Afternoon, Twelfth of One, Harvest, 236 CR

I’d known that Shem had an aristocracy, with autonomy and authority devolved from the Crown to the Duchies to the municipalities—each step along the way was another opportunity for multiplicative boosts to, well, everything. What I hadn’t realized was that inheritance was strictly adoptive, with the addition of a pretty broad exclusion from policy-making positions of children born to the title-holders. They still had vast advantages, but they weren’t rulers; I had no idea if it made a real difference in practice, but I liked the aesthetic of it.

The Crown was no exception to the rule. Queen Ka, the fourth person upon whose shoulders had come to bear that weight, was an Immortal who’d been ruling since Queen Zü’s death in the Irregular War. Heir Mala had been just one of the latest of a series of Heirs until then, a member of a sprawling, adoptive family of mortals who served as the primary representative of the Crown for forty-nine years before stepping down and becoming assistants to the new Heir.

It wasn’t that the Queen was a figurehead. Rather, the Queen was the ultimate force-multiplier of Shem—an executive, emphasizing the execution of policy rather than its genesis. The Crown was the locus of the Shemmai civic not-a-religion, and the Queen by her nature concentrated all of that power into a form that could be wielded. Zü had been a gardener, a horticulturalist by trade and vocation under whose reign Shemmai crops grew taller and healthier than any other on the continent of Alqar. When war came, she’d led several dozen invading Immortals on a chase through Sudh, and it had taken a major manifestation of Praetor to slow her down enough for them to catch up.

With gardening shears against swords, she’d killed seven war-tempered Immortals before they’d taken her down.

The current Heir, Jin, seemed like he would struggle to wield the gardening shears at all. A gangly man well over six feet tall, he looked as though he was about to blow away in the breeze or overbalance, flailing, in a pratfall that would take at least one other person with him. His clothes—white-trimmed black robes with purple and gray stripes—certainly billowed enough that they should have acted as sails.

They didn’t, though. For all the awkwardness of his every undignified motion, his path was ruler-straight and every step he took seemed to move him farther than it should have.

His only companions were two Clerks, both possessed of that perfectly neutral face I’d seen James sporting so often and both in shades of gray. Something was different about them, and it only took me hearing Ketka’s barely-audible hiss to catch on to what it was.

“Hold it together, girl,” I’d murmured as quietly as I could, nudging her shoulder with my head. “No picking a fight until after this.”

“Easy for you to say. Sand and ash, do you see how they move? What a crucible they must have had. The woman even more so than the other.”

My paramour, my friend and bed partner—Ketka, when I’d asked if she knew a good word for what we were to each other, had simply shrugged and offered the Yarovi yetnizhaya—sighed wistfully as I giggled. The powerhouses of the village, minus one, had shown up again once Nameless was gone—gone with no drama and barely any discussion, gone into the Forest with Handler and Farmer—which meant I’d gotten the chance to spend the night with her and to have her company for whatever the morning would contain.

Mostly, I’d just slept. In Ketka’s new bed with its stronger enchantments, wrapped in her arms and basking in the furnace-heat of her, yes; but it had been a race against exhaustion every time I’d woken up, and the priority had been to shovel more food into my stomach.

She’d risen to the challenge and vanquished it. The joy of her touch had carried into my dreams to an extent, though that might have been my bladder’s doing—but certainly, my giggling and rambling in the morning was wholly her responsibility.

It was distorting my thinking. It, and the growing tide of sleepiness that had begun to rise after breakfast, had me taking the morning lightly. Not the people involved, never that, but the actual proceedings themselves, especially since at that moment I wasn’t too much concerned about whether we would get the patent. I was just happy that we’d gotten the ink working, which meant I’d be able to work on the rest of the project without violating the recommendations for my medical rehabilitation.

Plus, things had begun… boringly.

A slow trickle of people came to the grassy open in front of Kibosh’s southern gate and sat down across from Jin at a table with four chairs, with James—or in one case, Ketana—sitting across from one of the Clerks whom Jin had brought. It was a sort of traveling court where things that were related to the Crown were litigated. The topics being brought up were public, but the actual proceedings were conducted under privacy spells or Skills. Hitz was up first, with something that combined tax law and the difference between international trade and international diplomacy, and I found myself remarkably annoyed that I couldn’t listen in on it.

