It was late after caring for my horse and cleaning my revolver, but I had to see Rianna about my cough, and I still had to put Huygens’s broken carbine on Mother’s workbench. I had planned to leave a note with it, explaining how it had seemed to jam, but Mother was there, working late. She had her engraving station set up, with magnifying loupe and fine tools. She rarely bothers with that, though long ago she had made some uselessly beautiful patterns, designs etched on metal plates as intricate as any native lady’s tapestries. If her new prototype part required such small detail, her chances of getting it approved by the council would be lower than ever. She was intent as always, though, and listened distractedly while I explained briefly about Huygens’s weapon. She seemed typically unhappy about a weapon failure, but surprisingly little interested in a quick-firing carbine. She would examine it in the morning, and I left her with no further discussion.

I went to the inspection room. While I waited outside as Rianna finished binding Huygens up in splints, I wrote up a short report of what had happened on the patrol. One advantage of my new rank was that I didn’t need to report in person to a council member. I could just decide for myself that there was nothing urgent to communicate, and leave it for the morning to post the news.

Rianna listened with a stethoscope to my breathing, and shrugged again wordlessly. This was her usual bedside manner, and I found it reassuring. We all knew that the world was fundamentally hostile to all our kind, and that the centuries of human settlement had not been nearly enough to probe all its dangers. Previously unknown poisons or blights could suddenly prove lethal, and there was nothing in our medical knowledge that could prevent this. Confidence would have been dismaying evidence of delusion in a surgeon, but a sign that nothing urgent was apparent meant that I would probably recover. We are only very rarely affected by illness. Something in our bodies resists disease. We also heal well. I had never been sick in any way, but I had been cut and burned many times, and had numerous fractures. I healed quickly from all of these episodes, and they left no scars.

Rianna put salve on my scorched hands, and gave me some of her famous yellow throat lozenges. She hands them out at every excuse. We have all been taking them since childhood. The lozenges are a comfort to her patients, if only because they are familiar, and it comforts Rianna to have something to give. One of my classmates once went to the inspection room with a twisted ankle, and came back with lozenges. Rianna had been exhausted just then, dealing with the effects of a nasty ambush by bandits trying to steal magic from one of our patrols. This time the lozenges actually seemed to help my cough, a bit. I went to my room and slept. In the morning I remembered no dreams.

At breakfast I saw Lethandra eating porridge with Joel Strander, her husband. I surprised myself by calmly sitting down opposite her and showing her my report, as a courtesy, before posting it on the main hall board. Lethandra showed no surprise at my disturbing them, though everyone normally left her and Joel alone at their table. They have little enough time together. She read my few lines, nodding at the fact that we had sighted rocs, and frowning at what she read between the lines in my opaque explanation of how Doctor Huygens had been taken. She looked me in the face at that point, and I just blinked back. She rolled her eyes and read further. Her eyes went wide as she read, “Anastasia was seized by a second roc. She broke free in the air and killed it. She fell into the golden tarn and emerged with help from Karlin. The golden tarn stalk mass proves able to break a fall from at least sixty paces’ height, but flares must be used at the landing point.” I was no more an eloquent writer then than I am now.

Lethandra glanced up at me quickly, and passed my report to her husband. She looked me over anxiously, and I assured her that I was fine except for a cough that was already much better. She shook her head, blinking, and then smiled. “I remember the first day we took you out to hunt rocs,” she said. “They were really becoming worrisome, you know. We could hit them, but they’d just spring away that fast, and come back at some unpredictable time, from some impossible angle. We always told ourselves that some of them must have been hurt enough to fly off and die somewhere, but we never actually downed more than one or two, in years of trying, and their numbers were only increasing. They hadn’t killed any of us, but they were starting to take natives from the roads.

“Finally Joel found some log entries from the last century, that spoke about how the altitude bulb attack had been developed, based on your great-great-grandfather’s shooting gift. It went so against the grain, to take a child of nine out on patrol! A dozen of us stood around you anxiously, with enough weaponry to melt the damned roc if it came too close. You lifted up your little sub-caliber carbine as the roc flew over the far side of the caldera, watched its tail flick, and suddenly fired. It was such a little sound, in all that space. The echo was like a whisper. I asked you, ‘Did you hit the bulb?’ And you just looked up at me with enormous eyes, and nodded. We turned and saw the roc gliding stupidly down. It didn’t dart away and circle back, the way they always did. Two of us just rode over and shot it as it neared the ground. Nothing easier.”

I remembered that, too. The roc had just been a target. With all those grim adults around me, though, and Lethandra herself asking me a question, I was too awed to speak. The adults were all pleased, but still serious. They asked me whether I had been afraid, and I shook my head. So after that I got to do a lot of patrolling. I had less time for playing with my friends, but I didn’t mind that. Hunting rocs was real.

