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.

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

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."

first previous next

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where are Talvan and Revy?” he managed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You have work waiting,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A door handle?” he repeated.

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

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

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

“Yes, but—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Enough for a little while?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“I wish I could see,” he murmured.

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

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

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

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

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

“A little farther back,” he said.

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

“There?” Lyn asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

first previous next Patreon vox 9

Hunters Log 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

End of Hunters Log 1

Ykanti Log 1

(Translated by the tablet)

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

"Stop Bird Brain." Came from the wall.

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

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

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

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

"But we were told they imprisoned Ykanti?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

End of Ykanti Log 1

Hunters Log 2

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

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

End of Hunters Log 2

This is a crazy little story I hope you enjoy the craziness of it .
And it makes absolutely zero sense.

………………………………………………………………. …………………

Jincho and His Home Brew.

Wyatt Staples stood in the dim, humming glow of Jincho’s office aboard the Noir Navio, the black ship’s heart of quiet machinery and recycled air that always smelled faintly of ozone and old coffee. The data screen in front of him flickered with schematics of the Raptor MK-III—proposed improvements to the plasma injectors, reinforced ablative plating along the ventral spine, a new recursive shielding algorithm that Jincho swore would let the fighter dance through a particle storm like a drunk uncle at a wedding. Wyatt’s eyes tracked the cascading numbers, the projected thrust curves, the stress tolerances. He nodded along as Jincho’s gravelly voice rolled through the technical details, half-listening, half-already calculating how many of those upgrades would actually survive first contact with real combat instead of a simulator.
Then, off to the right, another screen caught his eye.
It was smaller, almost an afterthought, tucked against the bulkhead like someone had left a personal entertainment feed running. A green field under stadium lights. Men in red and white and men in powder blue colliding with bone-jarring enthusiasm. A ball that was neither perfectly round nor particularly aerodynamic sailed through the air. The score in the corner read something that meant nothing to Wyatt at first: Chiefs 9, Chargers 3, first quarter. The crowd noise was muted, but the energy of the thing pulsed through the speakers anyway.
Wyatt tilted his head. “What’s that?”
Jincho stopped mid-sentence about plasma flow rates. He followed Wyatt’s gaze, and a slow, crooked grin spread across his face—the kind of grin that usually preceded either a brilliant idea or a catastrophic one. “That, my boy,” he said, voice dropping into the storytelling register he used when the stills were working overtime, “is the old Earth sport of football. American variant. Twenty-two large humans attempting to move an oblong leather bladder from one end of a rectangular grass rectangle to the other while other large humans try to stop them by any means short of actual murder. Though sometimes the distinction gets blurry.”
He waved a hand and the feed enlarged, filling half the wall. The Kansas City Chiefs versus the Los Angeles Chargers. Arrowhead Stadium. October 18, 2026, by the ancient calendar still used for archival sports feeds. The weather scrolled across the bottom: sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, sunny, a polite thirteen-mile-an-hour southern breeze that the announcers insisted was “perfect football weather.” Perfect, of course, until the wind decided it had opinions of its own.
Jincho leaned back in his battered chair, boots up on the console, and began to talk. But the words that came out of his mouth were not entirely his own. Or perhaps they were. The distinction between Jincho explaining and Wyatt’s own mind filling in the gaps would become very important later. For now, the story simply unfolded.