Boredom and my ongoing exhaustion rapidly overcame that annoyance, especially since the combination of the sun’s warmth and Ketka’s lap were a relaxation aid that couldn’t be beat. Murmuring happily as she played with my hair, I drifted off to the sense-memory of the mants I’d eaten on my first day in Kibosh, sitting on the same bench Ketka and I were occupying.

I startled awake when I heard my name spoken by an unfamiliar voice. Glancing up, I saw the androgynous Clerk, so unremarkable that I could barely get myself to pay attention to them, nodding at me with a hint of a smile. They pointed with a closed fist towards the table in front of Jin, who was waiting with an aura of utmost patience, and I scrambled to my feet as my face started to redden.

A hand gripped my elbow, and I stopped short on my very first step. “Slow down, girl.”

“Rafa?” I turned, surprised. “Didn’t know you’d be here.”

“Alchemist Nadash is engaged in recovery,” Rafa said in a carrying voice, ignoring me in favor of turning to the table in the middle of the grass. “Fool girl’s prone to pushing herself. Healthy in moderation, but I won’t be having her undo my good work.”

“The Crown,” Jin said in a voice laced with humor, “recognizes the primacy of medical jurisdiction. Teyuumi, please note that such is held by Rafa of Kibosh.”

“As the Crown wishes,” the slender woman at his right said. A shimmering blueness coalesced around her wrist, forming into a feathered pen which slid neatly across the page. “Rafa of Kibosh, attending medico; Alchemist Sophie Nadash; Clerk James Morei, representing the Alchemist; First Friend Kelly Avara, in whose charge the Alchemist is. Join us, please.”

Her words were formal, but there was a kind, reassuring smile written across her face and reinforced with lines at the corners of her eyes. I walked over, belatedly collecting a hand-squeeze from Ketka as I did so, and managed to finish blinking away enough of the sleepiness that I felt properly present. I was at least present enough to note that all three of the Crown party were on the older side; Jin’s skin was drawn taut across his hands in a way that might have marked him as being at least sixty without the use of magic, and both of the Clerks looked older still.

“I am Teyuumi, in service to Shem and the Crown,” the woman continued once we’d all stopped in front of our respective chairs—I’d been a step behind the others, which had to have been a deliberate way for me to have know I was sitting one chair left of center without being told. “I will adjudicate, with Yojea serving as the representative of the Knowledge and Heir Jin representing the Crown. If that is acceptable to all parties?”

Her tone of voice did its best to communicate that it would, in fact, be okay if it weren’t acceptable. Of course, I had absolutely no grounds on which to even evaluate what that implied, so I just gave a verbal assent a beat behind the others.

“Alchemist Nadash is unaware of the details of these proceedings,” James said, giving voice to my thoughts with eerie timing. “Her efforts on behalf of another have left her with insufficient time to prepare. Are all parties willing to accept First Friend Avara as adequate to represent her personal interests?”

A chorus of assents—not rote ones, but carefully considered ones, even I could tell that—followed his question. I gave mine, as well; Kelly and I had talked about this, and I’d agreed she should take point in the paperwork.

It’ll probably look good in your record, I’d pointed out, and she’d made a face, because apparently that wasn’t supposed to be part of her motivation. But I wasn’t an idiot, and I wasn’t about to pretend that I was blind, and so we carried on with compulsorily more honesty than was probably healthy.

“I’ll begin the demonstration,” Kelly said, leaning forwards. “Yojea, do you mind doing the honors?”

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A sharp curiosity lit up their gaze as they looked at me and then at the sheaf of papers in front of them. “One flask, two standard coldstones set to minus eight degrees Arcane, one standard, charged neutral battery. An amount of ink sufficient to fill the flask, said ink having a liquid base infused with a Kaas-Ratza draw of point eight two.” They looked up again. “First Friend Avara—”

“Thousands, Yoj, this isn’t an inquest, just call me Kelly.”

Despite her protests, she seemed deeply pleased, which suggested to me that being addressed by title instead of first name was some sort of professional respect thing.

“Kelly, then. Do you want anything more than a standard force-ward on the table?”

“Magnitude one log-sump, general.”

