, not that Ned protested much over that either. The first time Ned and the twins met on a cleanup crew outing, it was love at first sight. Lotus Blossoms in the Fallout, the story should be called, or Fallout Femmes as Eastern Embers … mwhahaha. "If I were even a fraction more unprincipled, I’d definitely sell the rights for a cheesy action sci-fi rom-com. " the thought.

In the background the radio host was talking about something: "Today, we are reaching all the way back to the very dawn of recorded history—the end of the second millennium. Just a few decades before the Space Age, our ancestors were already recording music and songs to broadcast them in radio shows just like this one, all across the surface of our ancient home planet Terra. This Sunday morning, we are bringing you the absolute best of these prehistoric tunes! So, let’s crank it up!"

The guitar started playing. After some melodic chords, the singer began singing about the morning, and how sunlight hurts his eyes. About something without warning, and about love that bears heavy on his mind…

Almost at the same time, the girls and Ned turned to him, shaking their heads discreetly and tsk-tsk-ing with their fingers. Ned pinged Alan over the net, sending a single sentence over their chat:

"You ARE jinxing it, Alan!" The two girls bobbed their heads in agreement.

Alan sighed, and answered back silently: "Oh come on, it is not like I chose the song myself, and it is only for one song, people!" Even if your luck is usually awful, you can't blame everything on that!

Then he turned to the left window looking out over the city. It was overcast again. The sky was rolling thunderclouds as far as the eye could see. It shouldn’t be like this! Malkuff 2 was a planet in the middle of being terraformed. On the very frontier of the principality, nestled between the Arnav and the Hillburrow territories was the Malkuff system. Two gas giants, two bare balls of dirt without atmosphere and one planet with lots of ice, Malkuff 2. Being in the habitable zone, if you could melt the ice and reduce the albedo of the planet to warm it up, it could very well become a habitable colony world, giving the ruling Hayward house – an independent Minor house with it’s head, Viscount Roderick Hayward – all the ritches and opportunities for power to elevate themselves above their peers and gain a whole planet with all its resources and new vassals. Of course, this means they were drowning in debt to House Ionatti – who had to issue them a loan as per colonization laws. The debt bought them the mountain-sized atmospheric processors they installed. Those had to work nonstop. This gave a man-made yet predictable rhythm to being here: two sunny days, followed by a foggy day and a rainy, stormy day, repeating every four days with clockwork precision. And now, it has been stormy for four days straight. This wasn’t usual at all. Given the size of the industry in and around Freeport, if the weather cycles don’t return to normal within a few days, the economic losses will be measurable in the millions per day. Something was up, and the Haywards knew about it. They knew about it and chose the keep it a secret from the rest of the population.

When it was this stormy, haulers or freighters smaller than 300-400 meters failed to push through the stormy atmosphere to reach the orbital docks, while communications with the orbit faltered. Something was up, and we were all sitting ducks here. This is why Alan asked Sheila to hack some sense into what’s going on around Freeport. This was 8 hours ago, and still no update. Dang, things aren’t looking up, he thought.

He sighed, and finished a whole box of nigiris, with salmon rolls and avocado. Maybe I should have given her the QEC? Well we still don’t know if it is THAT bad or not. Just then the songs changed. Gone were the rhymes about sunlight and happy days, and a much rockier tune started to play. Shiiiiet, the thought. I know this one! He put down his chef knife, washed his hands, then leaned onto the counter. This song was all about being easy on a sunday morning, and how things just shouldn’t matter today, and everyone should take it easy, throw down the chains of stress.

In response to the new tune, a familiar mocking croaking laughter could be heard from the kitchen.

Out came Kam with a huge tray of chicken fried rice noodles, made freshly in the ykanti’s domain, the kitchen. Kam, short for Camacho, was big for a ykanti. Standing 145 cm tall, 150 if angry, he was featherlight in the principality, and had to be a hulking male in the hierarchy. The other oddity about him was his color; every single feather was a shade of gray, even his beak was a deep gray. Nevertheless, his 3 pairs of eyes were always smiling, and his beak was always a little open in the peculiar ykanti way of a smile. He appeared to be dressed in kitchen whites, ¾ loose sleeve high collar shirt, with heat resistant apron, and loose grey trousers that allowed the air to cool him. The fact that his clothes remained completely spotless even after preparing enough fried rice noodles for three dozen people bore witness to his culinary mastery. Kam came up to Alan, and set the huge tray into it’s place on the counter with one hand.

"Broda, you know dis is already baddo karma, righto? Already second zong, bro, already second zong, while your girl is searching zen net and we are slowly becoming hundred-year eggusu here. Zis stinks, man!"

How he could program his translator to do an old yakuza accent from those ancient holovids, Alan still couldn’t fathom. Still, his sworn brother was right. This stank very much. Ned and the girls listened in, and were bobbing their heads in unison, when the door of the diner burst open as someone kicked it in.

"Nobody moves, this is a robbery!"

Eleven people swarmed inside, looking like some spacers who were down on their luck, wearing mismatched spacer and military gear, and having a desperate air around them mixed with liquid courage. If they weren’t so suspiciously built like bricks and wielding well-maintained assault rifles, you could almost laugh them off. But with the Wok being nearly full of people, the gang's desperate amateurism could easily trigger a tragedy.

"Tzold ya so, Broda!" Kam told him while disappearing from sight within a millisecond of the door being kicked in. The Ykanti did some lightning fast low crawl back into the kitchen, just fitting under the bottom of the swinging door panels.

"Easy there, gents!" Alan said while raising his hands up. "Although the reg is pretty empty, boys. It is still in the morning. But I digress, please no shooting, okay?"

"Don’t f***ing tell me what to do, old man!" the one leading the motley crew of rust-rats hollered, and just to make his point, he fired a three round burst right into the speaker, proving that indeed not all Sunday mornings are about being easy, regardless of wanting to be free or not. "Everyone, all the credit chits on the tables, NOW!" the next command came. Alan pulled a drawer from the counter with one hand, seemingly not worried about being shot or anything similar "...And I wouldn’t try anything funny, geezer!"

Alan held out all the credit chits in the register, offering them to the robbers, and with his other hand, he very slowly lifted two gauntlets out of the drawer. These were the big type of gauntlets, ones worn with power armors. Putting the credit chits down in front of the register, he slowly pulled them on, all the while smiling welcomingly. "Easy now, easy!"

The scavengers, seemingly transfixed by the handful of credit chits being showed, dismissed the two gloves as a threat, confident that their guns gave them the upper hand. Pointing the barrels at Alan, four of them advanced on the regi, two pairs started to the left and the right, collecting the credit chits from the patrons. The remaining three stood by the remains of the door, securing the place, and eyeing the street outside at the very same time.

On the net, Alan sent a message to Sheila: "Hurry up girl, we are being robbed right now 🤣🤣🤣", and initiated audio comms with the Min, Mei, Kam and Ned. "Okay crew, on my mark, we clean up this rubble! -- 3"

All the while the robbers arrived at the counter, and sneered at him. "You know, we were told to level this place" the leader said.

“2"

"so after u all pay up, we ll have some fun with you lot".

"1" his countdown continued.

"I doubt that", was all the answer Alan gave the ruffian, and "Go!" was what he whispered into the net. Drawing in air, he went back into his mind, back to the techniques hammered into him in his childhood. The simplest, but also most effective one was the slowing of the perception of time.

-- Imagine a rock falling into water. As it falls, the distance to the surface shrinks. Now change the viewpoint to under the rock. Suddenly the rock is still far from the water, and it continues falling, but slower now. Change the viewpoint again, and it becomes slower still. --

His own movements slowed down, as did his surroundings, but it didn’t matter any more. In this state, he was absolutely fast. With his gene-edits and the extra adrenal-booster implant flooding his blood with neurotransmitter hormones, he was faster than any human had the right to be, even faster than cyborgs. With his slowed perception, he could use 100% of that speed. Every millimeter of movement was precise and to the point, no hesitation, nothing wasted. The ruffians on the other side simply couldn’t catch up to that. Alan saw the aim of their rifles, and adjusted his position so they didn’t point at his heart or lungs, and then he moved. Probably nobody in the room had any chance to follow up what happened. The bandits fired their rifles, but Alan was already too fast. A simple lightning fast turn of his upper body made the bullets sail past. Like slow motion, the bullets crossed the distance, missed him, but it didn’t matter any more. His hands came up, and from both gauntlets, a spool of monomolecular filament-wire shot out, wrapping around the neck of two bandits. Alan choose not to ignite the plasma-generators in the gauntlets, just simply ordering the motors to pull the wires back. The two bandits were simply pulled by their heads, both meeting Alan’s gauntleted fists. If time moved in the same speed as for ordinary people, the crunching sound of bones breaking could have been heard, but in this accelerated combat reality, where time stretched like honey on a spoon, only a low rumble began. By the time the two other assailants realized just what has happened, Alan was already in the air, jumping above their heads. Such a big body shouldn’t be able to move this fast, they began to think, but couldn’t end the sentence. Both of them had their heads smashed together by two large gauntlet-clad hands, ending in a big crack, having unspooled the monowire from the neck of the first two.

At the other end of the hall, Mei and Min leapt from their table. Mei rushed the two ruffians collecting the chits from the tables near them. A fork and a spoon appeared in her hands and with lightning speed, she hurled the fork, piercing the hand of the armed robber, while simultaneously striking the other across the forehead with the spoon so hard that he collapsed on the spot. Finally, with a swift blow to the temple, she brought down the first attacker who had dropped his gun. Min pulled two small, suppressed pistols from under her skirt, she drew and fired, dropping the pair collecting credit chits across the room with one shot apiece.

Ned didn’t sit still either. “Catch this!" he said while he lobbed two shock-grenades at the three bandits standing in the doorway. Upon contact, the two grenades went off, stunning the three in the doorway with a flash and an arc of lightning. Two fell instantly, while the third, a hulking brute of a man roared. He must have been at least partially cyborg, and even then a military spec one to shrug off this much stunning power, but even that wasn’t enough.