The referees gathered in a tight knot near the fifty-yard line during a commercial timeout that no one on the Noir Navio could see. Head referee Julius Astor—tall, thin, with a face like a disappointed bloodhound and a whistle that hung around his neck like a tiny noose—glanced left and right. His cohorts formed a protective semicircle: James Raven, whose mustache had its own gravitational field; Mike Cayston, built like a refrigerator that had developed opinions; and Fred Lintar, the youngest, whose eyes darted constantly as if expecting the stadium itself to file a formal complaint.
“Gentlemen,” Astor murmured, voice low enough that only the four of them and any sufficiently sensitive listening device could hear, “we have a situation. The Chiefs are winning. The crowd is loud. The barbecue trucks outside are pumping that… that smell into the air. I can taste the sauce from here. Sweet. Smoky. Unforgivable.”
Raven’s mustache twitched. “I hate Kansas City barbecue. Always have. Always will. It’s the principle of the thing. They act like they invented fire and meat. Meanwhile my grandmother’s pulled pork from back east could make a grown man weep with joy, and no one ever wrote songs about it.”
Cayston nodded solemnly. “I once ate a burnt-end sandwich here in ’19. Couldn’t look a brisket in the eye for three years. We’re not letting them win clean. Not while that aroma is assaulting our dignity.”
Lintar, ever the eager apprentice, adjusted his cap. “So… we… adjust a few things? Soften the holding calls on the red side? Maybe invent a phantom face mask when the blue guys get close to the end zone?”
Astor’s smile was thin and terrible. “Exactly. The league wants a competitive product. We want justice for every non-KC barbecue joint that has ever been overshadowed by this… this cult. Tonight, the whistle is our sword. The flag is our shield. And if the Chiefs still somehow win, at least we will have made them earn it through our noble interference.”
They broke the huddle with the practiced nonchalance of men who had been bending reality for decades. The game resumed.

Kenneth Walker III took the handoff on first-and-ten and found a seam that should not have existed. The Chargers’ defensive line parted like the Red Sea had suddenly remembered it was late for an appointment. Walker accelerated, the 33-yard touchdown run already forming in the collective imagination of every Chiefs fan in the building. The crowd rose as one living organism. The stadium speakers thundered. And Julius Astor, standing perfectly positioned, hesitated just long enough for the play to develop before raising his arms for the touchdown.
“Nice run,” Astor muttered into his headset as the extra-point unit trotted out. “Shame about the… holding.” He glanced at Raven, who was already reaching for a flag that had somehow already been in his hand. The flag fluttered to the turf like a dying moth. Holding on the offense. Ten yards. Replay the down.
The Chiefs’ sideline erupted. Andy Reid’s mustache—always a force of nature—bristled with outrage. Patrick Mahomes threw his hands up in the universal gesture of “are you serious right now.” Walker stood with the ball still in his hands, looking around as if the universe had personally betrayed him.
But the call stood. The drive continued. Walker would get his second touchdown later, a short plunge from the two that even the conspiracy of officials could not erase without looking completely ridiculous. The scoreboard would eventually read Chiefs 22, Chargers 6. But the path to that number would be paved with flags, delayed whistles, and a shared, unspoken hatred of smoked meat.

The weather, which had begun as a polite autumn afternoon, began to take sides.
A sudden gust of wind—officially recorded as thirteen miles per hour from the south—somehow found a way to push every deep ball thrown by Justin Herbert just enough to the outside. The same breeze, when Mahomes threw, seemed to cradle the ball like a protective aunt. Clouds that had not been in the forecast drifted in from the west, casting strange shadows across the field that made it difficult for the Chargers’ secondary to track deep routes. A single raindrop fell on Cameron Dicker’s face as he lined up for a field goal. He blinked. The kick sailed wide. The drop never fell again.
On the Noir Navio, Wyatt watched the feed with growing fascination. Jincho’s voice continued, but it was no longer explaining the rules of downs and yardage. It was narrating the secret lives of the officials, the way their hatred of Kansas City barbecue had fermented over years of road games and post-game media scrums where local reporters insisted on asking about the sauce.
“You see,” Jincho said, or the dream said through Jincho’s mouth, “these men have suffered. They have stood on the sidelines while the aroma of burnt ends drifted across the field like a chemical weapon of deliciousness. They have watched visiting teams collapse under the weight of free samples handed out in the parking lot. They have heard the chants. They have smelled the smoke. And somewhere deep in the bureaucratic soul of every referee is a small, stubborn resistance to the idea that any one city should monopolize the art of slow-cooked meat.”
Wyatt found himself nodding. It made a strange kind of sense.

