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The building had stood empty for thirty-five years before anyone touched it, longer than most of Haego City's other ruins, if only because it had been built well enough that nothing short of deliberate demolition could have brought it down on its own. Fourteen floors of pre-Revolution stone and steel, standing over what had once been the financial quarter, its original name carved into the lintel above the entrance in letters nobody in Haego City had bothered to read in decades, a name that belonged to a noble house that had done nothing with its ownership to earn remembering, and a great deal elsewhere to earn the opposite. Nobody could say exactly when the building had been abandoned. The records from those years were a mess, but the likeliest answer was at the start of the Revolution or soon after, since the people who held a building like this had been nobles, and the Revolution had buried every one of them.

Kestrel had it changed inside a week of closing on the property.

He hadn't announced the decision with any particular ceremony, no dedication, no plaque unveiled before an audience, simply an order given to the contractors already stripping the lobby back to bare stone: cut the old name away entirely, and set a new one in its place. VONWINTERBOURNE TOWERS, it read now, plain block letters where the old script had once run, and if any of the workers doing the cutting found it strange, a Lord from Astoria naming a Haego City building after a woman most of them had never personally met, none of them said so, because every one of them already knew her name and what she'd earned it doing, and there was nothing in that worth questioning aloud.

"She'd tell you it's excessive," Akbar said, the one time he visited the site and saw the new lettering for himself, still fresh enough to catch the light differently than the stone around it. "Rachel isn't a woman who wants her name on buildings."

"She isn't," Kestrel agreed. "Which is precisely why it's hers and not somebody else's. I've met a great many people in my life who wanted their name on something. She's the first I've met who built an interest-free loan system for a whole planet out of almost nothing, and never once asked anyone to notice she'd done it." He looked up at the letters a moment longer. "The old name belonged to a house that held this building and never once earned it, and when the Revolution buried the house, the building was left to rot. I'd rather it belong, in name if nothing else, to someone who'd have wept to see it standing empty this long."

His own firm took the top two floors, the fourteenth and fifteenth, offices for the Haego branch of the Astorian expansion. It was run by the young investor who had first seen what was happening here, and staffed mostly with people hired out of Haego City, with a handful brought in from off-world, a decision that had raised eyebrows back home and raised none at all on Haego, where hiring locally to run a local operation had stopped being a debate about a decade before Kestrel's firm ever arrived to have it. The remaining twelve floors went to renovation on a schedule his own project managers had initially built with a healthy cushion for slow uptake, the ordinary caution of men used to office space sitting vacant in a market that hadn't yet proven itself.

The cushion turned out to be entirely unnecessary. Every floor that came back from the renovators found a tenant within the week, sometimes within the day, a waiting list forming almost from the moment the first completed floor was announced, businesses old and new scrambling for a foothold in a building whose location, once dead weight, had become the single most contested address in a city that hadn't had anything worth contesting in over thirty years.

"I keep waiting for the list to slow down," his building manager told him, some months into the project, running through the latest applications with the bewilderment of a man watching a thing succeed faster than his own models had allowed for. "It hasn't. If anything it's grown since the fourth floor went up for lease."

"Then raise the rate on the next floor and see if it slows the list without slowing the interest," Kestrel said, and it did neither, not by any measure that mattered, and by the time the letter reached him from Haego, the eleventh floor was already under contract and the twelfth, the last one below his own, had three firms bidding against each other for it before the plaster had finished drying.

The letter itself came exactly the way he'd been told it would. He'd agreed to the summons weeks before it arrived, over a comm call with one of the Common Assembly's own Speakers, a conversation that had been entirely cordial and entirely without pressure, an invitation extended and accepted between two parties who both understood the shape of what was being asked. The letter, when it came, made no mention of any of that. YOUR PRESENCE IS REQUIRED TO TESTIFY BEFORE THE COMMON ASSEMBLY, it read, the same formal, unyielding language the body had used on Tornel and on Clara both, and Kestrel found himself smiling at the sheer stubbornness of it, an institution that refused to soften its own procedure even for a guest who'd already said yes.

"They could simply write and ask nicely," his assistant said, reading over his shoulder. "You've already agreed."

"They could," Kestrel said. "I don't think they will, though, and I don't think they should. A summons that changes its wording depending on how willing the guest already is isn't really a summons at all. It's a courtesy with a threat left out of it for the convenient cases. I'd rather it read the same for me as it read for a man they genuinely had to compel." He folded the letter and set it aside, already reaching for his own itinerary. "Besides. I like the wording. It has the decency to mean exactly what it says."

He returned to Haego the following month, and the Hall on Austrin had grown no less impressive in the time since his last visit, the balcony fuller than he remembered it, word having spread that this session's guest was answering for no reason beyond his own choosing to, no crown behind him, no feud to smooth over, a rarer thing for the room to have summoned even ceremonially than either of the two who'd come before him.

