Thanks to u/Womble-1 for the idea behind this story.  I am going to make up most of the stuff about the Hierarchy, so if I get it wrong, the sooner you let me know, the more I will be able to fix it.

The Hierarchy: Chapter 1, The Envoy's Brief

Envoy Varkesh Torlan read the report on the Drazzan survivors for the fourth time on the transit and still did not like it.

It was short, which was the first problem. The Hierarchy's reports ran long when the news was good, because everyone down the chain wanted credit, and short when it was bad, because everyone wanted to be gone. This one was three pages. The Ykanti who had come out of the Drazzan holds had been picked up by a Principality relief ship, treated, fed, and returned to Hierarchy space without a demand or a question. Then they had been debriefed, and then they had been separated from each other.

"You have read it enough," said Ressil Anuk from across the cabin. She was his junior aide, young for the post, and she had been told to say nothing on this trip unless asked. She said things anyway. It was the reason he had picked her.

"I am looking for what they left out."

"They left out that it frightened them." She kept her eyes on her own screen. "I spoke to one of them before the debriefers took him. He said the Ykanti on Haego have a street. An ordinary street, with shops. He said it twice, as if I hadn't understood."

Torlan set the pages down. His colors had dulled on the transit, the way they did when he slept badly. "Who built the shops?"

"Ykanti hands. He said they told him so as though he had asked. And there is a school. And a woman on the council of the Screaming Forests who was born in the same district as his mother." Ressil finally looked up. "He was not afraid of the Humans, Envoy. He was afraid of how it felt to stand there."

Torlan said nothing. Below the viewport Astoria turned in the light, with more orbital traffic than the whole Hierarchy fleet could have scheduled. He had been told to count the ships on approach. He had stopped at four hundred.

"We are here to ask for a visit," he said. "The Council calls it a courtesy. We look in on our own people and see whether they are well. If they are well, we say so. If they are being used, we say that instead."

"And if they are well, and happy, and do not want to come home?"

Torlan was a long time answering. "Then I send a very different report from the one the Council expects."

He heard it as he said it. Ressil did too, and had the sense to look at her screen again.

---

The Prince received them in a room smaller than Torlan had prepared for.

He had expected a hall. He had read about the halls, the banners, the nobles in rank order, the long walk to the dais that was meant to make a visitor feel his own size. There was a table instead, with a window behind it and eight chairs. The chairs on the Hierarchy side had been set low. Someone had measured. Torlan noticed it, and found he did not know whether it was a courtesy or a remark.

A man in plain dark clothes sat at the head of the table, and he stood when Torlan came in. It was done correctly and without warmth, the way one stands for a guest who is owed it. No Hierarchy ruler had ever stood for an envoy. The man was not old, which was the first surprise. The second was how tired he looked, in the way of someone who has been awake for years rather than hours. He did not offer a name or a title. Two nobles flanked him, a heavy man in grey who did not bother to hide his dislike, and a thin woman who took notes and said nothing.

"Envoy Varkesh Torlan. Sit." The Prince waited until Torlan had done it. "I read your request. You wish to visit Haego."

"We do, Your Highness. We wish to confirm the welfare of our people there."

"Your people." The Prince said it flatly, and it landed harder than a raised voice would have. "There are Ykanti on Haego who came out of the Drazzan holds, and others who came after. How many of them were left behind by your space?"

"I would need to consult the records."

"You know the number. I would rather it not be said in this room."

The thin woman looked up from her notes. It was the first time she had done it since they sat. "Highness, if I may. I have read a great deal about the Ykanti on Haego. Every one of them has a single name. The envoy has two."

"Yes." The Prince did not look at her. He kept his eyes on Torlan. "The ones you have read about are workers. Drones, in the Hierarchy's word, not mine. They were given one name because the Hierarchy did not think they would need a second. Everyone in the Hierarchy proper has at least two. The envoy has two. The head of his corps has three, and the one who leads the Hierarchy has four."

Torlan had not known what he expected the man to say. It was not that. The four names of the Hierarchy's leader were not written in any Principality file he had ever seen, and no human had said the word drone in his hearing without a smile on it. It was accurate, and it was said without one.

Beside him, Ressil Anuk shifted by the width of a feather and was still.

"That is correct," Torlan said, and found the words came out level.

The Prince folded his hands. "You may go. Haego is Lord Jhinaq's ground and the Marquess's charge. I have told them both you are coming. Go where you like and speak to whoever you like. No one will walk beside you to tell you what to say."

The man in grey shifted. "Highness, a word."

"Later, Lord Bessemer."

"It is not only a courtesy we are discussing. These people will ask for them back."

"Then they may ask," the Prince said. "I am not afraid of the question."

Torlan had spent thirty years in Hierarchy service and had learned to hear what a ruler left unsaid. He had prepared for a refusal, the long argument, the concession traded for a concession. He had prepared for a leader who guarded his possessions. He had not prepared to be told yes before he asked.

"You are generous, Your Highness," he said, and heard how flat it came out. "Or confident."

"I am neither. I am telling you what the policy is."

"Then I must ask whether the Principality would object if any of our people wished to return with us."

"Object?" The Prince looked almost surprised, and the look was gone at once. "I will not stop one of them from boarding your ship. I will not put one of them on it. If a Ykanti on Haego wants to go home, they may go, and I will see they have the passage. If they want to stay, they stay. That is the whole of my policy. It is short."

The thin woman had stopped writing. Lord Bessemer looked at the table.

Torlan understood then what the Hierarchy had gotten wrong. They had come to bargain for the Ykanti as if the Ykanti were cargo and the Prince were a merchant who could be talked down. But there was nothing to buy. The man across from him had already given away the one thing the Hierarchy knew how to bargain for, which was control. What remained was a question the Hierarchy had never once had to ask. What would the Ykanti themselves choose?

"We accept," he said.

"Good." The Prince rose, and the others rose with him. At the door he turned back. "Envoy. The Marquess will tell you the same thing I have, and he will say it plainer. Do not mistake that for hostility."

Ressil waited until they were deep in the corridor before she spoke. "He said yes."

"He said we could try," Torlan said.

"He did not smile once. Humans smile when they are being generous. I have watched them do it for years, and it is always a little insulting."

"He was not being generous," said Torlan. "He was being exact."

"The Council sent us to pull our people home."

Torlan kept walking. In the window at the end of the corridor the sky was full of ships going about their business, no two on the same errand, none waiting for permission. He thought of the street the survivor had described, and of his own district on his own world, where nobody had ever built a shop that was not first approved by someone above him.

"Pack light," he said. "I want to see it before anyone has time to tidy it."

In 2699 the Ash Nation was formed separately from the Commonwealth of Sol with making sure that they remained completely separate from the Commonwealth. The Ash Nation grew out of the old anti-ritual colonies and the secular networks M.I.D once only called terrorist cells. It is not a pirate haven and not a Commonwealth member. It is a recognized government on the far side of a negotiated current, holding three star systems and a capital world it calls Furthest.

The Ash Nation’s space is a tight cluster, reached by a single negotiated Abyssal route that the treaty opened and both sides monitor.

• Yggdrasil — the gateway system: The receiving station and the treaty port sit here along with their capital, traffic in and out of Ash space is supposed to pass this way. The world that anchors the gate is industrial and blunt; the Ash do not bless fuel.

• Ra — the bright system. Higher insolation, more energy infrastructure, the place the Ash put their heavier industry and their shipyards, the world Gagarin is the only habitable planet with it being very rocky and full of mountains.

• Odin — the outer system of the three. Colder, more scattered, used for deep extraction and for the long watches toward directions the Commonwealth does not yet claim. Odin is where Ash patrols are thickest and where visitors are least welcome and the harsh world Typhoon resides as it is full of relentless storms.

Furthest is the capital world in the Yggdrasil system, on the settled side of the gate. It is not the richest body in Ash space, It is the one they chose to govern from a hard, thinly atmosphered world with sealed cities and a council seat that faces the gateway rather than the sun, Ash political culture treats Furthest as the proof they are not a gang. Ministries, a small fleet headquarters and the treaty mission all sit there, Commonwealth diplomats are received. Commonwealth chaplains are not invited to open anything.

The Treaty of Yggdrasil
The treaty is the document that made the Ash Nation a government in Commonwealth law. Its public terms are short.
What the Commonwealth gave:
• Recognition of the Ash Nation as the legitimate authority in Yggdrasil, Ra, and Odin.
• Transfer of an older Abyssal Drive generation and not the current C.D.F. standard, but enough for Ash ships to use the negotiated current and to maintain their own gate hardware under inspection. The Commonwealth did not hand over modern Drop-field practice or strategic systems.
• A defined gateway regime: scheduled slots, shared storm warnings, and liaison officers at the Yggdrasil receiving station.
What the Ash Nation accepted:
• A ban on hiring, harboring, contracting, or trading with pirate organizations. The same ban binds the Commonwealth. Neither side may use the other’s enemies as privateers.
• No Ash military presence on the Commonwealth side of the current except liaison and declared transit.
• Inspection rights on the transferred drive technology so it is not quietly improved into a peer fleet.

(Let me know what y’all think 🙌)

Next

Previous /

First

Tornel had never set foot on the Noirnavio. He had seen it in the sky a dozen times and on a screen a hundred, and he had signed papers that mentioned it, but he had never gone aboard. When Clara asked him to come, he understood why a call would not do. She wanted to see him say it.

Wyatt flew him up himself in a shuttle, and he said almost nothing on the way. The Informant crew that followed Tornel everywhere had been left on the landing pad at Newtown, grumbling. Clara's rule, Wyatt had told him. Her ship, no cameras.

The hangar was larger than Tornel had pictured, and quieter. He had spent his army years around soldiers and knew how a deck sounds when the people on it are afraid of the officer walking through. This one did not sound like that. A senior petty officer, a woman with grease to the elbows, looked up from a landing strut, saw who it was, snapped a salute, and went straight back to her work. Nobody froze or hurried. Two crewmen argued about a hydraulic line as he passed and did not lower their voices.