There was a momentary flash of skepticism on the Clerk’s face, passing quickly enough that I would have thought I’d imagined it if Kelly hadn’t stiffened marginally. “Done,” they said, rather than anything else, with a hint of excitement taking root in their eyes. “Show me what a Traveler invented in her first fortnights in the world!”

“If it pleases the panel,” Kelly began slowly with a wicked smile, and there was a choked-off cough of laughter from Yojea. “Snap it, Yoj, I’m working here. Anyway! Here’s a corked container.” My hands had been busy while she joked, my own amusement notwithstanding, and she put the rapidly-cooling flask on the table in front of us. “As I’m sure you all know already, Sophie’s athaumia is total and, by Rafa’s judgment, not treatable without substantial personality erasure. This is a Class Two disability—”

“Rafa,” interrupted Teyuumi, to a lack of reaction by everyone around the table, “is that correct?”

“Irrelevant to the matter at hand,” James interjected serenely.

“Granted,” she said with a wave, “but the Crown asks regardless.”

“Girl hasn’t given me permission.” Rafa flicked a glance at me, then at James.

James also glanced at me, securing a small nod from me before turning back to the table. “Granted, on her behalf.”

“Put me and Veil in a circle together,” Rafa said levelly, “and maybe if the Gods put a shoulder behind the plow Sophie would come out of it someone who understands how far she is from who she was before. She’s an adult grown, no matter how young she seems to us; integration, maybe, but it might be a decade until she even manages to draw in the Flame enough to have proper perceptive capacity. And before you ask, we aren’t talking about divinity; the magic’s relevant, that’s not.”

“Granted,” Teyuumi said immediately, and Yojea followed suit a couple of morose seconds afterwards. The look on the androgynous Clerk’s face made me feel much more at ease, because there was an unguarded moment of pure, fascinated curiosity before they went properly neutral again.

Absolute nerd shit, I thought to myself affectionately.

“So, Sophie has a Class Two disability,” Kelly started up again from where she’d left off. “It’s not debilitating, but it’s professionally inconvenient; more than that, Sophie is inclined towards the act of study, and this locks her out of being able to actually do any of that without active assistance from someone else. Like it’s written: First Friends are a pillar for a year and a day; but the centuries are as long as Ease is short, and we must expect life to outlast bonds.”

Everyone around the table nodded in agreement and approval at that, and I found myself nodding too.

“Anyway, I’m not going to bore you. Yojea, can I borrow a number three quill from you, and by borrow I mean you’re getting it back but it won’t be usable?”

“You may have,” they said primly, “a number three quill construct, since there is very clearly magic in that ink.”

Kelly snatched the amber quill that appeared unceremoniously on the Clerk’s palm. “Great,” she said absently, pulling out a knife. With a few strokes, she opened up the top of the quill and made a wide, slanted cut at the bottom. “Now, I’m going to take the cork of the flask,” she continued, putting action to her words, “and use the knife-sharpened top of the quill to get it through the cork. Thus, I’ve got the world’s least gainly inkwell strapped to the quill.”

“I’m glad I didn’t let you take my quill,” Yojea observed, but for all their words, their eyes were locked onto Kelly’s hands like iron drawn to a lodestone.

“Now, I’m going to take one of these sheets of paper,” she said with deliberate drama as she very carefully drew a deceptively simple shape with the quill, never letting the tip of it leave the paper, “and make a little something with it. A little magic, magic that doesn’t take any magic to do.”

The glyph she’d drawn was familiar to me, even from my very brief time on Yelem—it was one of the simplest glyphs in existence. A vertical line, an arc, a small circle, and then the rest of the arc.

Yojea clearly wanted to say something, but it must not have been proper, because they stayed silent until the glyph was completed and the spike of light and flame rose up from the center of it. Kelly had snatched her hand away just in time, and everyone around the table was silent for a moment, staring at the results.

“Oh good. That worked.”

“Kelly, did you not…”

“Well, you know, we were rushed for time. So Sophie said we would do it live, whatever that means, and now we’re here and it worked! Thank you for the use of your wards.” She turned from Yojea to the Heir, steepling her fingers. “The thing where the whole battery drains into the rune is just because we haven’t gotten it right yet. There’s a pen that’ll get us closer, Hitz says they’ve got an order up, but there are so many improvements to make.”