Joel smiled at me as he gave my report back. He was our archivist, and he said he would put my observations about the stalk mass into the log, adding one more fact besides the ones that its toxin is caustic and its fibers do not burn without oil. We don’t really know much else about it. We’ve never seen anything else like it. I doubt that any future Morandau patroller will have leisure to read those notes while flailing in the grip of a flying roc, but we record anything that seems interesting, on principle. My childhood had been shaped by obscure facts recorded about rocs long before I was born.

I posted my report on the main hall board, for everyone to read, and went to ask Mother about the quick-firing carbine. By house etiquette we were supposed to do our best to repair it and return it to Doctor Huygens, so I wanted to get a look at it while I still could. If I could fire that quickly, I could destroy a small army single-handed, unless the weapon failed as it had for Huygens.

Mother wasn’t in her workshop, but she hadn’t come to our quarters either, so she was probably washing or eating after working all night. She often worked strange hours. Huygens’s strange carbine lay on the workbench straightened, reassembled, cleaned, and oiled. I was disappointed not to see a little pile of Mother’s quick but accurate drawings, recording how the parts had been put together and deducing how the mechanism had worked. I started disassembling the piece myself, laying the parts out carefully in order on the table.

I discovered that it was a clever design, but stupid. Its second partial barrel, above the real barrel, was a tube that would carry pressure from firing back to the weapon’s breech. I realized that there had to actually be a hole in the barrel, to vent some of the blast into the return tube. The blast of force traveling back down the upper tube would then simply knock the breech block back, ejecting an empty casing. A strong spring then drove the breech block back forward again, loading a new cartridge. The weapon held a dozen cartridges in a sort of box under the breech, and all of these could be fired in rapid succession, for the carbine would reload itself with every shot.

All that was very clever, but also obviously stupid. A gunshot produced not only pressure, but also heat and a lot of grime. We were not using plain black gunpowder much any more, with its enormous clouds of white smoke, but our powders still didn’t burn very cleanly. Huygens’s carbine was a beautifully simple design on paper, but with every shot it would blast hot dirt and grease into its own mechanism. Our metalwork could produce this design of rifle, but our mills could not yet produce the clean-burning powder it would need in order to keep up its high rate of fire for very long. Seeing how it worked, I was surprised the Doctor had gotten as many shots out of it as he did before it jammed.

I was just starting to put it all back together when I heard Mother’s crutch in the hallway outside, moving unusually fast. With a pang of alarm I guessed: she had read my posted report. I started to jam Huygen’s carbine back together as fast as I could, my mind racing with excuses for why I was there, and why it had not been my fault that I had been grabbed by a roc, when suddenly I remembered that I needed no excuses. For casualties in battle I would answer to the rest of the council, but for any lesser failures than those I was now my own judge. I set the carbine down and stood up straight behind the bench.

Mother swung into the workshop with her eyes grim but her voice level. “Anastasia. Why would you ride out under a pair of rocs.” She didn’t make it sound like a question. Then she met my strangely calm gaze, and I lifted an eyebrow. It drew my mother’s eyes to that awful black mark just above it. She stopped short, reeling slightly on her crutch. She shook her head, frowned, then her face suddenly brightened and her eyes went wide, and slightly wild. She barked, “Ha, so this is scrapwork! Well, then!”

She swung right up to me and shouted in my face, barely pausing for breath, “Anastasia what are we going to do with you? You ride out on your first patrol with your father and me sitting up worrying, and even old Talitha hiding up in her balcony with her spyglass, and you ride out around the tarn, alone, when you know there are rocs waiting for you, and you get dragged off and plunge how bloody far I can’t bear to think into the golden tarn and then you come riding back and don’t even tell us? You have been the most bloody difficult child to raise that anyone in this whole House of violent lunatics has ever seen, and even if your father and I hadn’t been three parts mad before you were even born I can tell you we would be no pretty vision of sanity now with all you put us through! Damn it, girl, can’t you wake up? You may not give a damn about a damn bloody thing in the whole flaming universe, but can’t you try letting it vibrate through your thick Morandau skull that other people care about you, and be just the slightest, tiniest bit more careful? Anastasia? Please?”

She finished breathless and elated. She hadn’t spoken to me like that in years. Maybe ever. Scrapwork, she had said. That was her word for working with leftover materials that were useless for anything proper anyway, so it did no harm to use them up in crazy prototypes. Scrapwork meant being free of the responsibility that otherwise weighed so heavily on her, of carefully husbanding our limited stock of good supplies. Somehow she felt the same way about shouting at me, apparently, now that it didn’t make any difference. She looked younger than she had ten seconds before. She gazed at me happily, this woman grim as a gun barrel, as if she had finally performed an amazing trick that she had been trying for ages to learn.