"They always do that," Wyatt said. "She'd be upset if they stopped."

Clara's quarters were at the end of a long corridor and smaller than a marquess would have guessed. Cynthia stood inside the door in her red armor with her arms folded. A table was set with a plate of pastries and two glasses of juice, one of them already poured and placed at the chair meant for him.

"That's all, Wyatt," Clara said.

Wyatt looked at Tornel, nodded once, and left. The door sealed behind him.

"General," Clara said, and gestured to the chair. Her violet eyes did not leave his face. "Sit. Eat something. I want you slow and honest and a little tired. Tell me what you want to do, in your own words, the way you'd tell Patricia."

Tornel sat. He did not touch the pastry. "I want to knight two people. I don't know how it's done."

"Who?"

"Kathleen and Julius Comscutt Sr."

Clara nodded slowly. "The Comscutts. Poppy's grandparents. I know who they are."

He told her the rest. He told her about the girl in the alley and the old woman and the man at the rail, and he said Kathleen's name and Julius's more than once, without meaning to, and as he talked he noticed how closely she watched. She was not looking at his words. She was looking at his hands, then his jaw, then back at his eyes. At one point he stopped, lost for a word, and she said, "No, keep going. That part was true."

When he finished, she sat back.

"There isn't a real method," she said. "People imagine there is. A marquess says the words and signs the notice for the House Rolls, and it's done. You could say nothing special at all. Walk up to them, tell them they are knights, file the paper. It would be just as binding."

"That's what I was afraid of. It feels too small."

"I know. I watched your face when you said their names. It isn't small to you." She turned her glass a quarter turn on the table. "Then don't make it small. You'll be on the floor of the Hall with the Informant's cameras on the east balcony, and half the Principality watches Assembly sessions now. If you do it there, everyone sees it. Decide whether you want that, because it can't be quiet afterward."

"I want it seen."

"I believe you. Then make it a real occasion. Say what's true and keep it short enough that you can't hide behind it."

"Don't tell them first," Cynthia said.

Clara closed her eyes for a moment. "She's right, and I'll deny I said so. A surprise only works if they think it might be bad for the first few seconds. Otherwise they spend the whole time bracing for the honor."

"Bad for them," Tornel said slowly. "They're old enough to remember what it meant to be told to kneel."

"Then you'll be the one who lifts them up," Clara said. "That's the difference. Make sure they can see it."

She pushed the plate an inch toward him. This time he ate.

---

He got home late and did not sleep much. Near midnight he went to the wardrobe in his dressing room and took down the long flat case from the top shelf. Inside, wrapped in oiled cloth, was the sword in its scabbard.

It was a plain officer's sword, issued to him the day he was commissioned, more than thirty years ago. He had never drawn it for anything but a parade ground. He had polished it himself every year since, because the orderly who offered once had been politely refused. The grip had worn to the shape of his hand.

He sat with it across his knees for a while. Then he wrapped it again and set the case by the door.

In the morning he gave it to Harlan Ashtail, who had been his adjutant for fifteen years and had not asked a question about a strange order in all of them.

"This goes to the Hall with us," Tornel said. "Out of sight. Carry it in with my papers. Nobody at the door will ask the Marquess's adjutant what is in a case, and nobody in that building is to be told. If I look at you, bring it to me."

Harlan took the case. He looked at it, then at Tornel, and something in his face settled. "Yes, my lord."

"Will the Comscutts be there today?"

"They have not missed a session, my lord. Mistress Comscutt keeps the same seats every time, east gallery, near the rail. Her son and his wife sit with her, and the two children."

"Good. Say nothing to them." Tornel picked up his papers. "You haven't asked what it's for."

"I've worked for you a long time, my lord," Harlan said. "I'd rather watch."

---

It was the fourth session since the first hearing, a year on, and the Hall was full again, as it had been every time. The Register's names had been read into the record at the opening, as the recommendation required, and the Marquess's summons had become the first business after them. The last question came from Delegate Edda Marsh, who had put it to him at every session: how many were left.

He answered it standing, as he always did, and he did not round anything up.

"The old soldiers guessed two hundred thousand, in the first week," he said. "In a year they have found a hundred and sixty thousand and written every name into the Register. Ninety-one thousand of those are housed or mended. The first hundred and sixty were the easy ones. They were in the alleys and the barns and under the bridges, and the soldiers knew where to look. The last forty will be harder, and I won't pretend otherwise. They are further out, and better hidden, and some of them do not want to be found."

"Of the hundred and sixty, sixty-nine thousand are found and still waiting. Some are waiting on a bed or a physician, and that is mine to answer for. Some are waiting because they said no. There are men and women on that Register whom the war left unwell in their minds, and they will not come indoors. I will not drag them. Nobody on Haego is to be forced under a roof. But they are not to be left, either. Someone from the Register goes to each of them every day, the same someone, with a meal and a blanket, until the day they say yes. If the day never comes, the someone goes anyway."

He paused. Edda Marsh had stopped looking at her papers.

"There is one more number, and it is the one I said I would find. A year ago a woman stood in this Hall and asked me how many never made it as far as an alley. I told her I did not know. I know a part of it now. We have the names of nearly nine thousand who took their own lives in the years since the war. We are going to their families. We go to sit with them. We do not go to count them. Care for these soldiers does not end when they die. It goes to whoever they left."

When he finished, the Hall was quiet. It had learned at the first hearing that it could put hard questions to the man who signed its budget. It was still learning what to do when he answered every one of them straight.

Vincent leaned toward his microphone. "If there are no further questions for Lord Swallowtail, the Assembly thanks him for his answers and dismisses him."

Tornel did not move toward the exit. "Before you close this, I ask leave to speak."

Vincent paused. Along the long desk, the other two Speakers glanced at each other, and Tornel saw that neither had been told. "The hearing is concluded, my lord. What is the matter?"

"It isn't a question, and it isn't part of the hearing. I have no business raising it without the Speakers' leave. I ask for it now."

Another look passed along the desk. "Leave is granted," Vincent said slowly.

Tornel turned to face the gallery. Twelve hundred seats rose in a ring around him. On the east balcony the Informant crew had already swung their cameras toward him. He found the Comscutts in the third row near the rail, where they had sat at every session, with Julius and Aaliyah beside them and the two children between. Kathleen and Julius Sr. were sitting close together.

"Julius Comscutt Sr.," he said. "Kathleen Comscutt. Come down to the floor."

Kathleen's hand went to her husband's arm. From where he stood Tornel could see her fingers tighten. A murmur went through the delegates' half circle. In the row, Poppy started to rise, and Austin caught her by the sleeve and held her where she was.

They came down slowly. The gallery stair had a rail, and Julius Sr. kept one hand on it the whole way. They crossed the open floor to the front, and every step carried in the silence. Tornel had given orders to soldiers most of his life and had never once disliked it. He disliked it now.

"Stop there," he said. "Kneel."

He watched it reach them. Kathleen went white. Julius Sr. did not move. Forty years had passed since the Revolution and neither had forgotten what it meant when a lord used that word in that tone. For a moment Tornel thought he had made a mistake he could not repair.

Then Julius Sr. exhaled through his nose, took his wife's hand, and lowered himself to the floor. Kathleen followed. They knelt side by side. He looked straight ahead and she looked at the boards.

Tornel looked at Harlan.

Harlan came across the floor with the long case in both hands and opened it without a word. Tornel took out the sword and let the cloth fall away. The sound of the blade clearing the scabbard was very small in that room, and every person in the gallery heard it.

"A girl found a man with no legs sitting at the bottom of an alley with an empty tin cup," Tornel said. "He had fought for this planet, and no one had looked at him in years. She told her grandmother. Her grandmother could have walked away. People did, for a long time. I did."

Kathleen's head came up a little. In the third row, Poppy had her notebook open on her knee and was not writing in it.

"I run this world, and I missed him," Tornel said. "Wyatt Staples built a hospital on a beach and missed him. Two people who were servants before there was an Assembly did not miss him. They wanted to shout it from every screen on the planet, and then they chose to bring it here, to the people who could fix it, and ask for help instead of blame. They had no land, no title, and nothing to gain. They did it because it was in front of them."

He lifted the sword.

"I have seen a great many things called noble in my life. Most were not. What these two did is the most noble thing I have ever witnessed, and I will not let a notice in the House Rolls say it quietly."

He touched the flat of the blade to Julius Sr.'s right shoulder, then his left.

"Julius Comscutt Sr., by the authority of the Marquess of Haego, I name you a knight of House Swallowtail. Rise as Sir Julius Sr."

He turned to Kathleen. Her hands shook in her lap.

"Kathleen Comscutt, by the same authority, I name you a knight of House Swallowtail. Rise as Lady Kathleen."

Neither of them moved. Tornel handed the sword back to Harlan, held out both hands, and took hold of each of them. It took no great strength to lift them. They rose together, unsteady, and he did not let go until they stood level with him.

Kathleen's hand started toward his and stopped. A commoner never offered a noble her hand. Then she seemed to remember that it was no longer so, and she put her hand into his.

"Thank you," she whispered.

"No," said Tornel. "Thank you."

He did not let go of their hands. "I am not finished," he said, "and neither are you." He raised his voice, so the gallery could hear it. "A year ago I stood at that lectern and was asked who would keep my promise to the soldiers, if not me. I have my answer. By the authority of the Marquess of Haego, I appoint Sir Julius Comscutt and Lady Kathleen Comscutt the first heads of Haego Veterans' Affairs. Their charge is the Register, every name on it and every name still to come, the living and the dead. House Swallowtail puts one million credits behind them, from today."

Kathleen's mouth opened and closed. "My lord," she said, very low. "We were a gardener and a maid."

"You were the two who looked down the alley," said Tornel.

Julius Sr. said nothing at all. His hand had closed hard on Tornel's.