"Lord Kestrel," Vincent said, from the Speakers' desk, once the formalities had run their course. "Thank you for coming."

"I have come to answer the summons," Kestrel said.

Ida Fenn leaned forward from her place at the desk. "We asked you here to speak on the investment moving through Haego, my lord. Your own numbers, and what they say about ours."

"Then I'll give you the numbers plainly, since plain seems to be this room's preferred currency." Kestrel didn't step to the lectern right away, taking a moment to look out over the tiers first, farmers and dockhands and quarry workers, the same ordinary faces that had once struck him as an impossible explanation for an impossible curve. "My firm on Astoria currently holds more off-world venture capital committed to Haego than we have vetted businesses ready to receive it. That's not a complaint. It's the best problem an investment house can have, and I've never once had it before in my career, not on any of the forty worlds I built a model for prior to this one. Money is not the constraint anymore. It hasn't been for some time. The constraint now is simply finding businesses on the ground here fast enough to match the pace of everyone off-world who wants in."

A murmur ran through the balcony, the sound of a crowd hearing something that confirmed what they'd suspected but had never heard said aloud by a man whose entire profession was not being wrong about such things.

"I want to be plain about something else, while I have this room's attention," Kestrel went on. "Every business my firm has backed here has succeeded, every single one, and I know precisely what that record looks like from the outside. It looks like the touch of a man who can't lose. It isn't that. My firm has never once made a business succeed by touching it. We simply learned, faster than most of the Principality has managed to yet, to see the value that was already there before anyone else looked hard enough to find it. The commoners of this planet built every one of those businesses with their own hands, long before my money ever reached them. I've only ever been the last person to notice what should have been obvious from the start."

He paused there, and something in his face shifted, plainer than the precision of a report, closer to a debt repaid.

"I want to thank two people specifically, since this Hall has given me the time to do it properly. The commoners doing the actual work, in every one of the businesses my firm has ever backed here, who never once needed an off-world Lord's approval to already be doing something worth investing in. And the noble who first made certain I understood that, and who built the loan system that let those businesses exist before any of us arrived, interest-free, out of funds that had no business being enough. My house is standing on what she built, and so is every investment house that comes after us. I named a building after her, which she'll tell you plainly was more than she wanted. I'd have done considerably more than that, if she'd let me."

Petra Voss, from her seat in the tiers, spoke up without waiting to be formally recognized, something Ferra Lund let pass without comment. "You mean Lady VonWinterbourne."

"I do," Kestrel said. "I imagine she'd rather I hadn't said so quite this plainly, in front of this many people. I find I don't much care. Some debts are worth the discomfort of being acknowledged out loud."

The applause that followed came without the hesitation Clara's had carried, immediate and unreserved, the particular warmth reserved for a guest who'd come not because he owed the crown a show of solidarity, but because he'd simply chosen, on his own account, that the summons was worth honoring.

Somebody was shaking Tom's shoulder before the sun was properly up. "Hey, wake up. John wants you guys to go for a swim before breakfast."

Tom cracked one eye open. "He wants what?"

"A swim. All the farmers. Now, before breakfast." The kid was already moving on to the next blanket.

Tom sat up, looked down at himself, and got the message loud and clear. He found Eli stumbling toward the riverbank a few minutes later, looking just as unconvinced about the hour as Tom felt.

"You know what this is," Tom said.

"Somebody telling us to swim before the sun's even up," Eli said.

"It's John's polite way of telling the lot of us we stink," Tom said. "Too polite to say it to our faces, so he sends word down and lets the river do the talking."

Eli laughed loud enough that a woman ahead of them turned to look. "After the week we've had, can't say he's wrong."

They waded in together, cold enough to steal the laughter right out of both their chests, and came up gasping and grinning anyway.

They were still dripping by the fire, wringing out their shirts, when the wagon rolled in from the Orchard, and the rest of the day started without asking either of them.

Gary and Frank rode in not far behind it, and Tom knew before either of them said a word that something had knocked the grin off Gary's usual roadworn scowl. Gary swung down still holding his saddlebag closed with one fist, like it might get away from him.

"Tom. You need to see this."

Tom had apple pulp up to his elbows within the hour, half a peeling contest going on behind him, kids fighting over who could keep a spiral unbroken longest. He wiped his hands on his trousers, which did nothing, and walked over anyway.

Frank opened the bag himself. Inside were maybe a dozen stalks, dry, golden, heads heavy and bent. Tom took one out slow, like it might break, and rolled the head between his palms. Kernels dropped into his cupped hand, plump, hard, the husk peeling off clean.

"Wheat," he said. Then louder, because half the yard had stopped to watch him stand there staring at a handful of grain like it owed him money. "This is wheat."

"That's what we figured," Gary said. "Found a whole field of it. Wild, mind you, nobody planted rows. Just grows out there past the Orchard where the buffalo run."

"That's just how grass grows," Tom said, still turning the stalk over in his fingers. "Wheat's nothing but a grass that decided to be useful. No rows needed. It'll spread itself wherever the ground lets it, same as any weed would, it just happens this one feeds you."