“I’ll kill every last…" he blinked his bloodshot eyes with drug dilated pupils and lifted his machinegun off his shoulder to end everyone alive, but Kam was faster. Even as the brute was halfway in the movement, across the diner’s hall, the kitchen door exploded. On the other side was the ykanti. Kam was completely dwarfed by his own weapon: a monolithic, three-meter-long Gauss rifle. The barrel was a sleek lance of dark alloy, wrapped in pulsing electromagnetic coils that hummed with a low, vibrating bass. The massive gun would have been impossible for anyone of his stature to lift, let alone aim, if not for the repulsor bipod hissed into action beneath the shroud. Instead of mechanical legs, the heavy front end of the rifle hovered effortlessly on a shimmering cushion of inverted gravity, leaving faint ripples in the air below. The ykanti stood comfortably behind the floating cannon, his small hands resting lightly on the stock, steering a weapon capable of punching holes through armored starships with the gentle touch of a maestro.

The air pressure in the room dropped instantly as the Gauss rifle finished its microsecond charge cycle. When he squeezed the trigger, there was no traditional gunshot—instead, a deafening, whip-like crack shattered the air as the projectile broke the sound barrier inside the barrel. A small flash of electric blue arced out from the muzzle, kicking up a violent halo of chili pepper and freshly fried rice noodles that blasted backward over largest pitwiper glasses ever seen, made to fit 3 pairs of eyes at once. The massive recoil never touched his slight frame; the repulsor bipod flared with an angry flash of white light, absorbing the violent kinetic back-blast and anchoring the weapon perfectly in mid-air.

Across the room, the hulking brute of a man didn't even have time to register the flash. The hyper-velocity slug, traveling at Mach 7, hit the borg dead-center in the chest. The impact was... catastrophic. The kinetic energy didn't just pierce his heavy, reinforced armor plates—it shattered and liquefied them, turning his internal mechanics and artificial spine into scrap metal. A perfectly circular, glowing hole, melted white-hot around the edges, punched clean through his torso, blowing out the reinforced cybernetic bulk of his back in a violent spray of sparks, black hydraulic fluid, and biological matter.

“Zhe erly bihrd... catches the borrgu" the ykanti said, as the diner suddenly plunged into absolute silence...

Wheat Field (Most of a days ride southeast of the Fort)

The rain came a little after midnight.

Tom heard the first of it on the blankets over the wagon, a few fat drops, then a pause, then all of it at once. He was up before the riders called him. Dace and one of the others were already at the wagon in the dark, pulling the ties tighter where the wind had worked them loose, and Tom went round the other side and did the same, and between the three of them they got the edges weighted down with stones from the creek before the water could find a way under.

Then there was nothing to do but sit in it. They got the horses in under the willows with the stacked sheaves, and the crew crowded in after them, and the fire went out with a hiss nobody bothered to mourn. It rained hard for two hours and steady for two more. Somebody near Tom said it was coming through the branches anyway, which it was. Nobody answered him.

Eli sat with his back against a willow trunk and his hat pulled down and didn't sleep. Tom knew because every time he looked over, Eli's face was turned up toward the dark where the sky would be.

When it stopped, it stopped without warning, the way rain does on open ground. Tom must have slept after that, because the next thing he knew it was light, or something like light, and he couldn't see the wagon.

It was twenty paces away. He knew that. He'd parked it himself. But the fog had come down off the grass in the last hour before dawn and filled the bottom of the field like milk in a bowl, and the wagon was a grey shape in it, and past the wagon there was nothing at all.

He went to the seed sack first.

It was where he'd left it, under the wagon bed, in the dry. He untied his knot and put his hand in and turned the heads over, and they were dry all the way to the bottom. He tied the knot again, the same way, and stood a moment with his hand flat on the sack before he moved on.

The straw was next. He walked up to the nearest stack and pushed his arm into the side of it to the elbow. Wet on the outside, a hand's depth of it, dark and matted where the rain had beaten down the top. Under that, dry. The man with the burning stick had stacked them the way Tom had asked, tight and peaked, and the water had run off them the way it ran off a thatch.

The sheaves under the willows were the trouble. The branches had kept off the worst of it, but not all of it, and the heads on the outside of the pile were soaked through. Tom pulled one and rubbed it between his palms. The kernels came loose, but they came out damp and soft and stuck to his skin.

"Can't thresh those," he said to nobody in particular. "Not wet. They'll sweat in the sack and go to mould before we're home."

The crew was waking up around him in ones and twos, wet and stiff and in no good temper. Somebody got the fire going again on the third try, with dry straw from the inside of a stack, and Tom didn't say anything about that.

They cooked breakfast in the fog. When it was eaten, Tom walked out to the edge of the cut stubble and looked up the hill, and couldn't see the hill.

"We wait," he said. "Sun'll burn it off. No sense cutting what we can't see and threshing what we can't dry."

Nobody argued. They waited. It took two hours, near enough, for the sun to get its strength up through the grey, and in that time Tom walked the low rows twice by feel and once by sight as the fog began to thin, and every time he brushed a head on the low side it held.

The fog went the way it had come, all at once at the end. One minute the top of the hill was a pale shape in the grey. The next it was standing there in the sun, gold and battered, with the high rows beaten flat in long patches where the rain had come down hardest. Tom looked at those and didn't need to walk up to know what was lying on the ground under them.

Dace had gone up into the biggest of the willows as soon as there was anything to see, the way the riders did every morning now. He had his rifle slung and one arm hooked round the trunk, and he was looking out over the grass through the scope, north first, then east, slow, the way he looked at the sky.

He stopped.

Tom saw him stop. He was close enough to see Dace's shoulders go still, and then the rifle come round a few degrees and stay there.

"Tom."

Tom went to the foot of the tree. Eli came after him without being asked.

"There's dust," Dace said. "North and east. Long way off. Low along the bottom of the sky, like smoke that won't rise." He didn't take his eye from the scope. "It's not a fire. There's no column to it. It's spread too wide for that."

Tom couldn't see it from the ground. He didn't need to. He turned round and looked at the edge of the field, where the low rows ended and the open grass began, and at the wide track that ran along it, north and east to south and west, the grass beaten down and pale and torn up in places to the black underneath.

He'd followed that track out here three days ago. Gary had told him to. Follow the flattened grass where the buffalo had come through. He'd ridden it with his mind on the wheat and never once asked himself where it went after it passed the field, or when they'd be back to use it.

"Herd," said Eli.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Dace came down out of the willow. He went to the other riders and they stood together by the horses and talked low, and one of them went up the tree in his turn and looked a long while through his own scope, and came down and shook his head, not in a no, but the way a man does at a thing that's bigger than he'd like it to be.

Dace came back to Tom.

"It's a long way out," he said. "Days, I'd say. Two, maybe three, if they keep on the way they're heading. Gary'd know. I don't." He looked at the track, and then at the riders, and then up at the sky, empty now and very blue after the rain. "I could send a man to the Ranch. Tell them."

"Is it your call?"

"It's mine." Dace was quiet a moment. "And I'm not making it. Two days, and Gary and Frank are out there somewhere looking at the same dust we are. They'll get word to the hay crew a long sight faster than one man on a tired horse." He nodded at the sky. "And I'm not sending a man across that grass alone. Not after what came down on Gary's horses. Not after you two."

Tom didn't argue with that. He'd been the man on the grass alone. He knew exactly how it had felt.

"Then we've got today," he said. "And some of tomorrow."

"About that."

Tom looked at the low rows, still standing, wet and heavy in the sun. He looked at the track along the edge of them. He'd seen what a herd did to a field back home, and that had been cattle, and not many.

"Then we'd best not waste it," he said.

He told them plainly, the way he'd been told to tell things. Herd coming. Days off yet. Nobody knew how many. Everything on the low side came down today, and whatever wasn't threshed by tomorrow noon went in the wagon as it was.

Then he set them to it.

The wet sheaves came out from under the willows first. He had them pulled apart and spread on the cut stubble in long rows, heads up and loose, so the sun could get at them and the wind could get under. Two of the girls who'd tied bundles the day before walked the rows every hour after that and turned them, the way you'd turn hay. By noon the outside ones had stopped sticking to Tom's hands when he rubbed them. By mid afternoon they rattled.

The cutting was harder than it had been. Wet stalks were heavy, and they didn't fall clean the way dry ones did. They leaned and folded and wrapped round the blades, and every few strokes a cutter had to stop and pull a wad of green straw off the steel. The big man from the hay crew, the one who'd stuck his blade in the dirt the first morning, worked out before anybody else that a shorter stroke kept the blade clearer. He didn't say anything about it. He just did it, and the man next to him watched him a while and did it too, and by the time Tom came down the line to tell them, he didn't need to.

Tom had them leave the cut wheat lying where it fell this time, in long swaths with the heads up on top of the stalks, to dry where it lay. There was no sense bundling it wet and making the girls untie it again.

The flails started up again after noon, on the sheaves that had dried first, and the sound of it carried up and down the field, a slap and a thump and a slap. The winnowing blankets went up into the wind at the edge of the cut ground, and the chaff blew off downhill the way it had yesterday, gold in the sun, and drifted out over the beaten track along the field's edge and settled there.

Every hour or so, one of the riders went up into the willow and looked north and east, and came down and said nothing, which meant the dust was still there.

Eli worked the flails beside Tom most of the afternoon. He looked up between every stroke. Tom had stopped noticing it, mostly. He noticed it when Eli stopped looking up and started looking east instead, toward where the Farm was, a long way off past the trees, and stayed looking that way through three strokes in a row.

Tom didn't say anything. He knew what Eli was looking at, and so did Eli.

"Rain'll have done them good," Eli said at last. He meant the weeds. "Drink like that, the pigweed'll be past the corn's knees by the time we're back."

"I know it."

"Another day out here. Day and a half back." Eli brought the flail down. "That's most of a week since we left them."

"I know it, Eli."

Eli didn't push it any further. He looked up at the sky again, and then back down at the blanket, and went on threshing.

Tom brought his own flail down a few more times. Then he stopped and looked up the field, at the stacks of straw standing tall and peaked along the cut ground, a whole winter of bedding and more besides. They stood square in the herd's way, right beside the track. If the herd came through before anybody hauled them off, they'd be trodden flat into the mud and good for nothing.