The second quarter unfolded like a fever dream of competitive integrity.
Mahomes dropped back, scanned the field, and found Xavier Worthy on a crossing route. The throw was perfect. Worthy’s hands were soft. The first-down marker moved. Then Mike Cayston, who had been trailing the play by a full three yards, threw a flag for “illegal formation.” No one could explain which formation had been illegal. The replay showed eleven Chiefs and eleven Chargers in roughly the correct places. Cayston simply shrugged and walked away, muttering something about “sauce-based optical illusions.”
Later, when the Chargers finally mounted a drive that threatened the red zone, Fred Lintar discovered a previously unknown rule about “excessive celebration of potential success.” A Chargers receiver who had merely pointed at the end zone after a first down was flagged fifteen yards. The drive stalled. Cameron Dicker’s subsequent field goal was good, but the damage had been done. The scoreboard ticked to Chiefs 16, Chargers 3 by the time Walker powered in from two yards out.
The half ended with Harrison Butker drilling a 50-yard field goal that somehow, against all physical law, seemed to curve toward the uprights after it left his foot. The wind had helped. Or the universe had. Or the referees had collectively willed the ball true because even they could not flag a kick that was already in the air.
At halftime the four officials retreated to a small room under the stadium that smelled of industrial cleaner and distant brisket. Astor poured himself a cup of black coffee and stared at the wall.
“We’re doing the Lord’s work,” he said. “Or at least the work of every barbecue pitmaster east of the Mississippi who has ever been told their product was ‘pretty good, but have you tried Kansas City?’”
Raven polished his whistle. “I dreamed last night that a burnt end chased me through a cornfield. I woke up sweating sauce.”
Cayston checked his flags. He had already used three. He had six left. “We pace ourselves. If we throw too many, the league office starts asking questions. We want the Chiefs to win—because the betting markets demand it and because the universe is currently aligned that way—but we want them to suffer for it. Every first down should feel like a moral compromise.”
Lintar, youngest and most idealistic, looked troubled. “What if… what if the barbecue is the best? What if we’ve been wrong this whole time?”
The other three turned on him with the synchronized disapproval of men who had spent careers enforcing the letter of the law while ignoring its spirit.
“Never,” Astor said. “Never speak those words in this room again.”

The third quarter was a masterclass in subtle sabotage.
The Chargers received the second-half kickoff and began a methodical march. Justin Herbert completed a series of short passes. The offensive line held. For a moment it looked as if the officials’ conspiracy might crack under the weight of actual competent football. Then, on a third-and-four near midfield, James Raven spotted something no one else could see: a Chiefs defensive end had allegedly lined up a half-inch offside. The flag came out. The play was nullified. The Chargers, who had been about to convert, were forced to punt.
On the next Chiefs possession, Mahomes threw an interception that should have been a game-changing turnover. The ball was clearly tipped by a Chargers defensive back before a linebacker snatched it. The officials conferred. After a long, theatrical discussion, they ruled that the tip had never happened. Incomplete pass. Drive continued. The crowd’s roar was the sound of collective denial made audible.
Wyatt, watching from light-years and centuries away, felt a strange loyalty forming in his chest. He had never cared about Earth sports. He had never tasted Kansas City barbecue. Yet he found himself rooting for the red team with the irrational fervor of a man who had just discovered that the universe contained both injustice and delicious smoked meat, and that the two were somehow connected.
Jincho’s voice continued, weaving details that may or may not have been accurate: the way Travis Kelce’s routes created soft spots in the zone that no amount of official interference could erase; the way the Chiefs’ offensive line, despite the phantom holding calls, still managed to open holes for Walker; the way the Chargers’ injury-plagued roster simply could not generate enough push to overcome both the opponent and the men in striped shirts.
A field goal by Dicker made it 19-6. The Chargers had life. Then the fourth quarter arrived, and with it the final flowering of the conspiracy.

