May 7, ’94 (11 days After the Fire)

The submarshal looked again at his inner wrist, branded with two letters: AR. Accelerated Retirement.

He had earned this sentence six days ago. He had duly rendered unto the Company everything he’d found in the ashes of the Witch’s Cabin, with the exception of one artifact: the pink silk ribbon. It wouldn’t help him meet a weight quota, and it was not in any of those categories of objects—weapons, narcotics, gems, gold, captives—the Company tended to value highly, so he took it for himself because, even though he thought it would fetch no more than thirty grot, retirement was only half a year away, and he would need all the money he could get.

The fate branded on his skin was, at least, permission not to worry about the money problem. It no longer mattered. He knew exactly where, and approximately when, he would die, and he would not have to suffer on the streets.

On the way home that night, six days ago and after a long day in the sun raking through ashes, the train squealed to a stop just before Astiuta. A man came on board wearing the gray-green cravat of rail police, and those motherfuckers didn’t mess around. The track, he explained, had been wrecked by pessimou and, since it could not be fixed until tomorrow morning, all passengers—including civilians, because no such thing existed in the Company’s world—would have to stay overnight in a barracks.

Nothing was wrong with the track, of course. These slowdowns were an economic necessity, because half the people on board were diamond miners coming from Rusty Mountain. If the Company did not exercise its right to search everyone, a thousand-grot gem might scuttle away inside a five-year-old girl. No one much liked the men with gray-green neckties, but they did the world a service by looking inside and making sure such a thing did not happen.

At the barracks, the submarshal’s rank did entitle him to a shower: three minutes and forty seconds of hot water. He washed away the ash, soaped up quickly, and hadn’t finished drying off his dick when two whiteshirts stepped into the stall to arrest him.

The first, without a word, held up the stolen ribbon. The submarshal explained that he had intended to turn it in but had forgotten. The other whiteshirt, also saying nothing, tied a striped prison smock around the submarshal’s naked body. The old man, thus apprehended, was immediately put on one of the windowless “black trains” and shipped to a Performance Improvement Facility (PIF).

The submarshal had seen other men, no better or worse than him, be taken into the PIF system, so he knew how it worked. He’d get the sleepy gas, instead of the screaming agony gas, so long as he played by the rules. Confess on arrival. Don’t ask for a trial—those cost money. Never complain. Tell the story in simple sentences: “I stole the ribbon. I have no excuse. I accept the Company’s justice.”

The prison, he found, was devoid of comfort, but not nearly as bad as he’d feared. Two decades ago, in justified fear of Smitz Bell’s electrical tortures, people used to throw themselves over cliffs or into industrial meat grinders to avoid incarceration, but these days, guards seemed indifferent—not sadistic. The worst pain was the crushing boredom, the waiting. The lights were dim but always on, so he could not be sure if it was day or night. Time’s flow was odd; it lulled like the flow of cooling glass, then jerked itself into rapid existence, then stalled again like a dripless wet pipe.

Death. He had no fear of being gone, because he did not believe there was a place to be afraid of going, but he realized he did not want to go, not just yet, because one could not be sure how long the process took. Did a decapitated head know, even for five seconds, its wretched state? Did its neck feel wet to it? Was there enough time, before blood pressure went to zero, for it to feel pain? What about, if there was life after death, harms on a body that a soul could not forget? He had next to no education, certainly not on matters such as this, but he realized he might not want accelerated retirement. He had seen violent death, he had seen foolish death, and he had seen unfair death; he wanted none of it.

He had occupied his whole life, in terror of its inevitable conclusion, with other things. In here, he had but one. With nowhere but inside a six-by-six cell to walk, with no pen or books—not that he’d ever been much of a reader—to muscle out his time, he decided he might try to solve the mystery of Farisa’s Fire. Why had she started it? Why was a murdered woman, who was not Farisa, at the cabin? What could the bicycle wheel have had to do with it?

The submarshal had added time to his tenancy in the living world two days ago. The warden came by to tell him execution was imminent, and he said, “I want a trial.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Yes, sir. A real one, with a judge and a jury. And an attorney.”

The two hooded men who would walk him to the site never arrived. A meal came, then another. The warden arrived, half a day or so after the request was made, to say, “Your trial begins in two hours.”

“May I speak with my attorney?”

“There will be no attorney,” explained the warden. “The performance improvement process, like all human capital matters, exists for the worker’s benefit. To bring lawyers into such matters, in addition to costing time and money, would suggest an adversarial nature to the process as well as the relationship between worker and Company. The risk of such a matter becoming contrary to morale is unacceptable.”

The submarshal nodded in appreciation. He could not argue against such ironclad logic.

So the trial occurred, and he found it to be a string of tedious formalities. H’vast Hampus this, H’vast Hampus that. Guilty verdict, sentenced to death, why does it smell like fish in here, execution at dawn, that sort of stuff. The meager amount of time it added to his life, he used to count flaws in the Company’s narrative of Farisa’s Fire. Her students had all been interviewed; none considered it possible that she had gone mad. If her purpose in starting the fire had been to cause death, why had she started it at the cabin, more than a mile north of campus, so that most of Cait Forest’s people were able to find safety? The evidence and the grudges it had been claimed she had did not add up to observed events.

In the hours after the trial, he slowly chewed his morbid prison food, counting the pips and dimples of his cell walls, letting the rare engines of his brain chung away, producing mostly slag but, it could be hoped, insights that might lead to a solution...

A man he had never seen before came by.

“Hello,” he said, followed by the submarshal’s name. “I’m Detective Sam Midgley. I have heard you might have some information on Farisa’s Fire.”

“I might,” said the submarshal.

“You were on the site five days after it occurred. Is that correct?”

“I was.” The submarshal was glad to have someone to talk to. It turned out that time, in the wait for one’s own execution, dragged like an old dog’s belly without some way of passing it. “I was up at the Witch’s Cabin.”

The detective, who had brought a metal chair, placed it outside the submarshal’s cell, sat down, and opened a briefcase. They pored over photographs in third print, manifests of valuable campus artifacts, records of testimony from survivors, and even the remnants of Farisa’s journal.

After an hour, Midgley asked the submarshal, “Do you ever think it wasn’t Farisa who started it?”

“Who else could it be? We know when the fire started—just after midnight on the twenty-sixth—and we know where it started: a cabin no one else knew existed.”

“The ribcage you found.”

“Died before it happened.”

“There are no accidents in the universe,” said the detective as he stood up.

“Now, that is a lie.”

“Anyway, I am glad you were able to help.”

“So am I,” said the submarshal, not insincere.

The detective left. The submarshal continued to ruminate. Nothing the detective had told him brought new information, yet the tone and order of presentation indicated some kind of implicit knowledge that had not been shared yet.

A guard arrived soon after. “Your retirement is in one hour.”

The submarshal said, “I’m getting the sleepy gas, right?”

“No gas these days. Higher-ups say we might need it soon for the camps out east.”

“Oh. So, a firing squad?”

“No, sir. We cannot afford to waste consumables.”

“So what’ll the method be, then?”

“A good old hangin’ is what I’m told.” The guard whistled as he walked down the corridor.

The submarshal nodded in thanks. Hanging wasn’t his preference, but there were far worse ways to die. The first and worst death he had seen up close had been his father’s, by the dread disease called “coal rot.” The disfigured skin on the man’s forearm had seemed, aside from its creeping growth, harmless of more than a year. One day at work, he collapsed, delirious. The medic discovered a six-point-five fever. His body, over the next few days, shut down from cold feet to yellowed face.