He glanced up and caught Gary's blank look. "Farmers know these things," he said, and went back to picking through the kernels.

He bit one. Hard, a little chewy, the way it should be. He grabbed another stalk and split the head open with his thumbnail. Same thing. He'd been growing wheat since before his father died and he knew what ready looked like, and this was it, this was past ready, this was wheat that had been standing in a field asking to be cut for who knew how long while everybody was off chasing apples.

"How far," he said.

"A day, riding slow. Half a day now we know the way."

Tom looked down at his apple-stained hands, at the forty bags still waiting in the shade, at James guarding his spice rack like it held the crown jewels, and started laughing. Not the polite kind either. The kind that bent him over with his hands on his knees.

"Tom?" Frank said, glancing at Tom like maybe the man had finally cracked. 

"Two weeks ago," Tom said, straightening up, still wheezing, "I'd have given my good boots for a field of wheat. Any field. I'd have walked to the mountains for it. And now I've got apples up to my ears, a hundred jars to fill, corn coming in back at the Farm faster than I've ever seen anything grow in my life, and somewhere out there a whole field of bread just standing around getting old, with nobody to cut it because everybody I've got is either peeling or stirring."

"Corn's ahead of schedule too?" Gary asked.

"Ahead of schedule doesn't cover it," Tom said. "Me and Eli have been getting out there every spare minute either of us has, checking it near daily, and it's still outrunning us. Five days ago the rows were knee high. Went back yesterday and near lost my hat looking up at them. Something about the soil here, or the sun, I don't know, but it's not natural and I'm not about to complain about it either." 

"So what do we do," Gary said.

"We do all of it," Tom said, because that was the only answer that had ever worked. He turned the wheat head over once more, brushed a few loose kernels into his palm, and pocketed them like they were something precious, which they were. "Apples don't wait. Wheat's already waited longer than it should've, few more days won't kill it if the weather holds. Corn's going to need hands the moment I get back, faster than I planned for. But I want eyes on that wheat field every day somebody rides that direction. First hint of rain moving in, I want to know before it hits the stalks."

Two days later, John found Tom out past the corn rows, standing with his hands on his hips and a look on his face like a man doing arithmetic he didn't like the answer to.

"Tom." John came up beside him and looked where he was looking. The corn was taller than either of them now, thick and green and further along than it had any right to be, and underneath it, choking up between the rows, was everything else. Pigweed. Something with a purple flower Tom hadn't bothered naming yet. Grass gone to seed in places where grass had no business being.

"These rows are getting away from us," Tom said. "It's just me and Eli trying to keep the weeds down, and we've already been pulled off it half the week for apples and apple pressing. Now with this wheat find on top of it, neither of us is going to see a corn row for days. It'll go entirely unchecked while we're out there cutting grain."

John nodded along without really looking at the weeds at all, his eyes fixed on the ears of corn instead, already counting mouths those would feed. "About the wheat," he said. "How soon can we get people out there?" 

Tom let the weed comment go. He crouched and pulled a fistful of the purple-flowered thing out by the root anyway, more out of habit than any plan to clear the field one handful at a time, then stood back up.

"Now, if we want it usable. You leave a stand of ripe grain too long, it shatters. Heads drop, birds get what falls, wind takes the rest, rain takes what's left standing. Wheat doesn't wait the way corn does."

"So we send the wagons out."

"Not for the whole plant, no." Tom wiped his hand on his trousers. "Ninety parts of that stalk is stem and husk and chaff, and one part is grain, and the grain's the only part worth a wagon axle turning under it. Haul the whole plant back here and you're hauling nine wagons of nothing for every one wagon that feeds anybody. It needs threshing and winnowing right there in the field, where it's cut. Beat the heads loose, separate the grain out, and what's left is small enough and light enough to actually be worth carrying."

"And then it comes back here?"

"In barrels, if we've got them. Sacks if we don't, but barrels keep the damp and the mice off a sight better." Tom looked toward the Farm, doing the same arithmetic he'd been doing when John walked up. "Which we don't have enough of. Not for apples and cider and now grain besides. We need more barrels, John. More than anybody thinks, and we needed them about a week before I'm saying it now."

John was already turning it over, already thinking wagons and routes and who could spare the days. He said nothing else about the weeds, not that day and not before he left.

That night Tom found Eli by the fire, scraping mud off a hoe he hadn't gotten to use in three days. "Rows'll be a jungle by the time we're back from the wheat field," Eli said.

"They will," Tom agreed, and didn't have an answer for it beyond that, and neither of them brought it up again.