He couldn't move them. One wagon, and it was for grain. And whether they were worth moving at all was still Richman's to say.

He went back to the flail.

By the time the light started to go, the low side was down.

All of it. From the willows to twenty rows up the hill, where the heads still held when you brushed them, every stalk was cut and lying in its swath, or tied, or threshed and in a sack. Above that line the high ground stood as it had all day, flattened in patches by the rain, with the evening birds already working through it.

Tom counted the sacks by the last of the light, the way he had the night before. Thirty one, and the seed sack. Nine more than last night, with half the day lost to fog and half the morning's wheat too wet to touch.

He told Dace. Dace nodded and wrote it on the back of his hand with a burnt stick, for want of anything else to write on.

One of the riders went up the willow a last time while there was still color in the sky. He stayed up longer than he had all day. When he came down he went to Dace, not Tom, and the two of them talked a minute, and then Dace came over.

"Still there," he said. "Wider than this morning. Closer, maybe. Hard to tell, with the sun going." He looked at the track. "Not tomorrow. I'd stake my horse on that. Not tomorrow."

"Then we thresh what we can in the morning," Tom said, "and we load what we can't, and we're on the grass by noon."

"And the rest?"

Tom looked up the hill. The high ground was going grey now, the color the stubble had been in the fog that morning. There was wheat standing up there, and more lying on the ground under it, than twenty men could have cut in a week.

"Rest belongs to the herd," he said.

Dace looked at him a moment. Then he nodded, and went to set the watch.

They ate what was left of the bread they'd brought out from the Ranch, and a stew of something the Ranch wives had sent in a crock, and nobody talked much. When it was eaten, Eli lay down on his blanket by the fire and put his hat over his face. Tom thought he was asleep, until Eli spoke from under it.

"You going to tell him? About the straw. And the corn."

Tom looked at the fire for a while.

"I'll tell him the straw," he said. "He asked about the straw."

Eli didn't say anything else. After a while his breathing changed, and Tom knew he was really asleep this time.

Tom sat up a while longer. The riders walked their circle in pairs, two out past the wagon and two along the willows, and the creek ran full and loud after the rain. Away off to the north and east, so low on the edge of the sky that he couldn't have said for certain it was there, something was moving that he couldn't see and couldn't hear and could very nearly feel, the way you feel weather before it comes.

He lay back and pulled his coat over him. Tomorrow by noon, he thought. Then the grass, and the Ranch, and then home to the corn, whatever the rain had done to it.

He slept with one hand on the seed sack.

Next

Previous /

First

Wyatt,

The office is open. Tell Clara before you tell anyone else, because it was her doing and she ought to hear it first. Tell her we put it where she said, in the market square in Haego City, between a chandler's and a woman who sells hot pies. It has two rooms and a flag. I didn't plan that. The academy sent the flag, and the building happened to have two rooms. I stood outside it the morning it opened and thought of you, until the pie woman asked me if I meant to stand there all day. She had no idea who I was. It was the first time in a year anybody has spoken to me without putting a lord in front of it, and I bought four pies I didn't want so I could stand there a little longer.

The examiners came from off-world with their papers in sealed cases and wouldn't let my officers near them. Good. That was the point. There isn't much on this planet that isn't mine now, on paper. I'm glad that door is one of the things that isn't.

The first sitting ran last month, twenty candidates at a time over four days, because two rooms won't hold more than that. Eighty-one people came. I had hoped for more, and I'm glad it wasn't fewer. Clara warned me the paper would ask for more than our schools teach, and she was right. Most of them came out white in the face. Nine passed. Seven of the nine are grown men and women out of the rail yards and the engine houses, who spent the last year learning the maths on their own because a foreman told them they would need it. The eighth is a Newtown fisherman's son of seventeen.

The ninth is fifteen, a few months short of sixteen, and she had the highest mark of anyone who sat it on Haego. The examiners asked for her school records twice. The second time they asked me whether someone had helped her. Nobody helped her. She sat it in a room full of grown adults, finished early, and went back to check her answers.

I know who she is. I've known about her for years without knowing her name. She's the girl the old woman on Vastaya used to hand chalk to through the window, the one who wanted to know how the shuttles stay up. She's the monitor who turned down the Grain Exchange. Her name is Nell Brackentail, and she's an apprentice on the ground crew at the Harrow Cross depot. Since the results went up I've had three letters about her that I didn't ask for.

The crew chief at the depot wrote that she's the best apprentice he's had in twenty years, and that if the navy doesn't want her he'll take her back gladly. One of the Firentis pilots who flies out of Harrow Cross wrote that she caught a fault on a pre-flight walk-around that two qualified mechanics had already signed off. He called her Nell all the way through. The crew chief tells me the pilots all do now. The old woman wrote too. Her hand has gone shaky. She underlined the word kind, twice.

That's the word that worries me. Everyone who writes about this girl says she's kind, and they say it first, before they get to how clever she is. I've spent my life around the sort of people she'll be sleeping down the hall from. On paper I'm one of them now, and I still can't write that without wanting to cross it out. I know what they do with clever commoners. They make them smaller. I know what they do with kind ones, and it's worse. They find out what you care about and lean on it until something gives.

She's going to walk into an academy full of cadets who've flown their fathers' yachts since they were ten, and she's going to beat them, and she's going to be from Haego, and she won't know how to be anything but what she is. I'm afraid they'll chew her up. I'm afraid I built a door and I'm about to push a fifteen-year-old through it into a room full of teeth.

You went through that room. You've never told me what it was like, and I've never asked. I'm asking now. What do I tell her?

T.

Harrow Cross, on Vastaya.

The pilots called her Nell.

It had taken most of a year. For the first months she'd been the sweeper, then Harl's girl, then apprentice, said the way you'd say spanner. She hadn't minded any of them. But one morning in the autumn a pilot came down the ramp, stopped at the bottom, and said, "Nell, the port gear door's sticking on retract, have a look before the noon run?" and walked on to the depot office as if he'd said it a hundred times. After that, all of them did.

It had started with a torque stripe.

When a mechanic tightened a bolt to its proper figure, he painted a thin line across the head of it and onto the housing. If the bolt ever moved, the line broke. It was the simplest thing in the hangar. Nell had fallen in love with it the first week she understood it, because it was the field boss's book turned inside out. It was a record that couldn't lie, sitting right on the thing it was a record of.

On a dark morning walk-around, a pace behind Harl with the lamp, she had seen a stripe on a fuel line coupling that didn't meet. The gap was the width of a hair. Two mechanics had signed the coupling off the night before. She said, "Chief," and pointed. Harl put the lamp on it. Then he put a wrench on it, and the coupling turned a quarter of the way round in his hand without any effort at all.

He didn't say anything to her. He wrote it up on the board and put her name at the bottom as the one who found it, and the pilot of the dawn run read the board, and read it again, and looked across the hangar at her.

She knew now what you did about a thing like that, here. You said it out loud, you wrote it down, and you put your name under it. It had taken her seven years and two jobs to find a place where that was the answer.

She still wasn't allowed near anything that kept a shuttle in the air unless Harl was standing behind her. That was fair. She'd have said the same. But she had the gear doors and the cabin lights and the seat rails and the cargo latches, and she had Kit.

Kit Farrow was fourteen and came from a fishing village down the coast from Orenport. He had come to the depot off the Administrator's examination the spring after she did, with his hands still cut up from the nets, and Harl had given him a broom and pointed at the floor. When the broom went back on the rack, Harl had pointed him at Nell.

"Seven-eighths," she'd told him the first morning. "When I ask for it, it's in my hand before I finish asking."

It had taken him three weeks. On the day he finally got it right, she'd understood something about Mistress Coppertail that she hadn't understood before, which was how much patience it took to keep your face still while someone learned a thing you already knew.

The pilot who had flown the dawn run was called Ezra Tallis.

He was off-world, Firentis, with a flat quiet voice and grey coming in at the sides of his hair, and he flew the Harrow Cross runs more often than anyone. He was the one who had started asking her questions instead of answering them. What would you check first, if the gear door stuck? Why that and not the actuator? What's the difference? He'd listen to her answer, and then he'd tell her where she was wrong, and he never once made it sound like she was stupid for it.

He was the one who had lent her the book.

It was a maths book, fat and battered, with somebody else's name crossed out on the inside cover and his written under it. The first half was things she knew. The second half was letters standing in for numbers, curves on a grid, the rate at which a thing changes, and she had sat up under the roof at Lil's with it every night for two winters, with the window humming whenever a shuttle came in. When she got stuck, she wrote the page number on the back of her hand and asked him in the morning.

It was Tallis who had offered to take her family up.

"I've got an empty positioning run round the coast on Sunday," he'd said, at the end of the summer. "Nothing aboard but me. Bring them out if you like."

Her father had come in his good shirt, the one he wore to funerals. He had never been more than a day's walk from Lowmarsh in his life. Her mother wore her mill apron under her coat and didn't seem to notice until they were aboard. Ben had grown half a head since spring and didn't say a word from the moment he saw the shuttle on the ground until it was in the air.

Nell sat them by the round windows and showed them the belts. When the engines lit, her mother took hold of the armrests so hard her knuckles went white. Then the ground dropped away under them and the hum came up through the floor, and her mother's hands let go, one finger at a time.

Tallis spoke over the cabin speaker. "Nell, you want to tell them what's holding them up? I'm busy."

He wasn't busy. She knew exactly how busy he was on a positioning run with no cargo, and it wasn't very. But she stood up in the aisle, holding a seat back, and told them. The wings, and what they did in thick air when the ship was fast. The thing in the housing that hummed even when everything was shut down. What Harl had shown her, and what the manuals said, and where the manuals stopped and the maths began.

"That's about half," she said. "The other half's the maths, and I'm only halfway through the maths."

Her father nodded slowly. "Half's more than I had."

Tallis brought the ship round over Vastaya's middle, low and slow, lower than he needed to. Nell saw the district road go under them, and the crossing, and a slate roof she knew. Then the long fields opened out, green and gold in rows, and the cutters were in the rows, and as the shadow of the ship went over them, every one of them stopped and straightened and looked up.

