Devi Valley, June 22nd, III Leeland:16
“There’s always a way back, y’know.”
The older mercenary winked as his younger companion hurriedly reloaded a long gun with fresh powder, wadding, and a lead ball. The thunderous crack of black powder discharge filled the chamber around them with chaos, and the acrid smell of smoke stung their lungs and noses. The finery ventilation shafts were still open, but there was a limit to how quickly they could draw out fouled air. Rain from the storm above dripped down the shafts and splattered on the billed caps of the soldiers. The wind howling over the openings, hundreds of feet above, added a haunting descant to the cacophony below.
“What do you mean ‘always a way back,’ Rigg?” asked the younger man. His black Finery Corps uniform was tattered and smudged with dirt, and the smart silver trim and buttons were decidedly bedraggled. The embroidered ‘S’ on his cap was missing the tail. His eyes were fearful.
The younger soldier handed the long gun to his partner. The older man turned and raised his head over the wall, sighted, breathed out, and pulled the trigger. There was a terrific bang, and a scream from beyond.
“Always a way back from wherever you are, Sal. Maybe you don’t see it, is the thing. Take us, now. Here we are, about to get ourselves killed in a cave, so as that big engine thing over there has time to heat up enough to get the last of the workers and scholars out over the river and the western ridge. Ain’t what I hoped for in this trip—seemed like an easy job, low risk. But here we are, doin’ our duty for coin they’ll give to our families. Gun.”
Sal handed him a fresh gun, and took back the one he’d just fired.
“But my point is, Sal—” he crouched, raised the long gun, and fired again. There was a thud, barely audible amidst the cacophony of gunfire, screams, and shouts. “Pretty gold buttons he wears, Dickie Redcoat. Shows up nice against the torches down the passage. What was I saying? Here you go. Oh, a way back. There’s always some way you come out of this alive, Sal, and go back to your wife and sons in Bad Hurl. You just can’t see it right now. Maybe you get on the train, or maybe you put on a red uniform and make like a Dickie until you get away, or maybe you make it up to the ridge and ride out with Rufus Snugg. See what I mean? You just gotta look out for your own way back, Sal. Gun.”
Behind them, a worried lieutenant hurried over to the company captain, standing near the massive iron steam engine and its gray-skinned crew. A tiny, six-inch tall man rode in a cup at the top of a staff held by the captain. There was a shouted conversation, of which Sal and Rigg caught a few snatches.
“…more Giant-men on the other side of the river…”
“…outpost is running out of powder…”
“…enough balloons…”
“…up from the south…”
Sal and Rigg looked at each other, and Sal handed Rigg a freshly-loaded gun.
“Just keep lookin’ for it, Sal,” said the old soldier, as a crossbow bolt suddenly appeared in his cap.
✽✽✽
“By all twenty-seven Black Testicles of the Nine Black Gods of Broob!” barked Cyrus furiously. “Could we not instead have searched for twelve specific mirrors in the Mirror Shaft of the Black Catalog? Or perhaps twelve of the King’s turds in the sewers of Uellodon? Because we’d have a better chance at either of those than finding twelve marked scroll cases in these stacks. Whoever was responsible for cataloging this place ought, if there were any justice, to have been buried alive under the weight of his own misplaced tomes.”
The distant sound of gunfire echoed through the dark library, and Jonathan, Merrily, Cyrus, King Simon, and Devi all looked back sharply at the great iron doors. Devi, riding in her pouch behind Jonathan’s shoulder, brought her lance up defensively. But as yet there was no sign of either the Giant-men or the Republican Guard.
Jonathan, Cyrus, and Merrily were frantically pulling books, scroll cases, and all other manner of dusty oddities off the shelves. They paused long enough to glance at each group, looking for the sign that King Simon had described: A circle in the center of two equal lines crossing at right angles. Following along behind them, King Simon and Devi inspected the heaps of discarded volumes, scanning for something that the taller humans might have missed.
“It’s ‘opeless,” muttered Devi acidly. “We’ve made ‘ar way down jes’ this one row.” She glanced around in the darkness, seeing the lanterns left by the Snugg librarians receding off into the black on either side. There must be a hundred rows in the ancient stacks; or maybe even more.
“Nothing is ever hopeless, Devi,” answered Simon in his musical lilt. “It is only very improbable. And, considering how improbable are our lives, our capacities for thought, our speech, our very existence—not to mention our presence together in this place—a little more improbability is nothing to be afraid of.”
