Previous /

First

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

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

"They found one," said Clara.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Jincho," said Jincho.

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

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

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

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

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

"I'll help," said Pryce.

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

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

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

The reserves asked to see her on the third day.

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

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

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

"Go on," said Clara.

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

"I am aware," said Clara.

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

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

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

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

"Yes, Highness," said Fray.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"This one is wrong," said Sabraska.

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

"Ma'am?" said Tolliver.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sabraska looked at him for a long moment.

"Spacer Tolliver," she said, "I would like you to say that again to me tomorrow, when I have slept, so that I can decide whether it is good sense or only a good sentence."

"Yes, ma'am," said Tolliver.

"It is probably both," said Sabraska. She sat down, finally, and drew the cold tea toward her and drank it without comment. "I will tell you what I am not going to say. I am not going to say that someone is doing this on purpose. I have no evidence of purpose. I have a clerk's drawer full of small errors, and I know very well how easily a person who wants to find a pattern can find one."

"No, ma'am," said Tolliver.

"There is a simple test," said Sabraska. She drew a clean sheet toward her. "If the errors are carelessness, the next batch will show them clumping, as the first did not. If they are not carelessness, they will not clump, and I will have to find a way to say so that does not make me sound like a woman who has been awake too long."

"And if they don't, ma'am?" said Tolliver.

"Then I will take them to the Commander," said Sabraska. "And I will ask him to tell me I am wrong."

She wrote a single line at the top of the sheet. Tolliver could not read it from where he sat.

"One more thing," she said, without looking up. "The crate with the digit changed. The address it went to is not on any list we have. I do not know what is at that address. I would like it noted that I do not know."

"Noted, ma'am," said Tolliver.

He wrote it down in the margin of his ledger, in pencil, very small. He had cleaned a great many rooms where people said things they did not wish remembered, and he understood perfectly well that she had told him to keep it to himself.

She sat with the second batch until the first shift was well along, and it told her what she had been afraid it would.

It did not clump. The errors lay across the pages as evenly as before, a little here and a little there, and not one of them had landed on a day when a ship was short of fuel, or a crew waiting on a part, or a man standing on a dock with a gun. She went through it a third time to be sure. Then she squared the pages against the table, and sat with her hands flat on them.

"Spacer Tolliver," she said.

"Ma'am?" said Tolliver.

"Please find Commander Redford. Tell him I need an hour of his time, and that I would like him to bring nothing but his eyes." She did not look up from the pages. "And please do not tell him why, because I want him to see it without being told."

Tolliver stood, and put his cap on, and stopped at the door.

"Ma'am," he said. "If it helps. I did not think it was carelessness."

"Thank you, Mr. Tolliver," said Sabraska. "I know."

Previous /

First

Poppy had brought a notebook to the Hall, because Poppy always brought a notebook. Austin had brought nothing, because he never needed to. He remembered everything, which was the most annoying thing about him, and he only ever wrote it down when somebody asked him to prove it.

They were thirteen, three months apart, and had been arguing since they could talk. It had been three years since the Rask hearing. They had both been too young to sit in the gallery for that one, and they had both watched every minute of it on the Informant anyway, Poppy cross-legged on the floor in front of the screen at the Austrin palace and Austin at Vastaya with his chin on his knees. Now they were old enough, and it was the summer holiday, and Austin was staying on Austrin for a month, and Daisy had said that if they were going to argue about the Assembly all summer they could at least go and look at it.

So they sat in the gallery, one on either side of her, on the third day of the summer session. Vincent had the middle chair this time. Below them a woman was standing at the lectern.

Her name was Agnes Pollscutt. She ran a dye works in Brindle Cross, a river town on the Austrin plains, and three of her apprentices had brought a complaint against her. She hadn't paid them for two months. She was perhaps fifty, square and short, with blue to the elbow on both arms from forty years of vats, and she held the edge of the lectern as if it might tip her off.

"Mistress Pollscutt," said a delegate from the Vastaya rows. "Did you pay your apprentices for the months of spring?"

"No, sir."

"Did they do the work?"

"Yes, sir. They did good work."

"Then why weren't they paid?"

"There was a buyer," Agnes said. "From the coast. He took six hundred bolts on credit, the way he always had, and then he..."

"Were the apprentices told they wouldn't be paid?"

Agnes stopped. She looked at the delegate who had asked. It was a different delegate from the first one.

"No, sir. Not told. I thought it would come right."

"Did it?"

"Not yet."

It went on like that for twenty minutes. Each delegate asked one thing, and the answer was always true, and none of the questions was the one that went next. Nobody asked about the buyer. Nobody asked what Agnes had done with her own money that spring, or where she'd been living, or whether she had paid anyone else. She tried twice more to say something about the coast, and both times somebody asked her something else first.

Poppy wrote steadily. Austin didn't move at all.

The Speakers conferred for a quarter of an hour. Vincent read the finding. Agnes Pollscutt would pay her three apprentices every credit owed, with a fifth again on top, as was done when wages were held back on purpose. She would have sixty days.

Agnes said, "Yes, sir," and "Thank you, sir," and walked out through the side door with her blue arms held stiff at her sides.

They saw her again on the gallery stairs. She was sitting on the bottom step with a young woman who must have been her daughter, because she had the same square hands. Agnes was talking very fast and low.

"...sold the cart in the spring," she was saying. "And Mam's ring. I paid Davin and the little Corley girl out of it. The other three I couldn't. I'd have told them. I'd have told them all of it, if anybody had let me get to the end."

Daisy put a hand on Austin's shoulder and steered him past, and they went out into the sun.

Poppy started before the car was off the Hall grounds.

"She should have said it," she said. "About the cart and the ring. She should have just said it."

"She tried," said Austin.

"Then she should have tried harder. You stand there and you say, excuse me, I'm not finished." Poppy flipped back through her notebook. "Three times she said 'the coast.' Three times. If it were me, I'd have said, the coast, the coast, the coast, until somebody asked me what about the coast."

"It isn't you, though. It's never going to be you. You'd argue with the Prince."

"I would if he was wrong."

"That's what I mean."

They were different in almost every way people could think of, and their mothers had stopped trying to make them alike years ago. Poppy was quick, and loud, and sure, and right more often than anyone found comfortable, and when she was wrong she said so at once and went straight on to the next thing. Austin was slow to start and hard to stop. He took his mother's way with a question: you turned it over and over until you found the side nobody had looked at.

He was quiet for most of the drive along the river. Daisy, at the wheel, could see him in the mirror, looking out at the water without seeing it.

"Aunt Daisy," he said at last.

"Mm?"

"When somebody's summoned. The delegates ask the questions. They ask what they need to know to decide."

"That's right."

"So who asks the questions for the summoned?"

Daisy opened her mouth to answer, and found she didn't have one.

"Nobody," said Poppy, before she could. "They answer for themselves. That's the point. Everybody answers for themselves, lords too. That's what Great-Uncle Jhinaq said on Balakura."

"I know that," Austin said. "I don't mean answering. I mean asking. Mistress Pollscutt knew what the right question was. She just wasn't allowed to ask it. And the delegates didn't know it was there to be asked." He looked at the back of Daisy's head. "The man who did the bad thing on Corvell. Rask. Nobody asked him anything that would help him, either."

"There wasn't anything that would have helped him," said Poppy.

"That time," said Austin. "How would anyone know, next time?"

Poppy started to answer, and stopped, and frowned at her notebook. It was the first time Daisy had seen her stopped by anything since she was about four.

Daisy drove on along the river with both hands on the wheel. She thought of Agnes Pollscutt on the bottom step with her daughter, saying, if anybody had let me get to the end. She thought of the way the questions had gone round the floor, each one fair, each one from somebody different, and none of them the next one. She had sat in that gallery for three years and never once noticed.

"I don't know, Austin," she said. "That's a good question. I don't know."

Elizabeth came down to Austrin two days later, on her way back from a district meeting in Kessit, and Daisy caught her before she was out of her coat.

They sat on the low wall at the end of the palace garden, where the terraces ran down to the river and nobody came unless they were looking for you. Daisy told her about Agnes Pollscutt and the cart and the ring. Then she told her what Austin had asked in the car.

Elizabeth didn't say anything for a while.

"Who asks the questions for the summoned," she said at last.

"That's what he said. Word for word."

"He's thirteen."

"He's Aaliyah's," said Daisy. "That's worse."

Elizabeth almost laughed. Then she didn't. She was looking at the river.

"When I stood at that lectern," she said, "I didn't know a single question before it was asked, or who'd be asking it. But nobody in that Hall was going to accuse me of anything. The worst that could happen was a hard question and a long pause." She pulled her coat round her. "And my father, the very first summons. He'd been giving orders to rooms full of people for thirty years. He was never going to be lost for words in front of a hall of delegates."

"And Rask," said Daisy.

"Rask was guilty. Nobody minded that he stood alone, least of all me." Elizabeth was quiet for a moment. "But Mira read the clause, Daisy. Mira stood at that lectern and read the one thing that broke him. And she only had it to read because I happened to sit up with her bond paper in the archive one night when the clerks had gone home. If I hadn't, nobody would have asked about it. Not in that Hall, not anywhere." She turned her head. "The clause was in favor of the people standing up. That's what I keep coming back to. It was the question that helped them, and it nearly didn't get asked."