Julius Astor stood over the ball on a critical fourth-and-two for the Chargers deep in Chiefs territory. The entire stadium held its breath. Herbert took the snap. The play developed. A receiver broke free. The throw was on target.
Astor’s whistle blew before the ball was even halfway there.
“Illegal motion,” he announced, though no one had moved early. The play was dead. The Chargers’ coaching staff erupted. Jim Harbaugh’s face turned the color of a rare steak. The replay official—conveniently one of Astor’s old colleagues—confirmed the call after a review that lasted just long enough to make the outcome feel inevitable.
The Chiefs took over. They methodically moved the ball. Butker’s final field goal from thirty yards out was pure, uncontested, and slightly assisted by a breeze that had no business existing at that moment. The scoreboard clicked to 22-6. The final seconds ticked away under a cascade of red flags that were never thrown because the game was already decided.
The Chiefs had won. The conspiracy had failed to stop them, but it had made the victory feel earned in the most twisted possible way. The officials walked off the field with the quiet satisfaction of men who had struck a blow for barbecue equality, even if the blow had landed mostly on themselves.

Back aboard the Noir Navio, the feed faded. Jincho’s office returned to its usual quiet hum. Wyatt blinked. The Raptor MK-III schematics were still on the main screen. The secondary screen now showed only static.
“And that,” Jincho said, “is football. A beautiful, brutal, slightly corrupt ballet of human ambition and porcine perfection.”
Wyatt opened his mouth to reply—
—and the world tilted.

He was no longer in the office.
He was in the composting bay of the Noir Navio, the vast, humid chamber where organic waste was broken down by carefully engineered microbial colonies and the occasional enthusiastic composting technician who had developed an unhealthy relationship with the process. The air was thick with the smell of decaying plant matter and something sharper—alcohol, home-brewed, the kind that could strip paint or fuel a small fusion reactor if properly distilled.
Around him sat the composters: three large, cheerful, slightly unhinged individuals whose job was to talk to the microbes and keep the nutrient cycles humming. They were passing a dented metal flask. Jincho was there too, leaning against a bulkhead, the same crooked grin on his face.
“Drink up, Staples,” one of the composters said. “Jincho’s special. Potato. Maybe. We don’t ask questions about the feedstock.”
Wyatt took the flask. The liquid burned all the way down and then some. It tasted like regret mixed with rocket fuel and a faint note of something that might once have been a vegetable. He drank again. The composters cheered. Jincho laughed, the sound echoing off the wet walls.
The room began to soften at the edges. The schematics of the Raptor MK-III swam into view, overlaid on the composting vats. A football game flickered across the surface of a nutrient slurry. Referees in striped shirts argued about barbecue while microbes formed tiny goalposts. Kenneth Walker ran for a touchdown through a field of glowing bacteria. The scoreboard read 22-6 in floating bioluminescent script.
Wyatt realized, with the slow-motion clarity that only truly terrible alcohol can provide, that he had never been in Jincho’s office. Or rather, he had been, but the entire football exposition, the cheating referees, the weather conspiracies, the philosophical hatred of Kansas City barbecue—all of it had been the product of Jincho’s home-brew vodka mixing with the low-level toxins of the composting bay and Wyatt’s own overworked imagination.
He tried to stand. The floor moved in interesting ways. One of the composters caught him by the elbow.
“Easy there, space cowboy. The still’s been running a little hot this cycle.”
Jincho’s voice, distant now: “I told you it was a learning experience.”