“Noted,” he replied with an almost-entirely-straight face. “Clerks?”

“Advances the art,” Yojea said immediately. “The extraction is novel, but the patent is without general utility.”

“Remediation of a Class Two Disability?” James raised an eyebrow at the three people across from us.

“Below the threshold, and not accounted as a special need.”

“Does the Crown not consider it an orphaned condition?”

There was a pause at that, and everyone’s eyes went to Teyuumi. She smiled amiably, shaking her head. “Orphaned conditions are a formal recognition,” our adjudicator pointed out. “The law forbids retroactive assignment.”

James’s smile went thin, rather than genial. “Then shall I file for two easements?”

“For Sophie’s benefit,” Kelly interjected into the uneasy moment of silence, “orphaned conditions are eligible for bounties from the Crown even when the patent is useless. It’s, well, there’s value in treating people even when the research isn’t economical, that’s simple policy, but also it’s just a speculative investment in the advancement of knowledge, right?”

I nodded in acknowledgment, following her lead in pretending not to notice the tension around the table. “And an easement is a sort of let’s do this even though the law says otherwise thing, right? So the first easement would be for getting an exception to the law saying you can’t add the categorization retroactively, and the second one is to add it.”

The Heir’s eyes locked onto mine for a heartstopping moment, a completely mundane level of terrifying insight manifesting in his gaze. “Perhaps a different solution might be offered, one which would obviate the need for the remediative filings that Alchemist Nadash correctly describes.” Jin straightened, and everyone else’s attention snapped to him. “I understand that Sophie is currently recovering from efforts of aid which were above and beyond what is expected of a member of the community. Does the medico know the span of her healing?”

“The record,” Rafa said with a dryness that suggested the medico didn’t, but she did, and the two were separate somehow, “suggests that she will be fully recovered by Prelude.”

“The middle of Anticipation,” Kelly clarified on my behalf, “which is the third time in the season of Quiet.”

“Then the Crown suggests that rather than a deferment of her obligations, it is appropriate that Alchemist Nadash be compensated for her time by the Crown’s discharge of those; this will serve as our encouragement and endorsement of her research, as will according her the formal recognition of her discovery.”

“Of her Invention,” Kelly said sharply, imputing a capital letter onto the word somehow.

“If that proves to be so,” Jin said, smiling broadly, “then you have not just enriched the Knowledge of Shem. Inventors, you have enriched the knowledge of all Yelem, which is to be celebrated no matter the lack of practical applications it may have.”

“The Crown may undertake to supply Kibosh with the Alchemist’s quota of potions until Prelude, and to generously pay that span of her loans,” James murmured, “but a Clerk may yet feel it needful to remedy a lack.”

“The law,” Teyuumi said dryly, “requires not even one easement for a Clerk to propose a forward-facing addition to the orphaned conditions.”

“Since Sophie’s getting the patent and the formal recognition,” Kelly said rapidly as James’s eyes narrowed, “her personal interests are fulfilled by this. Also, informally, as her First Friend, I’m really happy to hear that the Crown is giving Sophie a totally appropriate amount of money, and I bet whoever’s representing her business interests at this table is happy about that, too.”

Rafa cackled at that. James winced, but it was a wince that served as a laugh in its own right. “Sophie is well served by her First Friend, and Alchemist Nadash’s interests are well served by the Crown’s proposal,” he admitted. “I am not blind to the practicalities at hand. But even the appearance of—”

“Inkheart,” Teyuumi interrupted, “do you really not see it? Sophie’s been here how short a time, and she’s already put her life on the line to save someone else’s! The Crown isn’t buying you off of making a paperwork fuss; Jin wants the girl who did that to grow into a woman who’ll make that same decision, and the Crown wants that woman to be an Alchemist of Shem.”

“I will not pretend that the Kingdom is charitable.” The Heir to the throne of Shem smiled at me, and I could see the steel under it. “But. Clerk Administrator, we spoke once about duty and rights, years ago. How did it go again? Whether we choose it out of the interests of each person or the interests of the Kingdom, we choose that all should flourish? We’re on the same side, James. Now! Let’s knife each other over the details, and we’ll see how much you can drain out of the Crown’s veins on Nadash’s behalf.”