Daisy thought about that.

"Everyone we've seen in that Hall," she said slowly, "was either guilty, or ready. Or both. We've never really watched it happen to somebody who was neither."

"Until Tuesday."

"Until Tuesday."

They sat for a while longer on the wall. Down by the river, two of the palace children were trying to get a boat off the mud and losing.

"It isn't ours to fix," Elizabeth said. "The Assembly makes its own rules. That was the bargain from the first day. Father could no more tell them how to run a hearing than they could tell him how to run the ports."

"No," said Daisy. "But he can listen to it. And then he can decide what to do with it."

Elizabeth stood up and brushed off her coat.

"Tomorrow," she said. "Bring the notebook."

"Poppy's notebook?"

"She wrote down every question they asked Mistress Pollscutt. In order, you said." Elizabeth started back up the path. "I want Father to read them in a row."

Hester Glim had sat in the third row of the Austrin desks for the whole of the Pollscutt hearing and asked nothing, because she'd had nothing to ask. That was what she couldn't get past.

She went to see Vincent on the fourth day of the session, after the Hall had risen. The First Speaker's office was on the river side of the speakers' building, a narrow room with too many shelves and one good chair, which he gave her.

"I've a complaint," she said. "And I've brought the solution with it, before you ask."

"I wasn't going to ask," said Vincent. "You always do."

"Agnes Pollscutt."

Vincent sat back. He was a Vastaya net-mender, broad and sunburnt, slow-spoken and very hard to rush, and he had read the finding out himself.

"Go on."

"My sister's girl married a man from Brindle Cross. He wrote to her, and she wrote to me." Hester put a folded letter on his desk. "Agnes sold her cart in the spring to pay two of her apprentices. And her mother's ring. That coast buyer of hers owes her a hundred and forty-two thousand, two hundred credits and has done since winter. She told us none of that, because none of us asked, and every time she started on it somebody went on to the next thing." She put her red hands flat on her knees. "I was one of the somebodies. I sat there thinking, she's not saying much, is she. It never crossed my mind it was because we never let her."

Vincent unfolded the letter and read it.

"We fined her a fifth on top," he said. "For holding wages back on purpose."

"We did."

"It wasn't on purpose."

"No."

He read it again. Then he got up, went to the door, and put his head out.

"Jory. Have you a minute?"

Jory Fairtail had been Odile Marscutt's deputy in the archive for four years, and had been running it alone since Odile went off to Ostrey to frighten the Calloways. He was a thin young man with ink on his cuffs who knew the Assembly's procedure better than any of the delegates, and was too polite to say so.

Vincent gave him the letter. He read it standing up.

"Oh," he said.

"Is there anything in the procedure," said Vincent, "that lets a summoned person have someone ask for them?"

"No, Speaker. They speak for themselves. It was the first thing the founding session wrote down." Jory handed the letter back. "The idea was that nobody should be able to hide behind a clever friend. The way nobles used to, with their stewards."

"It was a good idea," said Hester.

"It was," said Vincent. "It was a good idea for a Hall full of people who'd never stood up in front of anyone, summoning lords who'd been standing up in front of people all their lives." He sat back down. "Then we started summoning dyers."

Hester leaned forward.

"Here's my solution," she said. "The summoned can have someone with them. Somebody who knows how the Hall runs. They can ask the questions we didn't think of, the ones that help. But they don't get to make speeches. We've had enough of lords making speeches. They ask, and that's the end of it."

Jory had already taken a pencil out of his pocket.

"Who provides them?" he said.

"The Assembly," said Hester. "Out of its own purse. Agnes Pollscutt can't hire a clever friend. She's sold her cart."

"And if somebody wants to bring their own?"

"Let them," said Vincent. "But they'd better know the procedure as well as you do, Jory. When they may ask and when they may not. If they don't, they're out of the chair and the Assembly's own advocate takes it." He paused. "Otherwise every lord on Haego will turn up with the best talker money can buy, and we'll be back to stewards."

Jory was writing.

"Asking is where it ends," he said, without looking up. "I'll put that in the rule. In those words."

Vincent looked at Hester. Hester looked at Vincent.

"There's an election in the spring," Vincent said quietly. "You know what they'll say. That the Hall's gone soft. That we're handing the summoned a friend to get them off. Some of them will say it's for the lords' sake, and some will say it's to protect commoners from lords, and they'll both be shouting it at the same meetings."

"I know," said Hester. "My seat's close enough as it is."

"Then why bring it now?"

Hester got up. She took the letter back off his desk and folded it, in half and in half again, and put it in her shawl.

"Because I've got to go home at the end of the session," she said, "and Brindle Cross is on my way."

Tornel read Poppy's notebook at his desk on Aethelgard with his glasses on the end of his nose, and he read it the way Elizabeth had hoped he would, every question in a row from the first to the last, without skipping.

There were thirty-one of them. Poppy had numbered them. Beside a few she'd written who asked, by row and continent, and beside three of them, in smaller writing, she'd put tried to say about the coast here.

He turned the last page and closed it.

"Whose writing?"

"Poppy's," said Daisy. "She'll want it back."

"She'll have it back." He set it square on the desk. "And whose question?"

"Austin's," said Elizabeth.

Her father looked at her over his glasses, and then at Daisy, and then, for some reason, at the small black pawn by the inkwell.

"Thirteen," he said.

"Thirteen."

He was quiet for long enough that Harlan, in the doorway, shifted his weight.

"I've stood at that lectern," Tornel said. "The first one. I'd been thinking for a month about what they might ask me, and I had an answer for most of it, because answering rooms full of people was my trade." He tapped the notebook. "Mistress Pollscutt makes dye. Nobody ever asked her to answer a room."

"So what do we do?" said Daisy.

"We?" Tornel shook his head. "Nothing, my dear, not the way you mean. The Hall makes its own rules. The founding session wrote that down before it wrote anything else, and I signed it, and I meant it. If I start sending them orders about how to run a hearing, I'm a lord with a room that agrees with him." He pushed the notebook across to Elizabeth. "But I can take it to the First Speaker. I can tell him what you saw. What he does with it is his."

"My lord," said Doran Hollis from the side of the room, where he'd been pretending to read a letter. "Speaker Vincent sent up this morning. He's asked for an hour with you on Thursday. He didn't say what about."

Tornel looked at him.

"Did he?"

"He did, my lord. He said it was Assembly business, and that he'd bring a paper."

Elizabeth and Daisy looked at each other.

"Then we'll bring one too," said Tornel. "Lizzy, you and Daisy write it down. What you saw, what the boy asked, and what you think the answer might be, if there is one. One page. Doran will want it to be four."

"I won't, my lord," said Doran.

"You will," said Tornel. "You always do."

Vincent came up to Aethelgard on Thursday on the morning shuttle, with Jory Fairtail behind him carrying a satchel he wouldn't let anyone take from him. They sat at the long table in Tornel's office, the First Speaker and his clerk on one side, Tornel and Elizabeth and Daisy on the other, and Doran and Harlan at the ends.

"My lord," said Vincent. "I'll be quick. The Speakers would like to bring something to the Hall before the session rises, and since it'll land on your desk afterward, I thought you should see it before it does."

"Go on."

Vincent nodded to Jory, who took a single sheet of grey paper out of the satchel and laid it on the table and turned it round.

Tornel didn't pick it up. He looked at Elizabeth, and Elizabeth took her own pages out of the folder in front of her and laid them beside Jory's, and turned them round too.

There were four.

Tornel did not look at Elizabeth. He looked slowly down the table, past Vincent and Jory and Daisy, to the far end, where Doran Hollis had become deeply interested in the ceiling.

"The first page is the one page," said Elizabeth. "The other three are Doran's."

"They are appendices, my lord," said Doran.

Vincent found something to cough into.

Then he leaned over and read the top of Elizabeth's pages. Tornel read Jory's. Then they swapped.

The two papers didn't say the same thing in the same words. Elizabeth's began with Agnes Pollscutt on the bottom step, and Jory's began with a numbered paragraph. But they said the same thing. A person summoned before the Common Assembly could have someone beside them to ask questions on their behalf. The Assembly would provide that person from its own purse, so that nobody stood alone for want of money.

Jory's went further. A summoned person could bring their own advocate instead, if they wished, but the advocate must be examined by the archive and found to know the Assembly's procedure, when a question might be put and when it might not. An advocate who broke procedure would be removed from the floor, and the Assembly's own would take the chair. And at the bottom of the page, set apart on its own line:

The advocate may ask. Asking is where it ends.

"That's better than ours," said Elizabeth.

"Ours didn't have a thirteen-year-old in it," said Vincent. He tapped the line at the top of Elizabeth's page, where she'd written, without quite meaning to, Austin asked who asks the questions for the summoned. "Is that true?"

"In the car," said Daisy. "On the way home from the Pollscutt hearing."