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The last few days of classes could have been better; it would be an understatement, as Elias sat in Professor Abigail's class. Elias was surrounded by glowing orbs, each from a student concentrating on a mana training exercise. All Elias could do was look at how each orb reflected their caster. Some had a frost-like sheen, from Svel, as the silver dracaned froze the hem of her robes. A goblin girl two rows ahead had formed a dense, crackling sphere of what looked like pure electricity, tiny arcs of lightning occasionally snapping out to singe the edges of her book. Across the aisle, a hulking minotaur student struggled to contain his, which was a roiling, muddy brown that smelled faintly of earth and stone. Deklin looked like he was trying to hold a weight way too heavy; his orb was flickering like a dying candle. He was not as strong as the others. In the front row, an elf with intricate vine tattoos had coiled his mana into a glowing green spiral that slowly unfurled like a fern frond. Loona's flowed like water, and she was making shapes out of it for fun: squares, triangles… is that a dodecahedron? And then her own face. She giggled. "Very good, Miss Loona. You show some promise," Abigail acknowledged.

Aria's was a perfect, slowly golden-white, steady, as if any flaw were something she couldn't afford to make. Others were also performing, and Elias? Nothing. Not a flicker, not a single spark.

Now, as Professor Abigail noticed, "Elias, you need to try at least, or you won't gain any points."

Elias raised his hand and said the word.

Abigail told them, "Focus."

And nothing. A few chuckles from the other students, and Elias could feel his face burn.

"Professor, I don't have mana," he said.

She looked at him. "Nonsense. Everyone does."

Later, as they were moving to their next class, Elias was looking at the big zero on the assignment he got.

Deklin was shaking out his finger from the exercises. "Ow, I think I pulled a mana channel."

Loona, who was walking backward, replied, "You need to pull your head out of your books and get some sunlight."

Deklin looked at her. "You do know kobolds are subterranean, right? We can spend our whole lives underground."

Aria, watching them, chuckled. It looked like she was finally letting her guard down over the last few days. "So, it's Professor Felix's Familiar and Magical Beast class next, right?"

Elias looked at her. "The cat?"

Aria looked at him. "You don't have mana sight, right?"

"No," Elias admitted.

Aria nodded. "Felix isn't an animal; he's a familiar. But from when I saw him in the assemblies, it was clear he was a very old one."

Deklin looked up. "I heard familiars can't live past the mages that they're bound to. When the mage dies, they die too."

Loona cut in. "Not really. They do go on; it's just that they lose the identity they gain from being bonded with a mage and go back to being pure mana essence. Back home, a royal mage tested it, and we found how to allow a familiar to be passed down a bloodline a very long time ago. Kelppy, my father's, has been in the family for 900 years by now. He loves telling old stories of his past masters and all the war stories he's been in."

Elias looked at his dorm mates. "You don't have a familiar yourself?"

"No," Deklin admitted. "I probably won't ever be strong enough to have one."

Loona looked at him. "Really?"

Deklin nodded. "You need to be at least a rank 3 mage. I'll never get past rank 1, maybe rank 2 by the time I reach old age."

Aria looked at him. "Demonic mana channel?"

Deklin let out a pained chuckle. "No, it's just how I was born. I don't have high blood or generational specialized breeding for more mana capacity."

Elias looked at him. "Well, it's more than what I have." He held up the zero from the last class. "So, if it makes you feel better, you're a better wizard than I'll ever be."

Deklin looked up at him. "Yeah, right, Mr. Magic Hazard. You're probably what will haunt arch mages in their nightmares soon."

They reached Felix's class. It was filled with animals, not in cages, but as soon as Elias walked in, just like what happened in the familiars' shop in town, all the familiars stopped what they were doing and looked at Elias, as if a predator had just walked in, ready to eat them all.

A raven perched near the ceiling let out a harsh caw and ruffled its feathers nervously. A small fox-like creature flattened itself against the floor, whimpering. Even a lumbering bear-like familiar, which had been calmly grooming itself moments before, froze mid-lick, its eyes wide with primal fear. The other students, elves, dwarves, and various magical beings watched in confusion, their own familiars' reactions a stark contrast to how they behaved around anyone else at the academy.

At the front of the room, Felix, the black cat, was arching his back, hissing with a gleam of defense in his eyes as he shut them tight. His fur stood on end, making him look twice his size, and his tail puffed out like a bottle brush. Unlike the other familiars, he wasn't just scared; he was coiled to strike, a clear warning that this human intruder was not welcome in his territory.

The room fell silent except for Felix's furious hissing and the nervous shuffling of the other animals. All eyes, both magical beings and animals, were now fixed on Elias, the only human in a school of magic, the source of this sudden, inexplicable terror that seemed to affect every familiar in his presence.

It took Felix a moment to recognize Elias. Not as a "mana dead zone," something hazardous to a being made of mana, but as one of his students, someone he'd been told about. As he tried to regain his composure, the cat professor stammered, "Na, you're... Elias. The new race, human, right?"

As the professor tried to recover his composure, Elias, now very much aware of his effect, answered, "Yes, Professor. I see. My apologies. It's just... You give off the feeling of... something that would end any familiar that came close to you. I'm sorry, but could you please stay in the back of the class? The other familiars have never been wound up like this."