Unable to afford a burial, the family sold the body to the Global Company for experimentation. The dissectors found the organs, fully corrupted by the crab-like alien mass that had grown inside the man, useless for research, and therefore the Company assigned the family a debt as expensive as a funeral and burial would have been. The son who would become the submarshal realized then the price of poverty. A man had lived forty-one years and sired six kids; he had left them nothing but unpaid bills. Moving west, to dodge the debt, was easy enough for a boy of thirteen. He resolved never to be poor. Instead, he would follow the Company’s laws and rules to the letter. He joined the Company Youth (H’vast Cyril!) with the eagerness of a foxhound. On his sixteenth birthday, he volunteered to be trained in the use of arms.

Was the Global Company perfect? No. Of course it wasn’t, as nothing could be, but it had always played the game of death fairly.

His father’s death, by premature corruption in healthy flesh, had already told him that, outside of the Company’s reign, death had no sense of integrity. It could come of no accord. It cheated; the depravity of the natural world was made clear to him during the last days of the Alma Campaign, in the aftermath of the eruption. The natives of those islands did all deserve to die, yes, as they had refused to pay tribute to the Global Company, but they were still owed fair deaths, by knives and bullets, rather than what horror they got.

He remembered it all still. It had been closer to thirty years ago than twenty. They were just south of the fortieth parallel, where summer heat could reach eight flags and squibbani were the size of panthers. His crew, considering the recent quakes, had been stationed at a reasonable distance from the Mother Mountain, only able to see it from a lookout tower, but on that hot morning in November ‘67, the fist-shaped cloud rose twenty miles high, dwarfing thunderheads. Through field glasses in that high tower, he watched as a froth of smoke spilled over the rim, swept down at a falcon’s speed, and covered not only the host island but, fury unquenched by the ocean, more than half the archipelago. The shock wave rattled the watchtower; he expected it to fall.

The next day, when he and his men visited the island, he reflected on how, had Alma not intervened, they would have administered death only to young and middle-aged men, and only to enough of them to convince the survivors to surrender payment. Instead, here there were no survivors. The beaches were slurries of volcanic sludge and liquefied fish. Bodies lay buried—some at the market, some in coitus—where hot poison gasses had struck them.

No one deserved this. No one deserved a death one couldn’t buy or work one’s way out of.

This had been on his mind, too, when ranking through the ashes of Farisa’s Fire. This had not been a natural cause, but a force of nature had been used. And why fire? What kind of madwoman would use something so indiscriminate and cruel as a murder weapon? What about Cassi Stone’s testimony—if Farisa were mad, or malicious, why would she have put herself in danger to save others’ lives? Or had Miss Stone simply been too fond of her former teacher—for some reason, they all were—to see the truth?

A hooded man approached the submarshal’s cell. “It’s time.”

“Let’s get to it, then.”

His ankles were cuffed before his cell was opened, so he walked in tiny steps as two men led him to the open-air courtyard. The sky was dim, it being mere minutes after first light, and the air was quiet and cool. As he moved toward the gallows, he felt no ill will toward the Global Company. He never had. The execution of a petty thief, fairly caught, was one of those tasks out of millions that the world just needed to have done. Not everyone understood it this way, but the deaths his Employer caused were necessary and right, being the birthing pains of a better world. There had once been abominations like trade unions, collective farms, and elections that could get so unruly, one had to count the votes to know the results. There had been protectionist national governments, there had been religions disdaining the accumulation of wealth, and some societies had gone so far in depravity as to allow women to vote. The Company, rightfully, had brought such madness to an end.

The Company’s killings were a service. Those people the world didn’t want—newly in this status, he was glad it would end soon—had to be cleared away, for the sake of the chosen few. A victor’s triumph meant nothing without the misery of the defeated. War kept the collective heart of humanity beating, as the talk of politicians and executives meant nothing without guns behind it. War was just—those who died had been outfought. What game had simpler, fairer rules than that?

He climbed the gallows stairs. A scratchy noose that smelled like chicken offal was placed around his neck.

He looked at the executioner. “The words?”

I send you to a better place than this. It had been custom for centuries that a condemned man would hear, in his native tongue, that short sentence, a remark of commonality before the unknown that everyone faced.

“We don’t do that anymore. Company policy.”

“Oh,” said the submarshal. It made sense. What profit existed in compassion shown to those about to leave the Company’s dominion? Furthermore, it would be dangerous and decadent to indulge the heretical notion of a world outside the Company’s control. The submarshal, even upon his minute of death, still had no opinion either way of whether his existence would continue, he decided it would be best if it did not. He disliked the concept of a soul’s eyes opening to a world without the Company. Not to exist would be better than existence—for an hour, let alone eternity—in disorder.

The executioner shouted, “H’vast Hampus!”

The submarshal felt heavy hands push his back. He was weightless, then heavy against the tension of the rope, then swaying while the prison courtyard lost what little color it had. His airway touched itself for the first time.

A flash of imagery struck him—the pink ribbon! the warped metal wheel! the witch’s diary! L’tae qeru teru flara, of meaning unknown but clearly a curse. L’tae qeru teru flara, in a distressed woman’s handwriting. He could not speak, of course, so he made eye contact with one of the guards and used what little control he had of his limbs to make a hand gesture suggesting the opening of a book.

Diary. Read the Witch’s Diary.

A tingling spread inside and outside his body, until there was no distinction between the two. The sounds of the prison morning rose to a high-pitched whine; that noise, in turn, faded also. He felt a great sense of peace. The workday was over.

#

March 28, ’94 (4 weeks before the Fire)

A moment caught Farisa. She had placed a mirror on the opposite wall of the cabin, but was not used to it being there, so she saw herself, for a slip of a second, as someone else—not scared Fay, but proud, adult Farisa. She arched her back, taking the sight in; she flexed her feet, let down her wavy black hair, and exhaled the chaos of the day.

A few minutes too early, Erysi knocked. “Can I come in?”

Farisa arranged herself before opening the door. “I’m glad you’ve taken a habit of asking.”

Erysi stepped inside. “Am I interrupting something?”

“No.” Farisa laughed. “I will, uh, finish later.”

“Oh,” Erysi said. “Oh! You should have told me to go away.”

“Now that I have this place, I can... any time.”

“So, I came to tell you about—”

“Hold on.” Farisa noticed a beetle on Erysi’s collar. “Keep still.” She brushed the insect into her hand. “I got him. I’ll put him outside.”

Erysi wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Just kill it.”

“Why? He can’t hurt you.” Farisa looked at the creature in the lamplight. “It’s a golden scarab. He’s beautiful.”

“You know I hate bugs.”

As she released the insect back into the outdoor forest, she noticed that a few stars had become visible. “They eat shit, so we don’t have to.”

“Gross.” Erysi stood over the pile of letters on Farisa’s desk. “Who’s Raqel?”

“An old friend. Lives in Tevalon. Her husband’s trying to move her to the Yatek.”

“The Yatek? Where it’s minus two in June?”

“It’s not that cold,” Farisa said. “The coast is warmer than Tevalon, in fact, because of ocean currents, but....” She stopped herself. She doubted Erysi cared as much as she did about climatology.

“With all the Vehu moving there, I can’t imagine the natives love it.”

“It’s hard to know.” Farisa paused. “There’s a lot of space up there, and Vehu don’t eat a lot of meat. If the Vehu farm and build cities, and the taigamen live as they always have, it could work.”

Erysi said, “You know it never does. People are invasive. They want everything, they take everything.”

Farisa closed her diary, then put a letter she had written to Raqel—probably unlike the one she would actually sent—in her desk drawer. “Yateki cultures are fascinating. Did you know they have a higher rate of... people like me... than anyone else? Some tribes have one in a hundred born a mage. Their folklore suggests the Marquessa—which they call the Ancestor—is curable.”