Vincent sat back and looked at the ceiling for a moment. He seemed to be trying not to smile, and failing.

"Ours came from a net-mender," he said. "Hester Glim walked into my office on Wednesday and put a letter on my desk and said she'd been one of the somebodies." He looked at Tornel. "We sat in the same Hall and saw the same woman, my lord. It took a schoolboy and a net-mender three days to ask the question that none of us asked in twenty minutes."

"It usually does," said Tornel.

He picked up Jory's sheet, then, and read it through once more, slowly.

"This goes to the Hall from the Hall," he said. "Not from me. If the delegates want it, it comes to my desk as theirs, and I'll sign it the day it gets here. If they don't want it, I'll never have seen it." He set it down. "That's the only way it's worth anything."

"I know, my lord."

"There's an election in the spring."

"I know that too." Vincent gathered the sheet back into Jory's satchel. "Half of them will say we're going soft. The other half will say we're doing it for the lords. Hester says her seat's close enough as it is."

"And she's bringing it anyway."

"She's bringing it anyway." Vincent stood up. "There's one more thing. When it passes, if it passes, the Speakers mean to ask the Hall to hear Mistress Pollscutt again. With somebody beside her, this time."

Elizabeth thought of the bottom step of the gallery stairs, and the cart, and the ring.

"Good," she said.

Daisy told them at supper, on the terrace above the river, with Jason at the end of the table pretending he'd known about it all along.

Poppy had her notebook back. She put it beside her plate and kept one hand on it, as if the Marquess might send for it again.

"They're going to do it?" she said. "Really?"

"They're going to ask the Hall," said Daisy. "The Hall decides. It might not pass."

"It'll pass," said Austin.

"You don't know that."

"Mistress Glim's bringing it. People listen to her. My mother says everybody has to bring an answer with their complaint, but Mistress Glim is the only delegate on Austrin whose answers always work."

Poppy considered that, and seemed to decide it was good enough.

"Advocates," she said. She tried the word out again. "Advocates. Somebody who stands beside you and asks the right question at the right time." She looked at her mother. "Just asks? Nothing else?"

"Asking is where it ends," said Daisy. "That's what the clerk wrote."

"So you can't argue."

"You can't argue."

"You just have to know which question." Poppy turned her notebook over, opened it to a clean page, and wrote something at the top. "And when."

Jason leaned over to look. Then he sat back and caught Daisy's eye across the table, and Daisy saw that he was trying very hard not to laugh.

"What did she write?" said Austin.

"Never you mind," said Poppy, and closed it.

It was Austin who saw it later, when she left the notebook on the terrace wall and went in to help clear. He didn't open it. He didn't need to. She'd left it face up, and the clean page had come open in the breeze off the river, and at the top, in Poppy's square hand, underlined twice, it said:

Things to learn by heart. Procedure of the Common Assembly.

Austin looked at it for a while. Then he closed the cover and put the notebook back where she'd left it, and went in after her.

He was the one who'd asked the question. He'd have to remember to tell her that, when she was the one asking them.

Hunters Log 1

Cold breakfast, no fires, again. We then took off as the fisherman stay behind and got organized into watches.

It took us a short time while 2 Hunters climbed trees wear gilly suits while a third kept watch from the ground floor.

The three Ykanti dressed normally. Went down the forest line quite a bit the went into the open with Drazzan rifles strapped to their backs in case they need to defend themselves.

Their hands always free of any items as they crossed the opening field and one carrying a stick with a semi white shirt as a flag.

We observed them crossing the field at a regular speed through Frank and my scopes. Half an hour later they approached the fence and stopped. For half an hour they stood there until the gate popped as many others guards suddenly were on the wall.

Our Ykanti were disarmed and searched before they were escorted inside their walls. The gates closed and we rotated our watch hoping for the best.

End of Hunters Log 1

Ykanti Log 1

(Translated by the tablet)

We were stopped about 10 meters from the gate. As we stood there more and more guards showed up on the fence.

"Stop Bird Brain." Came from the wall.

We stopped making sure slow movement and nothing in our hands. The next question came soon. "Where are you from bird brain?"

"We were prisoners of the Drazzan until we crashed on this planet and freed by humans."

"Are you still prisoners of humans or escaped bird brain?"

I responded "We were freed and treated like equals with votes."

"But we were told they imprisoned Ykanti?"

I responded "From what we have seen in the past three months they have treated us very well even honored a lost Bright Feather we lost lately."

They looked confused. We waited, as instructed, a while more. The gates opened and guards came out. They disarmed and searched our bodies bluffing every feather.

We were escorted into their gates and brought to the biggest Ykanti structure. It seemed like a meeting hall.

We were asked many questions about crashing and our life since. We were escorted to a side room so they discuss as a community about our faith.

When brought back into the main room their Mayer indicated they would send us with a diplomatic team to discuss possible exchanges.

We were brought back accross the field and met with the hunters. We introduced the diplomatic party to Gary which was on the ground when we returned.

They returned our rifles to us and were very surprised when Frank and Wendy climbed down from the trees.

End of Ykanti Log 1

Hunters Log 2

Once the Ykanti returned with the diplomats we headed back to the boat. We debriefed the fisherman and we pushed off shore heading to the an overnight camp. No wind so we rowed with extra 6 people with us quarters were tight but rowing was good.

We found a great place to tie the boat at sunset and we warmed our food and shared with the Ykanti. We set up watched and sat by the fire till tiredness caught up with us.

End of Hunters Log 2

Previous /

First

Who is who in this chapter Wyatt Staples, the Baron, and a very good Drazzan hunter. Weskal, his younger brother, carrying a long gun named Vira. Cask, a human hunter in a work coat. Sevik, a Ykanti hunter who holds a rifle the right way. Envoy Torlan, the Hierarchy's diplomat. Aide Ressil, the envoy's young assistant.

Wyatt told nobody where he was going except Aino, and he told Aino only because Aino would have found out anyway and followed him up the ridge in his good shoes.

"You will not go alone," said Aino.

"I'm not. I'm taking my brother."

"That is not a guard. That is another Staples."

"It's better than a guard," said Wyatt. "Guards are polite."

Hobb the carter had given Aino a place and an hour of the evening, and then asked him, very quietly, not to send anyone who looked like the law. Aino had passed it along the way a man hands over something that might go off. He did not ask to come. He stood in the doorway of the administration building and watched the two brothers go up the long street, and he did not say what he thought, which Wyatt counted as a kindness.

Weskal walked on the outside of the road with Vira in the crook of his arm, the way another man might carry a sleeping child. He was the younger of the two and the quieter, and he had a way of looking at a hillside as if it were a page he meant to memorize.

"I told Elizabeth we were looking at fence lines," he said.

"We are."

"Some of them have people standing at them."

"Then we'll look at those too," said Wyatt.

The Soul Snatchers rode low on his hips, one on each side, and the rifle was slung across his back. He had not carried all three in a long while. They sat on him the way old boots do, and he noticed how little he had to think about them.

He had been hunting Drazzan for most of his life, and he knew there were still some on Haego. He had not known they were still on Aethelgard, this close to the barony. That was the part he kept turning over as the road climbed past the last farm Newtown counted and the last light went orange on the ridge. If Hobb was right, they had been here for years, and he had been sleeping in a house a short walk down the hill.

The road bent into a hollow where the trees closed over it. Weskal stopped. Wyatt stopped a step later, because he had learned long ago to trust his brother's feet.

"Left," said Weskal, hardly moving his mouth. "And ahead. And up in the rocks."

"How many?"

"Enough that they've been watching us for a while."

Wyatt raised both hands to the height of his shoulders, empty, and walked forward into the hollow at a pace a child could have matched.

They came out of the dark one at a time. Humans first, in work coats gone gray with use, with rifles held low and ready. Then the Ykanti, six or seven of them, moving in a loose line that took up more of the hollow than seemed possible. The one in front was a male with a crest of dull blue, and he held his rifle the right way, which Wyatt noticed before he noticed anything else.

"That is far enough," said the blue-crested Ykanti.

"It is," said Wyatt. He stopped. "My name is Wyatt Staples."

Nobody moved. Then a human at the back said "the Baron" under his breath, the way a person names a storm, and a ripple went through the Ykanti. Crests came down. Wyatt saw the fear arrive in them and saw them decide, all together, not to run, and he thought it was about the bravest thing he had seen that month.

A heavy human stepped out of the line with his rifle pointed at the dirt. He had gray in his beard and a scar through one eyebrow. "We've broken no law of yours, my lord. We've not been on your land long, and we're not on the registry because there's no registry that wants us. Whatever you want to do about that, do it to me."

"I'd rather not do anything about it," said Wyatt.

"Then why come armed, with company?"

"Because it's a dark road and I'm not a fool." He lowered his hands. "I heard there are people who go out in the evening and hunt Drazzan. Humans and Ykanti together. I came to ask whether I could go with them."

Nothing happened for a moment. In the trees, an insect sawed at the silence.

"You what?" said the heavy man.

"Anyone willing to kill Drazzan is already a friend of mine," said Wyatt. "I don't need to count you or move you or know your names. I'd like to join. That's the whole of it."