I was bemused to find I was almost smiling, too. “I’ll consider this tactical suggestion,” I answered. We stood there staring at each other for a moment. It was odd, but there seemed to be nothing further we needed to say. We could talk about the carbine later. I knew enough about the thing now to discuss it with her then. So I nodded at my mother and left her to her work.

My morning’s work would be to teach a class to build cloud mines. I had ordered a dozen brass shells the day before, hollow balls the size of a porridge bowl, as well as clay shells for the bursting charge, the two different kinds of powder, and a small barrel of fuel oil. All this was laid out on benches set up in the square, between the gateway and the remains of Stone Kelvin. I was not trying to be dramatic. We needed to be outdoors, and this way the gate sentries could join in the class. We were so few in Morandau House, in those days, that we were always trying to save time in ways like that.

All my students were familiar with detonations, but cloud mines are not simple devices. I had blown up the grinding shed despite being familiar with detonations. We were all watching carefully, and I was watching everyone else carefully, except when I had to shout away a crowd of eight- and ten-year-olds, who were playing some nasty game with one of them wrapped up in a sack, being dragged around the square, squalling faintly. I recalled enough about what it was like to be in that group that I guessed they were pretending the victim was a native they had captured from a nearby village. Morandau children of that age are half-trained soldiers, but they are still children. The stupidity of their cruelty had always infuriated me, but I had never known how to explain anything to them. I turned back to my class.

I was explaining about the effects of adding metal filings when I saw my students all gaping in horror at something towards the gateway behind me. I turned to look and my revolver was half raised before I knew it. Twenty paces before me a young native man with skin as white as paper was stepping into our square, his mouth working silently and his hands clutching the air like claws as he forced each step. I pushed my revolver straight up above my head and pulled the trigger. The children at the side of the square all dropped to the ground at the terrible sound, just as they had been trained. The native man dropped to his knees and pushed at the air with his palms. He gasped for breath, and in the suddenly ringing silence, the muffled squalls from the children’s sack sounded loud.

“Jammy! Jammy be quiet!” yelled the native, in his own speech. I knew it fairly well. He was obviously from one of the nearby villages. He even looked slightly familiar. I might have been buying fodder from his father for years. He was only a few years older than I was, I judged, but evidently he had a child. Our children’s game had been more real than I had thought.

The man began babbling to me so quickly that I could barely make the words out. I heard him call me queen. Dread lady. He begged me to spare his son and take him instead. Flames of hell, was all I could think. Death to pass Morandau. Twenty-four eyes at my back, there to learn destruction from my example. What did I do now?

But I found myself speaking sharply, in Vocal. “Get the boy from the sack. Bring him to me.” I heard one of my students sprinting across the square behind me. I still had my arm up, as if aiming a sky flare. That was stupid, whatever I had to do next, so I hauled it down. I took a cartridge from my belt and reloaded, slowly, as the kneeling man’s words faltered into sobs and the crying child behind me became louder. It was Miriam who had gone to fetch him. She brought him to me. He looked to be about six. I holstered my weapon and took him onto my right arm like an oversized infant, and he wailed, “Pappi!” and craned his head around to his father, but clutched my neck. I strode over to the kneeling man, hauled him upright by the upper arm with my left hand, and dragged him stumbling back down to the gateway, through it, and around the corner, out of sight of the square.

I gave him back his son, but squeezed his arm nearly hard enough to break it, so he would look me in the face and hear my careful words in his language. “One day you will owe me two lives, man. Be ready.” It was the best I could come up with on the moment, to serve as a sufficiently dramatic excuse for not killing them both. Then I let him go, and watched him run down the road with his son until they were out of sight.

I turned back, and in the gateway I met Uncle Yerzy. He had naturally come to the sound of my shot, but I was relieved that he did not have his carbine. He was not going to go and hunt down the man I had let go, along with his child. He had not done anything to stop me from shooting them, either, though. Our traditions were clear.

I stared into Yerzy’s dark lenses. The tears that trickled from behind them were no sign of pity. In case he was planning to go hunting later, I argued that the natives had enough fear of Morandau that one day’s mercy would not bring us into contempt. “We invest in our legend,” I said to him. “It can afford to pay us back some, for once.” He nodded very slightly. “Sometimes it can,” he said. We walked back up to the square together, and he went back into the House while I finished my class. The children who had captured the native boy stood silently at the other side of the square, squinting as the sun rose to midday. I recognized that Yerzy had told them to stay until I dismissed them, probably just by the way he looked at them.

