I stared at the small white square in my hand and didn’t notice when Yerzy left the hall. I was thinking about my father, but looking at the marker with which he had thought to banish himself in my place, I was also thinking about the strange white skull. It was a similar color.

The intrusion I had defeated was a real concern. It was a new kind of raider behavior, and the eery skull was a new kind of eldritch. The fact that it had seemed to disturb my shooting had alarmed the rest of the council even more than it had bothered me. Shooting with my left hand, I am expert enough to have a slight edge in accuracy over Mother, who was our champion shooter in her day. But with my right hand I do not aim. I simply reach out and touch.

I can take small birds from the sky, with a handgun in my right hand. The shaman and his eldritch skull were not the first targets I had ever missed with a revolver. But they were only the seventh and eighth, and the previous six had all been birds, flying high, on windy days. I adjust for wind by instinct, but at long range there may come a gust while the bullet is flying, and six times I had guessed the gusts wrong. With the faster bullets of rifles I have had no such trouble. I practice shooting a lot, with my left hand. Normally I only shoot with my right hand a few times a year, just to be sure that the gift is still there. It always is. I am the only one in my generation to have this gift, but it has been recorded many times in our history. It runs in the family. Sometimes it is the left hand, and long ago there were ambidextrous cases. I think this gift, like others, is becoming more rare among us.

The pale skull had somehow interfered with this gift in me, and this was indeed disturbing. I would need to recite everything I had observed about it to our expert on eldritch phenomena. Our expert on eldritch phenomena, however, was my father.

Either he had just become deranged, or there was something important about him that I didn’t know. The rest of the council didn’t act as though he were deranged. They seemed to understand what he had done. I needed to understand it, then, too, even just in order to be able to put his knowledge to its best use. It was not easy for me to talk to my father, even at the best of times. Before I talked to him, I needed to talk to Mother. She would be in her workshop.

Mother was our chief metalworker and our gunsmith. She was obsessed with improvements to machinery in general, and weaponry in particular. Lethandra had to struggle with her constantly, to get her to keep even one year’s production of parts interchangeable. Every few months Mother would try to insert some innovation, whose reliability she had carefully established, and she was savagely bitter when the council ruled, time after time, that the modifications would have to wait until the next year. Every autumn she was ecstatic, to finally bring her new creations to birth. The rest of the year she was miserable. She consoled herself with testing new features until they were so perfect that the council would have to see reason. It never did. It preferred to have last year’s model in decent quantity, so that everyone could train with it and learn to repair it, rather than have next year’s model a few months early, a piece at a time.

The first reason that Mother’s gunmetal crutch did not seem like an impediment was that she was so skillful with it. The second reason is that the crutch of the Morandau House gunsmith was naturally not just a support, but a weapon whose firepower she had augmented year after year. But the third reason that my mother’s steel crutch seemed to be an efficient part of herself was that she was hardly flesh and blood, anyway. She herself was like one of her deadly engines, whose design and construction are so robust that it is almost impossible to disrupt their operation. When something happened that would upset a normal person, though, she would start an especially difficult project, and work on it for many hours by herself. She had shown more emotion in the council meeting than I ever remembered seeing in her, and I would not have been surprised, this time, to have found her building a flying machine. But when I came to her shop, the door stood open, and she was merely sitting in her chair, polishing her crutch. She had set out a chair facing her. I walked in and sat down in it, and just held up to her the little ceramic square with my name on it. Her shoulders sagged a bit, and she stopped polishing. She looked very tired. But she looked me in the eye.

“We should have told you many years ago, Stazya. I should have told you. It was all so long ago. But it was always still there. We put it off with the thought that the story would need a fitting occasion. Perhaps we were even right in that.” She looked down, and closed her eyes, drawing a deep breath. Then she looked at me again, with a softer look in her eyes than I had ever seen, and an expression so strange and awkward, it took me a moment to recognize it for a terribly shy smile. “We never hoped for an occasion as blessed as this.” I frowned at her in frustrated confusion. My abrupt elevation to the council, to command rank in all our house, was terrifying and ridiculous whenever I thought about it. It came from a moment in which I had killed twenty people. I had never understood Mother’s religious concepts, though I had read her ancient books, but ‘blessed’ was surely absurd.