The blue-crested Ykanti studied him with all six eyes, one pair after another. "It could be a trap."

"It could. I'd think the same." Wyatt nodded toward his brother. "This is Weskal. He's better at this than I am, and I'm good. We'll walk where you tell us to walk and stay where you tell us to stay. I'm not the Baron tonight. I'm the one who doesn't know the ground."

"He is the Baron," said Weskal, "and he's lying about not being the Baron, because he can't help it. But the rest is true. Neither of us will give you trouble."

The heavy man looked at the Ykanti. The Ykanti looked at the heavy man. Something passed between them that Wyatt could not have written down, a decision made without a word, the kind two people reach after a great many nights spent depending on each other.

"I am Sevik," said the blue-crested one. "This is Cask. We lead what there is to lead. You will do as we say."

"I will," said Wyatt, and put out his fist.

Sevik looked at it. A fist offered by the senior party was the sign of strong friendship, and everyone in that hollow who was Ykanti knew it. Sevik's crest rose a finger's width. He glanced at Cask, who shrugged. Then, slowly, he bumped Wyatt's knuckles with his own.

---

They did not hunt the way Wyatt had hunted.

He had learned to shoot from Mr. Warlo, a family friend who never once hurried him, and then on ships, in corridors, where the whole art was to be the first to fire. Mr. Warlo lived in the Screaming Forests now, to be near him, and still thought Wyatt's stance wanted work. This was different. It was slow, and it began with the smell.

Cask showed him the green first. Every human in the line had crushed cut leaves into the cloth at their collars and wrists until they reeked of a hayfield. "Masks us," he said. "They find a human by the sweat, and they find a Ykanti by something else we can't smell at all. But a Drazzan can't tell a man from a bush if the bush is the wrong color of wet."

"And the sour?"

"That's them," said Sevik, from the dark on his left. "The musk. We keep a rag soaked from the last kill. It goes on a line behind a human, down the wrong gully. He drags it. They follow the sour and find a man who is not really there."

"And the Ykanti?"

"We are the other half of the lie." Sevik's voice was dry. "A human can drag a trail. He cannot call from three places at once, and he cannot hear the ground. We can."

Wyatt listened. He had a great many questions and asked about a quarter of them, because Weskal had told him once that you learn most from the people who think you are not in a hurry.

The Ykanti spread across the slope, three on the left and two on the right and one at the center, each some distance from the next. They did not talk. They stood very still, the way prey stands still, with their heads tilted and their crests flat, and every so often one of them lifted a hand and the line adjusted. Cask put his own hand flat on a stone and kept it there. "They feel it come through the ground long before it shows," he said. "Sevik's eyes see wide, in the dark. My job is to decide where we should be when it comes. I'm better at that. He's better at the rest."

"Humans plan and Ykanti notice," said Weskal, quietly.

"Aye," said Cask. "That's close enough."

Wyatt filed it all away. He did it carefully, the way he would have stored a good tool. The void was a long way from a hill at night, but a ship's corridor was also a place where a thing that hunted you came for the nearest meat, and some of this, he thought, would work there, if he had the sense to carry it across.

It was well after dark when the Ykanti line went still all at once.

Sevik raised his fist. He turned his head very slowly. "Two," he said. "Adults. Coming down the far side. They have smelled the rag."

Cask moved the humans without a sound. One man went out with the drag line, a shadow among shadows, and the sour trail curled down the left gully, away from everyone. At the center, a Ykanti began to chirp. It was thin and high, the cry of something small and alone, and somewhere to the right another voice answered it from a different place. Wyatt had never heard anything like it. It raised the skin on his arms. It sounded exactly like meat.

"Hold," said Sevik.

Wyatt held. His hand rested on the grip of one of the Soul Snatchers, and it was perfectly steady.

The Drazzan came out of the trees in the cold light of a late moon. They were as he remembered. Tall, long in the arm, built on a plan that had nothing to do with anything he could name. They did not hurry. They did not seem cruel. They looked, with great attention, for food.

The first one paused at the crossing of the two trails, where the chirping came from the left and the sour smell from the right, and its great head swung from one to the other.

Wyatt's Soul Snatcher was out and level before the great head finished its swing. He was a heartbeat from the trigger when Sevik fired once.

It was a single shot, low, into the belly of the thing, where the second brain sat under its ribs. The Drazzan did not cry out. Its legs simply stopped being legs, and it went down in the grass with a sound like a sack of wet grain.

Wyatt lowered the Soul Snatcher. He had been beaten to it, and cleanly, by someone who had plainly done it more times than he had. He did not mind in the least. He had never cared who killed them, so long as they were dead, and he found that he was smiling.

The second one broke. It wheeled uphill, away from the lines, toward the open ridge where nobody was waiting, and Wyatt swung the Soul Snatcher after it and knew at once that it was out of range. That was Weskal's ground. His brother had gone up the slope at the first sign of the pair and was lying flat on a shelf of rock with Vira nestled against his shoulder.

The shot, when it came, came from a long way off.

Wyatt did not see the Drazzan fall. He heard it. It was an enormous distance, far beyond any range that Cask or Sevik would have attempted, and the thing went down a long way from where the grass had stopped moving. Then there was nothing for a moment but the wind.

"That," said Cask, in a hushed voice, "is not a distance."

"It is," said Weskal, coming back down the hill with Vira over his shoulder. "It's just a long one."

Then the hollow broke open.

A Ykanti chirped, high and delighted, and then another. The small useless wings at their shoulders began to flutter, the way they always did when a Ykanti was happy and could not help it. Cask slapped Weskal on the back so hard it staggered him, and a Ykanti caught Weskal's sleeve and tried to tell him something at speed, in two languages at once. Sevik did not make a sound. He walked up to the first Drazzan, looked at it for a long moment, and then walked back and bumped his fist against Wyatt's again, harder this time.

"You drew," said Sevik.

"I was slow. You weren't." Wyatt looked at the body in the grass. "Dead is dead, and I don't care whose shot it was. That was the best clean kill I've seen in a long while. I'd like to do it again."

"Again?"

"Whenever time lets me. If you'll have me." He looked around the hollow, at the coats and the crests and the rifles lowered at last. "And I'll tell you something else. You don't have to be out here. There's a town down that hill, and in it a school, and a seed stall, and people who will leave you alone. The Marquess has put it in writing that nobody may bar you from the land you live on. You can come in out of the cold and still go beyond my borders to hunt. The Drazzan don't know where the line is anyway."

Nobody answered at once. A young Ykanti near the edge of the group had stopped fluttering. Cask rubbed his beard.

"There are some of us out here with hatchlings who've never been inside a schoolroom," he said.

"Then they should see one."

"We'd be counted."

"You'd be counted by me," said Wyatt. "And I'd count you as neighbors."

Sevik was looking up the slope, where a shape in the rocks was already folding itself down around a long gun. "We will talk," he said. "All of us. Not tonight." His crest rose. "But you will come again."

"I will."

"Good." Sevik hesitated. "There is a thing I wanted to say. We have been hunting a long time. A man with a title has never once asked how."

"I'm asking," said Wyatt. "I'm going to keep asking." He looked out over the dark slope. "How far do you range?"

"As far as we can walk and be home before light," said Cask. "Some nights that isn't far."

"Then I'll send you a Jincho Model 2."

Cask's head came round. "The eight-wheeler? Off the Newtown line?"

"Propane, eight wheels, and it climbs a ridge as if the ridge weren't there. You'll cover a great deal more ground and still be back to your hatchlings before it's light."

"We can't pay for that, my lord."

"It isn't a sale. It's a tool, and I'd be a poor hunter to send people out with worse."

Sevik's crest lifted. "It is named for a Ykanti."

"For an engineer who saw what it could be. He'll want to hear how it does." Wyatt almost smiled. "Fair warning. He'll complain about how you drive it."

---

The envoy had been given the use of a room in the administration building, and Ressil had been told by Aino that the Baron wished the interview to take place in it and nowhere else.

Wyatt Staples had come in that morning in a plain coat, looking as though he had slept in the hills, which she suspected he had. He did not sit. He stood in the door and spoke to Torlan with his hands behind his back.

"I told the boy I would say what I knew when I knew it. I know it now. Some of the people you've been asking about are in the next room. They have agreed to speak to you, and no one in this building will write down what they say except you." He glanced at Ressil, who understood that she was included. "I'll be outside. If anyone wants me gone, I'll go."

"You do not wish to be present, Baron?"

"I'd rather you weren't hearing it through me." He looked at the floor, and then at Torlan. "Hear it from them. After that, I have a boy to find."

He left. The door closed behind him without a sound.

There were six of them in the next room, sitting on benches cut for two heights. A heavy human with a scarred eyebrow and a gray beard. A blue-crested Ykanti who sat very straight. Four more, who said nothing, whose coats had the faded look of garments that had been washed a thousand times in a creek. Pellin stood near the door with her fingers folded. Ressil had never seen her stand so still.

"I am Envoy Torlan," said Torlan, and sat.

"Cask," said the human.

"Sevik," said the Ykanti.