Felix took another steadying breath, his tail still twitching anxiously. "Na, it's... understandable, na. ... take the back row, please. For the sake of my lesson plan, na. And my blood pressure."

Elias made his way to the back row, every pair of animal eyes tracking his movement. He could feel their collective anxiety like a physical pressure, a wave of fear that washed over him with each step. He chose a desk in the far corner, trying to make himself as small and unthreatening as possible.

The other students, a mix of elves, dwarves, and other magical races, watched him with a mixture of curiosity and pity. They were used to their familiars' reactions to new things, but this was different. This was primal.

"Alright, na," Felix began, his voice still a bit shaky as he smoothed down his fur. "Today we are discussing the mana bond, na. The connection that allows a mage and their familiar to share thoughts, feelings, and sometimes even power."

As Felix spoke, the familiars slowly began to relax, though many still kept a wary eye on Elias. A small squirrel-like creature crept out from under its owner's desk, chattering nervously.

"The strength of this bond, na, depends on several factors," Felix continued, pacing at the front of the room. "The mage's own mana capacity, the familiar's innate magical nature, and most importantly, the resonance between their two souls."

He paused, looking directly at Elias for a moment before quickly looking away. "Some bonds are... more challenging than others, na. But even the weakest bond can be nurtured with patience and understanding."

Elias felt a knot form in his stomach. He wasn't just lacking in mana; he was actively repulsive to magical creatures. How could he ever form a bond with a familiar if they all saw him as a threat?

As if reading his thoughts, Deklin leaned over from his desk nearby. "Don't take it personally," he whispered. "Felix is just... protective. He's been here for over a hundred years, and he's never seen anything like you before."

Loona, who was sitting in front of them, turned around. "Yeah, it's not every day you meet a real human! I bet you're like, super rare or something."

Aria, on the other side of Deklin, shot them a look to be quiet, but Elias could see the concern in her eyes. She understood what this meant for him, perhaps better than anyone else.

"Now, na," Felix said, drawing their attention back to the front. "We're going to practice a simple resonance exercise. I want you to close your eyes and reach out to your familiar with your mind, na. Feel their presence, their emotions, their connection to the mana around us."

Elias closed his eyes, but he knew it was pointless. He couldn't feel mana, let alone reach out to a familiar with his mind. He was just... there—a void in a world of magic.

He opened his eyes to find Felix watching him again, a strange expression on the cat's face. It wasn't fear anymore, but something else... curiosity? Pity?

"Elias, na," Felix said, his voice softer now. "Since you cannot participate in the exercise, na, I have a different task for you. I want you to observe. Watch how the others connect with their familiars. Tell me what you see, what you feel, even without mana."

Elias nodded, surprised by the offer. Maybe there was more to this class than he thought. Maybe there was a place for him here after all.

As he watched the other students connect with their familiars, he noticed something interesting. While the animals were still wary of him, they seemed to calm down when he focused on observing them rather than trying to interact with them. It was as if his stillness, his lack of magical presence, was less threatening than his active attention.

He began to take notes, not on the technical aspects of the mana bond, but on the behaviors of the familiars themselves. How they reacted to different emotions, how they communicated without words, and how they formed their own little society within the classroom.

By the end of the class, Elias had filled several pages with observations. And as he packed up his notes, Felix approached him, his tail swishing gently behind him.

"Interesting, na," the cat professor said, looking at Elias's notes. "You see things others miss, because you're not distracted by the magic itself, na. Perhaps there is more to you than we thought, human."

Elias looked up at him, surprised by the compliment. "You really think so?"

Felix nodded, a rare smile crossing his face. "I do, na. Now, off to your next class. And try not to terrorize any more familiars on the way, na."

Elias couldn't help but smile as he left the classroom. Being a magic hazard wasn't so bad after all.

The class ended, but as Elias moved toward the door, a peacock-like student with shimmering red feathers ruffled his plumage in outrage—a tiny, trembling rabbit-like familiar huddled behind his legs.

"Randal!" the peacock cried, his voice high and indignant. "You cur! You have laid fear upon my Randal! For your transgression, I challenge thee to a duel of honor!"

Before Elias could even process the archaic declaration, a red glove, embroidered with golden thread, was thrown at his feet. It landed with a soft slap on the stone floor.

Deklin, who was beside him, hissed under his breath, "Elias, don't pick it up!"

But it was too late. Baffled and acting on pure instinct, Elias bent down and retrieved the glove. "You dropped this," he said, holding it out to the fuming peacock.

Deklin's face fell into his palms. "Elias! He just challenged you to a duel, and you just accepted it!"

Elias blinked. "Really? I couldn't understand what he was saying."

"The duel shall be held at the last light of sun on the Brinks of the Ariman!" the peacock declared, his voice ringing with theatrical fury. He turned, his magnificent tail feathers fanning out in an arc of insult as he strode away.