She had never expected me to understand her, though, except in the working of metal. She simply drew another deep breath, and explained her life to me.

“Your father was the first one to think of climbing Stone Kelvin. Did you know?” I shook my head. Scaling Stone Kelvin had been the rite of passage for my whole generation. We thought it was an ancient tradition.

“It had always been a superstition, not to touch the black stone. Moritz was five years old. It is one of my earliest memories. I was four. He couldn’t possibly do it himself, but he saw how Arjan and Mattias could get up, with ropes and hooks. They were teenagers then. Then he got them to haul up the younger kids in a sling, letting two of us up at a time, to see the view. It was like flying. It seemed twice as high, you see, when we were so small. Moritz and I were the last two up, and I decided that when I grew up I would marry him.

“I didn’t lose my leg in battle. It was an experiment. A detonation. A new kind of incendiary. Very hot fire. It ignited unexpectedly and we were too close. It was me, and your Uncle Yerzy, and my friend Genevieve. She died. She and Yerzy were going to be married. They met out east, at the Foundry, and she came back with him for her last year of studies. They were so happy. It made all of us happy to be with them.

“We were all three burned very badly, but in those days the healing tank still worked, mostly. Not enough for Genevieve, but Yerzy’s face regrew without a scar, except his eyes were never quite right. For me, everything but the leg came back. It was too far gone.

“It was your father’s experiment. It wasn’t sanctioned. He was only twenty-three; he was supposed to still be studying. We were all students. We were all such different people, then. Yerzy was so funny. He could mimic anyone.”

Yerzy, funny. I would have been less surprised to learn that Stone Kelvin had used to dance around the square. Mother’s smile went less awkward for a moment, as she talked about the old Yerzy. Then it twisted up again.

“Your father. He was our leader, in a way, but not in the usual way. He was happy to follow along in someone else’s plan. But his plans were the biggest. They were like fairy tales, except they came true. He didn’t have to stand in the light all the time. He was sunlight. Whatever he turned his mind to, he made you see how easy it was. He was always doing something that had never been done before, and everyone lucky enough to be there at the time would join in, laughing at the absurdity of how nobody had done it yet, when it was so easy. He followed no rules at all, but nothing ever went wrong, until it did.

“We had been married a year. I still wasn’t used to it. Tears of joy would still come, now and then, when I remembered that I really had Moritz. He made me a part of everything. That was part of what he did for all of us. Being with Moritz was being part of something. He could do so much himself, but for him that was too easy. The game he played was to think of things that needed other people. There was always this light in his eyes, but it blazed when he saw how someone else could do something extraordinary. And I was special. Everything seemed to need me.

“We mourned Genevieve. We grieved for Yerzy. It was hard for me to learn to walk, and everything else. The loss that hit most of us hardest, though, was Moritz. His body walked, but he was gone. The pattern of what would happen had always been clear, to him. The idea of an accident was absurd. For him, with the accident, it was as Yerzy says. Everything was still there, but the pattern changed.”

My mother’s voice shook, now, finally. “Almost every waking minute since he could talk, he had been dreaming up adventures for his friends. I don’t think there was one of our generation for whom the defining experience of realizing who we were, and what we could do, didn’t come as part of one of Moritz’s projects.

“Suddenly all of those wonderful schemes, all the years of his life, were nothing but steps down the road to the fire that killed his brother’s bride, and crippled his wife. He had scarcely a memory in his head that wasn’t drenched in shame. He told me himself, the first words I could get him to speak: he would live because dying would be too easy. He saw, even before I did, how hard it was for me to live with him like that. There was nothing he could do, though. Perhaps the man he had been could have found the purpose that would have redeemed him. The man he had been, if he had met a stranger in such pain, would have cracked the sky, to try. But the man he had been was gone. He never came back.