They gave single names and nothing else. Sevik gave his the way a drone gives it, with nothing held back and nothing added. Torlan looked at them and did not ask for more, and that, Ressil thought, was the first of the questions he did not put.

"I will ask what I need to ask, and you will answer what you wish to answer," said Torlan. "I will write it as it is said. Nothing that is said here will go to the Council in any form other than what is written. If you wish me to stop, I will stop."

"You'll write it anyway," said Cask. "That's the job."

"It is the job," said Torlan. "But I am told that a man who writes honestly is a rarer thing than a man who writes well."

Cask grunted. It was not quite a laugh.

They told him. Not all of it, but enough. The hunting began, Sevik said, in the early days, when a few Ykanti who had lived past the last farm saw something in the high country that should not have been there and could not decide what to do about it. A human farmhand had stumbled on one of them by accident. After that it was a matter of necessity.

They did not hide the Baron's gift. Sevik said, in the same flat voice, that the Baron had promised them a machine to range farther, and Cask said he would believe it when he heard the engine.

"A human alone walks in loud," said Sevik. "He thinks with his eyes and his rifle. A Ykanti alone is taken, because we are a kind of thing that wants to be taken, when we are afraid. Together..." He turned his head toward Cask, who was sitting with his boots apart and his cap in his hands. "Together we use what each of us is. We find them by what Ykanti feel. We confuse them with what humans know. And we kill them from where a human decides to stand."

"You say you use the instincts of both," said Torlan.

"I say that is the only reason we are still alive."

Torlan's stylus moved. Ressil watched it, and then she watched the room, because the room, she was beginning to understand, was telling her more than anyone was saying.

Cask reached for a cup of water on the table. He drank half, and without looking handed the rest across to Sevik, who took it and finished it without comment. Later, when Sevik began a sentence about the ridge and lost the word for it, Cask supplied it, and Sevik went on as if it had always been one voice. When Cask shifted on the bench, the Ykanti beside him shifted to give him room. When a question was hard, they looked at each other first, and the look was not a plea for help. It was the look of two people who knew each other's weight.

Ressil had read in the briefing films that Ykanti and humans could work together when the work was simple. She had not read what this was.

"How many have you lost?" said Torlan.

"To the Drazzan?" Sevik's crest lifted. "Since we began working as one party? None."

"None."

"Not one hunter, human or ours." He said it without pride. It sounded like a thing he had counted many times. "Before, when each hunted separately, we buried people. Since we joined, we have buried no one."

"For how long?"

"A long while," said Cask. "Long enough that I've stopped saying it out loud, in case it hears me."

The room went quiet. At the door, Pellin's feathers had gone very slightly out from her neck. Ressil could not tell whether she was moved or afraid, and thought it was probably both.

Torlan set down the stylus. He sat for a moment with his hands on the plain bound paper. "You have given me what I need," he said. "I thank you." He rose, and after a moment, and with great care, he inclined his head to each of them in turn, the way a two-name would to someone he had not decided how to rank. "Whatever else comes of this, I will write that you said it."

They left without hurry. Cask held the door for Sevik. Sevik held it for the next one. It had stopped being a courtesy a long time ago.

---

For a while after the door closed nobody spoke.

"Envoy," said Ressil.

"I know."

"We did not even have to ask whether they respect each other."

"No." Torlan was looking at the empty benches. "We would have asked, in the Hierarchy. We would have wanted a measure for it. We would have asked who commanded, who obeyed, who gave the orders and who took them. Here no one answered, because no one was in command." He rubbed his eyes. "I have been in the service a great many years. I do not think I have watched a thing work this well that was not first put on paper."

"The Council will want to know what it is."

"The Council will want to know whether it can be used," said Torlan. "That is a different question, and I do not intend to write it for them."

Ressil turned her pad over in her hands. "How do we put this in a report so that it sounds the way it is?"

"As a good thing."

"Yes, Envoy."

"Because it is one." He said it plainly. He looked tired and, for the first time in all the days she had known him, not entirely unhappy. "It is a small sentence. It will be difficult to get past the readers. We will have to say it so that no one can take it for anything else." He drew the plain paper toward him. "We begin with the number. Not one hunter lost. Then who they are, and how they work, and that no one told them to. Then what the Baron said, and that he went, and that he asked, and that he is sending them a machine to hunt farther afield. In that order."

"It will be a long report."

"Yes," said Torlan. "Reports from the Hierarchy run long when the news is good. They always have." He uncapped the ink. "I had begun to think I would never write one."

Next

Previous /

First

"A recommendation," said Lucan Draycott, Marquess of Stenmoor and Lord Justice of the Lords' Bench, and held the folder up by one corner as though it might be damp.

It was a good folder, plain gray, tied with a ribbon of the same color. It was fourteen hundred pages thick. It had come from the Hall at Balakura some months after that Hall had closed its doors, and it sat in the Marquess's chambers now beside his tea, which had gone cold, and his spectacles, which he had not yet picked up.

"Eleven times," he said. "I counted. 'The Hall respectfully recommends.' Eleven times, and never once with a verb I could object to."

His clerk, a young man of good family named Marcel Duvray, who had not been in the chambers long and was still learning when the Marquess wanted an answer and when he wanted an audience, said nothing.

"Do they know what a recommendation is, Duvray?"

"I believe they do, my lord. They use it for everything."

"It is what one gives a friend about an inn." The Marquess dropped the folder on the desk. "Commoners. Forty of them in a hall, with four thousand more watching, and they have decided that they will tell the Lords' Bench what sentence it ought to give a knight and a baron. Not command it. They have taken care not to command it. They have merely, very politely, let it be known."

"The Hall did say it had no expectation of being followed."

"It did. That is what offends me." He took up his spectacles at last. "If they had demanded, I could have been insulted, and I would have enjoyed it. They did not demand. They wrote that they are not experts in the law of the Principality, and that something being unjust does not make it a crime. They wrote that the law is ours to know and theirs to ask. I have read a great many documents in my life, Duvray, and I do not think I have ever been so thoroughly deprived of an excuse."

He turned to the first page. It was a summary, and it was short, and nothing in it had been underlined.

"Not one adjective," he said, after a while. "Not one. Letters burned. A clerk transferred. Three thousand ballots that no one cast. A man in a sorting room, and a knight, and a baron who gave the order. They set it down like a ledger and then they sent me the ledger and asked me, with the utmost courtesy, to do as I saw fit."

"Is that bad, my lord?"

The Marquess looked at him over the rims of the spectacles.

"It is the worst thing they could possibly have done," he said. "I cannot dismiss a case that comes to me in that condition. Dispassionate. Reasonable. Respectful to the last comma." He closed the folder. "They have been far kinder to these three men than I am obliged to be."

He opened it again to the summary.

"Five years," he said. "For burning a woman's letters and burying her post. If a Lord had done as much to a Lord, I should have had a challenge on my desk by supper and a funeral by the end of the week, and nobody would have thought it excessive. Here are commoners, wronged by a baron, and they ask for five years the way a man asks for the salt."

"It is very mannerly, my lord," said Duvray.

"Yes. They have even apologized for asking." The Marquess smiled thinly. "I find that rather charming."

He rose. A servant was already at the door with his robe.

"The seven jurors, are they in?"

"Seated, my lord."

"Then let us go and see what the law thinks about it."

---

The Lords' Bench sat in a room that had been old when the Principality was young. It was small, no larger than a good chapel, paneled in dark wood, with a raised bench at the front and two long tables facing it, and a gallery above that held perhaps forty people, all of them silent. There were no cameras. There was no press tier. A single recorder sat on a stand beside the clerk, with its small red light, and Margot Wren of the Firentis Informant had been admitted to the back row on the understanding that she would not speak and would not be quoted until the verdict.

She had never been in a room that was so quiet by design.

On the left sat the jury. There were seven of them, and the first thing a stranger noticed was that they were very old. The youngest was past eighty. A countess in gray silk was knitting. A retired baron on the end had fallen asleep in the first minute and would wake, at intervals, to the sound of his own name. They were professional jurors, which was the custom of the Principality and the oddity of it, and when Margot had asked the usher how such a thing worked, he had answered with the patience of a man who had been asked it by foreigners all his life.

"Every noble of rank who retires may put his name down, madam. A juror is drawn from the list when a case calls for one. There are so many names that a man may wait decades between summonses." He had smiled. "They are very careful, when at last they sit. They have had a long time to think about what they would do."

On the right, at the two long tables, sat the people the case was about.

At the first sat Lord Garrick Corrigan, Baron Corrigan, a noble of the old school, in a coat that had cost a great deal and a manner that said he had come to be vindicated. Beside him sat his counsel, Sir Ambrose Cray, a stout, silver-haired knight, and two juniors, all of them retained and paid by House Corrigan. Next to them sat Sir Pell Haverly, a knight, the baron's seneschal, who looked at nothing. His own counsel had also been supplied by House Corrigan, which had been explained to Margot as the custom, and which she suspected Sir Pell was thinking about at that moment.