He discarded a long, elaborately carved scroll tube.
“Behold: The pornography of the ancients,” remarked the little goblin. “Evidently we’ve found the human adult section.”
Ahead of them, Cyrus, Jonathan, and Merrily had finally reached the far wall of the vast stacks, still desperately flinging books over their shoulders.
“When do we give it up?” asked Merrily breathlessly. “What if we can’t find the scrolls?”
Cyrus turned and glowered at her. “I still haven’t heard a good explanation for why that imbecile Franco killed Rolly—but after your story, Merrily, I’m certain he didn’t know either. Someone was using Robert Franco, and that someone levitated fifty feet in the air while I stood and watched. So, before Hobb the Wise gets his dirty paws on it, I want the missing element to Rolly’s calculations. Watch it, Miller—that book’s at least two millennia old. Have some respect for the vast and terrible knowledge of the ancients. If Professor Weaselbeer-Yourfork were here, she’d have your kidneys for dinner, dumping a book on the floor like that.”
Cyrus casually cleared an entire shelf with a backhanded swipe, then quickly pawed through the detritus.
“You’re a hypocrite and a liar, Cyrus Stoat,” said a woman’s voice from behind them. “Your hypocrisy is self-evident, and you’re a liar because you know perfectly well that I eat the eyeballs first.”
They all looked up. Behind them, holding a single oil lamp, was Prunella Weaselbeer-Yourfork. Next to her stood the slim figure of Elizabeth Karn.
“What are you two doing here?” demanded Cyrus irritably, turning back to ransacking the next shelf. “I thought you were turning tail to run with the #1 engine.”
“I’ve spent the last year and a half of my life trying to wring secrets from this library, Professor Stoat,” she replied. “When you first left here, I took you for a fool; if you now think I’m going to let you sneak in and poach the find of a lifetime from under my nose at the last minute, then you’re also a half-wit. No one’s going to publish on this collection without my name on it.”
He shrugged. “Come on, then. Help me with this shelf.”
“Hang on,” said Miss Karn. “I can see from the trail of destruction that you’ve just plowed right down this aisle. There’s a more efficient way.”
Everyone else stopped what they were doing and looked back at her.
“What exactly are you looking for?” asked the young linguist.
“Twelve sealed scroll tubes,” answered King Simon, “marked with two crossed lines and a circle.”
“And what’s in them?”
“Mathematical formulae, we think,” supplied Cyrus. “Why?”
“Because the ancients were as obsessed with taxonomies as they were with labelling,” answered Miss Karn. “What you’ve described is one of the graphemes we see regularly in the materials; we haven’t translated enough to know exactly what it means, but I have a theory that it’s linked to their religious texts. You see, there were several varieties—”
“Get to the point, Elizabeth,” snapped Professor Weaselbeer-Yourfork. The sounds of shouts and distant gunfire punctuated the flat urgency in her voice.
Elizabeth Karn blushed, but straightened her back. “Do a binary tree search,” she said. “The stacks are indexed for it. The books on the ends of each row are set up to direct you left or right to later rows, depending on a piece of the information you’re looking for. And after those it’s the same arrangement for the cases in each row. It goes all the way down to the shelf level.”
She pointed at faint etchings near to her shoulder on one of the towering bookshelves. Gathering close, the others could see a great many arcane symbols etched in two columns, each symbol accompanied by words written in the strangely spiky script of the Dawn Imperials.
“What did you call it?” asked Cyrus.
“A binary tree search,” Elizabeth replied, motioning with her hand and walking back toward the entrance. “You start at the root, with the broadest possible two-way decision. Then you do the same thing at the next branch, narrowing down the information with another two-way decision. One of the Snugg cryptographers taught it to me. They use it to quickly search for information in the intelligence archives. If your index is set up right, you can find anything, within any amount of information, in a tiny fraction of the time you’d need with a traditional subject index. The Snugg people thought they were very clever to invent it—but apparently it’s as old as dirt, because the Dawn Imperials used it too.”
“Branching pathways,” muttered Merrily darkly.
“What was that?” asked Cyrus.
“Just something Gregory said to me before he was executed,” she answered, shaking her head.
“If this binary tree is so efficient, why doesn’t every book in the world have an index like that?” asked Jonathan. “I’ve never heard of it before.”
