I called the meeting for two hours past noon bell, in the main area Beatrix had told me served as a dining room and recreational space.

The remains of the midday meal lay spread out over the table. There were thick slices of toasted bread drizzled with salted oil, hard cheese biscuits, small crumbly pastries filled with mashed obega and pepper, and thin oily pancakes flavoured with some kind of spice. There had been a bowl of candied fruits, and a plate of omelettes made from wild eggs, but both had been emptied over the last hour.

Lunch had been an informal meal, with most of the staff only dropping by to collect food before taking their loaded dishes back to their rooms. The soldiers of the garrison apparently always ate separately in their own small complex on the second floor.

I popped one of the pastries into my mouth while I waited, wiping my fingers on a napkin afterwards to avoid getting greasy prints on my ledger.

I'd been waiting for fifteen minutes before the other attendees arrived, Beatrix and Commander Rosewood, arriving together. They appeared at one of the room's side doors before closing it and moving to take seats around the table.

I'd invited Beatrix and Rosewood because they were both my most obvious direct peers among the fort staff, and also because I felt they could both have useful information and advice. I'd considered inviting the captain himself, but I'd found myself too nervous to knock on his door, and reasoned that the commander would report anything from the meeting to him that he needed to be aware of.

"Flexing already?" Rosewood asked me as she slumped into a chair. She wore an expression like she was annoyed I'd taken her away from knife-throwing practice.

She grabbed the plate of pancakes, sliding it in front of her, then rolled one and stuffed it into her mouth.

"You've been here a day," she said, speaking with her mouth full. "What can we have to talk about?"

I waited for Beatrix to sit down on the other side of the table before I began.

"Our food will run out in less than two weeks."

They were both looking at me, now. Rosewood swallowed the pancake and didn't take another.

"On investigating, it seems that the monthly food deliveries were made in response to monthly food orders placed by your last administrator – I never got his full name by the way."

"Wilfram Ged," Beatrix said.

I nodded my thanks at her.

"But he's dead," Rosewood said.

"And therefore he hasn't been placing food orders," I said. "We've reached a situation where the stockpile, which has lasted since his death, is almost empty."

"Why didn't we hear this from the cook?" Rosewood asked.

"She expected someone in North Hill to have taken the initiative in keeping us supplied," I said. "It wasn't an unreasonable idea, but it may have been too much faith to put in Polity machinery. However it happened, we seem to have slipped through the cracks."

I didn't say the other thing I was thinking – that following the death of my predecessor, it would have been the duty of the captain to, if not completely take over his duties, then to at least take the initiative in identifying immediate problems. I held my tongue for purely political reasons. I didn't want to lay the blame for a crisis at my superior's feet, on my first day, and a man I hadn't met and didn't know the temperament of besides.

"Well, if it comes to the worst, we can always eat the servants," Rosewood said. She leaned back in her chair and put her feet up on the table.

"The horses would be before the servants on the list, I think," Beatrix said.

Rosewood jerked upright. "Not the horses."

"This is quite serious," I said.

I opened my ledger to a blank page and checked the carbon in my pencil before continuing.

"How do we communicate with North Hill?" I asked the pair of them.

It was Rosewood who answered. "A cart comes up every month. They take letters and reports back with them."

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"Would that be the wagon I arrived on yesterday?" I asked.

Beatrix and the commander shared a look.

"So we won't get another opportunity to send an emergency request until next month," I said. I turned to Beatrix. "Is there a spell that could send a message to North Hill?"

It took her a few seconds to reply.

"I know a communication spell. It travels about as fast as a rider, but it will travel at night as well. It could work, if nothing breaks it on the way."

"Does it send a letter?" I asked. "How does it work?"

Beatrix sat up in her chair and pushed up her sleeve, then began drawing shapes in the air. I couldn't see anything happening at first, but after about a minute she stopped, and her hand started to glow with faint golden light.

She stopped sketching shapes and began moving her hand up and down, as if she were painting the air. The golden light began to grow, and where her hand swept through the space, it left a gradually brightening sphere, translucent, but glowing like a lantern light.

She made a final few sketches in the air, and said the words: "Like this."

She lowered her hands, and the golden orb floated slowly over to me. When it was about a foot away, it shimmered and emitted a sound, which sounded very similar to Beatrix's voice saying the words, 'Like this'.

Its voice wasn't exactly the same; I had the impression more of a bird mimicking human speech than if the magic had somehow captured her words out of the air.

After delivering its message to me, the ball floated back through the air to Beatrix, who placed her hand into it and let the magic flow back into her body.

"It takes most of my magic," she said. "I wouldn't be able to do much else here while it travelled. And if anything happened to it on the journey, it would represent a significant loss to me."

I didn't know enough about what Beatrix did here to know if that was a problem, so I turned to the commander to try and gauge her reaction.

"It won't work." The commander looked bored. "North Hill's not going to do something just because a magic ball tells them. Messages need provenance. Every link of the chain is accounted for."

The commander was quiet for half a minute, thinking to herself as she chewed through the food left out on the table.

"Here's what we're going to do," Rosewood said eventually. "I'm going to send a rider south. Jaquelyn. She could get lost on a straight road, but she's got principles. If we send her with a letter, she'll see it delivered. Beatrix will send her ball to North Hill, timed to meet Jaquelyn and check she didn't get stuck up a tree or fall off her horse, so we'll know in advance that she's still on schedule."

"Can the ball accept a reply?" I asked, turning to Beatrix.

"It's not called the ball, but yes it can. A short phrase."

"And if that fails," Rosewood concluded, "I have rights on Bramn. Lot of fatty muscle on that one."

I let that hang in the air for a few seconds, before clearing my throat and asking, "Could we supplement our stocks with hunting? Or fishing?"

Rosewood seemed to be thinking about that for a while before she answered.

"There's no water bigger than a pond close by, and nothing you'd want to eat comes nearer than a half day's walk. There's game further out, but no paths that deep." She considered for a while then added, "I'll put Levison on the roof, try to shoot down some birds, and I'll send Wren and Maypole out hunting. Don't expect much. They'll have to carry anything they bag back on their shoulders."

"What about rationing what we have?" I asked, not directing the question to any one of them specifically.

"Not a good idea," Rosewood said, but didn't elaborate.

"We can wait," Beatrix said. "If there's no answer when my message spell returns, we can start rationing."

"I'll see about writing out our order," I said. "If anyone has any idea where Wilfram Ged's documents might be, please let me know, or I'll be working blind."

I looked down at my ledger as we all sat in silent thought. Tidy minutes of the meeting lay on the open page, along with our conclusions and actions. I'd made note of several names I hadn't known, people whose faces I hadn't seen. If my predecessor's documents were really lost, then I had a lot of work ahead of me in creating the kind of system I'd need to keep the fort running. Personnel records, maintenance logs, duty rotas for the civilian staff. I needed to work out the fort's budget. Our material needs would be requisitioned from military stores in North Hill within reason, but the servants would have to be paid, or at least a tally of their recompense kept. Or perhaps that was the captain's job?

I felt heavy for a moment, and silently resisted the wave of fatigue that threatened to take me. At the Library I'd had a written job description, standardized and press-printed on headed paper. Here... it felt like I had been cast into an organizational wilderness, as well as a literal one.

The meeting wrapped up after that, Beatrix heading back towards her rooms, and Rosewood passing behind my chair so that she could lean down and snap her teeth twice sharply next to my ear on her way out.