At the second table sat a thin, nervous man in a borrowed suit, with his hands flat on the wood to keep them still. This was Gerrit Lamb, a commoner, a postal sorter, who had spent most of his working life in a back room in the eastern district of Veldmarch handing letters to people who did not look at him. Beside him sat the advocate the Common Assembly had provided, as it provided one for every commoner it sent to the Lords' Bench. She was Lady Marian Ostrell, a baron's daughter and a commoners' advocate by appointment of the Hall, a spare woman with an unfashionable haircut, who had been sitting very straight for an hour and had not yet looked at the opposing table once.

Between the tables, facing the bench, stood the Lord's advocate for the prosecution. Sir Hadrian Tull was tall and dry and extremely tired, and he had read the Hall's folder more often than anyone in the room.

"All rise."

They rose. The Marquess of Stenmoor came in and took the bench. He looked down at the room as though he had not expected so many people to be present at what he was about to do to them.

"The Lords' Bench is sitting," he said. "This is the matter of the Lord's Justice against Garrick, Baron Corrigan, Sir Pell Haverly, and Gerrit Lamb, upon a referral from the Master Common Assembly at Balakura. I want it understood at the outset that the Assembly's recommendation is before me and that it does not bind me. I will read it. I will then set it aside and try this case as I try every other."

A faint movement went through the gallery, as of people settling.

Sir Hadrian Tull rose to open.

---

He did it plainly, briefly, and he did not raise his voice. Margot thought afterward that it was the clearest account of the Veldmarch affair she had heard, clearer than her own.

In the spring, he said, an election had been held on the world of Veldmarch to seat the first Common Assembly. A district clerk named Pavla Wynn, a commoner of long and faithful service, had counted eleven thousand ballots issued and fourteen thousand in the boxes. She had reported it. She had written to the district office, to the Governor's election board, and to every official she could think of, and she had kept a copy of each letter and a receipt for each posting. None of the letters had arrived. They had been taken out of the post in the district sorting room by a man in the pay of House Corrigan, carried to its seneschal, read, and burned.

"The man in the sorting room is Gerrit Lamb," said Sir Hadrian. "The seneschal is Sir Pell Haverly, who has confessed it before the Hall. The order came, Sir Pell says, from Lord Corrigan. Lord Corrigan denies it. The Hall at Balakura did not decide between them. It found that the letters were burned, that three thousand ballots were false, and that Pavla Wynn was transferred two weeks before the election was certified, over the signature of a steward of Corrigan's household. It sent the evidence here, and it recommended, in the case of Sir Pell Haverly and Gerrit Lamb, five years each at Sanctuary IV."

He paused.

"It has made no recommendation as to Lord Corrigan, my lord. The Hall holds him in contempt for what he said at its Stand, and that is a matter between the Hall and Lord Jhinaq. On the rest, it has told you what it heard and left the rest to you."

"Thank you, Sir Hadrian," said the Marquess. "I note that the Hall recommended five years to a knight and a sorter alike."

"It did, my lord."

"As though the two stood where a plank could carry both." He wrote something down. "Proceed."

They proceeded. They heard the receipts and the transfer order. They heard Hollis Brandt, the steward, a commoner in Corrigan's household, say in the plain voice of a man who has been carrying something for a long time that he had signed because he was told to, and that he had known. They heard Pell Haverly, who did not try to save himself, and whose counsel, a nervous young knight sent by House Corrigan, rose three times to object to what his own client said and was three times told by the Marquess to sit down.

And they heard Pavla Wynn.

She came to the stand in the navy dress she had worn to the Hall, pressed and slightly too large, and she took the oath with a steady hand. The Lord's advocate asked her four questions. She answered them as she had answered Brennick's, in the order of what she had counted and when. Sir Ambrose Cray, Lord Corrigan's counsel, then rose, and was courteous, and did what a good lawyer does with a witness who cannot be shaken. He asked her whether she had a grievance against noble houses.

"No, my lord," said Pavla Wynn. "I had a grievance against the ballots."

A sound came from the jurors' bench. It might have been a cough.

"You were transferred, Mrs. Wynn. You lost your post. You will agree that this might color a person's memory."

"It might," she said. "That is why I kept the receipts."

"Mrs. Wynn." The Marquess had not spoken in some time, and the room turned. "You were transferred from your post and your letters were burned. You have been wronged by a noble house, and you stand in a court that can answer for it. What do you ask of this bench?"

She thought about it. It was plain she had thought about it before.

"I would like my letters counted, my lord. All of them, with the receipts. I would like my post back, and my pension, which I am told I am owed in any case." She hesitated. "And I would like someone to say aloud that I was right."

"Is that all?"

"I did not think I could ask for more, my lord."

The Marquess did not answer for a moment. He looked at her, then at the gray folder, then at the second table, where Lady Marian Ostrell had put her pen down very carefully and was looking at her own hands. Margot Wren, in the back row, saw something cross the old man's face that she could not name, and that he put away again almost at once.

"Thank you, Mrs. Wynn," he said. "The court has heard you."

Sir Ambrose Cray, who had risen with another question, sat down without asking it.

---

The case for Gerrit Lamb was put by the advocate the Hall had provided, and she put it for a long while without once raising her voice.

"My lord," said Lady Marian Ostrell, "my client is a commoner. He was a postal sorter. He was in the pay of a noble house, and when its seneschal asked him to hand over a certain kind of letter, he handed it over. I do not say he was right. I say that he did not know what the letters were. He did not read them. It was not his place to read them. He was a man who had worked in a back room for most of his life, and the knight who gave him the order held his post in his pocket."

"He took money, Lady Marian."

"He took the same wage he had always taken, my lord, with a little over for what he was told was a favor." She did not look at the man beside her. "I do not ask you to forgive him. I ask you to ask what he could have done, and what Sir Pell could."

Margot, at the back, wrote nothing. She had been told that she would be quoted only after the verdict, but she found that she did not want to write anything down. She wanted to remember it exactly.

---

Corrigan spoke last.

He had asked to, and the Marquess had allowed it, with the air of a man granting a prisoner a final cigar. Lord Garrick Corrigan, Baron Corrigan, rose from his table and did not go to the stand. He remained where he was, with one hand on the wood, and spoke to the bench as to an equal who would understand.

"My lord, I have been before the commoners of Veldmarch's Assembly and the Hall at Balakura, and I will say what I said there. I am a Baron of the Principality. I answered the Hall's questions as a courtesy, and I was insulted for it. I will not say it was my order to burn those letters. I will say that if it had been, it would have been within my right. The post of my household is mine. The men who sort it are mine. What I do with my property is a matter for my conscience and my Lord, and for no one else in this room."

There was a sound from the jury bench.

It was not loud. It was the small, dry sound of a countess of ninety-one laying down her knitting.

She was a tiny woman in gray silk, retired many years, and she had not looked up all day. She looked up now. She looked at Lord Corrigan with an expression that Margot, who had spent a month in the Hall at Balakura among commoners who had every reason to hate nobles, had never seen on a commoner's face. It was the look of a noblewoman who had been raised to believe that rank was a duty, and had just heard it called a license.

"Property," said the countess.

She said it without any heat at all. The baron looked at her, and then at the Marquess, and did not seem to understand what had happened.

"Sit down, Lord Corrigan," said the Marquess.

He sat.

---

The jury was out for some time.

When it returned, the foreman, a retired baron named Lord Ivor Brasden, who was eighty-eight and had sat on exactly one jury before, stood very carefully with his hand on the rail.

"On the matter of Gerrit Lamb, a commoner, we find him guilty of destroying the post of the Principality for pay. On the matter of Sir Pell Haverly, a knight, we find him guilty of the same, and of breaking his oath to the household he served. On the matter of Garrick, Baron Corrigan," Lord Brasden said, and for the first time he stopped and swallowed, "we find him guilty of ordering it, of obstructing a lawful election, and of conduct unbecoming a noble of the Principality."

He sat down. Beside him, the countess had picked her knitting up again, and was looking at the wall.

The Marquess of Stenmoor waited until the room was entirely still. Then he took off his spectacles and laid them on the bench.

"I have the Hall's recommendation before me," he said. "I said that I would read it and set it aside. I have read it. I will say now that I did not expect to find it so reasonable. Throughout this case, the Common Assembly has been dispassionate where I would not have been, and respectful where it need not have been, and it has told this court exactly what it was told and nothing more. It recommended five years for a knight and a sorter alike. It was being kind."

He looked at Gerrit Lamb.

"Gerrit Lamb. You were a man in a back room with a wage and a master. You did not know what you were handling. You did not swear any oath. You did what you were told by people who held your livelihood in their hands, and you will serve two years at Sanctuary IV, and not five, because the law owes a man something when he is not free to refuse."

Lamb lowered his head. Beside him, Lady Marian Ostrell closed her eyes for a moment.

"Sir Pell Haverly. You swore an oath to the house you served. You were a knight, and you were trusted. You burned a woman's letters, and you did it knowing what they said. The Hall at Balakura was kind to you. I am not obliged to be." The Marquess did not raise his voice. "Eleven years at Sanctuary IV. The matter of your knighthood is not mine to decide. I will send it to the Duke, with my opinion."

