The council convened the very next morning. I would have attended in any case for the formal review of my brief tenure as Mistress, though under normal circumstances I would have been dismissed with some ritual phrases. Other than a few such bits of ancient liturgy, our councils are not formal. The few most senior residents — the ones who will anyway end up taking leadership in patrols and engagements — simply sit around a table and argue. The Master and Mistress decide who should shut up if more than one person tries to speak at once, but there seems to be no authority among them beyond this. Consensus either emerges, or it does not. According to the history we are taught, this has always worked well. On urgent matters, the council quickly pulls together. Where there is no urgency, there is no need for consensus.

Under Yerzy and Lethandra’s leadership, councils rarely lasted as long as an hour, and were often over in minutes. On the wall behind the council table, a curious image was cut into the paneled wood. It was either a bird in flight, or a pair of crossed knives, depending on how it struck the eye. Rumor said Yerzy had carved it there when he was a young man. It was certainly the lesson he repeated to us in his tactics courses, that things would not change but their pattern might. In the noise of battle, and even more in the quiet before battle, the struggle was to see the pattern first — and then to see it change. The council didn’t try to find more facts. That took too long. It looked for patterns clear enough to act, but feared seeing the wrong one.

I did not expect a long hearing of my case, but I knew it would not be a ritual dismissal. I had blown up the grinding shed with an unsanctioned dangerous discovery, and during my preliminary punishment for that offense, I had broken Stone Kelvin in further pursuit of the same discovery. Against that, I had held the House against twenty-one raiders, alone. That should have weighed well enough in my favor that I would not have been worried, but I stood before the council that morning in despair, because it had come to feel as though I had lost the battle, after all. I had lost Stone Kelvin. That rugged old column of rock had been like one of us, in a way. I had reported that Morandau House stood, but that wasn’t quite true. Part of it had fallen.

I had also been having bad dreams, though the memory of them faded quickly in the morning. I guessed that I was disturbed by having killed so many people. Our training warns of such reactions, but the only help it offers is to assure us that the feeling passes with time. I took no comfort in that. Sleep had not left me rested.

Then my father stalked into the hall, and Mother swung in after him on her crutch, and my breath caught. The only ordinary reason for ordinary residents like my parents to attend a council meeting would be to make a very serious complaint against another resident. In my depressed state of mind, though, my thought leapt to the most extreme reason my parents might be attending that morning. While elders impose all kinds of corrections on youngsters, we have only one punishment for serious offenses: expulsion. By decision of council, an adult may be cast out from the house. It is worse than a death sentence, but we are superstitious about kinship, and we do not kill one another in cold blood. Another superstitious concession to kinship, though, is that a parent has the right to give their marker, to be expelled in their child’s place. This really happens, though very rarely. It is a custom too serious to mention seriously. An exasperated mother might swear to her son that he would never get a marker from her, but she would not use those words if he were really in trouble. Were my offenses even greater than I realized? Was Mother here to save me from being cast out? Would she do that?

I watched my parents seat themselves. I had never before seen Mother look like a cripple, but she hung on my father’s arm and would not look up. He looked straight ahead, at Uncle Yerzy, and not at me. As soon as he and Mother were still, Uncle Yerzy spoke. His eyes were on my father, but he spoke loudly to include me. “The council reviews the tenure of Anastasia Morandau as Mistress of Morandau House. She held the House for eight days. She withstood an attack by twenty-one lightly armed raiders. None escaped. We had no casualties. In the course of battle Anastasia severely damaged Stone Kelvin with an unsanctioned detonation.”

Yerzy paused, and looked down at his right hand, which he was holding flat on the table in front of him, palm down. Tears dripped out from behind his dark lenses, as they always did. His eyes had been injured, years before I was born. He spoke again. “We have heard witnesses to confirm this report and it is accepted.” The other three council members nodded: Aunt Lethandra, Crone Talitha, and dark-haired Slavin, the quiet one whom we rarely saw around. Yerzy himself was a man of few words, and the children were all afraid of him, but Slavin scarcely seemed part of the family at all, except that he was on the council.

Then Lethandra spoke. “Council acknowledges that this was the second unsanctioned detonation within the space of one week.” And Talitha croaked sharply, “It was large.” Then Yerzy spoke again, even more quietly than usual, and my heart seemed to pause. “An accusation has been lodged by Moritz.” His older brother; my father. My own father. And my father stood up.

He was wearing his formal coat, and even a collar and tie, though he had removed his hat for the council. He stood perfectly straight, and spoke straight at Yerzy, as if I were not there. He spoke in a tone of cold fury, as if finally unleashing an intolerable grievance, of which I had had no idea. “Anastasia must be expelled from the house. She endangers us, recklessly, without thought, with the folly that is our greatest crime. She must be expelled.” Then he wrenched his gaze to me. My father and I had never gotten along at all well, face to face, but now I stared into the burning eyes of a stranger.