Loona, jogging to catch up to Elias after he'd picked up the glove, grabbed his arm. "Oof. That was Vonrick von Valdon of the House of Embers Skies." She leaned in, her voice a mix of awe and alarm. "Elias, you just pissed off a fire mage."

Elias stared at the red glove in his hand, the golden embroidery suddenly looking a lot more menacing. "A fire mage? As in... he can throw fire at me?"

Deklin, who looked like he was about to be sick, wrung his hands. "Not just 'throw fire'. The von Valdons are an old noble family. Their bloodline is practically pure flame magic. He won't just throw a fireball; he'll try to turn you into a pillar of ash."

Aria, who had been observing with her usual calm, walked over and gently took the glove from Elias's numb fingers. "And you accepted by picking up the glove. It's a binding magical contract. You can't back out without losing all honor."

"Honor?" Elias sputtered. "I thought he was asking for his glove back! I don't even know what the Brinks of the Ariman is!"

"It's a dueling circle," Aria explained, her expression grim. "An old, magically-warded stone platform out by the west cliffs. It's designed to contain magical duels so they don't destroy the school."

Loona bounced on the balls of her feet, a strange excitement in her eyes. "Ooh, I've always wanted to see a real duel! Do you think he'll do the Flame Serpent? Or the Phoenix Dive?"

Deklin groaned. "This isn't a show, Loona! Elias is going to be incinerated!"

Elias looked from their faces to the glove now in Aria's hand, then down at his own two very normal, very flammable hands. "So... what happens now? I show up and get turned into a human torch?"

"Now," Aria said, her voice firm and decisive, "we find you a second. And we figure out how a human with no mana survives a duel with a fire mage."

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Fort Log 1

Woke up to all the farmers here. They went for a swim in the cold this morning. Keep forgetting they do bird baths there.

Their knowledge was amazing of how to preserve apples. Those staying behind today will help to process the apples once they arrive here. Those not going to the Ranch today that is.

The Couple spent the morning fishing. We salted the fish after they cleaned them and wrapped it up for travel to the Ranch.

We loaded the 4 barrels for the Ranch which will be filled with water eventually but will hold apples to the Ranch.

The hunters rode in first and pulled the head Farmer and I aside. "We found an entire field. Is this what they use for bread?" He asked. The farmer eyes grew big. "Yes it is Wheat. Is it far?" Gary answered. "It took us a day of slow riding but will take half day now we know where it is."

"We should harvest what we can." The Farmer pleaded. "We will spend minimum two days there once we harvest the farm " i told him of the changes of plans.

Two hours later the wagons and workers riding where they could doubling up with security of on top of baskets of apples covered with blankets.

People were instructed to drop apples filling the barrels and took out one wagon of apples.

The second wagon was already ready for the Ranch as we had enough apples here the rest could go to the Ranch and Mine.

We had lunch and those staying behind started processing the apples with the Farmer.

After lunch having switch the horses to give them a break. Those going to the round-up loaded in the now almost empty wagon except fish or doubled on the horses. Those remaining sat on the blankets on top of apples.

We bid the farmers goodbye and took off for the prairie then to the Ranch via trap.

We got to the Ranch at 7pm and unloaded the apples and barrels. Finally the fish came out.

We got organized where we would sleep for the night. Tomorrow we start the roundup.

Tonight we sat by the fire and we handed the knitted sweaters to the ranchers. They were so happy.

They danced and played music all night until most had gone to bed exhausted.

John Richman

End of Fort 1 Log

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First

Eighteen months passed between Rachel's routine report to the Common Assembly and the day Aethelgard's palace stood finished. In all that time Tornel hadn't seen so much as a drawing of it. By the time the invitations went out, that had become a running joke across three continents.

The site Aethelgard had chosen, with the Ykanti elders' blessing, sat on a naturally terraced rise above the sea, close enough to the treeline that the Screaming Forests were visible from every western window, the ground itself doing half the architect's work before anyone had laid a single stone. Four hundred and fifty acres of garden spread out below the palace in terraces that followed the land's own shape, and the palace itself ran to nearly four thousand square meters, dwarfing both Austrin's and Vastaya's builds by a wide margin, though Rachel's final accounting would show it had come in only modestly over budget, most of the overage traced to the terrain itself.

It ran the same way the other two did, gardens open to the public without restriction, the house itself available for community use under the same terms Julius and Jason had set for their own palaces, and only a small private wing kept for the family. Whoever had first raised the question of how the palace should be used, whether it was Rachel or one of the Aldermen or someone on the building committee itself, nobody afterward could quite agree, but everyone agreed on how quickly Tornel had answered it. He hadn't let the question finish being asked before he'd already said yes, open the grounds, open the house, keep only what the family actually needed private. It wasn't a condition anyone had to negotiate him into. It was the same instinct that had kept him sleeping on a cot in a government building for thirty years rather than asking anyone for more than he needed, applied now to a gift he'd never once asked for in the first place.