Miss Karn shrugged. “Because the index is enormous—sometimes larger than the information itself. It would take hundreds of times longer to create one than to actually write down the words of the book.”
They all glanced around at the towering, ancient stacks of the library, stretching into dim obscurity in all directions.
“How much of this is index material?” asked Merrily, her face still troubled.
Miss Karn shrugged. “We don’t know. We haven’t had time to read it all. We’ve only worked out the basics of the Dawn Imperial written language, and translating even a single book is still a labor of years. But I think we know enough to follow their path.” She stopped at one of the stacks nearest the door, traced her fingers along the etchings on its face, and then examined the volumes on the shelf. She removed one, turned the pages delicately, and then nodded in satisfaction.
“First decision point,” she said, replacing the book. She pulled out a small writing tablet and made notes on it. “The directions are simple enough for a child to follow, if she knew the language. Come on.”
The group followed Miss Karn in wonder as she moved confidently through the stacks, taking a winding path through the labyrinth of books and scrolls. When she withdrew a book from the stacks to search for the decision point by lamplight, they held their breaths, sure that she must be lost; but each time the young linguist closed a book, she added a note to her paper and set off confidently in a new direction. The echoing sounds of gunfire and of close fighting seemed to grow louder beyond the library.
After less than five minutes she stopped in front of a dusty, unremarkable stack that only time had touched for millennia. She reached up, scanned the shelf, and then turned to Cyrus.
“Let me stand on your shoulders, Professor,” she said. Cyrus obligingly knelt, and Miss Karn stepped up onto his shoulders, reaching up into the stacks above.
“You are a giant, Elizabeth, standing on the shoulders of midgets,” said Professor Weaselbeer-Yourfork sardonically. Cyrus glared at her, but kept still.
Miss Karn passed down a long tube of some dusky gray material.
“First scroll,” she said.
They crowded around to look at the case, and King Simon brushed some of the dust off the end. There, indeed, was the symbol he had described: Two lines crossing at right angles, with a circle in the center. The material was firm, but not as hard as metal, and it was lighter than anyone expected.
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“Second scroll,” came Elizabeth’s voice above them, and she passed down another tube.
“Third scroll. That’s all that’s here; the others must be in another location.”
She stepped down off Cyrus’s shoulders.
“How will we find them?” asked Jonathan, looking around at the darkness. His voice was tinged with urgency.
“By going back up the tree,” replied Miss Karn, consulting her notes and moving off into the stacks. “Sometimes you have to go back to an earlier decision point.”
She led them back, and then on again; and three more sealed scroll tubes came off the shelves. And then again, she doubled back, read the indices, and led them to another grouping of three. The long, light tubes began to pile up in Jonathan’s arms, and he shared some of them with Merrily. Miss Karn’s sheet of notes grew crowded.
“They seem to have shared our affinity for the numbers three and twelve,” remarked Professor Weaselbeer-Yourfork, as they followed the young linguist again to an earlier index point. “No one has ever explained that to my satisfaction, but perhaps we inherited it from the Dawn Imperials, through some hidden cultural meme.”
“Sounds like ‘uman nonsense ta’ me,” said Devi. “Like sayin’ ‘bless ye’ after ye sneeze, or them silly metal prongs ye use fer eatin.’”
“Here’s the last common ancestor in the index,” said Miss Karn, reaching up for a book. But before she could bring it down, there was a terrific explosion from behind them, and the room was suddenly lit up by the flash of black powder discharge. The sounds of men shouting and dying grew suddenly and shockingly close. Torch light could be seen flickering from the entrance.
“We leave—now,” said Cyrus firmly. “We’re out of time. We need to get to the train.”
“But we’re missing three scrolls!” protested Jonathan.
“And if we stay, we’ll be missing our ride out of here,” snapped Cyrus. “And probably some vital organs. I’m going to my son, and to Veridia. If you and Merrily want to see another sunrise, you’d best follow.”
He turned to Professor Weaselbeer-Yourfork, who nodded in grim agreement. “Nothing in this room is worth dying for,” she said. “When the political situation settles down, we’ll return. For now, I expect those nine tubes are quite enough to keep the mathematicians at Triad busy.”
They moved quickly toward the door, before which were scattered prone black- and red-clad figures. Long guns with fixed bayonets littered the floor around the bodies, mixed with the spears and short stabbing swords of the Guard; but the living combatants appeared to have moved on. Weaselbeer-Yourfork bent to pick up one of the long guns, a powder horn, and a small box from one of the Snugg mercenaries. Miss Karn followed her lead.