Tornel turned to the desk, and the Hall. "A million will not be enough, and I know it. It is a start, so nobody can say the work waited for the money. I ask the Common Assembly to fund it further, once Sir Julius and Lady Kathleen have shown you what this is and how large it needs to be. They will come to you with a complaint and a solution in the same hand. I'd ask you to hear them out."

In the third row a child began to clap, alone, standing on her seat so she could be seen. Austin was up beside her a moment later, then Aaliyah and Julius, and then it spread along the gallery, slowly at first and then all at once, and the delegates were on their feet. On the east balcony the cameras kept running.

Vincent let it run for a long moment before he raised his hand. "The Assembly has heard the Marquess's request," he said. "Sir Julius, Lady Kathleen, the Hall will summon you at the next session." He glanced at Tornel. "With a complaint and a solution in the same hand, my lord. I believe that is the rule."

---

They found a side room off the Hall's north corridor, because Kathleen had said she needed a chair and a wall. Aaliyah got there first. Julius came a step behind her and stopped in the doorway, and the children slipped in under his arm.

Julius Sr. sat with his hands flat on his knees, looking at his own hands. Kathleen stood by the window.

"I thought he was going to have us put out," she said. "When he said kneel. I thought, that's it, we've gone and done something. Forty years, and my knees knew before I did."

"Mum," Julius said.

"I'm all right." She turned around. Her eyes were red and her chin was up. "I'm a lady. At my age. I don't even know what a lady does. And now I'm to run an office."

"Don't look at me," Aaliyah said. "I was born a Firentis and nobody ever explained it to me either." She crouched beside the chair. "You don't have to know all of it, Kathleen. Daisy and I didn't, when we opened the palaces. We found out who did know, and we asked them to help. Maybe we should ask Lady Daisy."

"Lady Daisy." Kathleen let out a laugh that broke in the middle. "Lord help us, two ladies and a knight, and not one who knows." She crossed the room and sat down next to her husband, and he put his arm around her without looking up.

Poppy climbed onto the arm of the chair on Kathleen's other side. "Do I have to curtsy now?"

"You do not."

"Austin says we should."

"I said no such thing," said Austin. He was standing very straight by the door, watching his grandmother the way he watched anything he meant to remember. "I said he made you kneel first on purpose. So everybody could see him lift you."

Kathleen looked at him for a long moment. "Yes," she said. "I think he did."

"Dirt you can scrub off," she said, to nobody in particular. "Dirt that's back by morning." She wiped her face with the back of her hand. "Well. That's one thing that won't be back by morning."

Author’s note: Welcome back to the main story. If you read the side chapters, 63.1 through 63.7, thank you for taking the detour with me. One thing from them carries forward. At the end of 63.7, Tornel knighted Julius Sr. and Kathleen into House Swallowtail, and that gives their son Julius the lesser title of Knight as well, as their child.

For anyone who needs a reminder of where the main story stood, here’s Chapter 64. If you want to re-read it, here is a link: Chapter 64

Previously, in Chapter 64: Rachel VonWinterbourne found that Lord Edmund Rask, a lord from House Gimore’s territory, had twelve people on his timber payroll but was shipping timber that would take around two hundred workers to produce. He had also hidden most of his sales from the tax office. Elizabeth took the case to Speaker Aldous, and the Assembly summoned Rask. He decided nobody could make him come back and left Haego on his private yacht. His foreman took two hundred and four workers to the Austrin spaceport to follow him, but a passenger clerk noticed that none of them carried a bag and called the port police.

Chapter 65 picks up from there.

Previous /

First

The Austrin port had a passenger lounge meant for three hundred people, and at two in the morning it held two hundred and four.

Somebody had brought blankets. Elizabeth never found out who. By the time her shuttle came down, they were on every shoulder in the room, grey port-issue blankets and a few that looked like they'd come off somebody's own bed. The night staff had opened the food counter and nobody had told them to. Two cooks from the transit canteen were ladling soup into paper bowls, and a third was cutting bread as fast as she could.

The workers from Corvell ate the way Elizabeth had seen hungry children eat in the camps when she was small, with one arm around the bowl.

Her father was standing near the windows with Corwin Hale. Tornel was still in his office shirt, sleeves rolled, and he looked older than he had at supper. Hale looked the way he always looked, tired and careful, a widower who had learned to hold himself still.

"My lady," Hale said, and bowed his head.

"How many have spoken?" Elizabeth asked.

"About a dozen, properly. The rest are waiting to see what happens to the ones who talk." Hale nodded across the room. "Detective Voss has been with them since eleven."

Elizabeth knew the name. Everyone in her father's office knew it. Sella Voss had been a junior detective the year of the datapad fraud and had come out of it with Vane's approval, which people said was harder to get than a Marquess's. She was older now, broader in the shoulders, her hair cut short. She was sitting on the floor in the middle of the lounge with her back against a pillar and a bowl of soup of her own, talking to the woman from the second row.

"Mira Oakhollow," Hale said. "She answered to her name about an hour ago. She's the one most of them look to."

Elizabeth saw the camera then. It sat on a tripod in the far corner by the windows, its red light dark, and next to it a woman in a long coat was writing on a datapad with her head down. Margot Wren. The Firentis Informant kept a crew on her father whenever he left the palace, and they'd have been on the shuttle behind his.

"They came in with me," Tornel said, following her look. "I told them no faces. Not tonight, and not until these people say so."

"Did they agree?"

"Wren did. She's been sitting on her hands for three hours." He almost smiled. "I think it's the hardest work she's ever done."

"And the foreman?" Elizabeth asked.

"In a holding room," said Hale. "He says he's Lord Rask's man and nothing else. He's said it forty times."

"Is he bonded too?"

Hale looked at her with something like approval. "He says so. Born to it, like the rest. He carried the keys." He paused. "Sella thinks he may have been the one who had to use them."

Elizabeth didn't go to Sella straight away. She went to the soup counter instead, because her mother had told her once that you don't walk into a room full of frightened people as the Marquess's daughter. You walk in as someone carrying something.

She took a tray of bread from the cook and started down the rows.

The first woman she reached saw the Swallowtail colors on her coat and tried to get to her knees. Two more did the same, then a man with a bad leg, and within a few seconds a ripple had gone out across the lounge, people pushing blankets off and getting down on the floor.

"No," Elizabeth said. "Please. Don't."

Nobody got up. They didn't know how to take an order not to kneel.

Sella Voss set her bowl down and got to her feet. She didn't raise her voice.

"On Haego," she said to the room, "nobody kneels in a port lounge at two in the morning. The lady's brought bread. Sit and eat it."

A few of them looked at Mira. Mira looked at Elizabeth for a long moment, and then she sat back down on her blanket, and after that the rest did too.

Elizabeth handed out bread until the tray was empty. Nobody spoke to her. A small boy of about six took his piece in both hands and bit into it without once taking his eyes off her face, as if she might ask for it back.

When she came back around to the pillar, Sella moved over to make room on the floor, and Elizabeth sat down next to her.

"His name was Tobin," Mira said.

She said it quietly. She had a flat Corvell accent that rounded off the ends of words, and she kept her eyes on Sella rather than Elizabeth.

"He was on the big saw. The one in the long shed. In the winter the belts get stiff and you have to clear them by hand when they jam. You're not meant to do it while it runs." She looked at her hands. "But the tally was short that week, and if the tally's short you don't eat until it's made up. Nobody's hands, all of us. So he didn't stop it."

Sella didn't write anything down. She had a recorder going on the floor between them and she left it alone.

"What happened after?" she said.

"Dunmore took him down by the river. Under the white tree. The next morning there was a stone." Mira's jaw tightened. "Lord Rask came up from the lodge the day after that and looked at the tally sheet, and he said it was a pity about the belt."

Elizabeth sat very still.

"Where was the tally kept?" Sella asked.

"On the wall in the long shed. By the door."

"And your papers?"

"In the lodge. In the office. In a box." Mira hesitated. "We weren't allowed in the lodge except to clean it."

"How long ago was Tobin?"

"Last winter." Mira thought. "Before that, there was a girl. Her name was Anne. She was sick in the spring and she didn't get better. She's under the white tree too. I don't know if there's more. We were brought in two ships, a year apart. The ones from the first ship would know."

Sella nodded slowly. She reached over and switched off the recorder.

"Thank you," she said. "That's enough for tonight. We'll go up at first light and see for ourselves, and then we'll talk again."

Mira looked at her, then at Elizabeth, then back.

"What happens to us?"

"Nothing bad," Sella said.

"That's what they said on Corvell," Mira said. "When they put us on the ship."

Nobody had an answer to that. Sella didn't try to give one. She just nodded, as if Mira had told her something she needed to know, and after a while Mira lay down on her blanket and turned her face to the wall.

"She's right not to believe us," Sella said, much later, outside on the landing apron where the air was cold and clean. Elizabeth's father had gone to find Harlan. The sky over the port was starting to go grey at the edges. "Everything they've been promised has been a lie. I'd rather she waited to see."

"Do you think there are more graves?" Elizabeth asked.

"I think we'll know by noon." Sella looked at her. "You don't have to come up the ridge, my lady."

"My father's going."

"Your father was a soldier."

"My husband grew up on Volantis," Elizabeth said. "Under the same people who hold Corvell. He's never told me much about it. I think I'd like to know what he didn't tell me."

Sella studied her for a moment. Then she nodded, once, the way Vane used to nod when someone gave him an answer he could use.

"Then stay behind me, my lady, and don't touch anything."

They went up in three police transports and an air car, with the sun just coming over the ridge.

Jason and Daisy were already there.

Their car was parked at the edge of the lodge clearing with its doors still open, and Daisy was standing in front of it with her arms wrapped around herself, looking at the long shed. She didn't turn when the transports landed. Jason came over to meet them. He bowed to Tornel, correctly, and to Elizabeth, and then he forgot about correctness entirely.

"General," he said. "We've been here twenty minutes. Nobody's gone in. Hale's people said to wait for the detective."