“Do you think it is?”

“If I had a grot for every claimed cure, I’d be able to buy three Hampus Bells, dress them up like ballerinas, and make them dance. Still, it would be worth knowing more.”

Erysi pulled a knot out of her blonde hair. “Why do they call it the Ancestor?”

“They worship it like a god.”

“Who would pray to a disease?”

“Those who have it.” Farisa paused. “It’s not the most articulate prayer.”

“Right.”

She walked into the corner that served as her kitchen. She had forks and plates for two. “Are you hungry? I have some leftover pancake batter and… let me see… some strawberry compote.”

“I could eat,” Erysi said.

“Good.” Farisa made the pancakes, and then they sat cross-legged on her bed. “I’d prefer you not go over to the dining table right now,” she said as she pointed to the broken glass on her floor.

“What happened there?”

“Broken beaker. I’ve been trying to determine the active ingredient of hare’s lung.”

“Hare’s lung?”

“It’s a folk name for those pink mushrooms you see on old stumps this time of year. It’s been hard to find any, because it’s been so dry, but—”

“Hey, these pancakes are very good. Where’d you get the batter?”

“Made it myself, but I get the supplies from surplus. It would be thrown out if I didn’t take it. All I really stole was the maple syrup.”

Erysi said, “Maple notwithstanding, you give more to Cait Forest than you take out of it.”

Farisa, finished eating, set her plate aside. “I suppose that’s true.”

“I assume you know why I came here.”

“For my company?”

Erysi smiled. “To convince you—”

Farisa scratched the inside of her ankle. “No.”

“You won’t be young forever.”

“I have long given up on Cait Forest’s social life. I am a teacher. I have a job; I do it well.”

“Is this about Ilana’s stupid party? That was seven months ago. Nobody remembers that.”

“I do.” Farisa looked at the dishes she had used. There were no washing streams here, so she’d need to bring a gallon of water from campus for the cleaning. “I am not embarrassed by what happened, but by having gone somewhere I should never have been.”

“Spring Bath is different. Don’t be such a prude.”

Farisa found the charge stinging. It wasn’t untrue, but she never wanted to hear such a thing from Erysi. “Not just...” Farisa looked at her feet. “Nudity. That’s the tradition, right?”

“That’s correct.”

Farisa scoffed. “My answer is still n—Only women go, right?”

Erysi nodded.

She took a deep breath. “I suppose it can’t hurt.”

“Then I’ll see you there tomorrow.”

#

Thus, the next day, the two of them were walking across campus in cotton robes. The clear March night chilled their faces, but they were otherwise quite warm.

“You don’t need to be so nervous,” Erysi said.

“Nervous?” Farisa laughed. “Hardly. I’ve been to the Baths a hundred times.”

Erysi looked at her and smiled. “Exactly.”

“Of course, I usually go at six in the morning, when no one else will be there, and on mixed-sex days I wear a bathing suit, because it’s the rules, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Baths with more than four people in them at one time, but...”

“What?”

“I still haven’t told the headmistress about what we found the other day.”

“The stream?”

“No. I told her about the aquifer, but she’s been so busy and she seems so tired, so I never mentioned...”—the gun. “She needs to know. What it means, why it was there, I couldn’t guess, but... oh, and she wants me to add another course for this summer, which is going to be on—”

“You ramble sometimes. You know that, right?”

“I do,” Farisa said.

The Baths became single-sex—even days for men, odd for women—after six, and nudity thus permissible, as the tradition of Spring Bath, a highborn woman’s initiation into unclothed public bathing, required. Farisa had spent several nights reading about this event and its social protocols, but she suspected its advice—never to use contractions in speech, never to turn left when leaving a conversation—was antiquated and might in fact expose her as an ingenue.

“People like me don’t usually get invited to things like this,” Farisa said.

“Wasn’t your father—?”

“I know nothing about my father.”

“We’re almost there,” Erysi said. “You’re fine. Just breathe.”

She did. The sky told her the chance of rain washing out the event was near zero. The star closest to zenith—she would need a plumb to confirm this, but her eye was pretty good—was blue, always a good sign. She could, after a few chest breaths, mix her mind with the pleasant breeze and motion of walking. She cultivated the wordless peace between neural flashes; she let the sensations on her skin, the contrast between her warm robe and the chilly spring air, color the background of her mind.

“Never look, right?” Farisa said. “I read that.”

“Making efforts not to look will come off as weird. We’re all women and most of us have suitors, so it is not that kind of nudity. It’s nothing at all. Say this to yourself. ‘I’ve been naked before and it has been no issue.’ ‘I have been around others before and it has been no issue.’ Combine the two.”

Farisa smiled. “Thank you.”

They came to the serpentine concrete hallway—walls a story high, but no ceiling—that separated the Baths from the rest of the world, so no one would see inside, even by accident. A girl in a black robe, even though Cait Forest’s Baths were open to everyone aside from day-to-day gender restrictions, checked their names before they entered. Erysi walked in first, and Farisa followed. The other women had already disrobed, and everyone was in the pool except a redhead playing a set of hand drums. Apparently that was a thing one could do while naked.

Erysi, before getting into the water, wordlessly dropped her robe. Farisa did her best not to look.

“Remember what I told you,” Erysi said.

“Right.” Farisa wrapped the belt of her own robe around a finger. “It’s normal. It’s natural. It’s what normal girls do.”

Erysi’s body, no surprise, was perfect. Comparison couldn’t be avoided. She, like most of the girls here, had pink nipples, while Farisa’s were dark brown. The women’s busts were all of shapes and sizes; Farisa appreciated the shape of her breasts, though she felt they might seem a bit small, especially because she was two years older than Erysi. Her belly made tiny rolls as she leaned over—cute, but cute wasn’t what she wanted to be tonight. Her thighs were not thick, but might appear so when distorted through water. Can I do this? Am I allowed to be here, in this state? What if I—? She looked at her breasts and belly again. There is nothing to worry about. The other women were moving toward the center of the pool. No one is looking at me. No one sees orphan Fay. No one sees who I was. I’m Farisa—I’m beautiful, adult Farisa, and I have every right to be here. She tested the water with a bare heel; the temperature was perfect.

She removed her robe and went into the pool.

“See?” Erysi smiled. “It’s nothing at all.”

Farisa came down the steps. The brazier had been turned on early tonight, so the water was warm as its lip rolled up her ankles, knees, waist. “It isn’t done in the Far North.”

“Swimming natural?” Erysi shouldered her way into a circle of girls. “Really, no one?”

“The old men who live on icebergs with polar bears, they might go nude.”

Farisa found herself standing next to a girl with auburn hair and a wine-pink face, who touched her elbow.

“You’re the professor, right?”

Farisa chuckled. “Not at all. Why, do I look old?”

The girl smiled. “Of course not. Well, you look mature. Twenty-two at most. It’s a good thing.”

“I’m twenty.”

“You do teach a class though, right?”

Farisa looked around to see if any of her students had been invited, finding none. “That’s correct.”

“I’m Katya. I almost signed up for Lyrian.”

“Almost?” Farisa bent her knees to bring the water’s warmth up to her neck. “Why didn’t you?”

“Scheduling conflicts.”

“There’ll be a new section this summer. One o’clock. You said Katya, right? I’ll make sure you get in.”

“Thanks, Fareesa.”

“Farisa. And it’s never a problem.”

The warm water seemed to be working a slow miracle, because Farisa’s anxiety started to dissipate like an old memory, inaccessible without a degree of concentration that such noisome thoughts did not merit, not in this place where everything and everyone was beautiful.

