Fourteen

We got off the train in Olmstead. I didn’t rob us, so the ride was smooth. We’d played cards, or they played, I dealt, and dozed and spoke idly about nothing, least of all the broken house or the assassination attempt or the war which my word was not good enough to slow, and gazed out the window while I tried desperately to conceive of options for transporting us from Olmstead home. Hitchhiking was out of the question. Lurchers, best method, also out of the question. Everything that came to mind was laughable. When Vikare had brought up the night previous on the train, or alluded to her sore throat, she’d laughed and her laughter electrocuted us into laughing and together we’d laughed so hard that the conductor checked on us. Gossamer had started laughing as soon as the question was raised. Did she know what’d happened last night? Of course! Of course! You will be my bride. What a riot!

I wasn’t sure how laughable it’d be for us to walk twenty miles as a bonding exercise.

In Olmstead it was evening. Harsh milky fog but pleasant temperature. It reminded me of the humidity inside the Yann I. Chauncey Ichorite Foundry. Everything was always wet in there. When we walked down the station’s modest sandy stairs into the unmarked darkness, I thought about the viability of stealing a parked cart and playing it off as though I hadn’t. Like absolutely this had been my cart for years. Vikare would spackle over little holes in believability, I assumed, but gulches? Yawning gulfs of believability would not be so easily surmounted. I didn’t know if she’d cover obvious cart theft for me. My provincial roughness could only extend so far.

I carried luggage for all three of us and entertained this fear. I ran down plans whose woeful inadequacies almost endeared me to them. I walked ahead of Vikare and yawning Gossamer, dreaming up methods for keeping this going just a little longer. Just a few days more. If I was meaner and less clumsy I’d be dead and victorious and there’d be less fussy maintenance. It goes like this sometimes. I’d hire someone random and have them play valet. I’d coax us into staying at some skeevy boarding house and go out by myself into the night and fucking build a cart with my hands. Heaven help me, something.

There was a cart waiting for us at the bottom of the staircase.

In Cisra there was a budding consumer automotive industry that made slower lurchers for civilian use. They were murderously expensive and had not caught on, half because the manufacturers were Cisran royalists who wouldn’t use ichorite for sake of local pride and insisted on building the whole engine apparatus out of Bellonan-style steel, and half because the machines were thunderously loud, sickly, temperamental, persnickety, pollutant, and inefficient, and demanded even footing or else they’d roll over, mutilating and killing everybody inside them. They looked like sexy beetles. This was one of those. It was cherry red with obsidian rims. Big wheels, obviously standard lurcher wheels that’d been popped on to give the machine extra height, and a fine black leather interior.

Harlow sat on the hood. She cupped her hands around her mouth and lit a spliff. Shoulders raised as she took a belly deep drag and fell as she blew rings of smoke into the surrounding fog. She smiled when she saw us, leaped off the hood and onto her feet. Orange sparks flaked off her spliff and fell into nothing. Harlow bowed deeply. She wore an absurdly formal servant’s suit, crisp tailored eggplant jacket and pants over a high-collared shirt, gilded cufflinks, lush silk ascot, leather gloves, jewel-encrusted signet rings worn over the gloves, patterned spats, more earrings than she usually wore, so many I thought the weight must ache and threaten to rip her ears from her head. Velma Truth Loveday was half antiquarian conservative, half boardwalk pimp. Harlow had not one lick of conservatism at all. Full sexmonger. King among men. As was her habit, she’d slicked back her hair with high-shine grease, and I saw my expression reflected across it. Saw my open mouth.

“Master,” Harlow dripped. She fell to her knees, pinched her spliff between her thumb and first finger, and kissed the toe of my boot. “It’s delicious to see you. We’ve missed you so fucking bad. We’ve wept and torn our hair in your absence. We’ve drank. We’ve begun writing poetry and dancing naked dirges but it’s not enough to sate us in your absence. In our grief and boredom we’ve started to beat each other up. We’re killing each other. I’ve murdered two of the hall boys. I beat them to death with a crowbar. You look so sexy and distinguished. I am dizzy with pride to escort you home. You and your kitty cat.” Harlow threw herself back on her heels, knees apart, tossed her head to keep all her pomaded hair in place. She took another drag and glanced between my thighs. “Kitty cat and friend. What gorgeous women you’ve brought us. You’ll make such handsome babies inside both of them.”