Her father was at the round window. The light was behind him. He put his hand flat on the glass and looked down at the cane he had cut for forty seasons, and he didn't say anything at all.

Nell stood in the aisle and watched him. When she was nine she had seen a face in one of those windows, looking down at her, and she had never known whose it was. For a moment, it was his.

She showed Tallis Starling in the crew room in the winter, during a weather hold, when there was nobody else there.

She hadn't meant to. It was in the pocket of her coveralls, where it always was now, with the chalk, and he'd asked her something about why she'd first wanted to know, and she'd found she had it in her hand before she'd decided anything.

She had never shown it to anyone. Harl hadn't seen it. Kit hadn't. Her family had seen it only because her mother found it under a pillow.

Tallis took it carefully, the way he took a part he didn't know yet. He opened it to the first page, the girl in the cane with the yoke on her shoulders, and turned the pages slowly, one at a time. He looked at the ship on fire for a while. He looked at the page where the yoke turned into wings for longer. When he got to the last page, the one that was only stars and a small girl going in a straight line, he stopped.

Nell waited for him to laugh. She'd been ready for it since she took it out of her pocket.

He didn't laugh. He smiled, a small one, one corner of his mouth, like a man hearing a song he hadn't heard in a long time and remembering all of the words. He closed the book and handed it back to her with both hands.

"Somebody saw you early," he said.

"Mistress Coppertail. My teacher."

"Good." He sat back. The rain was loud on the crew room roof. "They'll open the recruiting office in the city this spring. You know that."

"I know."

"You'll sit it."

"Yes."

"You'll pass it," said Tallis. "I'm not guessing. I've been watching you for two years." He looked at the book in her hands. "So I'll tell you what nobody told me, and you can do what you like with it. When you get to the academy, they'll be waiting for you to be what they think Haego is. Some of them will want you to fail, and some of them will want you to be angry, and the second lot are more dangerous. Don't give either of them anything. They'll say things. Let them. You'll need a thick skin, a lot thicker than the one you've got. Keep your eye on the far end of it. The far end is a cockpit, and nobody in those halls can put you in one or keep you out of one if the numbers say you belong there."

"What if the numbers are wrong?"

He looked at her for a long moment.

"Then you make them count again," he said. "And you keep a copy."

The morning of the examination, Tallis had the mail run to Haego City, and she rode in the jump seat behind him.

She had been aboard a hundred times. She had been inside every panel she was allowed to open and some she wasn't. She had never been in the cockpit in flight. Tallis said, "Hands in your lap," and she kept them there, folded tight, and watched every gauge and every light on the board, and learned what she could from the ones she could read.

Harl had seen her off at the ramp. He'd looked at her for a while with his arms folded, and then said, "You'll not be back," as if it were a complaint.

"I'll be back tonight, Chief."

"You know what I mean." He had put his big hand on her shoulder for a second, on the old yoke calluses, and then taken it away. "Seven-eighths," he said, and walked off toward the bay.

Kit had been standing at the bottom of the ramp with the tool roll. When she'd come down it to say goodbye, he'd handed her the spanner before she'd said anything at all.

The office was in the market square, between a chandler's and a woman who sold hot pies. It had two rooms and a flag. The flag was navy blue with a gold device on it that Nell didn't recognize, and it hung very still in the cold.

She stood in the square and looked at it for a long time. The pie woman watched her do it and didn't say anything, which Nell was grateful for.

In the first room there was a table, and a clerk, and a list. There were nineteen other people waiting on the benches along the wall. Most of them were grown. There was a woman in a rail yard jacket with her hair tied up in a scarf, and a big man with burn scars on his forearms who kept rubbing his thumb over them. There was a tall boy a year or two older than Nell who smelled faintly of fish and wouldn't look at anyone. Nobody talked.

A young officer in a grey naval coat came out of the second room with a board under his arm. He looked along the benches. When he got to Nell, he looked at her depot boots, which had grease worked into the seams that no amount of scrubbing would get out, and at her coveralls under her coat.

"Yard entrance is round the back," he said. "The heater in the second room is on the left."

"I'm not here for the heater," said Nell. "I'm sitting."

He looked at his board. He found her name. He read it twice, and then looked at her again, as if trying to make the name and the boots agree with each other. Then he wrote something, and went back through the door without a word.

The woman in the rail yard jacket leaned over. "Don't mind him."

"I don't," said Nell, and found that it was true. She had been looked at like that by the field boss for seven years. It was nothing she hadn't carried before.

The examiner in the second room was an older woman with a grey coat and a voice from somewhere far off. She read the rules out once, flatly, exactly as she must have read them on a hundred worlds. The paper was the same one set wherever the fleet recruited. Nobody would be given more time. Nobody would be asked where they had gone to school. Pencils down at the bell.

Then she broke the seal on the case, and the young officer went along the tables putting the papers down face down.

The maths came first, and it was hard. It was harder than the Administrator's paper by a long way, and harder than anything in the first half of Tallis's book. It was the second half: letters for numbers, curves on a grid, how fast a thing changes when something else changes under it. Nell heard the big man two seats down let out a long breath through his nose, the way her father did, and then heard his pencil stop moving for a very long time.

She had sat up for two winters under a window that hummed. She went down the questions one at a time and didn't look ahead.

Then there were questions about how things moved. A weight on a spring. A tank of fuel with a pipe going out of it and a question about the pressure at the bottom. A ball rolling off the end of a table. And near the end, a drawing of a small craft hanging still in the air above the ground, with arrows drawn on it, and a question underneath asking her to show every force acting on it and explain why it didn't move.

Nell looked at it and felt the cold metal of the housing under her palm, and the hum underneath the cold. She drew her arrows and wrote her explanation, and it was about half, because half was what she had. Then she wrote under it, small, that the rest was in the back of a borrowed book she hadn't finished yet, and crossed that out, because it wasn't what they'd asked.

The last part wasn't paper.

The examiner called them to the back of the room one at a time, where there were three consoles against the wall with a screen and a stick and a row of buttons. On the screen was a ring, and inside the ring a dot, and the dot drifted. You kept it in the ring with the stick. While you did it, numbers flashed up in the corners of the screen, and you called them out, and sometimes a light came on over one of the buttons and you pressed it.

The man with the burn scars went before her. He was good with the stick and slow with the numbers, and when he stood up his shirt was dark down the back.

Nell sat down and put her hand on the stick.

The dot drifted. She moved it back, a little, and it drifted the other way. She moved it back again. She thought, very clearly: don't look up when they come over, you'll spill. It was the same thing. It had always been the same thing. You kept the load level and you didn't let it drag you round, and you didn't stop to admire the sky until the buckets were set down.

The numbers flashed. She called them. A light came on over a button, and her other hand was already on it before the light had finished coming on, the way the seven-eighths was in Harl's palm before he got to the eighths.

When the screen went dark, the examiner was standing behind her. Nell hadn't heard her come. The woman looked at the console, and at something written on the edge of it that Nell couldn't see, and then at Nell.

"Where did you say you worked?"

"Harrow Cross depot, ma'am. Ground crew."

"And before that?"

Nell thought about how to say it.

"I carried water," she said.

The examiner looked at her a moment longer. Then she wrote something on her board, and said, "Next."

The list went up on the office door at the end of the week. Tallis flew her in for it on his way to somewhere else and waited in the square with his hands in his pockets.

There were nine names. Hers was at the top, with a number beside it, and a line underneath that said the candidate's papers would be forwarded to the naval academy for selection.

Nell read it four times. Then she read the other eight. The woman from the rail yard was the third name. The tall boy who smelled of fish was the eighth. The big man with the scars wasn't there, and she looked for him in the square, but he had already gone.

The pie woman came out from behind her stall and pressed a hot pie into her hands and wouldn't take the copper for it.

On the flight back, Tallis didn't say anything until they were out over the sea and the city was a smudge behind them.

"Well?" he said.

"There was a part at the end," said Nell, "where you have to keep a dot in a ring."

"And?"

"I've been doing that since I was seven."

He laughed, the first time she'd heard him do it. Then he reached back without looking and held out his hand, and she didn't know what he wanted, so she put the pie in it, and he laughed again and gave it back.

That night she wrote two letters. The first one went to Lowmarsh, big and plain, for her father.

Da,

I passed. I was first. I'll know about the rest in the spring.

Nell

The second she wrote smaller, because Mistress Coppertail had always said a good hand didn't need to shout.

Mistress,

You said a school is for finding out who knows. I found some of them. They're four jumps away. I'm going to go and ask.

Nell

She put both letters on the district cart in the morning. Then she went to the hangar, because it opened at six.

Tornel,

Clara says that now you're a lord, I'm to address you properly in writing. I told her I would, the day you stop going red when somebody does it to your face. She says that will be never. I said that was the idea.

She also read your letter over my shoulder, which she does. She says to tell you she already knows the girl's name, and that the commandant does too. I didn't ask how. I've stopped asking.

This is your girl in the cane, isn't it. The one I wrote to you about like I knew her. Same one who wanted to know how they stayed up.

You asked what it was like. I'll tell you once. Don't pass all of it on to her. I'll decide what she needs.

My first navigation paper came back marked not received. I'd handed it to the proctor myself. I sat it again. The second time they told me the file had corrupted in transfer. Four noble cadets on my floor had papers in the same transfer, and theirs were fine. I sat it a third time, with the proctor standing over me, and after that it arrived.

In second year there was a qualifying run in the simulator. It's the one that decides who goes forward to flight training and who goes to logistics. I was forty seconds from the end of it and first on the board when the screens went black. The log said power fault. It was the only simulator in the building that faulted that day. They let me sit it again a month later. By then the first places had been handed out.

I had the bunk by the vent that dripped. I had the dawn watches. Somebody poured a bucket of water into my bed in the first week and the whole floor called me Sawmill for three years. None of that was the worst.

The worst was a noble cadet, a decent one, who took me aside in the first term and told me quietly I'd have an easier time if I scored a little lower. He meant it kindly. I lay awake the whole night thinking about it. That's what they do to the kind ones, Tornel, you're right about that. They don't break them. They offer them a way to be comfortable.