"Good," said Sella, stepping down. "Thank you, my lord."

"The door's padlocked," Jason said. "On the outside."

Sella looked at the long shed for a moment. Then she took a camera from her kit and photographed the door, the lock, the hasp, and the ground in front of it before anyone else was allowed within ten meters. Her people did the same with the lodge, the mill, and the path down to the river.

Elizabeth went and stood next to Daisy.

"I grew up in Orenport," Daisy said, without looking round. "My father worked the harbor cranes. We were poor. Everyone was, then. There were nights we didn't eat." She pressed her lips together. "But nobody ever locked us in."

The police cut the padlock at a quarter past six.

The Informant crew had set up at the edge of the clearing, behind the police line, where Sella had put them. Nobody went inside until Sella's people had finished photographing the door. When they had, Sella looked across at Margot Wren and nodded once, and the red light on the camera came on.

The long shed was exactly what Mira had said, and it was worse to stand in than to hear about. It was one room, bunks three high down both walls, and one stove at the far end that couldn't have warmed half of it. There was a row of buckets by the door. There were no windows that opened. The bunks had thin pads and no blankets. A few had things tucked into the corners, a carved bird, a ribbon, a bundle of letters in a hand Elizabeth couldn't read.

On the wall by the door, exactly where Mira said, was the tally board. It was a grid of names down one side and days along the top, filled in with chalk, and at the bottom, in a different hand, a column headed Ration.

Elizabeth read down it. Some of the ration boxes had a line through them.

"Don't touch it, my lady," said Sella quietly, behind her.

"I wasn't going to."

Sella photographed the board from six angles. Then she went down the rows, bunk by bunk, and photographed every carved bird and ribbon and bundle of letters, and had each one bagged and labeled with the bunk number.

"They'll want these back," she said, to nobody in particular. "Whatever else happens, they get these back."

The lodge office was locked too. Inside, behind the desk, there was a steel box with Rask's crest on the lid. Sella's people had it open inside ten minutes. It held two hundred and nine bond papers, each one with a name, a birth date, a Corvell registry mark, and the Rask seal. Five of them had a line drawn through the name.

Tobin Ashgrove. Anne Fallow. Three more that Mira hadn't mentioned.

Beside the box was the real ledger.

It wasn't the one Rask had filed with Rachel. It was the one he kept for himself, in his own hand, and it had every cubic meter of timber and every credit the buyers had paid, and one other column that none of his filings had, headed Bond Upkeep. The figures in it were tiny.

Tornel stood over the desk and read it for a long time without saying anything.

"He kept it," he said at last. "He kept the true one. Right here in the office, where anyone could find it."

"He never expected anyone to look," said Hale. "Why would he? Where he comes from, nobody would."

The white tree was a river birch at the bottom of the path, where the bank flattened out. There were five stones under it, flat river stones set in the grass, and on each one a number had been scratched with something sharp. They weren't names. They were numbers.

Elizabeth stopped at the edge of the grass and looked at them, and found she couldn't go any closer.

Jason went down on one knee beside the nearest stone. "We should get them out of here," he said. "Today. They shouldn't have to lie here one more night."

"My lord," Sella said, "please don't."

Jason looked up.

"If we lift them now, with shovels, we lose half of what they can tell us," Sella said. "The medical examiner from Kessit is two hours out. I'd like her to do it properly. I'd like every one of them to have a name on the report and a cause beside it, in writing, so that when this goes to the Hall there isn't a single word anyone can argue with." She paused. "They've waited this long. Two more hours won't hurt them. It'll only help them."

Jason stayed where he was for a moment. Then he nodded and got up, and he took his coat off and laid it over the stone, and after that he went and stood with his wife.

Tornel came down the path and stood next to Elizabeth.

"You can go back up, Lizzy."

"I know."

She didn't go. Neither did he. They stood by the river birch in the cold with the water going past, and after a while her father put his hand on her shoulder and left it there.

"This was a tax case," she said.

"Yes."

"Nine hundred thousand credits. You told me it wasn't the thing we could act on."

"It wasn't," Tornel said. "Not then."

"If Rachel hadn't counted the timber. If the clerk had just stamped the papers." Elizabeth swallowed. "He'd have taken them home, and nobody here would ever have known they existed."

Her father didn't answer. There wasn't anything to say to that.

The report went to Speaker Aldous at four that afternoon, under Corwin Hale's seal, with Sella Voss's name on the investigation line. It ran to sixty pages. It had the photographs, the bond papers, the true ledger, the tally board, the examiner's findings on all five graves, and Mira Oakhollow's account in her own words. Aldous read it in his small office by the river and didn't reach for his list once.

When he was finished, he took out another sheet of grey paper.

The summons already stood. It said the same thing it always said. It named no charge. But under it, in the Assembly's record, where the matter to be answered was written, Aldous crossed out Underreporting of revenue from Rask Timber and wrote something else, and signed it, and had it copied to the Marquess.

At the port that evening, Sella Voss did one more thing before she went home to sleep.

She had the bond papers brought down from the ridge in their steel box, and she set up a table at the end of the lounge, and one at a time she called the names. Two hundred and four people came up, one after another, and she handed each of them their paper and said, "This is yours. Nobody holds it but you."

Most of them took it and didn't know what to do with it. Some held it the way you hold a thing that might burn. A few put it inside their shirts, flat against their skin.

Mira Oakhollow came up near the end. She took her paper and looked at it for a long time, at the Corvell registry mark and the Rask seal and her own name written in someone else's hand.

"I've never read it," she said. "I didn't know what it said."

"Can you read?" Sella asked.

"A little."

"Then read it now."

Mira read it. It took her a while. When she got to the end she looked up, and for the first time since the desk at the terminal, she looked straight at Elizabeth.

"It says I owe him my life," she said. "And my children's lives. And theirs."

"It says that on Corvell," said Elizabeth. "It doesn't say anything here."

Mira looked at the paper again. Then she folded it in half, and in half again, and put it in her pocket. She didn't tear it up. Elizabeth thought she understood why. It was the only thing with her name on it that she'd ever been allowed to keep.

The Informant ran it at nine that night.

There were no faces. Wren had kept her word. There was the long shed with its three-high bunks and one stove, the buckets by the door, the tally board with the ration boxes struck through, and the steel box with the Rask crest on the lid. There were five flat river stones under a birch tree, with numbers scratched into them instead of names, and a man's coat laid over the nearest one. Wren didn't say whose coat it was. She didn't have to. Half of Austrin had seen Jason Firentis in it.

By midnight it was on every world the Informant reached.

Tornel flew back to Aethelgard that night. Elizabeth went with him, because the letter to Volantis had to be written and her father had said, on the landing apron, that he wanted her to write the first draft.

"Why me?" she'd asked.

"Because mine will say things I can't send," he'd said. "Yours will say the true things. I'll take out whatever I can't afford to put in."

She sat up with it in the small study in the family wing until nearly three, with Sella's report open beside her, and she wrote it four times.

It was hard to know where to begin. In the end she began with a name.

Previous /

First

The Noirnavio.

The orders came on a Tuesday, because everything at Kalin came on a Tuesday, and they came as two lines on two screens, the way things always came.

Report to the Noirnavio, Wing Command. Transport arranged.

Nell read hers in the mess. Across the room, at the table by the serving line, Del read his. He didn't look up. Neither did she. Caldwell came through the mess a few minutes later with his hands behind his back and a look on his face that Nell had never seen there before, and he stopped by her table and said, "Well, Brackentail," and nothing else, and went on.

He saluted them both on the docking platform, the morning they left. Nobody else was there. Nobody ever watched anyone leave Kalin. He held the salute for three seconds, and so did they, and then he nodded once and walked away before the transport door had closed.

---

Nell had seen big ships before. She had watched the Firentis relief ships come down over the long field, and she had seen the frigates at the academy, and once, from the cockpit of her Raptor, she had seen a Navy cruiser pass through the Tessic Varn on its way somewhere more important.

She had not seen anything like the Noirnavio.

It came up out of the dark in the transport's forward viewport and kept coming, and kept coming, until it filled the glass from edge to edge and there was still more of it. It was black, the way they said. Not painted black. It seemed to take the light and keep it. The transport slid in toward one of its flight decks, and the deck opened like a mouth, and the light inside was warm and yellow, and there were Raptors on the rails in rows longer than the long field.

Del, in the seat across the aisle, had gone very still.

"Have you seen it before?" said Nell.

"Once. From a long way off." He didn't take his eyes off the viewport. "My father took us to a review at Astoria when I was twelve. It went past the stands at the end. Everyone stopped talking."

The flight deck was loud and busy and smelled of fuel and hot metal, the way every good hangar did. A woman in a deck crew vest with a Senior Petty Officer's bars met them at the bottom of the ramp with a board under her arm. She had a voice like a gravel road. She looked at their boots first, then at the ace pins on their collars, two marks on each, and then at them. When she got to Nell, she stopped, and something in her face eased.

"Warrant Officer Nell Brackentail," she read, though she didn't look at the board to do it.

"Yes, Chief," said Nell.

The writing on the board was small and square, every letter standing up on its own, and Nell knew it before she knew the face. She had letters in that hand in the tin in her kit bag, about tool hands, and walk-arounds, and how a deck is run.

"Chief," Nell said again, and this time it came out differently.

The deck boss gave her one short nod. That was all. On a flight deck, in front of her crew, Nell understood that it was a great deal.

"Lieutenant Lord Delacourt."

Nell had not heard his title said aloud like that in two years. Not all of it at once. It sounded like somebody else's name, a long formal thing that had got lost on the way to Kalin and had only just caught up with him. He said, "Yes, Chief," in the same flat quick voice he used on the channel, and the deck boss wrote on her board, and Nell looked at him sidelong and found he was looking at her the same way.

"Walk-arounds on this deck are done my way," said the deck boss. "You wrote me yours take twice as long as anybody else's, Brackentail. I'm told his do too. Good. Don't hurry them for me." She tucked the board under her arm. "Now stand there. You're being collected."