“I’m going to get some wine,” Erysi said. “Red or white?”

“Which one’s more, uh…?”

“It’s all about what you like, Farisa,” Erysi said.

“Red. I’ll try the red.”

Erysi, as she waded to the pool’s edge, looked over her shoulder. Several rows of filled glasses sat on the rim. She picked up two and, holding them by their stems, returned.

Farisa held hers up. “I think we’re supposed to…”

Erysi tapped her glass against Farisa’s.

“Right. That.”

“You’re so…”

Farisa bounced on the ball of one foot. “I’m so what?”

“Nothing. Sometimes I forget that you don’t even…” The wind picked up. The cage fires set around the bathing enclosure danced. The drumming girl increased her tempo. Erysi ran the arch of her foot against her own shin. “Oh, fine. I’ll say it. You’re beautiful.”

Farisa laughed. “You’re supposed to lay on the compliments after you get me drunk, not before.”

More women had entered the water, and the group had moved to the deepest part of the pool, where some of the women were tall enough to stand on or bounce off the bottom, although Farisa had to tread water. When one of them, a blonde who had not yet gotten her head wet, lost a hair tie, she swam over to retrieve it.

The girl said with surprise, “You swim like it’s natural.”

“Where I’m from, everyone learns how.”

“Where are you from?”

Farisa chuckled. “Oh, that is a good question.”

“You look Loranian.”

“Lorani. The island, not the—”

A sandy-haired girl asked, “You’re Lorani, and you teach Lyrian, right?”

“I do,” Farisa said.

Katya said, “My roommate took your class.”

“Oh?”

“She loved it. Said you’re the best teacher here.”

“I wouldn’t go that far, but I’ll take the compliment.”

“Who’s better?”

“I haven’t taken her class, but…” Farisa looked aside. It was almost a lie of omission, to avoid saying that she had taken no classes here, or anywhere, but to confess to her lack of a student’s background would put at risk this excellent moment. “I imagine the headmistress is quite good.”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Erysi nudged Farisa’s wet shoulder. “Hey. Tell them what you told me about the stormcat.”

“Have any of you seen one?”

None of the girls had. “In Loran?”

“No,” Farisa said. The stormcats in the tropics were barely bigger than house cats, and reclusive, tending to go out only at night. “I grew up in the Far North. An island, near Tevalon. I’m sure you’ve never heard of it. When I was seven, I got this close”—she put her palms three feet apart— to a stormcat cub. Solid black, maybe ten pounds. The mother came out, close enough to look me in the eye.”

One of the girls asked, “Were you scared?”

“In that sort of situation, you aren’t scared until after it’s over.”

“Tell the story from the beginning,” Erysi said.

She couldn’t tell the whole story—she decided she would omit being an orphan, being disliked by those she had followed into the woods, and her use of magic—but an abridged version could work.

“It was one of those last warm days in autumn...”

A crowd began to form around her. Farisa had always envied these girls for their breadth of experience, depth of cultural knowledge, and general ease when moving about this world. Surely, people who could go anywhere would not be impressed by a young girl’s adventure in backwater woods? Yet it turned out that none of these girls had ridden a dogsled, experienced a blizzard—the six-hour snowstorms here didn’t count—or attended a white-night music festival, it being dark by nine down here even in the summer. She would never have believed it, but her new friends were fascinated.

“...so I stared the stormcat right in her face... no, of course it wasn’t like that... I was only seven. If I wasn’t scared, it was because I wasn’t old enough to understand danger. For a split second, though, it seemed I could speak her language well enough to convince her we meant no harm, and she accepted this.”

A redhead said, “Do you believe it was some kind of miracle?”

Farisa shrugged, lifting the shoulder with the scar out of the water. “Maybe.”

By this point, there were about thirty women in the pool. Ilana had come with five of her friends. Farisa had encouraged the girls to open their circle and merge the groups, but Ilana shook her head. In truth, Farisa’s grudge against Ilana had turned to pity four months ago during the Big Game against City Private, when the hylus star collapsed on the field. It had come out since then that her physicians had found a congenital heart defect severe enough that she could not continue the sport safely. Over the winter, Ilana had grown puffy and dour; in spring, she had regained her face and figure, but her expression had not improved.

The redhead said, “That’s one hell of a story. One for the grandkids.”

Katya asked, “Do you remember Loran? I’ve always wanted to go.”

“Just barely,” Farisa admitted. “I would love to go. It is my ancestral home.”

“But this is your home now,” Erysi said.

Farisa smiled. “That is true, isn’t it?”

Cait Forest was not perfect, but she had found friends and built a life here. She had a cabin to herself now. There was, in spite of all the difficulty she had found here when younger and too immature for this place, a fundamental goodness. Peace, like the water’s warmth, emanated from every tree in the forest, from the tall nearby maples to the pines in the western barrens, and beyond that frontier, too—over the starlit mountains holding up the sky, and beyond the flat long oceans, and all the way to the Antipodes.

Around three o’clock in the morning, Spring Bath ended. The women climbed out of the pool, enrobed themselves, and returned to their dormitories. Farisa recited names in her head to remember the friends she had made. Nights tended to get cold in March, but this one hadn’t, and the robe and cotton clogs were all she needed to stay warm on the path back to her cabin. She barely noticed the shadow following her.

“I think you’re lost,” she yelled. “Campus is that way. There’s absolutely nothing up h—”

Ilana grabbed her upper arm, pinching hard enough to hurt.

“I hope you enjoyed your time in the sun, Rissa.”

“I did have a good night. You as well?”

The face of the hylus star—the former hylus star—showed no response. She stepped back, keeping eyes locked. Farisa neither moved toward nor away from the blonde woman. Ilana’s eyes seemed curious, then frustrated, then angry—the sequence of a failing predator—as she put her hand on her upper chest, then turned around and walked back to campus.

#

On the third of April, an hour or so after breakfast, a bell atop Hooke Chapel, and not the one used to mark the ordinary passing of time, rang.

It rang a second time.

It rang a third time.

The trees were budding white. The day was warm but cloudy. Farisa’s peripheral vision blurred and shifted as the world seemed to move through her as if she had lost solid form.

Erysi had spotted her, caught up, and was now following her to the chapel. “What does three mean?”

“Nothing good,” Farisa said.

Over on the hylus field, the girls had stopped playing. On a picnic table, a rex board no more than five moves from the capture of a nameless king had been abandoned. A green-clad steward, as if people did not already know bad news would be announced, shouted, “Chapel, everyone!”

“I have to go to the cabin. I’ll be back in half an hour.”

A three-bell assembly meant classes were canceled for the day, but she would still need to be in her teaching dress, rather than attend such an event in a white tank top and jeans. She was not always teaching, but always a teacher. She hurried to her cabin, wiped away sweat, changed into proper attire, and then walked back as fast as she could go, knowing it would be permissible to smell of effort—everyone would, due to heat—so long as it was not seen on her face. When she arrived, it was ten thirty, and so many people had massed together outside the chapel as to make it obvious that not all would fit inside. She did manage to find Erysi again; by the time they met, five ranks of people and closed up behind her.

Erysi said, “You seem nervous.”

Farisa bit her knuckle.

“Why not go and ask the headmistress?”

“If there’s a three-bell meeting, I’m sure she is extremely busy.”

Rumors spread through the crowd—a mix of servants, stewards, students, and professors, atypically standing in no particular order—about what had just happened. A second-year girl had thrown herself into the Lepid River gorge, the first suicide in twenty years. Severe influenza had broken out, the kind that required sending everyone home. The sauciest story was that Professor Sotheby’s known dalliances with young girls had been exposed to the board, forcing a resignation. These all rang false; in the pit of Farisa’s stomach, she knew to expect something worse—those were all two-bell issues.