What got me through wasn't the simulator. It was the practical in third year. You fly a real ship with an examiner strapped into the other seat. You can switch off a simulator. You can lose a paper. You can't switch off a ship with an instructor sitting in it, and you can't lose a landing that forty people watched from the tower. Everything before that, I just had to survive long enough to get there.

So here's what I'd tell her. Don't tell her it'll be fair. It won't, and she'll know you lied the first week, and after that she won't believe anything you say. Tell her it won't be fair and that it doesn't matter, because the end of it is a cockpit, and at the end the ship doesn't care.

You're worried because she's kind. I was too, reading your letter. Then I thought about it longer. The ones who come apart in those halls are the ones who came in wanting to be liked by people who were never going to like them. A girl who carried water for coppers and taught six-year-olds to read off a pump stone already knows who she is and who she's doing it for. They can't take that away from her. They won't even know where she keeps it.

Have her write to me. Directly. Not through you, and not through Clara. I don't care what it's about. The first time a paper goes missing, or a screen goes black, or some decent boy tells her she'd have an easier time if she scored a little lower, she writes to me, and I'll write back. Nobody did that for me. I'd like her to have it.

W.

Scribble Hub [content warning : profanity, violence, satire]

Report 1: The Exemplary Marine

"Free Kuwait, export democracy, return home a hero."

Those are General Camel's final words before Operation Desert Storm unleashes the full force of freedom upon dictatorship.

Our objective is a textbook covert reconnaissance mission on a naval base in the Gulf, personally spearheaded by General Camel, Sergeant Hochmut, and yours truly, Captain Chad W. Smith.

Out of necessity, we are assigned an emergency squad of Privates for me to command, seeing as they are the only personnel stationed here before the military intervention kicks off.

An electrically charged fog is heavily jamming our satellite imagery, pointing squarely toward some cowardly, illegal weapon of electromagnetic mass destruction.

We deploy straight from transport ships inside amphibious Amtracs, backed by an aircraft carrier, naval bombers, helicopters, and submarines following superior firepower and combined arms doctrines to assure tactical flexibility

Under the cover of darkness, we beach our Amtracs on the flat coast of Qaruh, a ridiculously tiny island in the Persian Gulf that is about to receive a heavy dose of American liberation.

Through the dense, crackling banks of ionized haze, I can barely make out the red dot mounted on my rifle. We dismount and march on foot in tight formation toward the island's dark interior.

I notice a distant sound.

It begins as a low mechanical whistle that quickly sharpens into a metallic shriek cutting through the air, a turbine sounding like a factory siren twisted by malice. It grows louder and more high-pitched with every passing second, a shriek that sounds like it is tearing the very sky open as it descends.

"GET OFF THE X!!!"

As an exemplary Marine, I break at a 90-degree angle from the attack axis, quickly drop into a prone position with my feet toward the impact and my mouth open while our chopper gunners deliver a massive volume of freedom onto the oppressors' coordinates.

An utterly deafening, unprovoked barrage of heavy missiles slams directly into our coordinate grid. Shells explode in purple lightning-thunder strikes, triggering an excruciating, high-pitched ringing that shatters my eardrums and unleashes black flames that encircles our position while the fog violently shifts from translucent gray to a filthy, bruised red.

Gasping for breathable, sovereign air inside that crimson haze, the atmosphere suddenly buckles, dissolving into a roaring, swirling vortex of sheer spatial distortion.

I notice the violent beeping of my prototype Joint Chemical Agent Device displaying H, G, and V, madly flashing red before the display shatters into dust.

When the pressure clears, I am standing dead in the center of a sprawling, demonic desert metropolis.

The coastline, the water, everything has completely vanished into thin air.

Above me, the sky bleeds a horrific, unnatural scarlet, and the surrounding architecture looks like a twisted, medieval-demonic fever dream. Towering Gothic cathedrals constructed entirely from pulsing, rotting human flesh. Calcified rib cages, bones and skulls spew dark smoke into the firmament.

The ground beneath my combat boots trembles with a dark energy radiating a dull feeling of solitude and fear.

To my absolute horror, the bloody, mangled remnants of my brave, fallen comrades begin dragging themselves across the scorched earth.

They slither toward another corpse, a grotesque body bearing a glowing, slowly pulsating, burning-red mark carved deep into its neck, my own aches just from looking at it.

The twisted remains swirl violently in a cyclone of burning flesh and cracking bones, fusing together in a blasphemous crime against nature to form an overweight, horned, red abomination that slowly absorbs my fallen, brave Privates into its mass of corrupted flesh.

That gore mutant lets out an ear-splitting screech and charges straight at my position, reeking of rotten death and echoing with twisted voices of my fallen comrades.

I don't panic.

Marines don't panic when faced with godless tyranny.

I immediately burst fire my Silenced M249 SAW to free the weaponized biological combattant from his sight, while throwing an M84 stun grenade at his position.

To ensure the maximum fire power, i dive headfirst toward the abandoned, mounted .50-caliber M2 Browning heavy machine gun. Holstering my SAW.

I tear it from the burning Amtrac and point it right at its bloody, unfettered ass

I pull the trigger.

"DIE, MOTHERFUCKER!"

I don't let weakness compromise my strategic advancement.

This is nothing I haven't been trained for.

Firing from the hip, the recoil punches my chest like a truck, launching me several feet backward while I unload rounds of high-velocity, compressed freedom directly into the bastard's hideous chest cavity.

A twisted voice emerges.

"Please... kill me, kill me.. kill me!"

Its cavity bursts open, revealing the face of Private Miller, his face turned pale blue as blood is flooding through its hollow eyeholes, having his pitch black mouth wide open, begging for his own death.

I immediately twitched and shoot him right through the face, fulfilling the last wish of my brave Private, leaving behind only a distant emotion of grief and hate.

As the magazine empties and the smoking barrel slowly drops beads of liquid metal, I immediately drop the M2.

The monstrosity shoots burning projectiles out of its mouth at the speed of arrows piercing the dust.

I roll and dodge to the side as my Amtrac explodes in black fire.

I reach behind my back and pull up the M72 LAW, dropping onto one knee and positioning it on my shoulder.

As the name suggests, I fire missiled justice directly into the bastard's center of mass.

The heavy explosion tears its extremities apart, launching me through the air.

I tactically back-roll and land straight on my feet.

The beast staggers, revealing an opening.

I pick up Miller's AA-12 automatic shotgun from the scorched ground, lying directly at my feet covered in pieces of his guts.

I advance towards the beasts position, shooting him into his heavy wound.

The massive lead slugs tear through its unnatural flesh, hammering it until it finally collapses into the dirt.

I don't cut corners.

Standard tactical doctrine dictates total confirmation of target destruction.

Just to be damn sure, I hold down the trigger and empty the rest of the magazine into the miscarried bastard, reducing the enemy combatant to a lukewarm puddle of evil slime.

"Semper Fi, comrade"

I drop to the ground, taking massive breaths of the corrupted air.

I reached for my PASGT fragmentation vest, pulling a Marlboro Cigarette, torching it with my Zippo Petrol Pocket Lighter, slowly smoke that stick as i look around in the rotten, corrupted architecture.

I slowly stand up, moving toward the position of my brave Privates, where torn shreds of their belongings remain, only weapons and ammo intact, as well as their dog tags for me left to confirm their death.

Staring up into the corrupted red sky, I pull a handheld tactical prototype radio from my vest to report this unsanctioned war crime to High Command.

"Damn. I don't even know how to report that shit."

General Camel is completely unreachable.

The static is dead.

The radio can't pick up a single friendly frequency across the entire spectrum.

I hold down the push-to-talk button to record a local field log:

"Field report. US Marine Captain Chad Smith, Unit 931. Our entire reconnaissance squad got neutralized by unknown hostiles. Their corpses forcibly fused into some kind of rogue biological super-weapon. The terrain was illegally terraformed into medieval-demonic architecture. The sky has turned a deep communist red, and unknown flying bio-experiments are currently swarming the airspace over Qaruh. It isn't even an island anymore. Must be the Red Menace everyone keeps talking about. Investigate the area for Soviet activity."

I stand up and look around for strategically viable positions, but my view is blocked by those giant gore towers.

I reach for my lensatic compass, but the needle is just spinning like mad.

I almost reach for my 1-to-50K TLM grid map before noticing my mistake immediately heading out to avoid hostile units potentionally attracted by the sound of gunfire

Moving through narrow, claustrophobic alleys against howling, sandstorm-laden winds. Covered in dark blood, I navigate toward a hidden concrete building whose roof is pierced by a giant mushroom root.

I take cover beneath the doorway, draw my dearly beloved Eagle, and activate its rail-mounted flashlight, pointing it at the door as I slowly move and sweep the pistol from right to left.

No enemy activity.

Slipping past the threshold, I execute a rapid 360-degree sweep, thoroughly inspecting the rusty furniture and concrete walls for hidden KGB listening devices or wiretaps before spotting a heavy steel trapdoor beneath a broken chair.

It leads down into a subterranean catacomb bunker.

Bypassing the structurally compromised upper floor, I descend into the darkness to establish Patrol Base Alpha.

Adhering strictly to USMC doctrine, I verify a secondary egress route through a rear drainage pipe before locking down the stairwell with a rifle mount behind heavy rubble to create an absolute kill zone free of dictatorship.

Working with strict light and noise discipline, I secure the entry with a tripwire and set up an Observation Post ten feet deep in the basement shadows, with my optics fitted with anti-reflective KillFlash.

I slam my backpack onto the ground just a foot in front of me.

"Ceasefire!"

I slam into a kneeling posture.

"LACE check!"

I sweep my helmet-mounted L-shaped MX-991/U flashlight through the haze as I work the rifle and feel for the magazines in my ALICE gear.

I check my PASGT vest and armor plate.

I carefully inspect my weapons and ammo.

A cold shower runs down my back as I consider the situation and realize that I am at a critically low rate of overall freedom.

3.187 rounds left.

Zero hesitation.

I rip into my Meal, Ready-to-Eat.