In my heart I reached for Harlow, darling Harlow. I dropped the bags and I reached to fit my hands around her neck.

Harlow swayed out of strangling range and stood up. She was taller than me, broader with her boxer shoulders, and I knew well that if she wanted to manhandle me aside, she could. She held her spliff with her teeth and pulled me into a fierce embrace, luggage bags knocking between our knees as she emptied my lungs with the strength of her arms, then spun me, made me look at Goss and Vikare.

Goss and Vikare wore identical expressions. Gossamer’s lips had parted, her faint brows arched up to her hairline, her eyes stretched as wide and round as they’d ever been. Vikare looked like she might faint. Her mouth fluttered between a manic grin and astonished flatness. She didn’t blink. She didn’t so much as breathe. Horror. Glee. Pseudo-religious awe.

Harlow purred, “Which one of you is about to be my mistress?”

Gossamer and Vikare glanced at each other.

“On the left is Gossamer Dignity Chauncey, my fiancée, and on the right is Vikare zel Tlesana, her business partner.” My bones vibrated under my skin. “Goss. Vik. This is Harlow. She is,” I closed my eyes, adjusted my grip on the five bags I carried, “my valet.”

“It’s a pleasure,” said Goss.

“Mhm,” said Vikare.

“Pleasure’s all mine.” Harlow leaned down and kissed my cheek. “Let’s go for a ride.”

Maybe it was just Harlow. Perhaps the rest of my proud Choir waited in the Fingerbluffs acting casual and sane.

Harlow took the luggage bags from me. She dangled them over her shoulders on her fingertips with majesty and ease. Perfect finesse as she opened the automotive’s trunk with her toe, tossed in the bags as though they weighed nothing, and slammed it shut. She sucked down her spliff to the filter in one inhale. She flicked the filter into the fog.

I looked at Goss and Vik. I looked at the automotive. My body moved for me. I climbed into the front seat beside the driver’s, closed the door behind me, watched helpless as Harlow ushered Goss and Vikare into the back of this gorgeous glossy deathtrap. The two of them sat in total silence behind me. Gossamer was now grinning like a maniac. Vikare looked like she’d gone into a sort of trance. Harlow shut the doors behind them, then climbed into her own seat, revved the engine. She skimmed her palm over the wheel, a skill she must’ve learned from one of the pirates we knew, rambunctious Nero or short lovely serious Iodine, and whirled us around like a carnival ride. She tore forward, took a path I knew. We’d ride the Ridgeroad, the narrow shepherd’s path along the cliffs, a place where her and I and Tricksy and Candor used to practice lurcher tricks. A miracle we hadn’t all died. She took us down that way, and she cranked her window down, pointed a finger into the night. “Look over the water, good ladies,” she said. “Behold the end of the world.”

We did not speak. The absurdity of Harlow’s style and beauty had a sort of pacifying effect; nothing was stranger than her entrance into their lives, therefore everything could be magic without questioning. The automotive sounded and felt like a conveyor belt. It made my guts go liquid. Homesickness took me. This might be the last time I’d ever see the Fingerbluffs. When I left, it’d be to meet my destiny. War would follow. This place, these hallowed rocks, would melt into the air any instant.

The cliff skimmed the edge of the azurine orchards. Their supernatural luminous blueness felt unlucky now, an ill omen. There was ichorite under the ground. I heard Gossamer stir in the backseat, heard her spine adjust against the leather, and knew she was pleased by what she saw. I imagined her imagining the destruction of the Fingerbluffs. I imagined a smoldering hole.

Dark pink lights and gulls diving, screaming over the roaring tide.

The Fingerbluffs jutted from the ground, living filthy gold. Harlow took us along the city’s edge, away from the cliff now, and brought us down the most central street, the only one I’d wager could take a vehicle of this size. Lurchers leaning everywhere, no way to explain that. Candles stuck in wine bottles dangled from the street lamps. The magenta light through the red paper windows cast funny shadows with the machine. Everybody was outside and above us. I put my hands against my diaphragm. I was going to scream. I was going to jump and cry. The Choir crowded on the balconies of the skinny temples and along the endless triple gallery shotguns with their brilliant green overhangs, on the rooves too, perched on the edge of chimneys, on the backs of steeples, on a Virtue statue of Truth. They stood on the lips of six-tiered fountains and climbed up onto the freestanding ancient ornate archways and the chunks of Bellonan columns, hundreds upon hundreds of people, gorgeous grinning tipsy people, like a flock of seabirds, all dappled with the mottled glow festivity brought out inside a person, and everybody screamed at us, hollered down at the cherry red automotive, LITTLE LORD LOVEDAY’S COME HOME!