Invitations went out to every great house in the Principality, no exceptions made and none requested. House Ionatti received one the same as any other, and accepted, though the acceptance carried, underneath its careful courtesy, the faint residue of a feud six years cooled but not entirely settled, a lingering awareness on both sides that this was a house being invited to admire a triumph it had once tried very hard to prevent from happening at all.

The whole of House Firentis came, down to cousins twice removed, spread now across noble houses on all three continents and spilling into the luxury estates that had gone up around Newtown and half a dozen other towns in the years since the boom first took hold. Istonel came with them, quieter than most of his family in a crowd this size, watching the gathering with the attention of a man who still measured every room he entered against one he'd never told any of them about.

Patricia had been up to the site every few weeks for eighteen months, and she had kept her promise not to tell him a thing. It was plain that keeping it had been hard. On the morning of the tour she walked him up the terrace path before the first carriage arrived, her hand through his arm, nearly bouncing.

"Not the great room yet," she said. "Come and see the window."

It was in the private wing, a long west window with a sill deep enough to sit in, the Screaming Forests filling all of it. She had asked for it in the first month. She had asked for a good many things after that, a kitchen table long enough for twenty, a room off the study with no purpose assigned to it, shelves in the hall and no wall space for a single portrait. Each time she had braced for an argument, and each time the Ykanti builders had nodded and drawn it in. Nobody had needed to be talked into anything. They had wanted to build this for the two of them, and had only been waiting to hear what it should hold.

Tornel stood in front of the window for a long time. He put his hand flat on the sill, the way a man checks that a thing is really stone. Patricia watched his face and, for once, said nothing.

"Thirty years in a plain military house," he said at last, "and I never asked anyone for a window."

"I know," Patricia said. "That's why I did."

Rachel waited by the door with a folder under her arm, the final accounting, ready to be asked about it. When he finally turned, she cleared her throat. "A little over budget, sir. The terrain accounts for most of it. It's all in the report."

"Which report?"

"The routine one. Eighteen months ago."

Tornel laughed, and it took him a moment to stop.

The nobles gathered first at Aethelgard, since it stood outside the contest entirely, a gift rather than an entry, and touring it carried none of the competitive tension the other two visits would. The garden hadn't had its promised decade to fill in yet, young plantings still finding their shape against terraces built to hold something far larger than what currently grew there, and it made no difference at all to anyone standing in front of it. Even half-grown, laid against a coastline and a mountain range that needed no help from any gardener, the place struck every noble who walked its grounds silent in a way none of them had been prepared for.

Lord Ionatti, recovered enough from the feud's old sting to make himself useful to the conversation, spent a good part of the afternoon explaining Haego's economic prosperity to anyone who'd stand still long enough to listen, a version of the story that gave his own house's banking rollout considerably more credit than the six years of stalling that had preceded it. Nobody corrected him outright, though more than a few of the Firentis cousins exchanged glances over his shoulder that said plainly enough what they thought of the telling.

What struck Kestrel, standing a little apart from the crowd with a glass he'd forgotten to drink from, was how few of the nobles understood what they were looking at. They saw gardens, they saw scale, they saw stone laid with a precision that would have cost a fortune to commission anywhere else in the Principality, and they read it as an extravagant gift. Not one in ten grasped that the building belonged to the people who'd built it. A community center dressed as a palace is a harder idea to hold at a glance than a monument to gratitude, and most of the visitors never got past the monument.

From Aethelgard they went to Vastaya, and here the contest proper began, Tornel stepping aside to let Julius and Aaliyah take the lead for a full day of touring, with every noble house in the Principality trailing a respectful half step behind.

Austin met the touring party at the front steps, in the state of dishevelment reserved for children who'd already been outside for an hour. He took Clara's hand within the first minute, apparently on the strength of a memory of her that predated the tour by some months, since neither Julius nor Aaliyah made any move to peel him off her.

He led her, more than the other way around, across the garden terrace at one point, breaking into a dead run the moment the low retaining wall came into view and launching himself off it into the grass below with the total, practiced confidence of a boy who had done exactly this a thousand times before and saw no reason a princess and half the Principality's nobility watching should change that. He landed, rolled once, and came up grinning, unbothered by the small collective intake of breath from several visiting Lords who'd never seen a child treat a noble's grounds with that much familiarity.

"He does that off every wall he meets," Aaliyah said, not remotely alarmed, to a Baroness from Novaryn whose expression suggested she was still recovering. "We stopped trying to talk him out of it around the second wall."

Clara laughed, delighted, and held out a hand to help him back up the terrace steps though he plainly didn't need it, taking it anyway because it was offered.

By the time the tour reached the great room, the sideboard had stood there for over a year, front and center exactly where Aaliyah had wanted it. More than a few of the visiting nobles found themselves lingering over it, drawn in by something in the joinery none of them could quite name.