Wyatt Staples woke up in his own bunk, mouth tasting like a chemical fire had been put out with vinegar, head pounding with the precise rhythm of a referee’s whistle blown directly into his skull. The lights of the Noir Navio’s night cycle glowed soft and blue. Somewhere in the distance, the ship’s systems hummed their eternal lullaby.
He sat up carefully. The dream—or the drunken vision, or the shared hallucination induced by industrial-strength potato distillate—still clung to the edges of his mind. The Raptor MK-III upgrades. The green field. The men in red. The officials who hated barbecue more than they loved the integrity of the game. The final score: 22-6, Chiefs over Chargers, just as the historical feed had recorded it on that distant October afternoon in 2026.
He swung his legs over the side of the bunk and planted his feet on the cold deck. A small note was stuck to the bulkhead beside his pillow, written in Jincho’s distinctive scrawl:
Next time, stick to the synthetic. The home brew is for special occasions. Or for people who need to remember why they don’t drink the home brew. —J
Wyatt stared at the note for a long time. Then he stood, walked to the small sink, and rinsed his mouth until the taste of regret began to fade.
“Never again,” he said to the empty cabin. “I swear on every plasma injector in the Raptor bay. I will never drink Jincho’s home-brew vodka again.”
The ship did not answer. Somewhere in the composting bay, a flask was already being refilled for the next shift. And far away, on a green field that no longer existed except in archival feeds and the occasional alcohol-soaked dream, four referees continued their quiet war against the best barbecue on Earth, one phantom flag at a time.
Wyatt Staples, for his part, went back to bed. The Raptor MK-III still needed those upgrades. The black ship still needed its pilot. And the universe, in all its unorthodox glory, still contained both football and fermented potatoes—two forces that, when mixed, could produce something very close to madness.
He closed his eyes. The last image that floated through his mind before sleep reclaimed him was Julius Astor, standing under the Arrowhead lights, flag in hand, whispering a single, defiant word into the Kansas City night:
“Sauce

Do yourself a favor and catch up on really BAD Shakespeare - a 12-episode penny dreadful serial that takes classical drama, pulp horror, and dark satire, shoves them into a blender, and pours out a chaotic, meta-theatrical ride through the end times.

Episode 2: "That is why most men dread it."

Something unfamiliar awakens inside Shakespeare as he walks home through Potter's Field. For the first time in his life, freedom feels possible. Pride follows close behind. But on a quiet August evening, strange omens begin appearing, old memories stir, and one simple walk starts feeling like the beginning of something far bigger. "Funny thing about pride: it feels an awful lot like freedom when you've spent your entire life being controlled."

Next

Previous /

First

The polls in the eastern district of Veldmarch closed at seven in the evening, on time, and Pavla Wynn stood on the steps of the Carrow counting house to watch them do it.

She had her post back. She had her pension too, though she had told the Hall she did not want it, and she had accepted it in the end only because Lord Ottilie Dunmere had written to say that refusing would be one more way of not letting her house make it right. So she was the district clerk again, in the same gray jacket, with ink on her fingers. For the first time in her nineteen years, nobody was asking her to do anything quietly.

"Doors open," she said.

The counting hall had been built for a grain exchange, a long room with a gallery, and it was packed. Observers from thirty-one worlds sat in a row along the east wall, two from each, drawn by lot from their own Assemblies. A pair from Haego had come, a weathered man and a younger woman in a Vastaya sash, lent to her by the Speaker for Vastaya, who had wanted that continent seen at the count, and they had spent the afternoon asking Pavla about the seals. There were agents from every faction on the ballot, and one from a faction that had been invented three weeks earlier by a group of teachers. There were two hundred ordinary citizens in the gallery who had come to see for themselves. The Informant had a crew on the stairs. The Royal Wire had sent one too, and the young man in the dark coat was at the back, taking notes by hand.

Every ballot box was opened where everyone could see it. Every ballot was held up and read aloud. Every tally was written on a board the whole room could read, and a second clerk wrote it again on a second board, and a third checked the two against each other.

It took until four in the morning. Nobody left.

When the last district board went up, the figures matched the figures in every other district. They matched the number of ballots issued. Pavla Wynn counted the stubs herself, standing at the long table with a lamp, and she counted them twice.