I glanced behind me at Gossamer and Vikare. I tried to gauge their disbelief. They had none. They looked enraptured. Gossamer looked flush and hungry. Vikare cranked down her window. She leaned out of it and peered up at the crowd.

Flower petals, silver paper confetti, sugar beads, and popcorn rained from the sky. Fistfuls were tossed down on us. They rattled on the hood and roof like hail. Gulls descended for the popcorn. A churning mass of white feathered wings blanketed the street, and we pulled along at a leisurely pace, shifting the birds, taking time to cruise along the reception’s track.

Music started. Big sloshy brass and drums and singing, layered singing, rah rah work songs, unalone toward dawn we go hail Loveday, rye and poppies, and with the music cue people began leaping down onto the street. Jumping straight, mostly. Shimmying sometimes. Flips and virtuosic dives here and there, skirts fluttering as though underwater through the salted azurine air. On the ground, the Choir dispersed. They ran their usual games, knife throwing and drinking along the carousel, juggling and playing mean simple sports in the mews, breathing fire, dancing in the street. It felt like a last hurrah. It was. I was sick with love. Love swelled in my belly. I felt small and stuffed and so proud. It was difficult not to weep. It was difficult not to crawl out the window and cast away my long green jacket, peel the shirt off my waist and let my tattoos breathe, go marauding and rejoicing with my comrades soon to die.

“I missed you,” I said to everything.

Harlow put a hand on my thigh. She glanced over her shoulder at the rich girls in the back, sniffed. She inclined her head toward me. Softly she said, “The car’s for Sisphe. Nice, right?”

“You’re ridiculous,” I breathed. A tear fell and I couldn’t stop it.

“Couldn’t have her preferring straight money to me.” Harlow skimmed her tongue over her teeth. “I think we’ve got two days of this in us. Three max. Be quick with your wooing, yeah?”

“I’d die for you.” I put my hand on hers. I kissed her knuckles. “You know I’d die for you.”

“Sure thing. Die for Hereafter instead.” Harlow gave me a private smile, little and genuine, full of love. She was my brother. I rebuked any jealousy I’d ever held for her, any resentment that a younger me had fostered. I missed Candor dreadfully. She would’ve hated all this fuss. It would’ve been overstimulating. She would’ve hid in some loathsome crawly dive and drank in blissful quiet.

We arrived outside the Mansion. It was a regional style, frillier and wider than the Chauncey-Ramtha summer estate, bigger I now realized. Fortyish bandits lined the steps. All of them wore outfits whose grandeur and garishness seemed designed to upstage Harlow, unacceptable phantasmagoric swaths of velvet and fine leather and bunched lace and satin in every single color, ribbons in beards, capes and diamond buttons, an anchor’s weight in metal and gemstones, corsetry and great coats, long coats, furs and buckles and fishtail pleats and tall laced boots, an onslaught, a kaleidoscope of textures that simulated mushrooms soaked in wormwood laudanum on a hot summer’s night in a storm. The extravagance mocked refinement. Here was the antithesis of poise and restraint. Somehow the gathered Choir all wore ceremonial aristocratic knives, despite being, I assumed, the Loveday Mansion staff. As we approached, everybody drew their knives. They stabbed them into the air, made a tunnel for us to walk under. A few crawly bastard genius beauties had tied bright scarves to their wrists, made the tunnel florid as a circus tent. Everybody kept a straight face. Many of those faces were obviously heavily scarred under their immaculate brothel makeup, worn by work and violence. No smiling. No frowning. Dread serious staff tunnel.

I got out of the automotive. I looked at Harlow, who played innocent, and immediately abandoned all pretense that the aristocratic culture I’d encountered was any different than this. This was normal. This was better. I had grown up in this and loved my people fiercely. The truth was so much easier. I helped Gossamer and Vikare out of the car. A bandit climbed out of a manhole, one of a few that spotted the Mansion’s perimeter for the purpose of channeling rainwater down to the cliffs, closed it behind him, and popped the automotive’s trunk. He grabbed all our luggage and carried them out of sight. Absolutely we would never see the luggage again. Gossamer started saying something about it, but couldn’t seem to find the words. Harlow pulled away, took Sisphe’s obnoxious present elsewhere, presumably to Sisphe herself. We stood on the steps. I held both Gossamer and Vikare’s hands aloft.