Lethandra answered quickly, “She has endangered us.” Horrid old Talitha grunted. Slavin whispered, “Stone Kelvin.” But then he whistled softly, and smiled. Uncle Yerzy was staring down at his hand on the table. He looked up, and stared at his older brother, my father, and spoke very sharply.

“She has commanded Morandau in battle.”

My father snapped his head around to face Yerzy. “She was alone! She commanded herself — or rather, she failed to do so!”

Yerzy spoke calmly. “So much the more well done. She was alone.”

“She was alone in Morandau House! How much of an attack could fall here?”

Yerzy agreed. “We left Anastasia alone because we were sure no attack would fall here. But there was an intrusion. A serious one. We counted their bodies, as best we could. It is a very good question, why this attack was made.” In the pause that followed, Yerzy added, “They waited until we had all left.”

“She could have eliminated the threat with a few tanks of nightfog! Instead, she destroyed Stone Kelvin! With her recklessly uncontrolled discovery!”

Yerzy turned his dark lenses to me and asked, “Why didn’t you just use the nightfog, Anastasia?” I drew a deep breath, and replied, “The natives were approaching too close to a major artifact of Morandau. Nightfog is not deadly enough for such an urgency.”

Yerzy said quietly, “Stone Kelvin is not — was not — an artifact to be protected at the cost of lives.” My face grew hot, but I answered firmly, “The artifact I protected was the device I had placed on top of Stone Kelvin. I defended it. By using it.”

Yerzy nodded slightly, as if he had been expecting this answer, then asked another question. “Why did you attack the natives at all? They were people, like us. What harm had they done, merely riding within our walls, that they should pay for it with their lives?” I was surprised to hear a classroom question in these circumstances, but I answered quickly to avoid thinking too much about it. “If our arts are not hidden, far more lives will be lost. The natives all know it is death to cross Morandau.” Then I added, “And these raiders waited until all of you had left.”

I heard Talitha mutter, “They only cared that the men had all left. Their songs call us witches, but they don’t believe the songs.” I glanced at the other council members, whose eyes I could at least see. Lethandra had raised an eyebrow. Talitha was grinning. Ferociously. She had been a Morandau lady out of some of the ghastlier legends, that one. She was one still. If we survive, we live long.

When I looked over at Slavin, he suddenly spoke to me. “How do you name your discovery, Miss Anastasia?” I looked at him more sharply, but he simply looked interested. Well, I thought sadly, now they aren’t contraptions any more. “It is a cloud mine, sir,” I told him. He closed his eyes for a moment, and smiled.

My father slashed the air with his arms and cried out, “She squanders her talent on shallowness, she toys with everything as if it were a game, she is a danger to herself and to us all, and she could be so much more! She could do so much more!” It was all true, of course, but irrelevant to the proceedings. He had always been so calm, all my life. Now these words burst from him like blood from a wound. The words I knew well. The wound was a shock.

Yerzy lifted his hand from the table and slammed it down again; something clacked under it. “No!” he shouted, and everyone jumped. He spoke his next words slowly, as if trying to hammer each word into his brother.

“See the pattern change.

“Anastasia studies all twelve of our disciplines, where no-one else in her generation has followed more than six. Her examinations are never the best, but we have studied them. She ignores details. She remembers nothing that she can quickly find written. These flaws have always disappointed her teachers, and her teachers have overlooked the larger truth.

“We have not. We have watched as she found her way. She is mistress of all of our arts in their essence. You think her precocious, when the extraordinary thing is her patience. She has bided her time, and her time has come. She was here at the right time, and to everyone who was with her here, her leadership is now a manifest law of nature. And she has all of the family genius for destruction.”

At those last words my father flinched as though his brother had struck him. Beside him, Mother suddenly sobbed, and stood up, lurching as she normally never does. She put her hand on his shoulder, and he flinched again. Lethandra spoke gently, as I had never heard her speak. “Moritz, your accusation is not heard. She has commanded Morandau. Yerzy is right: the pattern has changed. Take him home, Evelaine. The council will sit in private now.” Father turned to Mother, stumbling, and she steadied him as they walked out.

I shook my head, dazed, and turned to leave the council to its privacy, and find somewhere to be alone and calm my thoughts. But Talitha’s voice grated, “Sit down, young lady.” I turned around. I swear, the old hag was cackling. Slavin kicked a chair aside for me at his end of the table, and grinned. Then, before I could move, he blurted out earnestly, in his nice soft voice, “My first battle was practically nothing, and mostly rather embarrassing, but do not let Talitha get started on hers. At first I had nightmares about the story, but now they are about her telling the story.” Talitha flung something in his face, apparently with intent to blind; he snatched the little knife from the air with uncanny speed. He has a gift, too. She stuck out her tongue at him.