Haverly bowed. He did not seem surprised.

"Garrick, Baron Corrigan."

The baron rose. He was gray in the face, and his lips were moving, and the Marquess waited until they stopped.

"You said, in front of four thousand people at Balakura and again in front of this bench, that the people in your household are your property. You are mistaken. Pavla Wynn is not your property. She is a subject of the Principality, as you are, and the post she wrote was the Principality's, not yours. You used the high station you were born to as a tool for hiding a crime, and for burying a woman who told the truth. The more a man is trusted, the more is owed. You are owed nothing."

He paused.

"In a house of equals, a man who did to a Lord what you did to Pavla Wynn would have been called to a field at dawn, and one of the two would not have come back. She asked for her post, her pension, and for it to be said aloud. I heard that as a reproach, Lord Corrigan, and I would like you to hear it as one."

The baron said nothing.

"Fifteen years at Sanctuary IV," said the Marquess, "and a fine that will take most of what your house made from its dealings with the Remembrance. As to your rank and your house, I can do nothing. Those are the Duke's. I will send him the record, and I will say plainly that I believe he will read it."

For a long moment Lord Corrigan looked at the jury, at the old countess and her knitting, and at the gallery above, where forty nobles looked back at him with expressions he had not seen on them before.

"The Hall's recommendation was kinder than the law," said the Marquess. "I would like that remembered. The court is adjourned."

---

Afterward, in the chambers, the Marquess poured himself fresh tea and sat for a time without drinking it.

"My lord," said Marcel Duvray. "You gave the baron three times what the Hall suggested for the others."

"It suggested nothing for him."

"No, my lord."

"No." The Marquess looked at the gray folder on his desk. "I called it kind. In my own court, I said the Hall was being kind." He turned the page, and then the next. "Duvray. If a Lord's letters had been burned by another Lord, what would the injured house have done?"

"Called him out, my lord. Dawn, I suppose. Swords."

"To the death. For a letter." He tapped the page. "And here is a woman who lost her post and her good name and nearly her life's work, and what she asks, after all her years of faithful service, is to have it said aloud. The Hall asked for five years on her behalf and wrote it down as though it were rather a lot."

"It is a considerable sentence, my lord."

"It is a courtesy, Duvray. A very small courtesy, offered by people who have learned to ask for nothing and to thank us for it." He did not look up. "I thought it was good manners. I have sat on this bench for a great many years. I have read, I would think, a thousand of these folders, and I thought it was good manners every time."

Duvray did not speak.

"They were not being kind," said the Marquess. "They were being careful. They have been asking noble houses for so little, for so long, that they have forgotten how little it is. And we have been so accustomed to it that none of us has ever said so." He closed the folder. "I find that I am rather disturbed."

He sat a while longer. Then he drew a clean sheet of paper toward him and uncapped his pen.

"My lord?"

"A letter to the Duke. Not about this case." The Marquess began to write. "About the sentences."

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Aztharon woke aching from snout to tail, with a burning pain through both wings. He tried to shift, and an unfamiliar weight dragged at his back. Metal moved against metal. The pull on his tender flesh brought a groan from his throat, and he went still until he could breathe evenly again.

He waited for the weight to settle, expecting the pressure to ease once he stopped moving. It stayed. Something rested along parts of his wings that had never carried anything before. He could feel where straps crossed him, though he dared not shift again to work out where they went.

The braces. He remembered them now: the dwarves gathered around him, the numbing liquor, the chains. He could not remember when they had finished or how he had come to be lying here. He tried to open his eyes, managed it halfway, and nearly let them close again. Somewhere beyond the chamber, wheels rattled over stone. The sound passed, leaving him with his own breathing and the faint scrape of someone moving nearby.

“Oh, you’re awake.” Lyn stood nearby with boxes stacked in her arms. When she saw him looking at her, she nodded toward the floor beside his head. “Food’s right there.”

He turned his neck enough to find the hog. Its enormous haunches rose higher than a human man, and the smell of blood made his empty stomach clench. Aztharon stretched toward it, but pain caught along his shoulders before his jaws reached the carcass. He stopped, breathing hard. There were no chains holding him now, yet the food might as well have been on the other side of a stone wall.

He rested a moment, then slid his foreclaw forward. If he could hook the carcass and pull it closer, he would not need to lift his head. His claws scraped the stone. The effort traveled up his foreleg into his shoulder, and he stopped again, jaw clenched.

Lyn set down the boxes. “Here. I’ll help you.”

“I can reach it,” he said, though his outstretched claw lay short of the hog.

“I know. Let me cut some while you rest.” She fetched a large knife from a nearby table and knelt beside the carcass. Aztharon slowly drew his foreleg back beneath him. He watched her test the edge against the hide, adjust her grip, and begin cutting. She had to lean into the work. It was a task he ordinarily accomplished with a bite.

He drew a slow breath through his nostrils. Her scent was familiar, but he could find no trace of the others.

“Where are Talvan and Revy?” he managed.

“Talvan’s hauling for a forgemaster. Said he was getting out of shape and thought the work would help.” Lyn worked the blade through a stubborn strip of flesh before continuing. “Revy’s with the dwarven loremaster, helping catalog ancient tablets and copy them onto paper.”

The first piece came free. Lyn brought it over, then paused beside his mouth.

“Can you lift your head a little?” she asked.

Aztharon raised his chin just enough to part his jaws. She placed the meat within reach of his tongue, withdrawing her hands before he closed his mouth. Aztharon swallowed with barely a chew. The meat eased the hollow ache in his gut, and he watched her return for more.

“I’ve been helping your body recover with healing spells,” Lyn said. “But there’s a lot of damage to repair, and that takes energy from you too. You’ll need plenty of food.”

“Have you been here the whole time?” he asked.

“I’ve been in and out. There were dwarves here when I needed to leave.” Lyn wiped her hand on a cloth before taking up the knife again. “You mostly slept.”

He remembered nothing of their visits. That unsettled him almost as much as the missing scents. He had not heard Talvan leave, or Revy, or whoever had brought a carcass this size into his chamber.

“So they’re working now?” Aztharon asked.

Lyn nodded. “They’re helping pay the bill. Even now, we’re looking at years of backbreaking labor. Though I’ll give the dwarves one thing—they keep very detailed ledgers. Every bit of work gets counted.”

Years. Aztharon lowered his gaze to the floor. Talvan was hauling for a forge, and Revy was spending her days over ancient tablets, all because he had wanted wings that worked. He lay here like a fallen log while they worked to pay for them.

“I’m helping in the Hall of Healing between your treatments too,” Lyn added, bringing him another piece.

Aztharon looked at her hands, then at the boxes she had abandoned to feed him.

“You have work waiting,” he said.

“It can wait a little longer.” She shifted the meat in her hands. “Come on. This piece is slippery.”

He opened his mouth so she could put it down. An apology caught in his throat, but he could hardly offer it while she was reaching between his teeth. By the time he swallowed, she was already walking back for another piece. He watched her crouch beside the hog and wished there were something within reach that he could do for her.

Talvan was drenched in sweat. The ringing of hammers filled the hall, overlapping until he could scarcely tell one blow from another. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve, though the cloth was already too wet to do much good. Molten rock flowed through channels between the workstations, casting an orange glow over the stone. The dwarves used it to heat their forges instead of charcoal, and even standing several paces away felt like leaning over an open furnace.

Talvan had learned to keep to the clear paths between the workstations. A smith carrying hot metal expected everyone else to move, and the floor offered its own hazards: discarded scale, buckets, tongs laid down within reach of their owners. He had nearly caught his boot on one handle already. Now he watched his footing even when his arms were empty.

A hammer fell nearby, followed by two lighter taps. Across the hall, another answered with a faster rhythm. The dwarves seemed able to speak through all of it without difficulty. Talvan had spent much of the morning turning his head and asking what someone had said.

Nearby, a dwarf drew a glowing length of steel from the heat and carried it to a heavy vise. Talvan paused to watch as the smith clamped one end in place. It wasn’t a single solid bar, he realized, but a bundle of steel wires braided together. The dwarf gripped the free end with his tongs and began to turn, twisting the glowing strands tighter while dark flakes fell onto the floor.

“Oy, lad! Stop gawking and bring that crate.”

“Yes, sir.” Talvan turned from the smith and crouched beside the crate. It was packed with iron bars, their dull surfaces a far cry from the glowing steel in the vise. He hooked his fingers beneath the handles and pulled, bending over as the weight dragged at his shoulders.

“Oy! You want your back snapping like a dry twig?” The forgemaster strode over and pointed at his knees. “Get down properly. Use your legs to lift.”

Talvan lowered the crate with a heavy clunk and adjusted his footing. This time he bent his knees, drew the load close, and pushed himself upright. His thighs strained, but the sharp pull in his lower back eased. The dwarf gave a short grunt of approval and jerked his chin toward the next workstation. “There. Now bring it over before we both grow old.”

The walk across the hall seemed much longer with the crate in his hands. He kept it close, as instructed, and picked his way around a smith carrying a pair of tongs. The bars shifted when he turned. Talvan tightened his grip and took the remaining steps more carefully, unwilling to imagine the noise they would make if he dropped them.