At ten forty-five, the head steward opened Hooke Chapel’s front doors. The crowd pushed its way forward. People jostled each other, surprisingly polite considering how uncomfortable it was for people—in general, but especially of this social class—to be backed so tight. Farisa stood on tiptoes, now curious where the headmistress was, but failed to spot her.

“Shit,” Erysi said. “One of my Mansford friends is freaking out. I need to go be with her.”

“Go,” Farisa said. “I’ll see you inside.” If I get inside. Even with pews removed, if there had been time to do that, the chapel would only hold half of Cait Forest’s schooltime population. The rest would have to learn the day’s news, whatever it was, secondhand or from the print.

Ilana’s cold hand landed on Farisa’s arm. “Out of the way, Rissa. My girls are already inside.”

The crowd, by this point, had fallen into that state of undirected jittery motion, coming from no one person but a sea of reactions to other reactions, in which fighting the current would have been dangerous, so Farisa could not, as she might have otherwise done, make way for hylus royalty—hylus ex-royalty.

“I said move, bitch!”

“I’m stuck too, Ilana.”

Ilana shoved her, causing her face to collide with the sweaty back of the man ahead of her. “You don’t belong here at all, tarsha. Don’t you have dishes to wash or something?”

Farisa turned around to face her. “I’m sorry, Ilana. What did you call me? Would you mind saying that word again?”

“Tarsha,” Ilana said. “Tarsha, tarsha, tarsha. Now go off and fuck a brick.”

Some primal instinct in the crowd had driven it, despite its density, to know how to make space around the two women, who now had about five square feet to themselves.

Farisa said, “We don’t need to do this now.”

“No,” Ilana said. “We do. I’ve had a problem with you for a long time.”

“I know. You envy me.”

“Envy?” Ilana laughed in contempt. “I envy you? You and your soft belly? I saw you at Spring Bath. I have seen you naked. Do I envy your shy navel? Your flabby brown thighs? Your defeated homeland, your culture with the food weirdness? Your dead parents?”

Farisa, though unnerved by the attention this altercation was already drawing to them—this bullshit, already on a day no one would forget—forced a smile.

“I know everything about you, Farisa. I know your past, and I come from a family that makes futures, so I know things about you that you don’t even know.”

“I doubt that,” Farisa said.

The crowd opened up further.

Ilana balled her fists. “Answer me. What of yours could I possibly envy?”

At this point, Farisa was aware of the crowd’s attention being focused more on what was going on between the two women than progress into the chapel, and she bit the side of her mouth and breathed deeply. She could not get away easily, but she did not want this to become physical, as would humiliate both of them. “My heart fucking works.”

“How fucking dare you.” Ilana’s spit flew in Farisa’s face. “How fucking dare you.” More spit. “My ancestors built this place.”

“My ancestors invented mathematics.”

“What a country you people have now. I’ve heard clay is the national dish.”

Farisa saw a spark of anger in Ilana’s eyes. “You can still walk away, Ilana. We don’t have to do any of this.

Ilana charged. Uneven ground landed on Farisa’s back as her legs slipped in the tackle. Noise came from everywhere, indecipherable. Ilana straddled Farisa, knees pressing into her waist. Farisa’s right eye flashed white and the ground smacked the back of her head. A second blow landed, and a third.

Farisa, in the blue, threw herself into Ilana’s solar plexus, where a knot of discomfort had already existed, possibly due to the heart defect, and could be played like the string of a lyre. Tendrils of pain ripped through Ilana’s body. She grabbed her chest. A resonance like that of a tuning fork erupted in her lungs. Her breath turned shallow, out of phase. Her mouth foamed and her face twitched, and she landed with a thud on Farisa’s chest.

A male steward arrived with two boys. The young men lifted Ilana, one elbow under each armpit, and walked her to a bench where they sat her down.

The steward shouted, “What the hell is this? At this time?”

“I never touched her,” Farisa said as she sat up, catching her breath.

“That is not how it looked to me, and I am sure you provoked her.”

“I did not.” The pain—she had been tackled, punched a few times, and had not felt it during the assault—began to make itself known in her body. Ilana seemed worse off, with foamy puke dribbling down her chin. “As for Ilana, she appears to be braid. Is that what this assembly is about, a rabies outbreak?”

Ilana tried to escape the boys holding her back. “Do you think this is funny, bitch?”

Farisa crossed her arms. “Not at all. Rabies is a serious medical condition.”

The steward grabbed Farisa’s wrist, hard enough that it hurt.

Farisa had no need to show deference to the man in green, because Katarin would take her side. “Look, man: I’m not the problem. I’m six inches shorter than she is. Do you really think I would pick a fight with a fucking hylus star?”

“You have been a part of it.” He guided her to a bench behind Ilana’s.

“Ask her, if you want to know why it happened. It would be absolutely stupid of me—a brown girl, a small girl—to start a fight with Ilana Harrow, pride of the Eastern Horn, best hylus player in twenty years. As you saw, I was losing that fight until her... rabies, let’s hope... took hold. Or, oh, is it because I’m a tarsha? Because I’m a tarsha, I must be an idiot. I must be an animal, right? I’ll have you know that I teach a class here.”

“Just shut up,” he said.

The stewards had long given up on indoor seating for everyone, so the news would be heard out here, but there were still more murmurations than indications that any real knowledge had disseminated, and no announcements had been made out here. Farisa, to still her own shaking, too a few deep breaths. Her dress had been torn up, but she had others like it.

Ilana, once the steward beside her became distracted, inched herself to where only Farisa could hear her. “What the fuck did you do to me?”

“Not kill you,” Farisa said. “It would have... damaged me.” This had been no lie; mages who used their power to kill often broke their own minds in the process.

“I feel like I’m going to throw up.”

“So do I. It lasts two or three days.”

“You fucking cunt. Whatever you did, Farisa, I will never forgive.”

An expression in Ilana’s eyes tripled Farisa’s disgust. She had lived long enough to know patterns, and something—foreknowledge of the assembly’s purpose, of course—had existed in the stewards all morning, but she detected it in Ilana as well. Ilana knew exactly what would be announced in less than one hundred and twenty seconds and, not only that, had made clear this knowledge once before, because she would not have picked a fight with Farisa unless...

Farisa escaped the steward’s grasp. He yelled for her to come back, but she ran. Nothing mattered. Ilana didn’t matter and the stewards didn’t matter. The assembly would announce what she had deduced just now; there was no value in hearing it announced by someone who cared less than Farisa did. She found herself on the banks of the Lepid River, reduced by drought to a trickle. She screamed at the sky until her throat could no longer bear the friction of her own wind, then knelt on the pebbled river and sobbed for at least an hour.

#

April 5, ’94 (21 days before the Fire)

Farisa carried her journal everywhere now, knowing that in her state of grief, she would forget things if she did not write them down.

She was in the Garden of the Patriarchs, which the deceased Sara Leonova had always wanted to rename, but this change had never come about and, now that the headmistress’s ashes were resting in it, probably never would. Other headmasters had chosen, for their memorial trees, oaks and elms that required a lot of fussing to thrive in the alkaline soil of human ashes, but the headmistress’s sapling was a local black spruce that demanded little.

Farisa’s tears wet the blue-green needles. “Thank you for everything, Headmistress.”

At four o’clock, she attended the funeral. No more than thirty students were in attendance. The woman had done so much for them—she had fought tuition increases, ended sex segregation in classes, and upheld the teaching of minority religions despite pressure from the board—but very few had used this occasion as more than a day off from coursework. The professors, in respect of decorum, mostly did arrive, though their conversations pertained almost entirely to the question of who would succeed her. At least half of them agreed that Katarin had been too radical, too idealistic, and too adversarial toward “the real world”—the Company.

