Part 1
The knock came at twenty minutes to five, and Lilianna was awake before the second one landed.
That was new. A year ago she would have struggled awake, then dragged herself out of bed. Now she woke fully alert, as she did in the barracks—eyes open, feet finding the cold floor, one hand already reaching for the clothing laid across the chair because she had learned to lay it there.
"Your Grace." Her maid spoke just loudly enough to be heard through the door. "A rider. From the First Minister's office."
Lilianna stopped with one arm in her sleeve.
The First Minister's office.
A message carried by a messenger, in the dark, in January. Not a card left to be answered at her convenience.
"Show him to the front room and give him something hot. I shall be four minutes."
She was there in three.
The note ran to one sentence and bore a seal rather than a signature.
The First Minister would be grateful for the attendance of Her Grace the Duchess of Wetdin at eight o'clock this morning, at the address below, upon a matter of great secrecy.
Lilianna read it twice. She could not quite believe what she was seeing.
"Wake Sergeant Pell. Four troopers, and they travel in the second carriage—the road above the escarpment will be glazed with ice and I am not having men on horseback in the dark in this weather. Working dress, nothing too formal." She folded the note.
The maid gave a small curtsy before leaving.
Lilianna stood a moment longer with the card in her hand.
Why me?
She knew the answer, and that was the trouble.
Since her father's death, the Wetdin votes had been exercised by a professional trustee in a good coat, who bowed to the Lord Chancellor and cast five votes exactly as instructed by consultants Clara had hired through the Wetdin Trust. Nobody had ever needed to persuade her of anything. Every case had been presented to the consultants first.
But tomorrow evening, she would be the one casting those votes on arguably the most important Bill in decades.
She had turned twenty-one nine days ago, in a room with a cake in it, and the cake had been the least significant object present. What had arrived with the date was a writ of summons in a stiff envelope, and the plain fact that at some point tomorrow evening the Lord Chancellor would put a question, and the answer would have to come out of her own mouth.
The distinction was suddenly clear. The First Minister had not summoned Lilianna. Rather, he had invited the Duchess of Wetdin to meet him on a matter of urgency.
They went north in the dark, and the dark did not lift for a long time.
The sky went from black to the colour of dishwater somewhere past seven and stayed there, and a fine sleet came slantwise across the carriage windows and froze in the corners of the glass.
In the dispatch box lying open on the seat beside her was tomorrow's running order.
Eleven o'clock: Introduction. Six o'clock, or thereabouts: division on the Ascension Bill, as amended.
Both on the same day. Her first day.
She had read the ceremonial instructions four times, which had not helped in the slightest. Two supporting peers. Garter ahead. The writ, the oath, the walk to the place appointed for a duchess, and the three risings and bowings toward the Lord Chancellor.
Her aunt Clara had prepared the robes. Perfect and lavish as always.
Lilianna settled the box on her knees and sat for several minutes.
MARABENDIA CAPITULATES, said the first newspaper's front page—the weekend's news, gone stale and reprinted because nothing had displaced it. Beneath it, the map. Beneath the map, the only figures a correspondent had been able to assemble, because they were the only figures anybody had: a country of little more than six million souls, sitting on the north-eastern shoulder of South America. The largest proven reserve of combustibles in the hemisphere. Thirty-one thousand men under arms, eleven vessels, and four fortified passes that two separate general staffs had spent a decade describing as impassable.
Seventy-eight hours.
Lilianna looked at the number for some time, and then at the map.
She remembered a lecture she had attended by mirror-link at eleven o'clock at night, her boots still on. Every summoned entity of the future would run on blue mana, and blue mana was being consumed far faster than anyone had forecast. As more was diverted to summoning and Familiar-related work, something else had to meet civilian demand or energy costs would rise, followed by the costs of transport, manufacturing, and everything else.
The combustibles had suddenly become strategic resources again.
Whoever held enough of them could keep homes heated, factories running, and freight moving while still feeding blue mana into the summoning race. They could expand without letting the price of energy pass through into the price of bread.
And a country that could expand without driving up inflation could keep rates low. Low rates meant cheap borrowing, high valuations, and investors still willing to turn future profits into present anchorages, seal foundries, and an expanded power grid.
The whole race rested on that money continuing to arrive—and on nobody having to discover what happened if inflation forced rates up and made all those promised futures suddenly worth less.
So the invasion did not surprise her. It was the speed.
Seventy-eight hours was not a war. It was a proclamation of a new era.
War, as she had learnt it from textbooks, was slow. Deliberations, decisions, marches—all took time.