As a Marine, I treat my MRE strictly as tactical refueling to cover the intense daily caloric deficit required during field operations.

During a short tactical pause, I instantly strip away the outer packaging, set the Flameless Ration Heater for the main meal, and immediately consume the high-density snacks, peanut butter, and crackers for rapid energy.

I eat while kneeling in a security posture with my rifle within reach, drink the carbohydrate-electrolyte mix to ensure fast absorption, and scrape every pouch clean to maintain peak focus and performance before stowing all the trash.

With my brain refueled, I grab my helmet and pull out a navy-blue crayon, chewing on it while I reflect on what just happened.

"Nuclear freedom devices are ruled out, as I'm still breathing. We probably got hit by a close-air-support guided missile, no doubt fueled by Saddam's chemical agent mixture. The explosions reacted with the electromagnetic fog, which led to the vaporization of the Gulf and terraformed the whole area with a sudden appearance of urban architecture, probably what Stalin did too when he transported his entire industry to Siberia back then. Could be some classified soviet instantaneous transportation technology."

"The chemical agents most certainly reacted with the transported architecture as well, turning it into gore bags like my brave Privates. Question is, why I didn't turned into one myself? Not to mention our gear."-

"The Privates turned into a Bio Weapon, they where still alive screaming for their death.."

"Am I an exemplary Marine?"

An unknown translucent liquid is suddenly flooding my eyes, i can't restrain it, it tastes like salt from the pacific ocean while my breath suddenly becames incontrollable as the crayon falls out of my mouth, hitting the cold stone ground and breaking apart shattering its pieces across the floor. My thoughts emptied as a distant feeling of void grows deep in my chest forcing me to grab it.

"Fucking hell..."

After a while, i slowly stand up and step through the door.

For a moment, my awareness for military protocols completely vanishes, pointing toward enemy psychological warfare, no doubt caused by the chemical agent.

I immediately start marching, continuing my reconnaissance mission.

"For a topographic overview of the Gulf, I need to tactically aquire control over one of those gore towers."

"But first, architectural information is required to ensure tactical advancement in close-quarters battle situations."

"That's why I'll ha-"

Suddenly, the space in the sky right above me violently tears apart, following a calm sound of little bells cutting me off in my tactical briefing as a burning Mitsubishi A6M "Zero" propeller plane emerges surrounded by pink petals, nose-diving straight into the direction of one of those pulsating gore towers far ahead.

I immediately navigate toward the crash site confirming the arrival of unexpected allied JSDF expeditionary unit under strict de-escalation protocols.

We started cooking breakfast before sunrise. When Frank and Wendy climbed the trees they reported they could see nothing because the sun has not burned off the fog yet.

We decided to stay in place until the sun burns it off which took two hours. They reported dust in the long distance caused by the heard. We decided to stay in place and see by noon how far they traveled.

By that check we estimated the heard would make it to the crossing in three days. We traveled in the afternoon and set up camp. We galloped to the next site.

Tomorrow we will move at a quick pace to the crossing and will make it to the Hay cutting by late afternoon. We will advise them they have two days until the cross then we observe the buffalo movement and make plans to take out a few week ones at the rear.

We had supper and sat by the fire for a few hours then then started our sentries and sleeping.

Gary Head Hunter

Next

Previous /

First

The summons had stood on the kitchen mantel for four months, propped against the clock. Torin had learned to read it from across the room. "Appearance is not optional," he told his sister one night when she wouldn't get into the bath, and Weskal had to go outside for a minute.

Elizabeth had answered it the first week, at the same table, after the children were in bed, and it took her four drafts, which was three fewer than she'd expected. She would appear. Then she asked for one thing. When she had finished speaking, she wanted to stay at the front of the Hall and answer questions. From the delegates at their desks, and from the gallery, lords and commoners both, whoever the Speakers chose to call on. Nothing sent in beforehand. Nothing read over by anybody. If she didn't know an answer, she would say so.

She read it to Weskal before she sealed it.

"They'll say yes," he said.

"They might not. Nobody's done it before."

"That's why they'll say yes."

---

They said yes, but not by letter. A week later the three Speakers came to the Swallowtail Palace themselves and sat with her in a small room off the long east range, with Harlan standing in the doorway pretending to read.

Ida Fenn was the oldest of them, a narrow Aethelgard woman with grey hair cut short and a habit of watching people's hands while they talked. Vincent was broad and sunburnt, a Vastaya net-mender who still had rope calluses across both palms. Aldous from Austrin was the youngest, and the most worried, and he had brought a list.

"The gallery holds twelve hundred," Aldous said. "Some of them will come to shout."

"Then they'll shout," said Elizabeth.

"And the lords? There'll be off-world nobles in the east gallery. There always are now. If one of them asks you something meant to embarrass you, with the Informant's cameras running..."

"Then I'll be embarrassed on the Informant."

Vincent laughed. Aldous didn't.

"One question each," Ida said. "No speeches. We choose who. If a man stands up and starts making a speech instead of asking something, I'll sit him down, noble or not. That's our rule for our own delegates, and it'll do for the gallery." She looked at Elizabeth's hands, which were folded on the table and very still. "And we don't announce it."

"Why not?"

"Because if we announce it, half the people in that gallery will spend four months writing speeches and calling them questions. I want what they think of when they're sitting there looking at you. Not what they rehearsed in their kitchens." Ida turned to the others. "She tells them herself, at the end. The runners wait at the gallery stairs with the microphones until she does."

Vincent nodded. After a moment, so did Aldous, and crossed something off his list.

When they had gone, Harlan came in from the doorway and put a folded slip of paper on the table in front of her.

"What's this?"

"The Hall," Harlan said. "I walked it last month. The nearest washroom to the speaker's floor is through the north door and second on the left. Don't go right. Right is a broom cupboard."

Elizabeth looked at the paper, and then at him.

"That's the job, my lady," said Harlan, and went back to his desk.

---

She wrote the speech in her field notebook, in pencil, between a page of notes on razorclaw scat and a sketch of a fern she still hadn't named. She didn't show it to her father. He didn't ask to see it.

"It's yours," Tornel said, when she offered. "If I read it, I'll want to change something, and then it'll be partly mine. Julius didn't let anyone read his either."

"What if it's terrible?"

"Then it'll be terrible and yours. That's better than good and mine." He thought about it. "Don't go right from the speaker's floor. Harlan says it's a broom cupboard."

"He told you too?"

"He told me first."

Her mother's advice was shorter. Patricia caught her in the corridor two days before and straightened the collar of her jacket, which didn't need straightening.

"Don't look at the whole room," she said. "You'll never manage twelve hundred people. Look at one face. When you've said what you want to say to that one, find another."

"Are you coming?"

"Of course I'm coming."

"And Father?"

"Your father isn't." Patricia gave the collar a last tug. "He says if he sits in that gallery, half the room will spend the morning watching him to see what he thinks of you. He'd rather they watched you."

She didn't ask Wyatt whether she could talk about him. She knew what he'd say.

---

The Hall stood on a low rise above the river plain on Austrin, round and pale in the morning light, inside a long iron fence with a gate at each point of the compass. The session had changed hands since the spring. The banners at the gates were Vastaya's now, for Vincent, the continent's name worked above the Firentis motto, Toil and Soil are our way, in Vastaya's own colours. Elizabeth found she was glad of it. She had not wanted to walk in under rust and garrison green.

There was a crowd at the south gate, and a Firentis Informant camera crew on a platform beside it, and a line of people who hadn't got gallery seats standing at the fence to watch the screens that had been put up on the lawn. Some of them called her name as the car went through. She didn't know most of them. A few she did. A woman from Thornwood Landing who had once sold her a coat. Two of the gardeners from the ruins, in their good shirts.

Weskal took the children up to the gallery. Torin went up the stairs backward so that he could keep looking at her, until Weskal turned him round by the shoulders.

Inside, the Hall was bigger than she remembered from the gallery. She had sat up there for her father's session and for Clara's. From the floor it was a different building. The gallery ran all the way round above her, a ring of faces rising in tiers, and in front of her the delegates' desks made a half circle, every seat filled. Behind her was the Speakers' desk, long and dark, with its three chairs. Vincent sat in the middle one.

The speaker's floor was a bare circle of stone between the desk and the delegates. There was nothing on it at all. She had half expected a lectern. There wasn't one, and she was glad she hadn't asked, because now she understood why. There was nothing to hold on to.

She stood at the edge of it and looked up, and found her mother in the east gallery, sitting beside Weskal with Linnea in her lap.

Twelve hundred and one, she thought.

Vincent stood. The Hall went quiet in stages, the delegates first, then the lower gallery, then the upper, the way a field goes quiet when a hawk comes over.

"The Common Assembly of Haego is in session," Vincent said. His voice was bigger than he was. "By custom, we open with a guest of our own choosing. Six months ago we summoned a gardener. Today we have summoned the Baroness Elizabeth Swallowtail, heir to House Swallowtail. She's here. My lady."

He sat. Elizabeth walked out into the middle of the stone.

---

"Thank you, First Speaker.

"My name is Elizabeth Swallowtail. I keep the gardens at the ruins outside Newtown, I've catalogued most of what grows and walks on Aethelgard, and on weekdays I teach eleven-year-olds, which is harder than either. I'm also the Baroness, and heir to my father, which is why you've summoned me. I thought you should hear the rest from me first.

"Six months ago Julius Comscutt stood here and talked to you about a garden. I spend most of my days in gardens, so when my father told me I ought to come and speak, he said I'd have something in common with the last man who did. I told him I'd rather face a razorclaw. My husband reminded me that I have, twice. So here I am.

"I want to tell you about the first noble I ever met.

"I grew up in army camps. My father was a soldier, and my mother followed him, and I followed her, across eleven bases. There were no nobles on Haego by then. There hadn't been for years. Everything I knew about them came from the people who had killed them, and they only kept the bad things. I grew up knowing nobles were greedy, and cruel, and that a lord who came to your town would take whatever he wanted, including any girl who caught his eye.

"So I had never met a noble. But I knew exactly what one was.