“Take what you can,” said the older woman. “If it comes to it, I can show you how to use them. Rufus made all of us learn.” Cyrus, Merrily, and Jonathan obligingly retrieved guns, powder, and shot, slinging the long firearms over their shoulders by straps.
They moved cautiously into the broad, tall, well-lit corridor outside the library. More bodies littered the floor, and the sounds of harsh orders and screams was all around.
“This way!” said Weaselbeer-Yourfork, beginning to cross the hall to the stairs leading down. But even as she spoke, a swarm of red-clad soldiers suddenly boiled up out of it. They carried long spears with steel tips, and wore breastplates and helms. Weaselbeer-Yourfork raised her long gun and fired swiftly, causing one man to drop. But the thicket of spears drove forward, piercing her body. Weaselbeer-Yourfork staggered backward from them into the library, groaning in agony and pressing a hand to her abdomen. Cyrus and the others retreated in the other direction.
“Come on!” screamed Miss Karn, turning to run back up the corridor.
They ran. Merrily and Cyrus knew their hand weapons would do little good against a forest of long spears. The fifteen-foot tall portals on either side showed the strange, ancient machinery of the upper level, but there was no time left for investigation.
“Where are we going?” bellowed Cyrus as they ran, looking back over his shoulder. The Guard, heavily armored, were slower—but there was no getting past them to the lower levels.
“The vent shaft!” shouted Miss Karn. “We can climb up! There’s scaffolding there, so we could get to the upper passages and circle back!”
At the end of the long corridor, the tall passage opened up into blank, empty space. A wide, perfectly circular shaft, perhaps fifty feet in diameter, ran up and down. Around the edge of the shaft was a narrow platform of braced wooden slats, newly-constructed, and a series of thin ladders and platforms led upward. But the central hole of the shaft opened into blackness below, with only a flimsy rope ladder to provide a descent. A vast, dry heat billowed up from beneath, and the smell of sulfur. There was a faint red glow from below them.
“I know that smell,” said Jonathan, his stomach churning in sudden fear. “We must be above the vents in that huge room with the giant wheels!”
“Aye,” agreed Devi from her pouch. “Me’n Daven near ta died down thar, along wi’ ye. I’ve no desire ta’ go back innit. ‘Tis a good t’ousand ‘eights of a snarf town ta’ the bottom. Five ‘unnered of yer feet, the way big-folk measure.”
“I’d tell you all about what we found down there,” said Miss Karn, also panting, “but we’re all about to die if we don’t start climbing.” She took two of the long scroll tubes from Cyrus and started up the ladders into the scaffolding above. Jonathan, Merrily, and Cyrus redistributed the remaining tubes, handing one to King Simon and taking two each. Then King Simon scampered up the scaffolding, followed by Merrily.
And then the Republican Guard drew near, their spears held forward in a bristling mass. Jonathan, backing away suddenly, teetered on the edge of the abyss beyond the narrow lip of wood.
“Go on, Miller!” shouted Cyrus, pulling Jonathan back and handing him two more scroll tubes. “Get out of here—I’ll hold them off a bit!” He drew his old broadsword and turned to face the Guard.
“Are you insane?” bellowed Jonathan, starting up the scaffolding ladder and awkwardly gripping the four tubes. “You can’t fight long spears with a sword!”
“Go!” screamed Cyrus. “I’ll follow! I won’t die here—Veridia would never let me live it down. And I have a son to—”
Whatever Cyrus Stoat was going to say about his son was lost to posterity, as the spears of the Guard found his chest. As Jonathan watched in horror from above, he tumbled into the blackness of the shaft, and fell down into the heat and smoke of the vent chamber below.
Sheria
Sheria lies next to Michael Rider in the bedroom above the inn. Outside, the March snowstorm howls and batters at the windows, like some animal wanting to get in to share their bed. In most close realities, the crude slats of the window keep the beast at bay; but in a few, it breaks, showering their bodies with frigid snow. She draws close around Michael, drawing warmth from him here and passing it to her other selves.
Her hands grip around his broad chest, still breathing deeply, and she nuzzles her head into his neck. His sweat dampens her face and hands, drawing her in to his definiteness and substance. In all the branches, there is only one Michael Rider.
“I love you,” she says in the crude human speech of this land. She could say it more completely in her own tongue, but she has never taught it to him. She must not; if he knows the language of the fey, then the path is lost to her.