"By whom, Chief?" said Del.

The deck boss looked past them, toward the far end of the deck, and something moved at the corner of her mouth.

"By him," she said.

---

He was coming down the deck toward them, through the crews and the carts and the Raptors, and people were stepping out of his way without seeming to notice they were doing it. He was not tall. He was not old. He wore a flight officer's working uniform with nothing on it but his rank, and he walked like somebody who had walked a flight deck ten thousand times and meant to walk it ten thousand more.

Del came to attention so fast that Nell heard his heels hit.

"That's a Lieutenant Commodore," Del said, very low, without moving his lips. "That's the Wing Commander. That's Baron Staples. Why is the Wing Commander collecting two new pilots off the deck himself?"

Nell didn't answer. She couldn't.

She had written to him for five years. She had written to him from a bunk at the academy with her face still wet, and from the service corridor with Navero's broom going three short strokes and a pause, and from Kalin the night after Tessic 11. She kept his letters in a tin. She had never once seen his face. She had imagined it, the way you imagine a voice on a radio, and she had imagined it wrong. He looked younger than his letters. He looked tired, and kind, and like somebody who had been punched a good deal in his life and had decided to stay standing anyway.

Wyatt stopped in front of them. Del saluted. Nell saluted, a half second late, because her hands had forgotten how.

"Lieutenant," said Wyatt. "Warrant Officer." He returned the salute. His eyes went to the pin on her collar, and the two marks on it, and stayed there a moment. Then he looked at Nell, and his face changed, only a little. "Nell."

"Sir," Nell said. Her voice came out smaller than she meant. "Lieutenant Commodore."

"Wyatt," said Wyatt. "I did ask."

Nell stood there for a second. Five years of letters. A tin in her locker. A bunk at the academy, and a service corridor, and the night after Tessic 11.

Then she stepped forward and put her arms round him.

She heard Del make a sound behind her that she had never heard him make before, like a man watching somebody walk off the edge of a flight deck. A commoner had just put her arms round a Lieutenant Commodore, in front of half a hangar crew. A Baron. On the flight deck of the Noirnavio.

Wyatt didn't go stiff. He didn't step back. He laughed, a short surprised sound, and put his arms round her and held on, and when she let go and stepped back he was smiling all over his face, and so was the deck boss, and a good part of the crew who had stopped to watch.

"Well," said Wyatt. "Hello to you too." He turned to Del, who was still at attention and looked as if he would stay that way for the rest of his life. "At ease, Lieutenant. She's been writing to me since she was sixteen. I think we can skip the salute." Then, to both of them: "Come with me. Somebody wants to see you before you do anything else, and it's not a request."

Beside her, Nell felt Del go stiffer still.

---

The corridors of the Noirnavio were clean and bright and full of people who nodded to Wyatt as he passed. Commoners, most of them, in crew coveralls, and some of them said "Sir," and some of them said "Wing Commander," and one, a big man with a scarred face and a staff sergeant's stripes, said "Staples," and got a nod back that was different from the others. Nobody on this ship seemed to be afraid of anybody. Nell kept noticing it. She kept waiting for the flinch, the half step aside, the eyes dropping as the Wing Commander passed, and it never came.

They went up. They went a long way up. The corridors got quieter and wider, and the doors got further apart, until they came to a pair of doors with two marines outside them, and a crest on the wall above that Nell didn't recognise and Del plainly did, because he made a small sound in his throat like a man who has stepped on a stair that wasn't there.

Wyatt knocked once and opened the door.

---

The room beyond was not what Nell had expected. She had expected gold, the way they had it in the stories Maddy Tuscutt used to tell, all silk and candles. It was a working room. There was a long table covered in reports, and a window onto the stars that took up one whole wall, and a chair by the window with a woman in it, and another woman standing by the door, with hair the colour of deep water, who looked at them the way the deck boss had looked at their boots.

The woman by the window stood up.

She was younger than Nell had thought she would be. Not very tall. Fair hair pinned up plainly. A uniform not very different from Wyatt's. Her eyes were violet, a colour Nell had never seen in a face before, and they took in everything at once. If Nell had passed her in a corridor at Kalin she would have taken her for an officer, and a good one, and then she would have turned round to look at those eyes again.

Delacourt stopped just inside the threshold as if he'd walked into a wall. He took one step forward, exactly one, brought his heels together, and bowed from the waist, deep and still, with his eyes on the floor. He held it.

Nell, who had never in her life been in a room with a Princess and had not the faintest idea what you were supposed to do in one, saluted.

Then, because nobody said anything, and because the woman by the window was looking at her with an expression that was very nearly a smile, and because at home in Lowmarsh you said hello when you came into someone's kitchen, she said, "Hello."

Delacourt, still bowed, made the stair sound again.

The Princess laughed. It was a real laugh, short and surprised, and she put a hand over her mouth afterward as if it had got away from her.

"Hello," said Clara. "Nobody has said that to me in this room in about six years." She looked past them. "Wyatt, would you step out? I'll call you when I want you back."

Wyatt looked at Nell for a moment. Then he nodded, and went out, and the doors closed behind him.

"Lieutenant Delacourt," said Clara. "You can stand up. You've done it beautifully. My mother would have been delighted with you."

Delacourt straightened. His face had gone a dull red, the same red Nell remembered from the library, the night before the navigation paper.

"Your Highness," he said. "Thank you, Your Highness."

"Sit, both of you."

Nell sat. She sat at once, in the nearest chair, because she'd been told to. Then she saw that Delacourt was still standing, stiff as a post, waiting, and that he was not going to sit until the Princess did, and she understood that she had got it wrong again, and she stood back up.

The Princess watched all of this with great attention. Then she sat, and Delacourt sat, and Nell sat again, and the woman by the door, who had not moved at all, said in a dry voice, "That was very well done, all three of you."

"This is Cynthia," said Clara. "She keeps me alive. Don't mind her."

"I mind everyone," said Cynthia.

---

They talked for a long time. Afterward Nell could not have said exactly how long. The stars went slowly past the window, and somebody brought pastries and a jug of juice, and Clara poured it herself and pushed the plate toward them until they each took one, which made Delacourt look as if he might need to lie down.

She asked about Kalin. She asked about Caldwell, and when Nell told her about the salute on the docking platform, she was quiet for a moment and then said, "Good. I hoped he would." She asked about Tessic 11. She asked about the scissors at Tessic 4, and made them explain it, and made them draw it on the back of a report, and when they both reached for the pencil at the same moment and then both pulled their hands back, Cynthia made a small noise by the door that might have been a cough.

She told them what the Noirnavio was. That nobody on this ship got flogged. That nobody on this ship called anybody a donkey. That titles were for the parade ground and the court, and on her deck a pilot was a pilot, and a commoner who could fly would fly ahead of a noble who couldn't, and anybody who didn't like it was welcome to find another ship. She said it plainly, without any heat, the way you'd describe the weather somewhere you lived.

"I promised Lord Swallowtail once," she said, "that I would be on the flight deck to meet the first pilot from Haego when she came aboard. I was told, rather firmly, that if I did, her first week aboard would be very difficult." She looked at Nell. "I've learned a little about that. So I had Wyatt fetch you instead, and I waited here, and it was one of the harder things I've done this year."

Nell didn't know what to say to that.

"And you turned me down," said Clara.

Nell's stomach dropped. "Your Highness, I'm sorry, I didn't mean..."

"Don't be sorry." The Princess leaned back. "I'd have turned me down too. My own flight is very beautiful and nobody in it has fired a shot in anger in ten years. You'd have been bored inside a month, and I'd have had a very well-dressed pilot who never found out what she was." Her eyes went to Delacourt. "I'm told you turned someone down as well, Lieutenant."

"My father, Your Highness."

"How did he take it?"

Delacourt considered the question honestly, which Nell had not expected. "Badly, Your Highness. He's come round a little. My mother wrote last month to say he's been telling people at dinner that his son is on the frontier by choice, as though it were his idea."

Clara laughed again, and this time she didn't cover it.

---

It was near the end, when the plate was down to crumbs, that she said it.

"You should both know," she said, "how long I've been watching you."

Nell looked up.

"You," said Clara to her, "since you were a schoolgirl. Lord Swallowtail used to write to Wyatt about a girl on Vastaya who sat under a schoolroom window because her parents wouldn't let her in the door. A girl who asked her teacher how the shuttles stayed up. He didn't know your name for years. He only knew you were there. Wyatt read the letters on the flight deck and I read them over his shoulder, which he pretends not to mind." She smiled. "I knew about the pump stone before you'd ever heard of me."

Nell sat very still. She thought of the dirt under the window, and the row of B's, and the chalk. She thought of her father's hand on the round glass of a shuttle window, looking down at the cane. She had never once imagined that anyone had been looking back.

"And you, Lieutenant," said Clara, turning to Delacourt, "since you tipped a bucket of mop water over a hangar floor."

Delacourt's face did something complicated.

"Your Highness," he said, "how could you possibly..."

"There's an Ykanti who sweeps the corridors at that academy," said Clara. "Navero. Navero writes to my head engineer. Jincho reads me the good parts." She folded her hands. "Navero was very thorough. The colour of the water. The four trips to the drain. The lieutenant with the house crest. The way you put your boot out on the way past and knocked the bucket over, and the noise it made. Navero said it sounded like a bell."

There was a silence.

Nell looked at Delacourt. Delacourt looked at Nell. His face had gone the dull red again, all the way to his ears, and for a moment he looked exactly the way he had looked in the hangar, the moment she took the bucket out of his hand and said, "Yes, Lord Delacourt." His jaw had dropped a little, like a man reaching for a stair that wasn't there.

She had done that face at the commoners' table. She had done it so many times, and Ilse had done it badly for a week.

It came up out of her before she could stop it. She laughed.