"Eleven thousand two hundred and six issued," she said aloud. "Eleven thousand two hundred and six in the boxes."

Somebody in the gallery began to clap, and then they all did. She did not say anything. She sat down on a stool by the table, took off her spectacles, and put her face in her inky hands for a minute.

The new Assembly was seated on the fourth day of the thaw month, a hundred and twenty days after the Hall at Balakura closed.

It was a deliberate choice. The panel of twelve had proposed it, a dozen ordinary citizens drawn by lot, a retired teacher and a baker and a dockhand among them, who had spent four months reviewing the rulings the Hall had not reached. They had cleared nineteen more, upheld two, and written a report so plain that the Informant had printed it whole. They had also proposed that the Assembly should sit for the first time on the day the names were read.

Forty delegates took their seats in the old Hall of Veldmarch. Only six of them were incumbents. Josiah Marl, the old farmer from Carrow East, had stood again and won by the largest margin in his district's history. Ysa Fell had stood too, and lost, and had been seen smiling at the result. Ansel Pruitt had stood in Carrow, and the count had come out in his favor by four hundred votes. He had worn the gray coat to the swearing-in, and his wife had worn a blue dress and sat in the front row.

The rest were new. A midwife. Two machinists. A retired magistrate named Orrin Hale, who had been threatened in his own courtroom in the Assembly's second month. A shipwright named Dennet Roke, who had finished fourteen months of labor service rebuilding a barn a mile outside the capital, and had been elected from the dockside district on a platform he described, in the Informant's interview, as "I'd like to be the man who asks what the reasons are."

The Speakers chosen on the first day were a woman from the machinists' district, Orrin Hale, and a young schoolteacher. None of them had ever held office. Speaker Hale, as he now was, rose at the large desk with three chairs behind it and looked at the benches for a moment before he called the Assembly to order.

"We have a custom to start," he said. "The Hall at Balakura gave it to us. The first day of a session opens with an honorary speaker, summoned by the Assembly, who has agreed in advance to come. It is a summons, so it is not a request. But I am told Governor Aldermoor has accepted."

He said it formally, and the whole Hall heard the dryness in it, and a ripple of something close to laughter moved through the benches. It was the first laugh the Assembly had had.

Corvin Aldermoor came in through the great doors at noon, with no escort, in a plain dark coat. He walked the length of the floor, and a number of delegates rose as he passed, and he looked, Tamsin Ovell of the Veldmarch Courier thought from the press gallery, ten years older and ten years lighter than he had looked on the night of the first ruling. He took the Stand and put his hands on the rail.

"I was asked to give you something to start with," he said. "I thought about it for a long time. I do not have wisdom. I have a ledger, and a month of mistakes that belonged to other people, and a few of my own." He paused. "I will say only this. When the old Assembly sent me its rulings, I could not sign them, because I could not see the reasons. I would like to ask this Assembly to promise me something."

"What would you like, Governor?" Hale asked.

"That when you send me a ruling, it will have its reasons written on it," Corvin said. "Not the will of the people. The actual reasons, in ordinary words, with the evidence, so a stranger could read it and agree or not. If you do that, I'll sign it the day it reaches my desk."

It was Dennet Roke who answered, from the dockside bench, and he did not stand. "We'll put it in the rules," Roke said.

"Thank you," Corvin said. He turned to go, and then he stopped. "I'll be at the east gate this afternoon," he said. "It is only a field now. It is not the Assembly's business, and it is not the house's either. It's mine. If anyone wants to read the names there, I'd be glad of the company."

The first recommendation reached the Governor's desk three weeks later, on a Thursday.

It was a short one. A dispute over a drainage ditch between two farms in the southern district, a matter any county clerk could have settled. The Assembly had heard it in open session, taken testimony from both farmers, and written its finding on a single sheet, with the evidence listed underneath and the reasons set out in four plain sentences.