We would detonate the cloud mines after the midday meal, then discuss the lesson I had given, in order to improve it for the next group. My students filed back into the House, except for the four very grim-looking gate sentries, going back to their posts at the outer wall. I raised my voice to correct their mistake. “If you had paid more attention to the gate, you might have killed us all with your mines. Double duty is a risk we take.” They walked more briskly. I turned to the children.

Still unsure what to say to them, I let them stand in the sun. I saw the sack they had used, lying on the ground. I picked it up. I walked over to our cairn of Stone Kelvin, and spread the sack across a few of the stones. I picked up one of the smaller chunks from the cairn, and weighted the sack down, so it wouldn’t blow away in a wind. Somehow that seemed correct. I walked back to the children and told them that they would remain standing there until it was time to clean the stables that night, and then they would do that, and would keep doing it every night until I said they could stop. I still had no way to explain to them, but I could make them remember.

We took all afternoon igniting cloud mines in the fat canyon near the start of the northern loop trail. It was slow work because each mine had to be brought up from the square separately, and armed, and the long fuse carefully laid. We used each one to experiment with cloud mine effects. Some we detonated on top of platforms, and some we lowered into holes. We set up test targets at different ranges, made of different materials, and observed the effects. No-one there but me had seen a cloud mine burst before. They were all very impressed by the first one, and in fact they seemed to retain their respect for the devices right through to the last. They were, after all, already familiar with detonations.

Two of the mines failed to detonate. We had to wait half an hour in case the fuse was somehow slow, and then I had to walk out to the armed mine and set a demolition charge beside it, to destroy it. Of all the bad parts in being a commander, destroying failed mines has always seemed one of the worst. Sometimes they do detonate, belatedly. At least in this case there was some sense in my doing the awkward job, since the devices were my discovery. We decided that we would simply repeat the class the next day, with the same group of students, in order to revise the lesson and try to get everyone’s mine to ignite.

That evening I joined my father in his laboratory, to try our luck again on the eldritch skull. My father had spent the day reading, poring over his tomes, but he had nothing to tell me from them. At the end, he said, he had become frustrated enough that he imagined he could hear my cloud mines detonating, even from deep in his lab, and he had simply hauled out a pistol and shot the skull in the forehead.

He had used a light air pistol, firing a soft lead pellet which had smacked itself flat onto the skull’s white front, and of course not even scratched it. The point was, the skull didn’t seem to be able to deflect bullets any more, since it was obvious that if it couldn’t deflect the light pellet, it would not deter a full-bore round. Probably obvious, anyway. We agreed that it was unlikely that the skull could know that the pellet wouldn’t harm it, and let it fly straight on purpose. We could not really be sure of this, though. Some of the artifacts of the Few, such as the healing tanks, could behave as though genuinely intelligent.

I wanted to repeat Father’s experiment myself. I took up his pistol, with my left hand as I usually shot, and from just across his workbench I easily put a second pellet-splat on its forehead beside his. I automatically charged the pistol with another pellet and set it down on the bench.

Suddenly I looked at my father, and he looked at me.

I picked up the pistol with my right hand, and casually fired. The pellet broke a jar against the wall. I reloaded the pistol, and tried again. The pellet hit the wall again. I loaded once more, and took careful aim at the skull, my arm outstretched across the bench so that the muzzle was nearly touching my target. I pulled the trigger and paint chips flew again from the lab’s far wall, quite impossibly. I stared at my father in dismay, to find him looking curiously at me. “Why are you shooting above it, Stazya?” he asked me.

As soon as he saw my eyes widen and my head start to shake, he grinned, as if understanding a jest. “You don’t think you are, do you?” I shook my head more vigorously. I couldn’t seem to speak. “You have a clear sight picture? Aiming just above the eye sockets?” I nodded. I could see exactly where I was aiming. I had been shooting since before I could talk. “But you’re not, Stazya!” my father told me, delightedly. “You’re aiming well above the skull. You’re aiming exactly where you’re hitting, of course.”

His smile changed, and his voice became almost sympathetic. I knew that he knew I understood, but it was too disturbing to have to doubt my own eyes, so he said the words for both of us. “It’s not steering bullets, Stazya. It’s steering you.”

I forced my mouth to move. “Only my right hand, Father. Only my right.”

We would discover more in the coming days, but this was the moment that set many things in motion. The beginning of those things was that someone would have to get this news to the intelligence advisors at the Mill and the Foundry. That someone, it soon became clear, would be me, and so I would leave Morandau House less than a month after being raised to command, not for the first time in my life, but for the first time alone.

I would be away for much longer than we planned. Those miserable children cleaned the stables for more than a year.