I pronounced to the bandits, “My bride and partner!”

The bandits stomped their feet.

Vikare said softly, “This is the loveliest place in the world.”

“This is a clown orgy,” Gossamer answered. She swayed in place. “I thought Horace was an insane conservative.”

“Oh, that’s right. He’s insane,” I said. Was there a Horace? Was somebody Horace? Who the fuck would be Horace? Amon?

At the top of the stairs, the doors opened. Amon and Uthste stood there, flanked by trumpeters. Amon and Uthste had dug up servant’s attire, real servant’s attire, which looked so out of place among the extravaganza that it became almost fetishistic. Amon was clearly not Horace. He wore his Torn makeup, a thumbprint smear of rouge on his eyelids. Uthste clasped her hands behind her back. “Welcome home. Come. We’ve prepared dinner for you.”

I ascended slowly, mimicked stateliness.

Vikare tore her hand away. She pulled up the itchy slinky liquid silver fabric of her dress and ran up the steps, fur coat swishing, looking I realized very much like she belonged here. She looked like a princess. A real one, one in fables whose cleverness and kindness distinguished them from humankind, not the junior tyrant position it meant in Royston and Cisra. She stopped running every few steps to look at a bandit’s outfit, examined the vintage beading and the delicate lacing on the sleeves. She looked at the knives above her and the riding boots below. She knew who we were. She knew what she was seeing. She looked happy. Happy in an uncomplicated childlike way.

Gossamer was not looking at the display. She watched me. Dissected my most minute expressions or scanned prints of my brain, I didn’t know for sure. She shivered. I let go of her hand and wrapped an arm around her, pulled her against my side. I glanced at the bandits on either side of me. I tried to tell them with my eyes that I was proud of them, and proud to be like them. That we’d be victorious. I wondered abstractly if this could end sweetly. If Gossamer could fall in love with this place and defend its strangeness with her unstoppable monetary might. This was lunacy, of course. We are the natural enemies of her monetary might. We stand to rob her of everything she owns and redistribute it to everybody alive. We could never resolve this peacefully. Our existences were mutually exclusive. The symbol of her existence would cease, or we would. She leaned her cheek against my shoulder. We reached the top of the stairs.

Inside the Mansion, kids too young for tattoos ran circles around the parlor. One kid had a trophy boar mounted on her shoulders, used its frozen open sneering mouth to see. She chased two boys, shook her tusks at them. One of the boys waved at us. I wasn’t sure whether they’d received the full brief or cared to enact it, but they looked excited about the commotion. They dashed around a corner out of sight. Magnanimity reclined in her wheelchair. She and the other biddies gambled with uncut jewels. Magnanimity was a notorious cheater, but being the eldest elder had its perks. She produced an extra mother card from her sleeve and slammed down her hand, six ascendant mothers, and put her hands behind her head. She winked at Vikare. The other biddies fully ignored us. On the second floor, visible through the staircase’s railing, a beautiful man reclined on a settee, and his lover, an older, rougher woman, lovingly painted the likeness of his chest hair on a fresh wet canvas. Music, chatter, somebody’s purring cat. The charade was less deliberate inside. Then the “staff” bandits swirled through the doors after us, the ones I assumed had agreed to participate actively in this bit, and flowed around Goss and Vik and me like a current. They swept us into the ballroom, which had been refashioned as a second dining room. I wondered what was going on inside the first.

The dining table was set before the ancestral congress wall. A sea of hands twisted out like antlers, reached for us, longed for us. The table was long. Candles, prayer pearls, a shocking garnet-and-ivory Torn Child Idol that Amon must’ve borrowed from a Shrine. Golden fresh bread, local goat cheese and hypnotically blue marmalade, dried spiced meats and nuts, oysters on the half shell, hot pickled peppers and roasted greens on skewers, barley cakes, and a swordfish, a whole fucking swordfish with an azurine skewered on its nose on a bed of fragrant rice. At the end of the table sat Brandegor. She wore her hair down. I’d never seen it down. It was more white than black now and fell past her knees, pooled on the floor around her chair. She wore a masculine housecoat and her torc. She stirred her tea with her long pinkie talon. She looked at us enter, unblinking, smiling.