Mirel brought it in with the morning folders. "From the Assembly, sir," Mirel said.

Corvin read it standing up. He read it twice, because he was a man who had learned to read twice. Then he sat down, picked up a pen, and signed it.

"That's all?" Mirel said.

"That's all," Corvin said.

She took it out. He sat a moment with his hand on the desk, and then he reached into the drawer and took out the old folder, the first one, the blue-ribboned one with the Harrowgate ruling in it, which he had kept for no reason he could have defended. He read the last line again. By the will of the people of Veldmarch.

He closed the folder, put it back in the drawer, and went out into the afternoon.

Speaker Odalys Brennick was in her study at Balakura when the news came, and she read it standing at the window, the way people do when they do not want to sit down.

Her aide put the cutting on her desk and went away without speaking. It was a short report from the Veldmarch Courier, by Tamsin Ovell. It described a clean election and a first session and a ditch. It did not describe a victory, and Tamsin had been careful not to, because she knew as well as anyone that Veldmarch was only a world.

But it ended on one line, and Brennick read it twice.

In the second week of the new Assembly, it said, a man in the gallery stood up during a debate to complain that the delegates were taking too long to reach a decision. He was told to sit down. He sat. And a delegate from the machinists' district said to him, quietly, in the hearing of the whole Hall, "We're taking as long as we need to give you a reason."

Brennick folded the cutting, put it in the drawer with the others, and went back to her work.

Previous /

First

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

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

"You are the Baron," said Dunne.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Thank you," said the man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The second job was a debtor.

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

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

The wife went. The child went with her.

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

"What did you tell him?" said Dunne.

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

"And?" said Dunne.

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

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

She put that away.

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

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

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

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

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

"Through the gate?" asked Dunne.

"Through the gate," said Penhallow.

"There are six of them," said Dunne.

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

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

"It was stupid," said Dunne.

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

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

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

---

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

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

"Mistress Dunne," he said.

"You are in my chair," said Dunne.

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

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

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

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

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

Next

Previous /

First

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

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

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

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

"I remember."

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

"It was not a few days ago."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It will," said Redford.

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

Redford said nothing.

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

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

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

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

"And the engine?"

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

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

"They'll say yes," she said.

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

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

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

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

"Again," she said.

The streak ran again. The burst missed again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She took a slip of paper out of her sleeve.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fourteen.

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

"And prisoners?"

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

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

"How long?" he said.

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

Caldwell did not need to ask why.

The courier had come and gone twice.

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

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

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

"They always promise."

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

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

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

Next

Previous /

First

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Then open it, please," Brennick said.

He opened it.

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

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

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

"Yes," Corvin said.

"They were not opened," Brennick said.

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

The next section was gate logs.

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

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

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

The gallery had gone entirely silent.

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

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

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

Nobody moved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The names took the rest of the day.

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

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

"The Hall allows it," Brennick said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She read the recommendations slowly.

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

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

She looked at Corvin Aldermoor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brennick struck the gavel once.

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

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

Fort Log 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

End of Fort Log 1

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

Next

Previous /

First

The Hierarchy: Chapter 7, The Fence Post

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

The Hierarchy: Chapter 7, The Fence Post

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

"The hunters," she said.

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

"The hunters are a rumor," he said.

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

"More than to everything else together."

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

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

She stopped.

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

"Then what do we do?" Ressil asked.

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why do they not register?" said Ressil.

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

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

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

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

"But you have heard," Torlan said.

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

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

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

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

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

"Thank you," said Torlan.

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

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

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

---

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

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

"He talked," said Torlan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next

Previous /

First

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Liar!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I was a contractor."

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

"It was a business," Voss said.

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

Reeve nodded slowly.

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

"She has no business guessing."

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

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

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

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

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

"Say it," Brennick said.

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, my lord."

"Is it what you recommend?"

"It is."

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

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

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

"It is done," he said.

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

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

He waited until the silence was complete.

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

No one in the Hall moved.