“I love you,” he replies in awkward Uellish, turning to smile at her. He runs a hand along the curve of her jaw.
“Do not leave, Michael Rider.” She sits up on one elbow and looks into his eyes. “Do not go on your errand to the north. Come with me to the west, and the home of my people. Come to our dwellings of air and light in the old trees, and there you will be my prince. Every day you will sing and eat and drink and laugh; and every night will be like this night. That way lies the Bright Path.”
“Would your people welcome me as a prince?” he asks with a laugh. “That would be like the King of Brasse marrying a dog.”
“They will bend as I wish,” she says, her eyes flashing.
The smile fades from his lips. “I can’t, Sheria. Not yet. I love you, and I want you to be with me, in your way, whenever you choose to. But I have a duty—a message I have to carry. It’s from the First Minister to Queen Anne. When I’ve delivered it, I’ll come away with you.”
“No!” She says the word sharply. “Do not! Come with me tonight! Leave behind your bag, Michael Rider, and your horse, and walk with me in the snow. Walk with me to the west, and leave this sad place of men behind. That way lies life, and here there is death. I do not desire for you to die. You must be mine, because I want it.”
As he looks at her, she sees the pathways in him, and all the different Michael Riders that are one. Some blink, and some move their heads one way or another; some kiss her, and some turn away. In some of the pathways, they make love again, and in others…
Here, in the most probable realities, he lies still.
“I gave my word,” he says.
The blood tingles in Sheria’s veins, and she can feel the inflection point slipping past.
“Break your word! What is your word, but air in your lungs? It is my air!”
“What I said will be done, because I said it,” he answers.
She looks down, gripping his chest and shoulders tightly. Her hands creep up to his neck.
“Your word is your death, and my death,” she says, and kisses him again. “I will not allow it.”
Jonathan Steward
Jonathan dreamed of Merrily every night.
He saw her holding a sword and standing over the body of a man, looking at a creature with a metal face. He saw her running through underground tunnels, carrying strange gray cylinders. He saw her sitting with him in a cathedral, telling him she didn’t love him; and her hand drifting toward him on its own as he walked away. He saw them standing together beneath great trees underground, looking up at a hole in the roof that let in the sky.
He saw himself stab her in the chest as war raged around them, and he lowered her to the ground, weeping.
Jonathan’s eyes fluttered, and he woke up. The bright, hot light of the high hills flowed in the open window of his bedroom. His pillow was covered in sweat, and his chest dripped with it. It took several minutes before his heart calmed, and the sunlight returned him from that other world to this one.
“Another dream, love?” asked the woman lying next to him.
Kmesha Mistress had black skin, full lips, and a finely chiseled jaw and chin. Her eyes were deep brown, and her hair wiry and curly. It was streaked with gray; the lines under her eyes were deep, and her body had lost some of its firmness. But she was still beautiful.
He touched her hand and nodded.
“Was it her again? The woman from your youth? What was her name?”
“Merrily,” he said, looking out at the orchards and fields of the plantation.
“I am insanely jealous,” proclaimed Kmesha Mistress.
“Don’t be, mistress,” answered Jonathan with a smile. “She’s dead. She’s been dead for twenty years. I got a letter from her old professor after it happened, before the ships stopped coming from the north. She fell at the Battle of the Four Corners.”
“And yet still you dream of her,” said Kmesha Mistress accusingly.
“Twenty years is enough time for the waking mind to govern the heart,” he said, “but not enough to escape the dreams. And I love you, mistress.”
She nodded approvingly and stood, drawing a gown over her naked body. “As it should be, Jonathan Steward,” she said, in her dusky voice. “You are mine, and you should love me. But I will tolerate this ghost in your head. The heart, once given, cannot be un-given, and it is dishonest to pretend otherwise. You will love me in the day, and may love her at night. It is acceptable to me.”
Jonathan rose, and put on pants.
“Come with me to the market, steward,” she said. “I will buy a new suit for you, and make all the other owners jealous.”
“As you wish, mistress,” he answered.
They spoke in Broobian, of course; it was the language of the mistress, and of her household. Kmesha Mistress had made Jonathan Steward teach her his own native tongue once, so that she could read his letters and his diary. But she lost interest after a few years, and now they only spoke Broobian.