One said, “If she had carried on five more years, our graduates would’ve become unemployable.”

Although her successor would not be elected till April 10, Barris Sotheby—whom Katarin had always considered a third-rate scholar—had secured enough board support in advance to feel confident in his announcement, minutes after the funeral was over, that he would be giving his inaugural speech on the seventh.

In this address, he announced that he would take the name Elior. He claimed the choice to be an homage to the excellent Elior VI, but Farisa knew, and on some level everyone knew, that he meant to rehabilitate the name of Elior XV, who had improved the university’s prestige and finances considerably, but whose expulsion of Vehu students in the prior century—in fact, right in the middle of the Black Eighties—had resulted in all two hundred and six being captured by Alcazar on the road to Exmore. In his hour-long speech, Elior XVI decried Katarin’s integration of the sexes in the classroom; he promised that it would be reversed, as soon as sufficient staff could be hired, because the demands of study risked forcing women to wear glasses, which never fit a female nose properly. He announced that scholarships would no longer be granted to “refugees and sad cases” but that they would instead be reserved for those “whose fathers died fighting for civilization, not against it.” He promised that the coming year’s graduates would enter the Global Company in greater numbers, and at higher ranks, than ever before.

“We shall be as we once were—as pure as mountain snow.”

Farisa looked over the audience. This event, unlike the funeral, had drawn wide attendance. The two Vehu boys sitting across the aisle seemed ill as soon as the man had announced his choice of name, and the girls in the pew behind her were whispering something that suggested general disapproval, but Elior’s reception was mostly one of rapt attention, with people applauding so much he had to fake-humbly demand that they stop.

She left before the speech concluded. The building had lots of old scriptures—dried-out paper—in it, and she did not want her anger to jump outside of her.

#

Farisa decided not to worry. She would not worry about the drought, because the second half of spring always brought thundershowers. She would not worry about Ilana, because they never saw each other and had no friends in common. She would not worry about Elior XVI, because the only policy change he had a chance of passing was to resegregate the sexes, and her weekly wage went up by two grot for each section added, so this would improve her pay.

“Good morning, Headmaster.”

The day after his speech, the not-yet-elected Headmaster arrived at her classroom door at a quarter after ten, did not knock, and walked to the back of the room, saying nothing, then sat with a snoozy look on his face. He clearly wasn’t asleep, because he had unfolded a sheet of paper and was taking notes.

“I’ll get back to the lesson, then.” Farisa added parse marks to a sentence she had written on the board. “This one is a literary affectation. It is doubtful that anybody ever spoke this way, but—”

He left after twenty minutes. He returned in the afternoon, still silent, still leaving before the lesson had concluded. He did not seem to walk, but to glide, like a cannon on a rex board that could menace a whole row or column if unobstructed. He came the next day, just once. He came twice on the eleventh.

April 12, for Lyrian I, was the date of the lesson that had become the students’ all-time favorite, and secretly hers, too—the lesson on profanity. She almost hoped the warped old man would arrive to watch her that day—and he did—because she would enjoy watching for signs of discomfort as she detailed the coarser uses—people were people, even in the old times—of this ancient language.

The headmaster arrived at the midpoint of the lesson.

“Good morning, Headmaster.

“As I’ve said before, we are aware of no words in Lyrian so disliked, when standing on their own, as to have attained the status of ‘curse words.’ If any existed, they were never written down. Still, all bodies of literature contain buried treasures of off-color humor, obscenity, and invective. We have the usual suspects—anatomical accusations, invitations to iniquity, lascivious libels—as we always have, for as long as human language has existed. But the most offensive curse in Lyrian is none of those.”

She wrote on the board: L’tae qeru teru flara.

“None of those words are offensive,” said a girl up front with curly red hair.

A boy added, “Yeah, I don’t get it.”

“Correct,” Farisa said. “They are four ordinary words. How could they possibly comprise the most vicious obscenity in a language over two thousand years? I’ll give you a clue: It lives on, in Ettasi.”

No one responded.

“What, in the Global Company, is the most vicious insult?”

One of the first-year boys timidly raised his hand.

Farisa smiled. “Don’t worry. You can say anything here.”

“May your child surpass you.”

“Yva kezen. ‘May your child surpass you.’ If you work for the Global Company and say those five words to your boss”—she glared at Elior, and he glared back—“you’d surely be fired. Possibly killed.”

The headmaster’s hand twitched as he scribbled notes.

“I, for my part, fail to understand what should make it an insult. Should that not be what decent parents hope for? I guess this is why people like me don’t get hired by the Global Company, because if I cou—I mean, if I did have children, I would want to them to have better lives than I did. Of course, the Globbos feel the exact opposite way—their revealed preference is to consume the world now, and leave a chewed-up husk for future generations—and this explains everything about what they do.”

Elior shifted in his seat as if trying to squash a bug between his buttocks.

Farisa put parse marks on the Lyrian sentence.

(L’tae (qeru teru flara)).

“L’tae, modal verb expressing a wish; qeru, become. ‘May x become y,’ x equals teru. Does anyone know what it means?”

“Child,” a girl said.

“Third child,” Farisa said. “I am not sure what makes the third one significant, and I suppose it has been lost to history. Now, what does flara mean?”

No one answered.

“Again, you’re not going to get in trouble.”

A girl raised her hand. “It means a prodigy, right? A genius?”

“Kezen. That’s one meaning—a talented child, a powerful one—but when this curse was first used, flara was used only in its literal sense: mage.”

The girl said, “May your child be a mage?”

“Yva sen.” Farisa flattened a wrinkle on her dress. "That’s exactly what the sentence truly means. May your child suffer the Marquessa.”

She looked at Elior. His eyes seemed to have closed, the only sign of wakefulness being the asymmetric, twitchy smile of his face. His lips puckered, seeming to point to her desk, where she found an envelope.

Not wanting to interrupt the lesson, Farisa swept the envelope behind the desk. When she noticed how heavy the object inside was, compared to its small size, the backs of her hands felt hot.

“What is that?” asked one of the girls.

“It’s nothing.” Farisa opened her desk’s drawer, then placed the envelope inside so no one else could see as she looked at its contents: a bullet, just like the one she’d found inside the discarded weapon in the mountains last month, and a tiny note on which someone had written, Is This Yours?

She closed the drawer and stepped aside, out in front of the desk so everyone could see her whole body. She deliberately slowed her breath and put her hands on her hips. “Listen. I need to know who put that on my desk. You’re in no trouble at all, but I need to see you after class.”

No one responded.

“Everyone, put your head on your desk and close your eyes. Yes, you too.”

Everyone, save Elior XVI, who refused to be compelled by the order of a mere teacher, did so.

“The person who put the note on my desk, raise your hand.”

No hands went up.

“I said before, you’re not in trouble.”

No response.

“A thumb. Raise a thumb, then.”

No thumbs.

“Lecture’s on hold until someone speaks up, and I’m not changing the test, so you’ll all fail unless—”

Elior said, “It was there when you came in.”

“Is that so?”

A red-haired boy lifted his head and nodded. The boy wasn’t the sort who would lie.

“You can lift your heads.” She sighed. “Sorry about the diversion.”

Under other circumstances, she would have dismissed class early, because she would not get back her ability to teach until she could process the threat and decide what to think it meant, but Elior was watching, so she kept talking.