Vikare curtseyed. Reflex, maybe. Gossamer bowed her head, untucked herself from my side to show proper deference.

I did not know how to address her. She could not be my father, clearly.

Mors Brandegor the Rancid said, “Sit down. Eat. Your father is dead.”

Gossamer looked stricken, and Vikare vaguely uneasy—I saw the concept of murder occur to her.

I sat down at the table’s near end.

Gossamer and Vikare sat at either side of me eventually. Valor appeared in a gorgeous white lace gown that could not be mistaken for servant’s attire by any stretch of the imagination. She wore a net of pearls in her hair. She looked like a Virtue made flesh. She made a plate for Gossamer, then for Vikare. She didn’t serve me, but gently rapped up the back of my head when she passed. Then she stood at Brandegor’s shoulder, put her hands behind her back.

“My father is dead,” I repeated.

“That’s right.” Brandegor sucked off her pinkie nail, then raised her glass. “Gone but in our memories.”

“I’m so sorry,” Gossamer started.

Brandegor didn’t seem to notice Gossamer existed. She didn’t take her eyes off me. I was young in her gaze. I was a child again and my father was dead. Here I was, spared by chance to remember him. “You’ve become Baron Loveday. You’re Lord of the Fingerbluffs.”

Gossamer cut into her swordfish eye. Delicately she said, “Who are you?”

“Mors Brandegor. For ten years I’ve been the baron’s tutor. This is Mallory Valor, my friend.” Brandegor took a drink. She swished it between her teeth before she swallowed. “You’re Gossamer Dignity Chauncey now.”

“Yes,” said Goss. “I am.”

“You want to marry my daughter.”

“Your student, you said,” said Gossamer.

Brandegor leaned forward. She put her elbows on the table. “Do you remember the name of your Hall?”

Vikare put her fork down. She’d been salting half an azurine. She glanced between it and Goss.

“Flox,” said Goss. “I don’t claim it.”

I put both my palms on the table. I pushed my whole weight against the table. I braced myself against gravity’s dissolution. I would break the table in half. I’d crack it.

“Tell me how you came to be in the possession of Yann Industry Chauncey, Flox Gossamer,” Brandegor said.

“Flox Hall shipped me and their other measly blodfagra to a charity sanatorium here. Crellin, if you know it. Ghastly evil blistered pit where love’s never been. I lived longest. I worked to keep my bed as soon as I was able to work. I was employed at the first Yann I. Chauncey Ichorite Foundry down on Burn Street for a few years, from when I was eight until I was thirteenish. That year was the riot. It caused a stampede outside the foundry. Hundreds were trampled alive. Maybe you recall it. It had a proper media moment, as it were.

“Obviously, I survived. I limped back to Crellin Sanatorium on a broken leg, and of course they knew my place of employ and contacted the authorities who reached my father. He heard about me, the sick riot survivor orphan, and came to visit me. Clearly not an instigator, given my age and frailty. My lucidity impressed him. Father has never had a family. For logistics’ sake, he wanted an heir.

“He paid for my education at Wilton School, the finest on the continent, and when I was top of class at the end of my first year despite my near illiteracy at time of enrollment, he adopted me formally. I converted to the Stellarine faith, became Dignity. I hated my Drustish name, because it stings of my abandonment, and dear Vikare, my best friend here beside me, picked Gossamer for me. Her heritage labor is dressmaking. It was appropriate, besides which, it had the same first and last letter as my birth name, and that felt awfully cute at the time. Now I stand to inherit the wealth of the world. I’d like to share it with your daughter and build fabulous factories in your city. Will you allow it?”

I stood up from the table. I turned my back on the people I loved and I walked out of the room, I did not parse the noise and the language behind me, I floated down the hallway with my head off, down the stairs and through the parlor and another then out a side door. I did not blink or look around me. I did not see or hear the bandits who spoke to me with conspiratorial jubilance, I was not aware of my own movements. I went outside.

Without touching the railing I jumped off the veranda and landed in the sandy flowers. A breeze stirred my curls. I walked through the dark to the edge of the cliff, the big basalt-column fingers that held us up from the hungry crashing water. I sat down.

The gulls screamed overhead. They drifted without moving their wings.

The sea crashed on the basalt columns. Foam danced, dissolved. Rabies and lace. Fish swam through them, curves of their bodies showed in heavy shadows between the waves.