She put her hand over her mouth, the way the Princess had, and it didn't help. And then, from the chair beside her, came another sound, and she turned and saw that Del was laughing too, with his head back and his eyes shut, helplessly, the way she had never heard him laugh at anything in five years.

They laughed until Nell's ribs hurt. They laughed until Del had to wipe his eyes with the heel of his hand. Clara watched them, smiling, and took a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed the corner of her own eye with it, and by the door, Cynthia looked at the ceiling and said, "I did keep the list of heads, you know. In case."

That set them off again.

When it finally stopped, Nell sat with her hands in her lap and her face hot, and looked across at Del, and he looked back at her. They were not friends. She didn't think they ever would be, quite. She would still argue with him about the third crossing at Tessic 4 until one of them died. But she knew what they were. So did he. It was written on both their faces, plain as a stripe of paint across a bolt.

"Well," said Clara, and tucked the handkerchief away. "I think I can call Wyatt back in now."

---

Wyatt came back in as if he'd been standing on the other side of the door the whole time, which Nell suspected he had. He looked at the two of them, red-faced, and at the empty plate, and at Cynthia studying the ceiling, and said nothing at all. It was a very Wyatt way of saying nothing. Nell had read five years of letters written in exactly that silence.

"The Commander's waiting," he said. "Then Jincho. Then you can sleep."

---

Commander Redford's day cabin was smaller than Clara's and much tidier. There was a desk, and a chair behind it, and a man in the chair who did not get up.

He was older than Wyatt, grey at the temples, with a face that looked as if it had been carefully arranged some years ago and left that way. Six report folders were squared on the desk in front of him, one on top of another, with their edges lined up exactly. A seventh lay open beside them. Nell recognised Caldwell's handwriting on it upside down, the same cramped, sloping hand that had signed her promotions.

"Lieutenant Delacourt," said Redford. "Warrant Officer Brackentail."

They came to attention. He let them stand there. He turned a page of the open folder, and then another, as if they were not in the room at all.

"Commander Caldwell writes a thorough report," he said at last. "Six of them, over two years, and this one, which he sent on the same transport as the two of you, as though he didn't trust me to remember who you were." He closed it. "He's right not to. I forget most people. I haven't forgotten either of you."

He looked at Nell for a moment longer than he looked at Del. She couldn't tell why. Then he looked at Wyatt, who was standing by the door with his hands behind his back.

"You were a good deal more trouble at their age," said Redford.

"Yes, sir," said Wyatt.

Redford turned back to them.

"I said in a letter to your commander that I had no interest in breaking up a pair that works. I meant it. Lieutenant, you'll have your own wedge. Warrant Officer, you'll fly as his second. The Wing Commander has picked the other three. You'll meet them tonight." He squared the seventh folder on top of the other six. "That's all. Welcome aboard the Noirnavio."

"Thank you, sir," said Del.

"Thank you, sir," said Nell.

Redford had already picked up the next report.

---

Jincho was waiting for them at the bottom of a ladder three decks down, in a corridor that smelled of hot metal and coolant and something green and growing that Nell couldn't place.

The head engineer was Ykanti, small and bright and bristling, with a crest the colour of a forge fire that stood straight up the moment Jincho saw them and did not go down again. There was grease on every one of Jincho's twelve fingers. A tool belt hung round the feathered waist with more tools on it than Harl had owned in his whole life.

Jincho looked at Nell. Then at Del. Then at Nell again, with the head tipped to one side in a way Nell knew from a service corridor at the academy.

"So," said Jincho. The voice clicked at the edges, like Navero's, but faster, and the words came out as if they'd been cut short to save time. "This is Water Girl." The crest dipped at Del. "And this is Buckets."

Del opened his mouth. Nothing came out of it.

"I'm sorry," said Nell. "What did you call us?"

"Water Girl. Buckets." Jincho was already walking. "Navero tells me everything. Come. Is a long way."

Del turned to Wyatt, who had come down the ladder behind them. "Sir. Lieutenant Commodore. Is that..."

Wyatt shrugged. "Jincho calls Her Highness Pretty Eyes," he said. "To her face. In front of the Commander. Jincho calls me Worm Brain, and has done since the day I came aboard." He started after the engineer. "It could be worse. You can take it as an honour, because it is one, or you can get angry. Either way it won't make the slightest difference. It never has."

Nell looked at Del. Del looked at Nell.

"Buckets," he said, under his breath, with deep and settled horror.

"You did bring it on yourself," said Nell.

---

The hangar Jincho took them to was smaller than the main flight deck and much quieter. It was clean all the way into the corners. Nell noticed that first, the way she always did, before she noticed anything else, and when she looked round she found that Jincho was watching her notice it.

There were five fighters on the rails.

They were Raptors, but not the Raptors from Kalin. The lines were the same and everything else had changed. The nose was longer. The engine housings sat further back and closer in. There was a second set of hard points under the wings, and the canopy was a single piece of something darker and clearer than glass. The paint was the Noirnavio's black, and it swallowed the hangar lights the same way the ship did.

"Mark Two," said Jincho, and walked up to the nearest one and laid a hand on its nose, the way Harl used to lay a hand on a housing to feel it hum. "Faster. Better shields. Better guns. Better everything. I build them. I build these five for you." The crest came down a little, and went up. "Wing Commander tells me you do your walk-arounds twice as long as anybody. Good. Do them three times as long on mine. I like that very much."

Del walked round the first Mark Two once, slowly, without touching it. Then he walked round it again.

Nell didn't walk round hers. She went and stood under the nose, and put her hand flat on the cold dark metal the way she had in a hangar at Harrow Cross when she was fourteen, and felt for the hum. It was there. It was deeper than the Raptor's. It was deeper than anything she had ever felt, and it went up her arm and into her chest and stayed there.

"There," said Jincho quietly beside her. "You feel it."

"Yes."

"Most pilots never touch. They climb in and go." The crest lifted. "Navero says you touch everything."

---

The other three pilots were waiting at the end of the hangar, standing at the kind of attention people only manage in their first week aboard a ship. Wyatt brought Nell and Del down the line.

"Your wedge," he said. "I picked them. I'll tell you why some other time."

The first was older than anyone Nell had ever flown with. He had grey stubble and a face weathered like old saddle leather, and he stood at attention the way a man does when he has stood at it ten thousand times and no longer sees the point in making it look hard. There was an ace pin on his collar with more marks on it than she could count at a glance.

"Warrant Officer Dace Merrin," said Wyatt. "Twenty-six years in cockpits, and most of them somewhere nobody wanted to be. Now he's going to fly on yours."

Merrin looked Del up and down, and then Nell, taking his time about it, the way Harl used to look at a new apprentice.

"I'm told you two do a thing called scissors," he said.

"Yes," said Nell.

"I'm told nobody else knows you're going to do it until you're already doing it."

"Yes," said Del.

"That'll stop," said Merrin. It wasn't unkind. It was the voice of a man stating the weather. "You'll tell the rest of us first. The void doesn't care how good the two of you are. It only cares whether the other three knew where you were going."

Del opened his mouth. Wyatt looked at him, and he shut it again.

"He's there to keep you both alive long enough to get old," said Wyatt. "Listen to him. I would."

Del closed his mouth. Then he looked at Merrin, properly, the way he'd once looked at a board outside a mess hall that told him something he didn't want to hear.

"Understood," said Del. "What else?"

Merrin's eyebrows went up a fraction. He had plainly expected an argument from a young lord and hadn't got one.

"We'll start with that," said Merrin.

The second was a quiet dark-haired girl from one of the mining worlds, very straight, with a burn scar across the back of one hand. "Pilot Sela Marr," said Wyatt. "She grew up on an outpost a lot like the ones you flew for. Ask her about it sometime. Not tonight."

The third was a woman about Nell's own age, lean and sunburnt, with a Seagull pilot's squint and a rank patch that had been sewn on and taken off and sewn on again.

"Pilot First Class Tamsin Reeve," said Wyatt. "Two years on the Corrane picket. Eleven confirmed."

Nell looked at her. She knew the face. She'd seen it across the simulator hall, over the top of a console, more than once. It took her a second longer to find where. Then she had it, and it came all at once, the way the answer to a sum does after you've stared at it too long.

"The wingman trials," said Nell. "Third year. You were second on the board, and you were only second by half a point. You nearly had me on the last run."

Reeve smiled, slow and pleased, as if she'd been waiting two years for somebody to say so.

"Nearly," she said. "You broke early on the final pass. I was sure you'd gone too soon. You hadn't."

"You were right behind me the whole way."

"I know. I watched you do it from about thirty metres." She glanced at Del. "We were all in the back rows at graduation, you know. When they read his posting out, the whole back row heard it. We talked about nothing else on the transport out."

Del looked at the far wall of the hangar. Nell didn't laugh, quite.

---

Later, when Wyatt had taken the new pilots off to find their bunks and Del had gone with them, Nell stayed behind in the hangar. Jincho was on a stool under the nose of her Mark Two with a panel off and a light in one hand, doing something to the inside of the fighter that made small satisfied clicking noises.

"Chief Engineer," said Nell.

"Jincho."

"Jincho. Can I ask you something?"

The crest came up. "Ask."

"Navero," said Nell. "At the academy. Navero wasn't always a sweeper. Navero made star charts, for thirty years, before. Good ones. Good enough that a small wrong line on one kept a whole world hidden." She took a breath. "You have ships here that go past the edges of the charts. Is there any way to get Navero a posting here? Not sweeping. Charts."

Jincho put the light down. For a long time the engineer didn't say anything, and the crest stayed very still, and Nell wondered whether she had said something wrong, the way she had in Clara's quarters, not knowing the rules.

"Seven years," said Jincho at last, "I ask for that. I ask the Commander. I ask Worm Brain. I write the forms. Nobody answers. Navero is small and bright and sweeps, and people think sweeping is what Navero is." The crest came down, slowly, and came up again, which Nell had learned meant a smile. "Now Water Girl asks. Water Girl who has been in Pretty Eyes' quarters for two hours, and made her laugh, and made her use the handkerchief." Jincho picked the light back up. "I think this time somebody answers."