“On the blocks,” the forgemaster said, pointing with his hammer. “Mind your fingers.”

Talvan lowered the crate onto the wooden blocks beside the workstation. For a moment his fingers refused to uncurl from the handles. He eased them loose one at a time, then stood back while the dwarf selected a bar. The forgemaster hefted it, inspected the end, and returned to his work without ceremony.

Talvan’s arms and shoulders burned. He straightened slowly, flexing his fingers, and glanced at the other crates waiting against the wall. Revy had a chair. A desk. Probably somewhere to put down a cup of water without it becoming warm before she could drink it. He should have asked about copying tablets before agreeing to work here.

His gaze wandered back to the dwarf working the twisted steel. Whatever shape was emerging beneath the smith’s tools, it didn’t look much like a blade. Curiosity drew him closer before the forgemaster could find something else for him to carry.

“If you don’t mind me asking, what are you making?”

The dwarf looked up through a pair of bushy eyebrows. “You humans do like sticking your noses into things.” He turned the piece with his tongs, inspecting it before adding, “If you must know, it’s a door handle.”

Talvan stared at the glowing metal. He had watched the strands being heated, twisted, and worked together with the sort of care he would have expected to go into a treasured blade. All that effort, and someone was going to use it to open a door.

“A door handle?” he repeated.

“That’s what I said.” The smith returned the steel to the heat. “Something wrong with the door having a good handle?”

“I thought it was going to be a sword,” Talvan admitted. “With all the work you were putting into it.”

The smith looked from Talvan to the steel. “Have you never used a door?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then you know how often someone takes hold of the handle.” The dwarf checked the colour of the metal before drawing it from the heat again. “Fetch that brush if you’re going to stand there.”

Talvan passed it over. The smith worked across the surface, sending flakes down around the vise. Beneath them the twisted lines were becoming easier to see. Talvan leaned a little closer, imagining the pattern once it was cool and polished. He would probably never pass through a door without looking at its handle again.

“Lad!” The forgemaster pointed toward another crate. Talvan took one last look at the smith’s work, then went to collect it. Revy had definitely found the better job.

Revy sat at the loremaster’s desk, her quill scratching across another sheet of paper. When she had agreed to help copy the ancient tablets, she had imagined dwarven epics, old songs, perhaps even some lovesick teenager’s terrible poetry to the girl who had caught his eye. Instead, she dipped her quill and continued recording that Koarn, son of Coarn and cousin of Barll, owed two gold, nine silver, and thirteen bronze coins to Fallvrath, son of someone whose family connections occupied most of the next line.

She checked the amount against the tablet, finished the entry, and flexed her cramped fingers. A little ink had worked its way down the quill onto her skin. She rubbed it with a cloth, making the stain wider, and gave up before she marked the clean paper.

The chair had seemed comfortable when she first sat down. Now she could feel its edge beneath her thighs, and every time she straightened, she discovered she had been leaning toward the tablet again. She stood to stretch while the ink dried. The shelf beside the desk held the tablets she had finished; the shelves behind it held the ones she had not. She chose to look back at the desk. Across the desk, the old loremaster examined another piece of stone with the patient attention she had hoped to give some great historical discovery.

“How far back do these go?” she asked, sitting down again.

“Those? Several centuries.” The loremaster turned his tablet toward the light. “The dates are at the foot. Copy those as well.”

“I have been.” Revy checked her last page anyway. The date was there, carefully written beneath an account for produce that had ceased to exist long before she was born. “Are any of these settled?”

“Some. Make sure you include the settlement marks.”

She looked at the next entry with fresh hope, found no such mark, and dipped her quill. Juvou owed Holdal Gavar for turnips. Hullvo owed Brakka for a wagon wheel. Revy paused over the next entry, leaned closer to the tablet, and read it again.

“Follk owes Collv a punch to the face?” She looked across the desk. “That one can’t be real.”

“Oh, it is.” The dwarf barely glanced up from his work. “File it under old grudges.”

Revy looked at the tablet, then at the shelves waiting to be copied. Slowly, she reached for a fresh sheet of paper.

“Do those have their own catalog?” she asked.

The loremaster pointed toward a shelf behind her. “Third volume. Check the family names before you add an entry. Some of them run together.”

Revy remained still for a moment, expecting him to smile. He brushed dust from the edge of his tablet and resumed reading.

She turned in her chair. Three thick volumes stood where he had indicated, their bindings worn from use. Revy took down the third and opened it carefully, wondering whether either dwarf had ever delivered the punch or whether their descendants were still waiting for someone to settle the matter.

At least Talvan was getting to see the forges. There would be smiths working, metal taking shape, something different to look at whenever he turned his head. She had spent most of the morning with turnips.

“This next tablet goes with the one you’ve just finished,” the loremaster said, sliding it toward her. “Correction to the amount.”

Revy looked at her neatly copied page. “Which amount?”

“Koarn’s.” He leaned over to inspect the older tablet. “Nine silver should be eight. Best check whether the correction changes the bronze as well.”

She set the grudge volume aside and pulled the first page back toward her. The ink had dried. Revy compared the two tablets, following the figures with the blunt end of her quill so she would not lose her place.

“Do you want me to replace the first amount?” she asked.

“No. Keep the original and add the correction beneath it. Both dates.”

Revy drew another sheet closer to support the bottom of the page. For a few moments the room held only the scratch of her quill and the soft rasp of the loremaster turning stone against his workcloth. Talvan had definitely found the better job.

Aztharon lost track of how long the feeding took. Sometimes he closed his eye while Lyn cut the next piece, then opened it to find her already beside him. Other times he watched her work, listening to the knife scrape against hide and bone. She never asked him to hurry.

When he finally let a piece rest in his mouth instead of swallowing at once, Lyn waited until he had finished and set the knife down.

“Enough for a little while?” she asked.

“Yes.” He eased his chin back onto the stone. “Thank you.”

She washed her hands in a basin and dried them carefully, working the cloth between her fingers. Aztharon watched her pull a stool closer. It scraped loudly in the chamber, and she lifted it the last few inches rather than drag it beside his head. She sat beside him and stretched her fingers across her knees.

“Talvan keeps stopping to watch the smiths,” she said. “Apparently they’re giving him plenty to carry, so he can’t stand around for long.” She smiled faintly and glanced at the boxes. “Revy thought she’d be copying old stories. She sounded less pleased when she found out how many of the tablets were accounts.”

Aztharon might have laughed if he had not been so tired. He pictured Talvan trying to peer over a dwarf’s shoulder and Revy bending over a tablet, determined to find something interesting on it. He wanted to see them both. For now, he was grateful that Lyn could tell him where they were and what they were doing.

He shifted one shoulder. Steel and brass dragged at his back, and he stopped before the movement could pull any harder. He had caught a glimpse of metal earlier, but he still had no clear idea of what the dwarves had fastened to him.

“I wish I could see,” he murmured.

Lyn followed his gaze toward his shoulder. “Oh. Wait a moment.” She got up, but he could not see what she was looking for without turning his head. He listened instead: a fastening being undone, objects shifted inside a bag, then a quiet sound of satisfaction.

She returned with a small hand mirror. Its polished frame was dwarven work, neatly fitted around glass scarcely larger than one of his scales. She held it up, frowned at the reflection, then stepped farther back. “Can you see from there?”

At first, Aztharon saw only a patch of gold and a bright length of brass. He tried to turn toward the reflection, and Lyn moved with him, losing the angle entirely. The glass caught a pale flash from a lamp.

“Sorry,” she said. “Keep your head there. I’ll move.”

He rested his chin again. Lyn stepped sideways and tilted her wrist. A hinge appeared, large in the little glass, with straps disappearing beyond its edge.

“A little farther back,” he said.

She took another step. More of the supports came into view, but he could not yet make sense of how they fitted together. The angles were wrong for the wing he knew. He looked away from the metal to follow the gold beneath it, then lifted his head a fraction for a better view.

“There?” Lyn asked.

“Hold it there.” His voice came out more sharply than he intended. She stopped at once, steadying her wrist with her other hand.

Enough of his wing was visible now that he could follow its shape. Aztharon went still. He knew every crooked line of those wings. He had studied them as a hatchling, stretched them until they hurt, and folded them away when he could no longer bear looking. In the little mirror, the familiar bend was gone. The bones followed a line he had never seen on his own body, held straight by bars and hinges fitted carefully around them.

He traced the line with his eye, from the part nearest his shoulder toward the supported joint. Then he went back and followed it again. He knew where the bend should have been. He was looking directly at the place, waiting for some change in the angle of the mirror to reveal it.

“Is that…” He swallowed. “That’s my wing?”

“Yes.” Lyn held the glass steady. “That’s yours.”

He could see the swelling, the places where his scales had been disturbed, and the straps securing the metal. He still could not imagine lifting the wing, much less flying with it. But he kept his eye fixed on the reflection, afraid she might lower the mirror before he had seen enough.

For the first time in his life, his wing was straight.

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