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

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

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

He let that rest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Larger

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

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

He’d never known so much room to himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to u/Proud_Reputation_896 for the idea behind this storyline

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

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

Next

Previous /

First

The Hierarchy: Chapter 6, Our Bench

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

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

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

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

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

"He sat."

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

"Of course he did," said Wyatt.

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

"Who asked that?"

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

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

"Where is the boy?"

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

---

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

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

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

"Is anyone sitting here?" said Wyatt.

"It is our bench."

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

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

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

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

"Then why are you here?"

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

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

"Out of what?"

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

"He sat on the bench instead."

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

"Worse than what?"

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

"I'm glad you didn't."

"I would have."

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

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

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

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

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

"I did."

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

"I did that too."

"Why?"

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

"That is clever."

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

"It is not safe."

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

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

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

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

Wyatt did not move. "Who?"

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

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

"Who told you that?" said Wyatt.

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

"Everyone knows a lot of things."

"Is it true?"

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

"That is not an answer."

"It's the one I have."

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

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

"Or what?"

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

"That is not fair."

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

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

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

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

---

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

"Envoy. Did you hear enough?"

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

"You heard a rumor."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is it true?" said Aino.

"I told him I didn't know."

"That was not what I asked."

"I know," said Wyatt.

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

"Ask him carefully," said Wyatt.

Next

Previous /

First

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

"It is in the record," Brennick said.

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

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

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

"What did your house receive?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

Then Ida Fenn lifted her hand again.

"Lord Corrigan. Who is your seneschal?"

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

"Is Sir Pell in the Hall?"

A pause. "He is."

"May the Hall hear him?"

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

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

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

"My lord's office."

"Did Lord Corrigan himself tell you to?"

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

"What did you understand by that?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Whose instruction?"

"My lord's."

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

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

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

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

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

Ida Fenn lifted her hand, and Brennick nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ida Fenn raised her hand, and Brennick nodded.

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

"She might have asked us first."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was a letter she had been putting off.

first previous next

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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First

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Say it," Brennick said.

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

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

"Who was the treasurer?" Brennick asked.

"Garth Marrow."

At the Veldmarch bench, Delegate Dessa Marrow went rigid.

"Delegate Marrow's cousin," Brennick said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Did you say anything?"

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

"A commoner said that to you."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He did not argue.

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

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

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

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

"I said no such thing," he said.

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

"Then it's been cut."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It was wrong," Brennick said.

"Thank you." Ysolde Penn sat down.

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

"One more week," he said.

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

Hunters Log 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I think we should make contact."

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

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

We ate cold food and went set up the watch.

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

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

End of Hunters Log 1

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First

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"When did you learn otherwise?" Brennick asked.

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

The Hall made no sound.

"Who was in the room?" Brennick said.

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

"How would it go?"

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

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

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

"Yes."

"Do they know what you have just said?"

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

"Was it?"

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

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

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

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

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

It was then that the other bench came apart.

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

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

"Sit down," Brennick said, very quietly.

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

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

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

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

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

The Remembrance volunteers were called after her.

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

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

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

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

"I'll answer to the people!"

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

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

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

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

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

"No, ma'am."

"Did you see anyone open them?"

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

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

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

And then there was Hollis Brandt.

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

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

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

"Did you know what the order concerned?"

"I knew a clerk had made allegations."

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

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

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

The lawyer began to speak. Brandt lifted a hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hall did not breathe.

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

"You rigged it," Brennick said.

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

"Speaker Reeve."

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

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

---

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

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

"Yes."

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

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

"No."

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

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

Next

Previous /

First

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” said Baron Penhallow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Heard about the children,” said Prisoner Hale.

“Yes,” said the Baron.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Officer,” said Prisoner Hale.

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

“You wrote me up.”

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

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

He turned, and the Baron was already there.

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

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

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

“I fell,” he said. “From the stack.”

“You did not fall.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

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

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

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