Nell went to her new bunk that night on the Noirnavio, in a room with a door that closed, and lay on her left side, and found that there was no gap in the roof to look at the stars through.

She didn't mind. She knew where they were.

---

Mistress,

I know now.

Not half. All of it. The wings, and the thing in the housing that hums when everything else is shut down, and the maths behind it that used to be the back half of a borrowed book. I know it well enough to explain it to a boy who draws pigs, which you always told me was the only real test.

I'm not going to write it down for you. You said you'd like to hear it, so I'm going to come and tell you, out loud, at your window.

That will be sooner than you'd think. I'm on the Noirnavio now. It is the biggest thing I have ever seen, and it is black, and there is a flight deck on it longer than the long field. My Wing Commander is the Baron of the Screaming Forests, and his home is on Haego, and he goes home more often than anyone would expect of a man in his position. When he goes, I go with him. It's only a short hop from the Forests to Vastaya.

I met the Princess. I said hello to her. I'm told that isn't how it's done, but she laughed, so I think it was all right.

I still have the chalk. The stub you dropped in my lap under the window when I was nine. It's in my pocket right now, with Starling. It went to the academy, and to the frontier, and it's come all the way to the Noirnavio, and it's hardly any shorter than the day you gave it to me, because I've never been able to bring myself to use it.

You told me a school wasn't for knowing everything. It was for finding out who does. I found them, Mistress. Some of them have feathers. Some of them have titles, and one of them tipped a bucket of water on me once, and now he flies on my wing. One of them wrote to me for five years and never once told me I couldn't.

I'm writing to Da as well. He's waited longest. I promised him the day I left for Harrow Cross that I'd tell him how they stay up, and he wrote back that he'd waited longer than two years. It's been a great deal more than two. I think he'll forgive me.

Keep the shutter propped open. I'll be under it before long.

Nell

THE END

Thank you for reading, and a special thank you to everyone who has stuck with Nell, Del and the rest of the crew from the beginning. Your comments and upvotes are a big part of why I keep writing.

I'm always looking for what to write next, so tell me what you'd like to see. It could be a character you want more of, a "what happened after" scene, or a whole new idea for a human story. Leave it in the comments and I'll read every one.

Thanks to u/Icy-Air7584 (Ed) and u/Plenty_Excitement658 for two separate but combinable ideas that became this story. Hope you enjoy the Tessic Varn Frontier, chapter 1.

The pods opened with a hiss, and the cold simulator hall rushed in. Nell sat for a moment with her hands still on the stick. The canopy had gone from a black field of stars to grey plastic, and the replay screen on the far wall was already running, silent and merciless, a little blue marker winking out at one minute fifty-two.

MARR, it said. KILLED.

Merrin was standing at the foot of her pod. He hadn't climbed out of his own yet. He had simply been there when she looked, grey stubble and old saddle leather and a face with nothing in it at all.

"Out," he said. "All of you. Stand there."

They stood in a row by the replay screen. Del on her left, Reeve on her right, and Sela a little apart at the end, rubbing the back of her scarred hand the way she did when she thought nobody saw.

"Run it again," said Merrin, to nobody, and the screen did. The blue markers swung in formation. Two of them, Nell's and Del's, broke apart without warning and went through the scissors, tight and fast and exactly as they'd done it at Tessic 4. The third marker, Sela's, had been tracking left to cover the break the wedge always made. It went on tracking left, straight into the lane they'd just emptied, and a red marker closed on it from the dark.

It winked out.

"Do you see it?" said Merrin.

"Yes," said Del.

"I'm asking Marr."

"I should have asked," said Sela, very quietly. "I should have called it. I just thought..."

"No." Merrin's voice stayed flat. "It wasn't yours." He turned and looked at Del, and Nell watched him decide how much to say, and then say all of it. "I told you the first night, Lieutenant. I stood in that hangar and said you tell us first. You said 'Understood.' I watched you say it. And on the first real run, you and the warrant officer did your little trick, the one nobody else knows is coming, and a girl who grew up on an outpost like the ones you flew for is a dot on a screen."

"Warrant Officer," said Del.

"I'm not finished, sir." The "sir" had an edge on it, a very fine one, the kind that cuts without being seen. "You're good. I'll say it to anyone. You're the two best pilots in this wing, and the way you fly, you're the two most dangerous. Not to the pirates. To us. You think it's a gift, flying like you've got one mind. It is a gift. It's also a way of leaving three people on the outside, guessing."

Nell's face burned. She stared at the replay screen, at the blue marker that had been Sela, and found she could not stop seeing it. She had felt it go right, in the cockpit. She had felt it the way she'd felt the scissors work at Tessic 4, that perfect, easy lock, and she had been so pleased with it that she hadn't once looked to see who was on the edge of it.

"Do you see the importance now?" said Merrin.

It was a very old question, and he asked it without any heat, which made it worse.

Nell expected Del to bristle. He was a lord, and he'd just been spoken to by a warrant officer in front of three pilots, in terms that would have got a man put out of a Delacourt house. She'd seen him take less from the director. She turned her head, ready for the stiffening, the red face, the stair he hadn't known was there.

It didn't come. Del was looking at the replay with his jaw set, and she could see him going back over it, frame by frame, the way he did a walk-around. She could see him arrive.

"Yes," he said. "You're right."

"I know I'm right."

"I'm not saying it to be agreeable, Warrant Officer. I'm saying it because it's true." He didn't look away. "We'll tell you first. Every time. Even when it's slower."

"Especially when it's slower," said Merrin. He looked at Nell. "Warrant Officer?"

She wanted to say something clever, or small, or kind to Sela. She wanted to say it was only a simulation. She found she didn't believe it, and she couldn't make her mouth say what she didn't believe.

"Yes," she said. "I see it. I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry to me." Merrin's eyes went to the far end of the line, to Sela, who gave Nell a small shrug, the kind that tells you someone is being generous, and that made it worse again.

"Again," said Merrin. "From the top. And this time somebody talks."

---

They ran it four more times. Nobody died on the fifth. Nell would have liked to say it felt like a victory, and it felt like being let off.

The summons caught them in the corridor outside the hall, while Sela and Reeve were walking ahead of them and not talking, and Merrin had gone the other way without a word. Del's data pad chimed. He read it, and held it out to her.

Princess Clara requests the presence of Lieutenant Delacourt and Warrant Officer Brackentail in her quarters at their earliest convenience. Cynthia Winfield.

"Earliest convenience," said Nell. "That's Cynthia for now."

"I know." Del looked down the corridor after Sela. "Do you think she saw it?"

"She sees everything." Nell wiped her face with her sleeve. It was still hot. "Del. Before we go in."

"I know," he said. "I've been thinking about it the whole walk. I'll give her the numbers, and I'll stop, and you give her the rest. Neither of us goes on past our part without saying so."

"That's it?"

"It's a start," said Del. "Merrin would say it's the beginning of a start."

---

Clara had the seventh report open on the long table in her quarters, and she had not touched the pastries, which was how Nell knew it was serious.

Nell had been aboard the Noirnavio only a few weeks, but it was long enough to learn a few things about the Princess. She took her tea sweet. She talked about fighters the way other people talked about weather. And whenever she had guests she set out a tower of pastries, six tiers of it, and ate half of it herself while she asked her questions. Today the tower stood untouched at the end of the table. Cynthia stood by the door and was not pretending to listen. Wyatt sat across from Nell with a cookie in his hand that he hadn't eaten, and Nell, who had flown beside him for a fortnight now, understood that to be a bad sign too.

"Commander Caldwell's seventh report reached me this morning," said Clara. "Redford forwarded it with a note. It says, and I am quoting, 'Please read it twice.'" She turned a page with one finger. "I have read it three times."

Nobody said anything.

"I answered the first four," she went on. "The Raptors, the parts, the hangar. I stood in that hangar and saw what he was flying, and they asked for things I had, so I sent them. The last three ask for pilots, and a second patrol carrier, and a destroyer near Tessic 4. I do not have those. The people who do have sent three letters back through Redford, and I've read the letters. They contain a very kind paragraph about the dedication of the frontier, and no verbs."

"Your Highness," said Cynthia, from the door, in the tone of a woman who has noticed a pot starting to boil.

"I'm not angry." Clara's hands were quite still on the table. Nell had known her long enough to see it for the lie it was. "I'm tired of being the only person who answers. That's a different thing." She looked up, and her violet eyes went from Del to Nell and stayed. "Wyatt and I were there for one afternoon, and I saw what a visitor sees. Redford has the numbers. You two lived in it most recently, and you carried this out with you. I would like to hear the part that doesn't fit in a report."

Wyatt had been looking at them since they came in. "You've come from the simulators," he said.

"Yes, sir," said Del.

"Merrin?"

"Yes, sir. He told us we leave people on the outside, guessing."

"He's usually right," said Wyatt. "He's rarely gentle about it." He turned the cookie over in his fingers. "Go on."

"With your permission, Your Highness," said Del. "I'll give you the numbers, and I'll stop. Warrant Officer Brackentail will give you the rest. We've learned that today."

Clara's mouth moved very slightly. "Then by all means."

Del glanced at Nell. She nodded. He had always been better at the numbers, and she had always been better at the part the numbers didn't say.

"The report says losses are down, Your Highness," said Del. "Two pilots in a year, against nine the year before. Command read that and wrote back that it was encouraging."

"I read the letter."

"It's the wrong number. It tells you how well we're flying. It doesn't tell you what we're flying against." He put a sheet on the table and turned it round. It was in his square handwriting, neat as a flight log. "When we arrived, a raid meant one freighter, maybe two. The turret freighter at Tessic 4 was the worst thing we'd seen. Then last quarter we had three raids with six ships or more, and command ships in two of them."