“It was six more years before you were born. Of course there could be no brothers or sisters.”

Mother calmed now. I thought, She has come to the part she has long prepared. And she spoke carefully, looking at me steadily.

“Stazya, I know that it has been difficult to have Moritz as a father. I have not been a proper mother, either. I have left half of your raising for Moritz. I have not given you more to make up for what he lacked. I have cut down my love for you to the measure of his. I could have taken another husband, who would have raised you with normal affection. I did not. I hoped ...” Mother’s voice failed for a moment, but she went on without blinking. “Children are so important to us. I hoped that if I let him be your father, as best he could, he might find his way back to us.”

“You are not a normal person, Anastasia. You will need to understand this lack in yourself. You have been raised by ghosts. I think I have sacrificed my daughter’s soul to the shade of my husband who has been dead for twenty years. I knew what I was doing. I cannot tell you I was sorry. I cannot ask forgiveness. I would give my life to give you more than this, now. But I have nothing to give.”

I can imagine now that all this would have been very hard for a normal person to hear. It was not as hard for a woman raised by ghosts. I heard a tale of terrible misfortune, whose victims had dealt with it as best they could. I had learned answers to questions I had been asking for so long that I had forgotten them. This was satisfying, though sobering because the answers suggested unexpected obstacles. Or rather, they confirmed that the obstacles I had begun to imagine ahead of me were probably real. Perhaps I might misjudge the way other people would react, if they had not grown up like me. It would be difficult to take this into account in my plans, but I would have to remember it, and try.

I saw nothing to disapprove in what Mother evidently thought of as her confession, except for that ridiculous idea at the end. I saw nothing she should call a sin, but rather wisdom, in her effort to salvage the leader that my father had apparently been. To recover a resource like that would have been worth a high price. Mother regretted that I had been the one to pay it. If I was, though: why not? Someone had to. Why not me? But how could I have paid a price, when I felt no loss?

If she had raised me differently, I would have become a different person. Could I wish that that other girl, a stranger, had grown up in my place? I was the rightful Anastasia, and would not cede my place to any usurper, no matter how many smiles and kisses she might have enjoyed. So I answered Mother sharply, perhaps more as a commander than as a daughter — already that had become easy. “I am the expert on whatever soul I have, Mother, and I tell you this. Whatever it is, it is mine. It was never yours to give or withhold.”

I shrugged off my frown. I thanked her for the information about my father. I told her that my revolver worked very well, when my aim was not disturbed by an eldritch skull. I told her I wanted a second one just like it, and that I would make it myself. It could be my graduation piece in machining. We fixed an hour the next day, before my mathematics class, to begin boring the barrel. Then I went to find my father.

I looked in his narrow study, but he wasn’t there. He was less likely to be in our quarters, but they were just down the hall so I checked them first, before dashing down the three flights of stairs and descending the ladders to his freezing cold lab in the back end of the undercroft. He wasn’t there either, but I saw through the heavy glass porthole that he had brought my shaman’s eldritch skull down. It was sitting in the vise, with a strong light shining on it. My father was nowhere in sight, but once I was down there, I remembered that the old healing tank, which had never been used in my lifetime, sat down there in an alcove, just around the corner. I fumbled along the dark hallway wall for the lamp lever I remembered. I turned on the light.

My father was standing as he often did, with his fingers to his temples, eyes closed. He had been facing the big silver and white cylinder that lay there under a quiet film of dust. When I snapped on the light he didn’t move at first, but then he turned to me, lowered his hands, and opened his eyes. At first he didn’t say anything.

I found myself watching him warily, as if I had just learned that he was gravely ill. What signs might I see, now that I knew to look for them? I had always thought him a demanding man, who was obsessed with his strange and frustrating work, and angry because no-one else would believe that the work was worth his time. He had been around me my whole life, of course, but now I was suddenly rethinking who he was, and what he was. I suppose every child has such a moment about their parents. (I frown now as I write that, wondering how my own children have reconsidered me.) But my case was probably extreme.