The mistress was wealthy. Her plantation had thrived selling food to the Holy Empire after the invasion from the north cut off their richest farmland. She owned mines, too, that produced iron and copper and coal to fund the great struggle on the coast and plains. As men and giant-men and dragons fought and fell on the fields of the shrinking Imperium, Kmesha Mistress grew rich from their suffering. She bought slaves to work her fields and mines, and then she bought more fields and mines to give productive work to her slaves.
Kmesha Mistress had bought Jonathan, too. It was his own doing; he had arranged to be put up for sale just at the right time, and for her to see him on the platform during the auction. He whispered to himself in the fey-tongue, and her eyes fell on him, and she smiled.
“I will take that one,” she had said firmly to the auctioneer, putting out a bid that dwarfed all others. “I need a new secretary, and a new lover. He will do for both.”
His new mistress was willful and petulant, but canny. Jonathan had trodden the paths of her life carefully, first earning trust, then affection, and then love. She took him to her bed, and made him the majordomo of her house. When he proved himself, he became the overseer of her farmlands. Jonathan watched her, and watched the paths, and made the right choices, though he could not see where exactly they led. He even loved her, after a fashion, for she could be kind and gracious when she wanted to. She made him the steward of all her lands, and her heir.
They took a carriage to the market.
“You look best in black,” she said critically, eyeing him in a dark suit at the tailor’s shop.
“Black is hot in the sun, mistress,” he said calmly. “I will sweat, and you don’t like that.”
“I like it well enough when you are on top of me,” she replied with a smile, “and I will assign slaves to follow you with a shade and wave fans at your body. It must be black. Your hair is gray, and your eyes are blue, and you shall wear black because it suits me.”
They went to buy wine to serve for the feast that night.
“The price continues to rise, mistress,” said Jonathan in her native Broobian. “Now that there are no more grapes from Carelon and Brasse, the vintners must rely on inferior varieties from the south. And the Giant-men took the Kavarik Hills last fall, where the best Imperial varieties grew. I’m afraid we’ll have to rely on apples and pears for wine before long.”
“Then we will drink the best wine that remains, while it remains,” she said. “And when the dragons come for Broob, Jonathan Steward, we will raise a glass to them while we burn.”
“Not for many years, pray,” said an obsequious merchant nearby. “The Holy Empire is ferocious in defense of their homeland, and their new weapons are most ingenious.”
“Tell this peon,” proclaimed Mistress Kmesha to Jonathan, “that they will all burn, and then this market will burn, and he with it. And then you and I will burn, Jonathan Steward. We will burn before they take our faces, and we will raise a glass of the finest wine that remains to the giant-men and their dragons and their metal god.”
Jonathan dutifully repeated her command to the wine merchant, and then paid an inflated price for ten barrels of the best that was left.
They went to a man who sold fresh fruits. Of these, there was no shortage; Broob’s fields were still rich and its trees laden.
I find the Dark Path, and it leads me into the wasteland, whispered Jonathan to himself, speaking in the old fey-tongue. I follow and I search all the days of my life, until one day I stand in the Great Place of Change and enter the loophole.
There it was, before him: a black thread running through the shifting realities around him. It led from the fruit sellers, through the infinite tree of choice and outcome, to an inflection point—tonight.
He bought fruit for the banquet with great care, and they rode the carriage home from the market.
In the afternoon they made love again, mingling their sweat and breath as the bright sun flowed through the open windows.
In the evening, the guests gathered for the banquet. Kmesha Mistress showed off her wealth to the Broobian elite, and she paraded Jonathan Steward about on her arm like the trophy that he was. He smiled, and bowed respectfully to all. He laughed at her jokes, and loved her for everyone to see.
After dinner, the fruit was passed around. Jonathan had nothing at all to do with it. But Kmesha Mistress’s pear was found to have a tiny worm inside after she had taken a bite. She threw the pear away in anger, and had one of the house slaves sent out to the fields. The guests looked away in embarrassment, and no one thought any more of the pear or of its worm.
That night, Kmesha Mistress and Jonathan Steward made love for the last time.
In the morning, she was dead. Her eyes bulged open, and her tongue protruded from her mouth. Jonathan sadly closed the eyes and arranged her body with dignity. The physician was called, and he said it was the poison of a tiny worm, very rare in these parts.
She would not face the fire when it came, and Jonathan had need of her wealth. He had made her happy in her life, and she would serve him in her death.
He sent for the attorneys and arranged for the execution of the will.