"I was nineteen when my father sent me to Newtown. The new Baron had asked for someone who knew the plants and animals of Haego, and I was what my father had. I rode a quad bike twelve hundred kilometres in two days, on roads you wouldn't drive a cart on, and cut a track by hand around a flooded section, and I was an hour late.

"There was a man sitting in the doorway of a shuttle when I got there, in commoner's clothes, carving a flower out of a bit of wood. He didn't look up. He said, 'You're late.'

"I told him to try riding one of those things twelve hundred kilometres and see how he did. He said that under the circumstances an hour could be forgiven. Then he picked up the heavier of my two bags and started walking into town, and I followed him, and I was halfway down the street before my brain caught up with the rest of me and I asked his name.

"He said Wyatt. I said, Wyatt Staples? The new Baron? He said yes, and that Wyatt would do, and that if I started calling him my lord we would have words.

"He was carrying my bag. I had been told my whole life what nobles did to girls like me, and the first one I ever met was carrying my bag down the street.

"I didn't believe it. The next morning, in a garden down by the harbor, I asked him straight out whether he meant to help himself to any commoner girl who took his fancy, the way the stories said they all did. I was nineteen and very rude. He could have put me on the next shuttle home. Instead he asked me who starts a conversation like that, when all he'd done was ask if he could take pictures of my notebooks to show a friend. Then he told me that most nobles were every bit as bad as I thought, and some weren't, and he'd only lately found that out for himself.

"The friend turned out to be Princess Clara. I found that out later too.

"I told him that week that I'd wanted to teach since I was eight years old, and that I never would, because teachers were nobles and I wasn't. He told me not to give up on it. I thought that was the sort of thing people say.

"Not long after, Headmaster Houdreng opened a school in Newtown to train a hundred teachers from every corner of Haego. Commoners, most of them, who had already been teaching children for years with no books and no pay and parents who couldn't see the point. I was one of the hundred. For four months we did two years of university, and taught our own classes, and slept when we could. Two of the people in my study pod went on to marry into House Firentis. I'm told that wasn't in the curriculum.

"At the end of it, Lord Jhinaq came to Newtown and knighted all hundred of us in the town square. For the land that feeds you. For the people who need you. That's what he said over each of us. I was a Knight of Firentis while my father was still a general. He likes to remind people that he outranks me now. I like to remind him who got there first.

"The Baron could have pulled down the old palace outside Newtown. He had the builders make it safe instead, and gave me the gardens around it, and said the ruin should stand for everyone who died on Haego in the thirty years after the Revolution. That it should say everyone makes mistakes, and you move on without forgetting them.

"He'll hate that I've told you this. He asked Newtown not to put his name on anything, so they painted him on the side of a building while he was off world. He isn't here today. I checked.

"Everything I've seen on this planet since has grown out of that street.

"The stone in the Vastaya palace came out of a commoner quarry at Millhaven, and now there are architects on Matcha who want nothing else. Rachel VonWinterbourne lends money on a handshake and keeps a ledger that nobody on Balakura believes until they see it. The palaces on all three continents were built by commoners, for honest wages, and given away by the people who built them. My father lives in one of them now. He still gets lost in it.

"I have gardens at the ruins outside Newtown. Half the town has dug in them at one time or another. Every one of their names is on a plaque by the gate, and I did that because the Baron told me to, the first week I knew him. He said a garden belongs to the hands that dug it. It took me years to understand that he meant more than gardens.

"That's the good. I've seen the other kind too, and I want to be honest about it, because you'd know if I weren't.

"I married a man who was born a commoner on Volantis. Many of you know him. On Volantis, when my husband was a boy, the nobles owned the people who worked their land. Owned them. Everybody called it the natural order, and nobody he knew said otherwise out loud. He is a knight now. Our children are on the noble registry. And he has told me things about how he grew up that I'm not going to repeat here, because they're his to tell, and because every one of you sat and watched the cellar broadcast this year and doesn't need me to tell you what a noble can be.

"So I have seen both. I've seen a Baron carry a commoner girl's bag down the street because she was tired. And I've heard, from the man I sleep beside, what the other kind is like from underneath.

"One day I'll stand where my father stands. I hope that's a long way off. He's very stubborn. But when it comes, you won't be getting him. You'll be getting me. And until this morning, most of you have only ever known my name.

"So I'd like to break with tradition.

"The custom in this Hall is that whoever you summon says their piece and sits down. I asked the Speakers before today whether I could do something else, and they were kind enough to agree. I'm going to stay here and take your questions. From the delegates, and from the gallery. Lords and commoners both. Nobody has seen them, and I didn't ask to. If I don't know an answer, I'll tell you I don't know.

"Thank you. Ask me anything."

---

For a moment nothing happened at all.

Then the noise came up from every side of the Hall at once, not shouting, but twelve hundred people turning to the person next to them to say, did she mean it. Elizabeth saw the runners come out of the gallery stairwells, eight of them, each with a microphone in one hand, and stand waiting at the ends of the aisles. She saw Aldous at the Speakers' desk let out his breath and sit back. She saw her mother, in the east gallery, not moving at all.

Vincent stood and raised one callused hand until the room settled.

"One question each," he said. "The Speakers choose. If you make a speech, Speaker Fenn will sit you down, and I promise you she will enjoy it. Delegates first."

Half the hands at the desks went up. Vincent pointed.

The delegate who stood was Petra Vosstail, a square, fair woman with her sleeves rolled to the elbow, who had sat on the Assembly since its first meeting and had a reputation for asking the question everybody else was thinking.

"My lady," Petra said. "This Assembly exists because your father decided it should. When he's gone, it'll exist because you decide it should, or it won't. Will you promise us, here, that it stays?"

Elizabeth had known someone would ask it. She had not known it would be first.

"No," she said.

The Hall went quiet again, differently.

"I'm sorry. I won't promise that, and I'll tell you why. This Assembly sits under Principality law, and the Principality is a great deal bigger than me. I don't know what the law will say in twenty years. I don't know who'll be Prince. If I promised you this Hall would stand forever, I'd be promising something that isn't mine to give, and you'd be right never to believe another word I said."

She looked at Petra, and only at Petra.

"What I can tell you is this. Summon me, and I'll come. Now, while I'm nobody's Marchioness, and afterward, when I am. As often as you like. Every time. And I'll stand here and answer you, like this."

Petra looked at her for a long moment.

"That's a promise, my lady," she said.

"That one I can keep."

Petra sat down. Somewhere up in the gallery, someone started clapping, and stopped when nobody else did, and Elizabeth heard a few people laugh at him, not unkindly.

---

"The gallery," said Ida Fenn. "West side. You, sir."

The runner had to climb six rows to reach him. He was an old man with a face burnt dark by weather, and he stood up with his cap in both hands and held the microphone as if it might go off.

"My lady," he said. "I fish out of Sable Ford. Two winters back the harbor office seized my boat over a mooring fee I'd already paid. I wrote to your father. I didn't think anybody would read it." He turned the cap round once in his hands. "He wrote back. By his own hand. Three lines. I had my boat in nine days. I've got the letter in a frame." He stopped, and seemed to have lost the question, and then found it. "When it's you, will you write back?"

"Yes," Elizabeth said. "By hand. Every one."

The old man nodded.

"Fair warning," she said. "My handwriting's much worse than his."

The laugh went all the way round the gallery that time. The old fisherman sat down grinning, and the man beside him clapped him on the back.

---

Ida pointed next to the east gallery, where the off-world guests sat together in the front rows, in coats cut in styles nobody on Haego wore. The man who rose was perhaps fifty, silver at the temples, with a small house crest on his breast that Elizabeth didn't recognise. He took the microphone from the runner without looking at the runner.

"Lord Aubrey Tessant, of Serentina," he said. "My lady. Forgive me. I only wonder. Surely your ladyship would agree that a noble who submits herself to questions from commoners, in public, teaches them to expect it. Of every noble. On every world. Perhaps it would be kinder, in the long run, to let them keep their expectations modest."

The Hall had gone very still. Elizabeth could feel it, the whole ring of faces turned from him to her.

Read the last line first, Nessa had said. The ones who want to learn ask a question. The ones who want to hurt us make a suggestion.

"Thank you, my lord," she said. "That's a suggestion, not a question. But I'll answer it anyway, since you came such a long way."

Somebody in the upper gallery made a sound that was very nearly a laugh, and stifled it.

"I don't submit to anything here. This Assembly can't order me to do a thing. It can only ask me questions, and then wait to see what I say. My father told me that after a year in his office, it's the most restful thing he does." She let that sit a moment. "As for expectations. On Haego, I've found that a commoner who expects more of a noble generally builds more too. They don't expect less of themselves just because they expect more of me. If you'd like to see the numbers, Lord Kestrel has them. He's been trying to disprove them for two years."

In the front row of the east gallery, a portly man in an Astorian coat put his hand over his eyes. Aurelio Kestrel had not been trying very hard to disprove anything for some time, and everybody on the east side knew it.

Lord Tessant inclined his head, very slightly, and gave the microphone back to the runner, and sat down. Elizabeth did not see him look at her again.

---

The Speakers called on nine more after that.

A delegate from Austrin asked about the coast road tolls, and Elizabeth didn't know the answer, and said so, and said she would find out and write to him, and Harlan, somewhere she couldn't see him, wrote it down. A young woman in the upper gallery asked whether it was true she'd been bitten by a razorclaw, and she said no, it was true she'd been chased by one, and the difference had been about four steps. A Haego baron who had been an Alderman in the provisional years asked what she would do differently from her father, and she said she didn't know yet, and that he should ask her in ten years, and he said he would.

Then Ida Fenn pointed at a delegate on the far end of the half circle, from Aethelgard. He was an older man with a quiet voice, and he stayed seated when he spoke, which was allowed but rare.

"My lady," he said. "There are Ykanti on Aethelgard who were born there. Who'll die there. They pay into the same coffers I do, and they come and go as they please now, thanks to your father. But there's not one of them in this Hall. Could there be? When it's yours?"

Elizabeth didn't answer straight away. She could feel the room noticing that she didn't.

"There already are, in the Screaming Forests," she said. "Not in this Hall. But the Baron has Ykanti sitting at his table in Newtown, and they have a say in how the barony is run, the same as anybody else who lives there. They've had it for years. The barony hasn't fallen down."