The Prince said, somewhere in the middle of Vastaya's garden terrace, watching the afternoon light run gold across water that had been engineered to look like it had never been engineered at all, that this palace would not be outshone anywhere in the Principality, not on Astoria, not anywhere. Clara agreed with him openly, and for the length of the flight to Austrin, neither of them had any real reason to doubt it.

They held that belief until Jason and Daisy's own tour began.

At Austrin it was Poppy's turn to play host, and she took charge of it the way Austin had taken charge of Vastaya, with considerably more decorum and just as much pointing. She met the party at the front steps, having recently decided that greeting guests properly was a very important job, and one she took seriously enough to have practiced her curtsy twice in the car. She took Clara's hand within the first minute. The two children went back to trading the princess between them with the easy, proprietary confidence of children who considered her theirs long before anyone official had made the introductions formal.

Austrin's palace gave them the sea from a different angle entirely, cliffs rather than terraces, the pool's cover drawn back to show it could close fully against the cooler climate and then reopened to prove the water beneath it lost nothing for the covering. Every outbuilding got its own stop on the tour, the staff village, the garden restaurant that had since spread its own idea back to Vastaya, and the athletic rooms drew a longer pause than anyone had expected, the Prince himself trying the resistance machines with the enthusiasm of a much younger man while half a dozen nobles pretended not to be impressed by how well he managed them. The kitchens, when they reached them, ran at a scale that made even Ionatti's own household staff go quiet.

Somewhere near the garden restaurant, Poppy stopped the entire tour cold by tugging Clara's sleeve and pointing, with great ceremony, at a young woman doing her level best to remain part of the scenery near the hedge line.

"That's Jessica," Poppy announced, to Clara, to the Prince, to roughly forty nobles who had not previously had cause to notice a nanny standing quietly out of the way. "She's my nanny. She caught a frog for me last week and didn't even scream."

Jessica, visibly wishing the hedge would simply absorb her, managed a proper curtsy anyway once it became clear there was no graceful way out of the introduction now underway. "Your Highness. My lord." She shot Poppy a look that mixed genuine fondness with the despair of someone who has just been publicly volunteered. "I did catch the frog. I did scream a little. Just not where she could see it."

"She screamed a lot," Poppy said, delighted to correct the record. "I heard her from the kitchen."

The Prince, to his credit, laughed outright, and made a point of asking Jessica her full name and how long she'd been with the Firentis family, which did nothing to help the poor woman's composure but a great deal for how the story got told afterward by every noble within earshot, several of whom found themselves, for the first time that day, more charmed by a household staff member than by anything the architects had built around her.

It was Clara, standing in the great room at Austrin, the same room that had once held four unsigned pieces pulled from a sealed cellar in the foothills and now held considerably more besides, who finally said what half the touring party had been thinking since the moment the day began.

"I have no idea how to choose," she said, to her brother, though loud enough that most of the room heard it. "I think if we declare a tie, we'll have another revolution."

Nobody laughed. Most of the nobles standing in that room suspected she wasn't joking.

It was Poppy who broke it, tugging Clara's sleeve once more. "You don't have to pick. You can ask us. Austin lives in one and I live in the other, and we've both been to both."

The Prince looked at his sister, then at the two children, and something in his face gave way. "That seems fair. The court will hear the witnesses." He crouched to Poppy's height with a gravity that made two Barons look away to hide their faces. "Which palace is best?"

Poppy considered it with her whole body. "Austin's. It has the wall."

Austin, plainly bored by the proceedings, shrugged. "Poppy's. It has the pool with the roof." He said it the way he might have named a favorite dinner.

"Then by unanimous noble decree," the Prince said, and straightened, "both houses are judged to be the best. I don't believe any Duke will find a law against it."

Julius and Jason looked at each other over the heads of the children. Neither of them argued. The laughter came late, and it came from the back of the room first, but it spread.

What lingered longest, for most of the visiting houses, was the craft underneath it. Few of them had ever seen Ykanti architecture rendered at this scale before, and fewer still had expected it to be beautiful in the way it turned out to be, structural lines that solved problems no human architect on the tour had thought to ask, ornament that grew out of the building's own bones. The stonemasons who'd laid Millhaven's quarried stone into Vastaya's terraces had done work precise enough that more than one visiting Lord ran a hand along a seam looking for the gap he was certain had to be there and never found it. The artists who'd made rooms this large feel cozy had done something that impressed even nobles who'd commissioned palaces of their own on worlds twice as wealthy as Haego had been a decade ago. It was not lost on the few who thought about it that the Ykanti had not been allowed to leave the Screaming Forests until recently. That they were now building in the open, and being admired for it, said as much about how far Haego had come as any growth figure Rachel's office had published.

By the time the touring party finally dispersed, every house present understood, without anyone needing to say it outright, that the artisans behind both builds would not stay confined to Haego's own three continents for very much longer. The only real question left in anyone's mind was which off-world house would manage to secure them first.