I took off my boots and put them beside me. I touched my ankles and the arches of my feet. I squeezed myself. I untucked my shirt and put my hands underneath the linen, underneath the ribbed undershirt beneath it, and held fistfuls of my belly. I held my breast, I held my sternum. I felt my heart seize and I mashed it back inside my body.

The near moon and the far moon were both out. Full and gibbous. In the water they overlapped and made a sort of milky blurry hourglass shape. The shape broke and rippled and re-formed with the water’s lolling movement. I watched the cyclical, soft-edged violence of waves over waves over rock.

From behind me you said, “May I sit with you?”

You could do anything you’d like to me. “Yes,” I said, I prayed.

You walked down the veranda steps, jaunty dandy careful traipsing footfalls, then came near the cliff’s edge. You stood a pace behind me, as though you were afraid of the drop. I wonder if you’d ever spent time near the water.

“I won’t let you fall.”

That was enough. You came and sat crisscross beside me, nervous anchoring hands on the ground on either side of you. “It’s chilly,” you said.

Off came my jacket. I draped it around you. The emerald green looked black in the night.

“I’m sorry about your father. I can’t imagine, having nearly lost mine. I know it was difficult, the relationship you had with him, or I imagine it must’ve been. It must make your grief complex. Nuance the victory of your ascension.”

I laid my head in your lap.

“Oh.” You stopped talking. Your hands drifted above my head, fingers tensing, stretching.

“It’s alright,” I said. “You can keep going.”

You carefully lowered your hands. You touched my hair. You plucked at the ringlets, tested the springiness, twisted them around your fingers with incrementally increasing comfort. You were so gentle with me. “Vikare’s falling in love with this place. Real love. She doesn’t like Luster City. Difficult memories. If you let her open a dress shop here, let this be her garden, I think she’d be happy forever. If you make her happy forever, I will do my best to be good to you. You would have bested me, and I would be in your debt. You have my word.”

In my debt? Ridiculous. I rolled onto my back and looked up at you.

You. It was you. How I’d missed it was beyond me. It was you, your thin pinched haughtiness, all bones where you used to be little kid softness, but you, nevertheless. Your blue eyes with orange lashes. Your skinny wrists and whip-sharp arrogance. You always had been smarter than me. How stupid of us to crawl away from the massacre in opposite directions. We could’ve gone together. You could’ve been a Choir girl. How brilliant you would’ve been. I couldn’t be an orphan ward. Your gamble required a nimbleness I lacked. What a funny revenge you’d picked, making the man surrender to you everything he’d ever owned. Giving you the foundry and the tools to build a thousand more.

You’d said “riot.”

You played with the ringlets around my face. Your skin was soft as water. You looked at me, really looked at me, looked at my scars and moles and pink fit splotches. Surely you recognized me. No bonnet and years of experience, but it was me. But I hadn’t recognized you, and I was deliberately obscuring my identity to use you, that would make the recognition harder. Perhaps you felt it without the precise language to justify why. The magnetic draw of my devotion brought me to you across the gulph of years and agony. I am your Marney and I will belong to you forever. You only could have picked me. All those aristocrats in your estate and you picked me. You know me. You know where I belong. We were beloved of each other before the violence bound us inseparably. This is our fate.

“She can stay as long as she’d like,” I said. “She could be one of us. She’d be good at it.”

You smiled at me. “It shows how much you love this place.”

“The Fingerbluffs is the heart of the world.” The spleen of the world. The cunt. The hands. The pierced and lathered tongue. “We will rest here before we run away together.”

You cocked your head to the side. Your smile looked peculiar. “Run away? How do you figure?”

“To spare you the coming war,” I said. “When everything is settled, I will see you safe and well.”

“The war,” she repeated, and a look of love and pity flickered across her face, then a different look, the coolness of someone who’s about to win a fight. You smoothed my hair, stroked my temples. “The war won’t touch us. I know you have a bleeding heart. Not just. You’re proud and honorable, in your rugged country way. The war is inevitable, but not for the reasons Royston says. It is not because of Old Bellona, it’s not because of history at all. It’s for me. It will happen because the war is necessary to seize materials with which to make products. It will happen because we need enormous swaths of land for mining and for establishing foundries, and we need the cheap labor that a war-torn country will happily provide. If we buy that land outright from the Drustish Hall assembly, assuming they were willing to so much as rent it to us, the bill would be untenably expensive. After the bloodshed, Royston will just give it to us.