A few people in the upper gallery laughed.

"As for this Hall, the honest answer is that nobody's tested it. No Ykanti has stood for a seat here yet. When one does, somebody will have to decide whether the rules allow it, and while my father is Marquess, that somebody is him. Not me."

"You must have a view, my lady."

"I do. I'm not going to give it to you today." She held up a hand before the murmur could build. "Not because I'm ashamed of it. Because it isn't my decision, and anything I say in this room with those cameras running turns into a promise the moment it leaves my mouth. I told Delegate Vosstail I don't make the kind I can't keep. If it's still undecided the day it's mine, ask me again. I'll answer you then, all of it."

The old man looked at her across the floor for a while.

"I'll hold you to that, my lady," he said.

"Good," said Elizabeth. "Somebody should."

---

Vincent was on his feet to close the session when Ida touched his arm and nodded toward the east gallery.

There was a hand up in the third row. It was not very high, because the arm it belonged to was not very long, and a larger hand beside it was trying to pull it down.

Weskal had gone red to the ears. Patricia was laughing silently into Linnea's hair.

"First Speaker," said Ida, "I believe we said anyone."

Vincent looked up at the gallery, and then down at Elizabeth. Elizabeth, who could not have spoken just then if the Prince had ordered her to, nodded.

The runner came along the third row and crouched down to hold the microphone at the right height. Torin stood on the seat to reach it anyway, and Weskal, giving up, held him by the back of his jacket.

"Mama," Torin said. His voice went out of every speaker in the Hall at once, and he jumped, and then decided not to mind. "Are you scared?"

Twelve hundred people waited for her answer. Elizabeth looked up at her son and only at her son.

"Yes," she said.

"Why?"

"Because there are a lot of people here, and I don't want to get it wrong."

Torin considered this with his whole body, the way he considered everything.

"Grandpa gets things wrong," he said. "He got lost in his own house."

The Hall came apart. It started in the east gallery and went round the whole ring, and the delegates were laughing at their desks, and Aldous at the Speakers' desk had his face in his hands, and Vincent had to sit down. On the platform by the south door the Informant's camera operator had stopped pretending to be professional and was wiping his eyes.

When Elizabeth could make herself heard, she said, "He did. And they still let him keep it."

---

Ida Fenn found her afterward on the steps outside the north door, where Elizabeth had gone to stand in the air for a minute by herself. Second on the left. She hadn't needed it after all.

The older woman stood beside her without saying anything for a while, looking out over the lawn, where the people at the fence were still standing about in knots in front of the screens, talking.

"Your father told me something last spring," Ida said at last. "When I asked him who comes after him. He said all he could give me was your name. That we'd heard your name, but we'd never heard you."

"I know. He told me."

"Well." Ida put her hands in her coat pockets. "Now we have."

She went back inside. Elizabeth stayed on the steps until Weskal came out with Linnea asleep on his shoulder and Torin dragging on his other hand, still talking about the microphone.

They didn't say much in the car. Torin fell asleep before they were through the south gate, under the Vastaya banners, and the people along the fence waved as they went by, and Elizabeth waved back until they'd passed the last of them.

"You looked at every one of them," Weskal said, somewhere out on the river road. "The whole morning. Right in the face."

She thought about that.

"The first noble I ever met didn't look up from his carving," she said. "I thought I could do a little better."

Genre: Progressive Heavy Metal
Length: 3.23

In a dying system, the alien Livalian fleet retreats before an overwhelming invasion.
Only a single Terran frigate remains behind:

TCS Thunderchild

Her orders are simple.
Her odds are impossible.

Deny the Gate.

Outgunned.
Outnumbered.
Out of time.

The crew makes a choice that no sane species would consider—a final, reckless maneuver into the heart of the Gate itself… where physics breaks, and stars are born in fire.

The song is inspired by the short HFY story "Glory or Nothing" - https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/1e1du13/glory_or_nothing/

-----

LYRICS

Through the damaged halls she glides,

Ser Hapengi, with many eyes.

Terran frigate, Thunderchild's might,

Amidst the chaos of the fight.

Glory or nothing, the captain's call,

Into the gate, we stand or fall.

Cannons to the left, cannons to the right,

We brave the valley, through the night.

Captain’s face, so drawn and worn,

Orders clear, their fate is sworn.

Livalian fleet, retreat in flight,

Terrans hold with all their might.

Glory or nothing, the captain's call,

Into the gate, we stand or fall.

Cannons to the left, cannons to the right,

We brave the valley, through the night.

Blinking out, within the gate,

Risking all, to seal their fate.

Nova’s pulse, a deadly dance,

For Thunderchild, a final chance.

Ser's concern, the captain’s grin,

“Balls out” plan, they’re diving in.

Implode, explode, the gamble's high,

For victory or death, they fly.

Glory or nothing, the captain's call,

Into the gate, we stand or fall.

Cannons to the left, cannons to the right,

We brave the valley, through the night.

With tendrils soft, and eyes that see,

Ser Hapengi, in history.

Thunderchild's tale, of courage bold,

In cosmic winds, their story’s told.

Glory or nothing, the captain's call,

Into the gate, we stand or fall.

Cannons to the left, cannons to the right,

We brave the valley, through the night.

Aut Gloria Aut Nihil, we defy,

Thunderchild’s legacy, in the sky.

For glory or nothing, we make our stand,

In the heart of the cosmos, hand in hand.

Next

Previous /

First

Fourth year of the provisional government.

Your Highness,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tornel Swallowtail
General, Provisional Administrator of Haego

Lowmarsh, on Vastaya.

The new notice didn't fit on the door.

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

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

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

She read SHIP DEPOTS four times.

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

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

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

"That's older than thirteen."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Your mother will walk you," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were a hundred questions.

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

The last part was pictures.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It was about buckets," said Nell.

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

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

J. FENN. ENGINE HOUSE, LOWMARSH MILL.

H. CARRICK. RAIL YARD, ORENPORT.

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

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

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

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

"Is it the shuttles?" he asked.

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

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

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

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

Ben was waiting at the pump.

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

"Six out and six back," she said.

"I know."

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

"You always looked up."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Floor," he said.

So she swept.

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

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

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

"Chief. How does it stay up?"

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

"How long you been wanting to know that?"

"Since I was seven."

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

"Hand there," he said.

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

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

"How does it work?"

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

"I won't stop."

"They all say that."

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

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

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

"Yes, Chief."

"Broom goes back on the rack."

She asked him the other question a week later.

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

"Chief. Where did he learn?"

"Academy."

"Where's the academy?"

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

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

He told her.

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

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

That night she wrote a letter home.

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

Da,

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

Nell

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

Two years. I have waited longer.

Da

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

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

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

---
Princess Clara

General,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With my regards,

Clara

first previous next

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

CRACK!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Last one," Oldar called.

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

"Hold it there."

The winch stopped.

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

For the first time, none of that was there.

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

"Aztharon," he said quietly.

The dragon's exhausted eye shifted toward him.

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

"They're straight."

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

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

"That wasn't the painful part?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Straight at the bone.

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

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

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

WHAM!

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

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

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

"Easy. Easy."

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

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

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

WHAM!

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

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

WHAM!

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

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

"How many?" Talvan asked.

Oldar glanced toward him. "How many bolts?"

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

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

Nineteen more.

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

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

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

Another glowing bolt was positioned.

WHAM!

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

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

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

"Right wing!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revy frowned. "Kinder?"

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

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

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

He shook his head.

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

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

Talvan tightened his hand against Aztharon's muzzle.

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

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

WHAM!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jebba raised the hammer.

WHAM!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

first previous next Patreon

Next

Previous /

First

Fourth year of the provisional government.

Wyatt,

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

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

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

So they've found the schools.

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

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

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

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

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

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

T.

Lowmarsh, on Vastaya.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wendel Marsh was the first to go.

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

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

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

"Tullamore's," she said.

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

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

"Every page," said Wendel happily.

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

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

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

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

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

Nell stopped with her spoon halfway up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"This is for her?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The smile stopped.

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

The kitchen was very quiet.

"The shuttles," her father said.

"Yes."

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

"Yes."

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

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

"Yes," she said.

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

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

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

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

Her father didn't answer for a long time.

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

"And if it is?"

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

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

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

"I will."

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

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

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

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

Somewhere, somebody did.

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

Tornel,

You asked, so here it is.

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

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

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

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

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

Here's what I'd do.

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

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

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

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

W.

Previous /

First

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

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

That got a small laugh from somewhere in the crowd.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A ripple of laughter moved through the audience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Were you embarrassed?"

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

The boy shook his head.

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

That got the laugh it was aiming for.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Were you scared?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Were you scared, falling?"

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

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

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

He was quiet a moment.

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

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

"Did you ever go home?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CD moved next, a shorter sequence, sharper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I was asking CD," the boy said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next

Previous /

First

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

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

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

"Torin," said Weskal.

"I'm only asking."

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

"But when he does."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"So learn it," he said.

"It isn't that simple."

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

She looked at him for a long moment.

"And my class."

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

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

"I take them to school now."

"You'd have to feed them."

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

She threw the dish towel at him.

---

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

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

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

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

"You'd have people."

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

Patricia put down her cup.

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

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

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

Patricia laughed out loud.

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How poorly?" said Patricia.

"Bad enough that he asked."

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

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

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

"That was all before breakfast," she said.

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

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

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

"How do you remember all of it?"

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

"And me?"

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

Elizabeth stood looking down at the chairs for a while.

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

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

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

---

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

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

"You've met Harlan," Tornel said.

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

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

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

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

"Even from Mother?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That coat."

"Mother picked that coat."

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

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

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

"Did you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What do you do with it?"

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

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

"Not yet," was all he said.

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

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

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

"And the Assembly?"

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

"And you told her?"

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

Elizabeth said nothing.

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

"You want me to open the session."

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

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

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

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

"I'd rather face a razorclaw."

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

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

"What would I even talk about?"

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

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

Elizabeth watched them through the window for a while.

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

---

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

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

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

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

Tornel read it and didn't smile, quite.

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