#

The outlets for her anxious energy were decreasing in number. A midnight ride on a pony would remind the stablers of her deeds last summer. To run across campus would draw attention that she didn’t need right now. The chemistry lab had been assigned a watchman who was surely one of Elior’s spies—when the opportunity came, moved everything her experiments required to her cabin, up north. The classroom could have been a place of respite—if one thing helped Farisa’s mood, it was to do something she was good at—but for Elior’s constant, wordless, scribbly intrusions. What did the man want? Surely, he had seen enough to be satisfied—or not, if so it were—with her teaching.

She had Bloom Library. Farisa could lose herself in study and fiction. She had probably used that key, given to her by the headmistress on her first day, five hundred times in her two-and-a-half years here. Once the library closed to everyone else, save a few eccentric professors who might linger till nine or ten, it was a hot but quiet space that the irritations of the rest of life tended not to invade.

Of late, she had made real progress in her search for the Marquessa’s cure. It had always been difficult to trust ancient recipes, given the tendency for the same names to be given to disparate plant species over time and in different parts of the world, but historical records did indicate a tincture had once existed that could quell the disorder’s worst manifestations. Analyzing trade routes of the Bronze and Castle Ages, she realized the main ingredient could be isolated here, in Cait Forest, from a flower that would bloom in autumn. In fact, the greenhouse had three plants of the species, but those had been planted long ago, and did not yield much. To test that particular candidate, she would have to wait, but there were other plants and reactions she had not yet considered; there were dozens of books here she had not yet read.

Her eyelids were heavy. Her lantern was dim and flickering, but she was not ready to quit her study for the night. Nature had made thousands, possibly millions, of chemical substances that the living world had taken for granted forever; only in the past hundred years had it become possible to isolate and study them.

She closed one book and opened another, a tome with a chipped green cover and stains on the sides of its pages. As she opened it, the scent of a dead animal wafted out.

On second thought, I might skip this one.

“Good evening, Farisa,” said Elior’s voice.

The green-backed book had, in fact, been blameless for the stench.

“The library is closed, Farisa.”

Farisa stood up and faced him. “I have a key. Your predecessor gave it to me.”

Said the halitosis, “I know. That woman is dead.”

“Factually true.”

“It is the middle of the night. You have no reason to be here.”

“I'm not bothering anyone.”

“I have the authority to demand you go.”

“Also factually true.” Farisa began packing her things. “I guess I’ll be gone, then.”

“What are you doing?”

“Leaving, as you requested.”

“To me, it looks like you are stealing my books.”

“I’ll bring them back in the morning.”

“No,” he said. “You will leave them here, all of them, because they are not yours. Empty your bag.”

Farisa decided to comply, but in the most languid way she could. “This one goes here.” She showed him a red volume, then walked over in no hurry at all to put it on its rightful shelf. “At least, that’s where I found it.” She removed a thin book from her pack. “This one is history, and those are sorted chronologically.” She walked the long way to its shelf, put it in place, and returned for another book. “Fiction’s alphabetical by author, and scientific texts are in order of—”

Elior’s anger, if the stench of his breath was any indication, had tripled. “I do not care.”

Farisa, after inverting her backpack to prove it was empty, walked outside. It was cold for April, and Farisa wished she had worn a thicker jacket today. Elior locked the door behind them.

“I need your key,” Elior said.

“Right.” Farisa threw it up in the air and pointed at where it hit the ground. “There it is.”

“The library opens at nine and closes at six. You’ll obey the posted hours like everyone else.”

She walked away, then turned right toward the servant’s quarters, realizing that if she went toward her cabin, he might figure out that it existed at all, and take that away too.

“Farisa!”

She stopped. She had not put more than thirty paces between the two of them.

“I know your secret.”

Farisa turned around to see him coming toward her. “My secret?”

He continued walking. “You killed your father.”

“I was three years old when he died.”

“I know.” Elior put a hand on her shoulder. She thanked her goddess for the jacket leather between his skin and hers. “War makes monsters of us all. You’re a killer, Farisa La’ewind. You may not know it yet, but killing is what you do. It’s what you are.”

She turned around again. She walked away, again. She lifted her head so he would not mistake her, though she was looking away, for making eye contact even with his general level.

His volume rose. “Your mother was a spy! A whore! A tavern archway! She’d take a man to bed at night and cut his throat at dawn. That’s what you people call a hero. Did your Vehu puppet masters ever tell you what sweet Kyana did to get information? She learned half of it on her back.”

She ignored him, walking faster, looking back every thirty yards to be sure the old man was not following her. A mile on, a stone the size of a pear fell from her hand; she had no memory of picking it up.

#

In the midnight darkness, Farisa threw a pebble at Erysi’s dorm room window.

Nothing happened, so she did it again. This time, a light came on. When she saw Erysi’s face in the window, Farisa waved her arms over her head.

Erysi came out a minute later. “What’s wrong?”

Farisa handed her a lantern. “I don’t want to do this alone.”

“Do what?”

“I’ll tell you up at my cabin. It’s not safe here.”

The trees, by their nighttime silhouettes, seemed to be growing their first spring leaves, though reluctant this year to do so. The grass was so dry, it cracked audibly under their feet. When they got to Farisa’s cabin, the witch was quick to close the door even though nobody was around.

“I told you about this, right?” She showed Erysi the envelope, intact with the bullet and threatening note inside. “That was five days ago. Elior said it had been there all morning, and I suspect he wasn’t lying, but how did he know? He comes in and comes out at odd times. It could be—”

Erysi read the note again “Is This Yours? This isn’t his handwriting.”

“How do you know?”

“One: it’s prep school handwriting. I’m not sure where he grew up, but it wasn’t here. Two: I took one of Sotheby’s classes in my first year. His scribbles are illegible.”

“It’s not one of my students,” Farisa said. “I checked it against every exam in the files. No match.”

“So...?”

Farisa put the lead slug in her palm. “I’m going to read the bullet. It’s not an exact science, but sometimes it works. I’d like to have you here while I cast the spell.”

“In case...?”

Farisa said, “Just be here.”

“Of course.” Erysi removed her shoes and sat on Farisa’s bed.

Farisa went into the blue. Confining her locus of consciousness, given her state of anxiety, was more difficult than usual—a millisecond of distraction would have her floating about the room, unsure why she had come here or whose possessions these objects were—and the odors of gunpowder and propellant in the unused cartridge did not help until she decided, for the one and only one reason of those scents being real, to crave them. This was an object that could kill, and for that reason she hated it, but it was harmless in her hand. The amplitude of her involuntary motion decreased; her bedroom turned familiar, no longer distorted. She was smaller, smaller. She could fit inside. She could have lead and fire be the only things she saw for one moment, for the draw between two moments, for maybe... no, it was getting to be too much. Her body heaved and she coughed when the blue expelled her.

“That seemed unpleasant,” Erysi said.

Farisa shuddered. “It was.”

“Did you read anything?”

“I got one image. A blonde girl—not like Ilana, much shorter—and about eighteen years old.”

“Fuck, I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“You read me. I touched it once. That’s what you were picking up. Which leads us nowhere.”

Farisa groaned.

“Could you read the envelope instead?”

“I wish. You have to get inside an object to read it, and paper’s too thin. At the microscopic level, it’s—it doesn’t matter. I tried something, and it didn’t work.”

“Then I have a different idea,” Erysi said.

“What?”

Erysi rubbed her thumb and finger on the envelope. “This isn’t cheap paper, is it? The handwriting is prep-school, which Elior’s isn’t, but the loops in the letters are tight, so it’s probably somebody trying to conceal his—or her—writing style by using the non-dominant hand. The letters also have an uneven profile, which suggests this person used—”

“Quill,” Farisa said. “A fucking quill pen.”

“How many left-handed people are there who use quill pens?”