“The alternative is starting this process here, in your home, under your beautiful blue orchards. If we tear up all the azurine trees, I bet there’s a whole clutch underneath. You know, that said, we should mine here. We should make this place, a marginal barony at the edge of existence, the center of the new age. We should treat it differently than progress demands. I will be softer with this place. I will be deliberate and attentive because you are owed that. Your architecture will remain. We’ll preserve these basalt columns, we’ll keep the history here intact. It won’t be like what must happen in the Drustlands. The war effort is hideous, but take heart. We’ll pay for the refugee movement born of this, we’ll lobby for the placement of Drustish migrants across Ignavia, we’ll make an extremely accessible work visa program and purchase tenements whose rent might be deducted from one’s wage. Education for all the children, work for all the adults. Did you hear I’ve raised the minimum age of employ? It’s going to be fifteen, now. We can make the world better. The materials to do so are acquired by first making the world worse. You’ve got to take to give.”

She paused, curled a ringlet between her fingers. “I know you made promises to the Drutish envoy. I admire you greatly for that. I would love to let you be the face of the humanitarian efforts you and I can spearhead together. We’ll break it, we’ll remake it, we’ll be the kings of tomorrow.”

“They’re your people,” I managed.

“Yes, they were.” You sighed, leaned back on your elbows. My coat slumped to the ground. “It’s unfortunate. I might resent the eugenic impulse that prompted my Hall to get rid of me, but that shouldn’t mean devastation. Thanks to Ramtha, bless and praise Ramtha, I think it won’t mean devastation now. The war will be relatively restrained. It won’t be a total annihilation, because High Hierophant Darya is going to ply the Hall assembly with Tasmudani mercenary armies, who might colonize the southern regions, but can absolutely take on Royston. Cisra will join Royston, but Ignavia is well positioned to pussyfoot around and be minimally useful to either side while maximally profiting from the action. In six years, you and I will be so rich we can hardly stand it. Think about all the good you could do with that money. What do you value? You could do it. We could make the first General Public Ichorite Foundry. Anything you want belongs to you.”

“I want you.” Repulsion poured into the air and evaporated. I couldn’t sustain it. I couldn’t sustain loathing or shame, I couldn’t produce resentment, I adore you. You are the idol of my worship. I reached up and brushed my hand against your face. You have such a delicate bone structure. I touched your ear, where your one earring dangled, and the hot pink memory of having made it for you lugged in the pit of my stomach. You’d kept the little ring I’d made you. It was so sweet of you to have kept it.

There would be no war in the Drustlands. After I killed Yann Industry, I decided that I would kidnap you, and I’d take you away beyond the Fingerbluffs. I’d plead my case to a pirate, Iodine maybe, ask her to take us someplace far away. We’d live in the Crimson Archipelago, or across the world in smoldering ruined Delphinia, no, north to Laodamia, live in the frigid sapphire winters and wear rabbit skins in the mountains in a cottage I’d build for you. We are smart. We have one another and could endure the future that gains on us. Maybe soon Harlow’s Hereafter would dawn. There would be no tyranny and we would be released from stricture at the end of capture and cruelty. Food would grow in forests and crawlies would laze around and fuck each other with garlands on their heads. Nobody would ever be forced to work or else die hungry and unwaged in the gutters. There’d be no such thing as ichorite. Then we’d return to the Fingerbluffs and I would be a good Tullian farmer. I would provide for you. You’re smart and you’d provide for me. I’d survive killing Yann Industry. I’d endure the gunfire and come back to you. I understood that we had a future of incomprehensible beauty. I just lacked the words for it then.

“You have me.” You leaned your cheek into my hand. Little dove, little lamb. “You and Vikare and I are going to change the world.”

I held your head and stroked the smooth skin behind your ear with my thumb. Sweet girl. “I am my only lord now. I am thrilled to give myself to you. I need to meet your father quickly. I want to speak with him before I marry you.”

You wrinkled your nose. “How you manage to be old-fashioned in a place like this is beyond me. I’ve never seen anybody so loved as you. The people here adore you.”

“Everybody who lives here is as loved as me. When can I meet Yann Industry?”

“As soon as we’re back home. I can send word.” You beamed at me. You looked just the same when you smiled like this. “You make me happy, Truth.”

“I’ll take care of us,” I promised.

I said I will. I am.