The man in the alcove before me now turned out to be yet a third father. He made a wistful half grin that I had never seen before, and spoke softly. “I’m sorry, Stazya. That was very stupid of me. Your blast didn’t kill any of us. Stone Kelvin was just a rock. The episode was not sufficient grounds for me to abandon my work, just to shout a lesson to you.

“I assume you have talked with your mother.” I nodded. He looked away from me, to the derelict tank.

“Then you will guess, I suppose, that I find rationality more of a struggle, at times, than I hope it appears. This morning I slipped. I think of it as being most like an addiction, if you can understand. Like an addiction to one of the stronger drugs. It will never really go away.”

He waved the subject away, but it didn’t go far. “It’s a change nonetheless, now, your promotion.” He pointed a finger at me, and looked at me sharply. “Don’t imagine that they raised you to command so as not to expel me. They do not think that way. My brother is not a soft man, or a kind one. They judged you very quickly, but that is how their kind always judges. How your kind judges, Stazya.” He let out a breath, and dropped his hand. As he turned towards the old healing tank, though, his gaze snapped back.

“Evelaine doesn’t know this. I put her in there,” gesturing to the tank, “first. It should have been Genevieve. They might both have lived.” A puzzled look crossed his face, as at an unfamiliar sensation. “But who knows how the damned thing worked.” His voice grew stronger.

“Who knows any of the dread eldritch lore of the Few, eh? I found the Postulates kicked into a corner in the tower stairwell. Did you make sense of some magic numbers, and the White Skull of Vengeance came to punish you for piercing the veil?” He stepped past me and around the corner to his lab, and I followed. The Postulates was the awful book I had been reading when the Minden girls called for my help. It didn’t say much about magic numbers, but the few pages near the front that listed strange sequences of fractions were the least unintelligible section of the whole volume.

My father and I had never done well speaking face to face together. This last speech of his was astonishing. But we had always worked well together, concentrating together on something else. I was his only student in the worthless thirteenth art, the nonsensical lore of the Few. By that incomprehensible art the Few brought all people to this world from a star in the sky: our own ancestors as well as those of the people we call natives because they were outcasts before us on this continent, and of course those of the Many who serve the Few still, in their kinder lands across the sea. The Few made miracles like the healing tank and the indestructible ceramic. Our ancestors had not been able to bring enough of this knowledge away with them when they fled from the Few, and in the centuries since, the miracles have mostly broken down.

We assayed the skull’s material against my marker tile, after using diamond files to scrape smudges of dust from both. They were almost the same stuff, but not quite. Every tough white piece that we had previously found had had the same composition, but the skull’s ceramic had a novel trace of antimony. Was it a more ancient artifact than all our previous specimens? Had it been made by some unknown rivals of the Few? It looked ageless. Had someone only recently started making eldritch skulls, out of a material that Morandau couldn’t make?

The assays took hours, and we had no idea what to do next. We locked up the lab and climbed up for supper. That evening Milyena put the black command bar on my forehead, with needles and a mixture of special inks. A finger’s breadth wide, three times as high, just above my eyebrows. Milyena explained how it would show up differently in different kinds of light, and this seemed potentially useful, in rare circumstances. Otherwise I saw little purpose in the marking. Everyone knew who I was. In particular they knew I wasn’t Lethandra or Yerzy. Would they find my plans more worth following because I had a black rectangle on my forehead? If so they were idiots, and we had been idiots to waste time on black tattoos instead of improving their training. Using black for everyone was stupid, anyway. It showed up well enough on Lethandra, but Yerzy’s bars were barely visible, though of course no-one needed to see them, on him. Milyena congratulated me, and I thanked her politely. She seemed pleased, but the procedure annoyed me. It was long and moderately painful, and afterwards I had to do my differential equations exercise with a headache that felt as though the sky was pressing down on the front of my skull.