He turned his head and addressed the next part to Wyatt, with the stiffness of a man speaking to someone he'd been taught to salute.

"The Tessic 9 raid, the one you ended with an asteroid, was the largest anyone at Kalin had seen in ten years, Lieutenant Commodore. Last quarter we had three that size."

Wyatt looked up. "That was a frigate and a very large rock," he said quietly. "It wasn't skill."

"It was what the Ninth had," said Nell. "That's all it ever is."

Wyatt didn't answer, and he put the cookie down.

"They're counting our response times," said Del. "They hold formation now. The first year, when one drone died the rest scattered. They don't anymore. Somebody is teaching them." He stopped. "That's my part, Your Highness. Nell?"

It was a small thing, and she felt it land. He had stopped on purpose, and handed it over where she could see him doing it.

"They used to time their raids around your rotations, sir," said Nell, to Wyatt. "Everyone at Kalin still talks about it. They don't do that anymore, not with the Raptors. They don't wait for a day we're thin. They wait until they have enough." She heard her own voice drop. "That's what frightens me. Intercepts are up about half again every quarter. We lost fewer pilots because the Raptors are better and the pilots are better. That's the whole of it. There aren't fewer of them, Your Highness. There are more."

"How many more?" said Clara.

"We don't know. That's the worst of it. Nobody counts them in one place. They come from all over the Tessic Varn, and they've begun to gather."

"How long?"

Del looked at his sheet. "At this rate, a year and a half. Maybe less. There'll be a day when Kalin puts up twelve and meets thirty. We can be the best twelve in the Principality and it won't matter." He drew a breath. "You can't fly better than arithmetic."

"Merrin says it differently," said Nell. "The void doesn't care how good you are."

The stars went slowly past the window. For a while the only sound was the quiet work of the ship.

"Does he sleep?" said Wyatt.

It took Nell a moment to see what he was asking. "Caldwell? Not much. He writes the reports at night. He lives on tea."

"The chair doesn't creak any more," said Del. "He had it replaced. I think that was the only thing he took for himself in two years."

Wyatt nodded slowly, and said nothing else for a time. It was the tired, kind look Nell remembered from the flight deck, the look of a man who had been punched often and stayed standing. He had been the one to leave Kalin, and he was listening now the way you listen to news from home.

"What would you do?" said Clara.

"Not more Raptors for us," said Nell. "Another patrol carrier on the frontier, so the Kessler isn't holding three sectors with one hull. A destroyer near Tessic 4, where the big ones come through. And somebody whose whole job is to find where they gather, before they've finished gathering."

"And Caldwell?"

"Caldwell has asked for all of that, in the last three," said Del. "He was polite about it every time."

"He always was," said Wyatt.

Clara closed the file. She sat quite still, and Nell watched her make up her mind. It was something she had seen once before, in a cockpit, a half second before a hard turn.

"I want to go back," said Clara.

"Your Highness," said Cynthia.

"I know." Clara didn't turn round. "I want to see what has changed since the last visit." She said it quietly. "Wyatt and I went so that he could thank Commander Caldwell in person for the pilot he helped him become. I stood in that hangar and left him thirty Raptors, and I thought I had done what I could. I want to see what thirty Raptors changed, and what they couldn't. Not through a report. I'd like to see it before the number gets any bigger." She looked at Nell, and then at Del. "And I'd like both of you to come with me."

"Of course," said Nell, and heard Del say it at the same moment.

"We'll send word ahead," said Clara. "Plainly. No ceremony. I'll tell him that no special preparations are to be made."

"He'll prepare," said Wyatt. "Someone on his staff will want to paint something."

"He won't," said Nell.

They all turned to look at her, and she felt her face go warm. She had spoken before thinking, which was something she'd been working on.

"He won't, Your Highness," she said. "He'd rather be called the commander of a dump than a liar. He said so once."

Wyatt looked at her for a moment. Then he nodded, very slightly.

"No," he said. "He won't."

"Then I look forward to the dump," said Clara. She turned a page of the report, and her voice came back to its usual quick, bright rhythm, the one that meant a plan was starting to run. "We'll take Lieutenant Commodore Caspars. I want someone who reads ledgers and isn't afraid of one."

"My wife will want all of them," said Wyatt, with the ease of a man who still found the word slightly surprising.

"Then she shall have them. And Jincho."

"Julius preserve that outpost," said Cynthia, from the door.

"And the wedges," said Wyatt. "Both of them. We should fly in ourselves."

Del frowned. "In the Raptor IIs, sir?"

"In the Raptor IIs. Let Caldwell's pilots see what a Raptor can be." Wyatt almost smiled. "Kalin has never seen anything like them."

"Neither had I," said Del, "until Jincho."

"Good," said Clara. She looked at the table. She looked, for the first time in ten minutes, at the tower of pastries at the end of it. Then she stood, and walked round the table, and took the top one off the highest tier, a small round cake with white powder on it. She bit into it, and chewed, and closed her eyes for a moment.

That was how Nell knew the decision was made.

She sat with her hands in her lap and thought about Kalin. The dim lights in the docking bay. The smell of coolant and stale air that nobody had managed to get out of the walls in a year. The seventh report, with Caldwell's neat plain sentences in the middle where a tired reader might not trip over them. She hadn't expected to miss it, and she did.

Somebody has to be the patrol, Del had written to his father. She had never heard anyone in command say it back.

Clara finished her cake, and licked a little powder off her thumb, and said, "Then we'll be the ones who come."

LORD SUMMERS’ SECRET MISSION part 2

🚨 Nornavio War Room

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

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

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

He tapped into the internal network.

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

Moments later, Galt’s voice crackled through.

Lieutenant Galt
Meeting confirmed. Shuttle ready in fifteen minutes.

Wyatt turned.

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

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

Wyatt watched him go.

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

Princess Clara folded her arms.

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

Wyatt leaned toward Cynthia.

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

Cynthia smirked.

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

She paused.

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

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

🚀 Nornavio Shuttle Bay

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

Everything stopped.

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

Leopold jogged up, slightly out of breath.

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

A crew chief sprinted over.

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

Leopold saluted, then gestured.

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

Summers nodded and boarded. The hatch hissed shut.

They strapped in.

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

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

Leopold
Understood.

The shuttle blasted through the shield, engines flaring blue.

🛰️ Approach to the Silent Runner

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

A giggly AI answered.

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

Summers and Leopold exchanged a look.

Summers
That… was different.

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

Summers stood.

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

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

Lord Stark approached, bowing his head.

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

Lord Summers
A secure room. We need to talk.

Lord Sark
Of course. Follow me.

🔒 Private Conference Room

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

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

Nikko’s eyes lit up.

Lord Sark
Ah. The special fighter project.

Summers nodded.

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

Nikko leaned back.

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

Summers raised an eyebrow.

Lord Summers
Go on.

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

Summers actually smiled — which was somehow more intimidating.

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

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

Stark escorted Summers back to the shuttle.

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

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

She giggled.

Nikko sighed.

🌍 Descent to the Screaming Forest

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

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

Leopold
Understood. Touchdown in twenty.

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

Summers disembarked, greeted by Sergeant Bauer.

Leopold wasted no time blasting off again.

Mid‑flight, he connected to Wyatt.

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

Wyatt burst out laughing.

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

They both laughed.

🏛️ BOSF Town Hall

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued…

Next

Previous /

First

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

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

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

"She said Daisy would," said Lord Salle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kestrel had a list, and he kept to it.

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

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

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

He was quiet for a long time.

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

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

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

"Yes, my lord."

Orme took his glasses off. He looked at Kestrel.

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

"Yes," said Kestrel.

"At a lower rate."

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, my lady."

"And you take his advice?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The old man thought about that.

"Why would he, my lady?"

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

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

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

"May I ask you something?"

"Of course, my lady."

"Are you frightened of us?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And the First Speaker is..."

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

"A commoner," said Lord Orme.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The gardener," said Lady Vance.

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

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

The chamber was very quiet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I do, Speaker."

"Say it anyway. For the record."

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

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

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

Reedscutt did not look up at the gallery.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They all turned to look at him.

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

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

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

"And?" said Orme.

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

He was quiet for a moment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody argued with her.

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

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

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

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

Previous /

First

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

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

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

"Torin," said Weskal.

"I'm only asking."

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

"But when he does."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"So learn it," he said.

"It isn't that simple."

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

She looked at him for a long moment.

"And my class."

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

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

"I take them to school now."

"You'd have to feed them."

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

She threw the dish towel at him.

---

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

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

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

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

"You'd have people."

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

Patricia put down her cup.

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

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

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

Patricia laughed out loud.

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How poorly?" said Patricia.

"Bad enough that he asked."

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

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

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

"That was all before breakfast," she said.

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

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

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

"How do you remember all of it?"

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

"And me?"

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

Elizabeth stood looking down at the chairs for a while.

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

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

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

---

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

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

"You've met Harlan," Tornel said.

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

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

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

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

"Even from Mother?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That coat."

"Mother picked that coat."

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

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

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

"Did you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What do you do with it?"

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

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

"Not yet," was all he said.

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

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

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

"And the Assembly?"

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

"And you told her?"

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

Elizabeth said nothing.

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

"You want me to open the session."

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

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

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

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

"I'd rather face a razorclaw."

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

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

"What would I even talk about?"

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

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

Elizabeth watched them through the window for a while.

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

---

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

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

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

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

Tornel read it and didn't smile, quite.

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

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

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

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

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

"How long you been out here?"

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

---

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

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

A scythe. Near enough.

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

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

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

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

"Those are the cutting things," Richman said.

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

"We start at the bottom," he said.

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

Somebody laughed. The big man went red.

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

"They'll stay up," Tom said.

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

"Tom. Tom Dell."

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

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

---

Tom kept the best of it separate.

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

"Not that one."

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

"What's that one for?"

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

---

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

Tom met him halfway.

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

"Not yet."

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

None of that was his to decide.

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

"Corn," Eli said.

"It'll keep."

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

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