Lethandra coughed, and waved me to my seat. “You should listen to all of our stories, Anastasia. Learn from our mistakes, as we will learn from yours. In fact we have already learned from some of them. As Yerzy has said, we have been watching you for some time. Not many girls of eleven complete the ground mine clearing exercise by scattering grains of black powder dipped in syrup, for the ants to collect. How did you detonate it, though?”

I couldn’t help frowning. “Karlin had warned us in woodworking how the fine oil evaporates exothermically and can ignite itself in a confined space. So in the evening I soaked some dry crumbs in it, mixed with a bit of syrup, and put them out.” In fact I had experimented with the method carefully several weeks before the mineclearing course, just for my own amusement, and after changing the oil and syrup mixture many times, I had at length gotten an anthill to emit a jet of flame, like a little volcano. I had then resolved to stop wronging the ants once the method was proven, but when the visiting instructor from the Foundry laid the mine in an anthill because the digging was easier there, I had been unable to resist solving the final exercise by enlisting the ants again, and giving them gunpowder first. Remembering the episode at that moment made me uncomfortable.

Talitha smiled sweetly around the table and declared, “I win!” Slavin murmured, “I believe you said a solvent, my lady. But it was closer than my dart theory.”

Lethandra pursed her lips and continued to address me. “Your ingenuity was not in doubt, but we were expecting to wait several more years to confirm your ability to act decisively under pressure. It is a gift that we either have, or do not. There is no reason to wait now. The sooner you begin learning from your mistakes in command, the sooner you will have learned.

“But now tell us about cloud mines. How big do you think they can be made?”

We talked for an hour. We, the council. It seems strange, now, that I had never thought to ask how its members were selected. I knew that any serious engagement would of course be led by Yerzy or Lethandra, or possibly by Slavin if he were around, or maybe even by Talitha, despite her rheumatism, if no-one else was there. I had assumed that it would always be one of these four that would lead us in battle, just as I had assumed as a child that my parents would reach things down from high shelves. I knew these four were the senior family members, and that was why they had the bar tattoo on their foreheads, and met as our council. Of course, with the childish thinking that takes how things are for granted, I had had it exactly backwards. Yerzy is my father’s younger brother, Slavin is the same age as Mother, and Lethandra is younger than both of them. The council do not command because they are senior family members. They are senior family members because they command.

It is strange that the rule is not explained to us all as children, but somehow that is not the tradition. Like most of our traditions, though, the rule is simple. Battle is the trade of our house, and to determine who should make the most critical decisions, we find no test more effective than battle itself. Whoever has successfully commanded, even just once, has proven able to decide correctly when it matters most.

The rule is not entirely simple, however. How many casualties still count as success? Often this is a matter for judgement. In my case that was not a question, but on the other hand, the council might well not have recognized my actions as command at all. I was alone, and it was all over in a few moments. Yet they had known me all my life, and they acted as though their verdict was irrefutable. They listened when I spoke. Where they thought me mistaken, they argued with me, as though my opinions mattered.

They did matter. Council decisions are to be unanimous. In declaring me one of them, the other four council members had given me the right to forbid anything they might do, at least in time of peace. I was younger by far than any of them, the youngest recognized adult in Morandau House. I was the youngest commander in Morandau House history, in fact, though I learned that the current master of Morandau Hold, our coastal mountain fortress far to the northwest, had been raised to command, in a terrible time, at the age of only thirteen. It should all have felt terribly strange. It did not feel strange.

We decided which residents would begin helping me work more on cloud mines, and how we would begin investigating the strange details of the raider attack. Or, to give it its proper term in our tactics, the intrusion. Other kinds of attack could be considerably more serious.

As I remember that time, now when our work stretches over the decades, it seems hard to believe that things happened so quickly. At the time it did not seem strange. The training that filled my early years was intense. One month I had learned to glide down from cliffs on cloth wings, the next to walk the sea floor with my air in a bronze tank, the month after that to make steel from iron, and then to survive in winter. I had taken no time for years to stop and think. I had lost the habit of doing that. Now suddenly I was a commander: another lesson. I went on. I also realized, now that I was thinking about such things, that we had needed more commanders, badly, for quite some time.

As we began to disperse to our work, Uncle Yerzy called me quietly back. He had kept his hand flat on the table, all this time. Now he lifted it. Under it was a small white square of the strangely tough ceramic we find useful in so many ways, but cannot reproduce. On the square was writing in our darkest indelible ink, in my father’s small, pedantic script. “Moritz. For Anastasia.” Yerzy tossed it to me, and I caught it in my right hand without a thought. “Your father gave in his marker for you two years ago, Anastasia.” Yerzy spoke with the same deep, level tone as ever, and wept only as he always weeps, but I thought his voice shook slightly as he added, “See the pattern change.”