“I should be able to figure this out.” Farisa had spent her first months here delivering mail, because the stewards had never wanted to hire her for anything else. The headmistress had told her to be observant around campus. She had been so; but, so much time had passed. “I remember seeing, in all my time here, one quill pen.”

“Where?”

“The hylus coach’s office, but he’s right handed, so...”

“So the envelope came from his office, but it wouldn’t be him. And why would he?”

“How many left-handed hylus players are there?”

“We’re a rare breed,” Erysi said. “There’s me, but I’m not much of one. There’s Mel—no, she graduated last year. And then there is your favorite former hylus player—”

“That fucking bitch, Ilana.” Farisa shook her head. “I’m not sure it fits, though.”

“Why not?”

“She’s a hothead. Sneaking into a classroom in the middle of the night to leave a threatening note isn’t her way.”

“I agree that it doesn’t seem like her, but you do know the rumor, right?”

“What rumor?”

“She and Elior—”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Not that.” Erysi laughed. “Ilana prepped at Blunt, right across the street from Mansford, and so even though we had never met before, I knew who she was. Of the four Harrow sisters, she was always the least favored, the worst treated.”

Farisa chuckled. “A measly allowance of five hundred grot per week?”

“No,” said Erysi. “There were always these rumors about her real father being someone else, some embarrassing commoner out west. A second-rate Exmore barrister, or a middling architect in the Voorlands, or a quack doctor peddling eel sperm.”

Farisa added, “Or an unremarkable academic, now inexplicably headmaster of a prestigious college.”

“It could fit.”

“If we could prove it, they would both leave me alone. My job here would be safe forever.”

“Proof will never happen. Nobody who knows anything would tell someone like me, let alone you. The Eastern Horn keeps far dirtier secrets.”

“I have an idea.” Farisa got out of bed, got on her knees, and then searched for a wooden box. Inside, she found a tiny iron key. “Good, I still have it. This opens the dead letter office.”

“Dead letters?”

“All the stuff that can’t be delivered, nor returned. Bad addresses, illegible names. Half of the stuff that lands there, though, is correspondence people intended to hide. They use fake office numbers, intending to check later, but sometimes they forget or they can’t find it. We don’t even need to prove that he’s her father—he may not be. If we can prove, let’s say, something small like favoritism in admissions—”

“Farisa.”

“We should go now.” With the key now in her jacket pocket, she opened her front door. “Are you coming?”

“I’m not sure this is a good idea.”

“What would be?”

“Chances are, Elior will grow to accept your presence and you will see very little of him.”

“If he does, we will be at peace. If he chooses war, I must know everything about the man that I can.”

Erysi frowned.

“I am going. You can stay here, or you can go somewhere else, or you can come with me.”

#

“Nothing in this one either,” said Erysi.

They had worn dark colors, at Farisa’s insistence. No rules were being broken, but she did nothing she would endear herself to a new headmaster by using a key he did not know she had. They had arrived at the dead letter office at a quarter to two. They had left—April light came threateningly early—around five, each with a handful of letters that looked promising. It was now about seven o’clock, in Farisa’s cabin, and the combination of sleeplessness and the nature of the work they were doing made it feel unlike her place at all.

“I’ll burn it later,” Farisa said, after checking for herself. Someone, on October 10, ‘69, had requested that Dr. Sotheby take better care of an office plant that had become an eyesore. “Thirty-six nothings in a row on my end. Nothing connecting him to Ilana?”

“No,” Erysi said. “He never mentions family. No wife, no children, no parents. How many are left?”

“Ten,” Farisa said as she opened another letter. “Oh, this one’s fucking disgusting.”

“Can I see it?”

Farisa handed the folded sheet to Erysi.

“And she’s...?”

“Thirteen. At the bottom, she mentions a fourteenth birthday coming up. It’s clear that he is the one asking her for details, and that she is very reluctant to provide them.”

Erysi shuddered. “It would be an absolute scandal if she were eight or nine, but if we can’t get anything earlier, it won’t mean much. The Company issues girls as young as twelve now to common soldats. What is that Lyrian phrase again?”

“Eska verus ponotto. Liberty Is the Salary.”

They read the letters for another hour or so.

“Nothing,” said Erysi. “I found nothing to connect him to Ilana. No evidence that she is his love child—”

Farisa rubbed her forehead. “Which means he is probably not.”

“—or even that he has one.”

“This love interest is not Ilana, either. She turned fourteen in May ‘84.”

“We have absolutely nothing.”

Farisa growled. “No. There is something. There is something.”

“You need rest, Farisa.”

“It’s not about Ilana. You’re right. And all we have is something that no one in the Global Company, or in the Hundred Families, would care about. So he had a lecherous correspondence with a fourteen-year-old girl, whom the letters suggest he met frequently on the Eastern Horn. It’s repulsive. It’s evil. It would probably be illegal if laws existed. And still, if that’s all there were, he would have no need to hide it, to have it delivered to Blackwell 444, which I know for a fact does not exist. The secrecy is the evidence. I just don’t fucking know of what.” She picked up a letter, crumbled it up, and threw it at her cabin wall. “These men are so fucking careless as we want them T. B.”

“To be.”

“Slip of the—wait a minute.” Farisa sorted through the letters. The young girl had used purple ink, so hers were not hard to find. “She put her initials on the first one, but never again. T. B. He must have asked her to stop doing that. So, we have initials. We have a birthday. We have a postmark on—”

“The Eastern Horn. That’s right.”

“None of this means much, until we consider the secrecy and conclude, with high probability—”

Erysi’s mouth opened. “No.”

“Tenessa Bell. Forget everything else. Forget Ilana. Imagine what would happen if the Patriarch of the Global Company learned that a ‘B. Sotheby’ had written such filth to his niece while she was a child.”

“That goes entirely too far, Farisa.”

Farisa opened her door. Her cabin was getting quite warm already. “Does it?”

“The Global Company would level this place.”

“Or the Board of Cait Forest would offer him up, to save it.”

Erysi’s face had whitened as if she were about to faint.

“Am I missing something?”

“I have lived around rich people my whole life. You have not. We are cruel. We’re vindictive. One does not rise in society and hold one’s place there without being willing to stab a face, now and then. Our world runs on mutual extortion—it is being young in a place like this, seeing others’ vulnerable and humiliating moments, that bonds us for life and holds our businesses and our gatherings together, but this can never—never—be acknowledged.”

“And so...?”

“I don’t want you to do this. If he thinks you mean to blackmail him, then even his own certain demise will not stop him from destroying you.”

“I have no desire to destroy either of us. I only want to be left alone.”

“Good.”

“Shit. It’s the eighteenth, isn’t it?”

“I think so.”

Farisa looked at her diary, where yesterday’s entry had been dated 4/17. “I have four classes to teach, and I’ve had no sleep.”

“I’ll go with you,” Erysi said.

“You will?”

“I will. I don’t know what Elior wants and I don’t know what is happening, but you need to be cautious. I care about you, Farisa.”

“I better get going. I’m late.”

They set out on the path to the Old Schoolhouse. Crows were cawing and the sun, from that almost-nine angle that cast light upon the whole body, was relentless. They were still far enough from campus that they could talk, though they whispered as they walked.

“What you’ve found is powerful,” said Erysi, “but it’s poison. It’s death in a vial, and it does not care whether or not the person who ingests it deserves to die.”

“I intend for no one to die.”

“I know that, but if he feels you have threatened his good name—his career—his standing on the Horn, he will...”

“Raise the Monster of Cait Forest?”

“Something like that.”

“Don’t be silly, Erysi. There’s no such thing as the Monster of Cait Forest.”