Between one weekend and the next, a sovereign country had simply stopped being one, and all four papers did the same thing with the space where the explanation should have been. They filled it with adjectives. Lightning. Unprecedented. Bewildering.
She sat back against the leather and watched the sleet find the corner of the glass.
Impossible, people would be saying in the officers' mess and the tea rooms and all over the Collective Space. Impossible. They would say it with the conviction of people who thought themselves experienced enough to know how the world worked.
She had believed in "impossibility" before.
She had been seventeen, in her last year in the schoolroom, with a season ahead of her that never arrived. She had thought it impossible that a fortune built over several centuries could vanish in a few years. She had thought it impossible that the boy who had professed his eternal love and promised undying commitment just four months earlier could stop answering her letters within two weeks of her family's insolvency.
She had also thought it impossible that her best friend—the girl who had supported her emotionally and financially during her darkest hours, before Clara came along—had been going on secret dates with the boy who had just left her.
Lilianna had learned something that summer: that "impossible" almost always meant "unprecedented in my own experience", and that the two were not remotely the same.
She squared the papers and put them away.
Then she looked around the carriage.
It belonged to the Wetdin Family Trust, as did the horses, the box, and the coat on her back. The Trust also paid for the four troopers in the carriage behind. Aunt Clara had served as interim chair since Lilianna's father died, and would remain in the role a while yet.
Until a fortnight ago, Lilianna had believed that turning twenty-one was the only requirement for taking over as chairwoman. Then Mr. Ballantry, going through the schedules with her for the introduction, had turned a page, cleared his throat, and shown her the other clause: the chair of the Wetdin Trust had to hold either a degree or a recognised professional qualification in finance or management.
She sighed and slowly drifted back to sleep.
Part 2
The castle came out of the murk at seven thirty.
First the escarpment. Then a line of crenellations that seemed four centuries out of place in the surrounding countryside. Then the airstrip on the level ground, lit and swept and empty but for a single machine under a tarpaulin—and along the outer wall, a row of garden ornaments: cheerful ceramic gnomes at exact intervals, their painted faces fixed in expressions of unhinged delight, standing in six inches of snow.
Lilianna counted them without meaning to. The spacing was perfectly regular.
The carriage turned in through the gate.
The courtyard was wet black stone.
Then the strangest thing of her strange year happened.
The ceremonial guard turned out.
Eight men in ceremonial dress stood ready, wrapped in winter coats against the sleet. The instant her boot found the step, the sergeant's voice rang off the stone like a struck bell, and every carbine came to the present with a single, crisp sound.
"Guard—general salute—present ARMS!"
Not the salute due a serving cavalry captain. She knew that one; she had received it and returned it a thousand times.
Lilianna came down the step, stopped, and returned it correctly. Chin level. Hand steady.
She had stopped expecting the world to be consistent about this. In this Empire, power was one thing, wealth a second, and status a third; they travelled together so often that everybody assumed they were the same substance—right up to the moment when one went missing and the other two carried on regardless.
A man came down the steps beneath an umbrella held by somebody else. Sixty, silver-haired, and dressed with the sober perfection of a household officer who would have been horrified to be mistaken for a gentleman and equally humiliated to be mistaken for a servant.
"Your Grace." The bow was pitched exactly right. "Aldrick, Comptroller of Winston House. The First Minister asks me to say that he is aware of the hour, that he is ashamed of himself, and that there is coffee."
"Then he is forgiven, Mr. Aldrick."
"He will be relieved. This way, if you please."
She walked.
She was aware of walking, which was the trouble. Left, right, spine long, shoulders down, chin level—the whole ridiculous architecture Aunt Clara had hammered into her over eleven months, syllable by syllable and inch by inch, in a mirrored room, until it passed from performance into something almost like habit.
Almost. On mornings like this it came apart into its component parts, and she had to reassemble it consciously, one piece at a time, while a comptroller walked ahead of her and did not look back.
She passed through the medieval doors into an atrium of glass and steel that had been set inside the shell of a thirteenth-century keep like a modern heart in an old chest. Displays hung in the air, folding and unfolding, streaming figures she could not read at that speed.
Then a gallery, and stairs, and a corridor smelling of beeswax and rain, and at the end of it two doors.
They were enormous. Oak gone black with age, bound in iron, twelve feet if they were an inch, and carved across both leaves: a hunting scene, or a battle—she could not tell which, and suspected the ambiguity was original.
Two guards in ceremonial dress stood at the leaves with their hands on the rings.
Aldrick struck the floor once with a staff she had not noticed him carrying.
"Her Grace the Duchess of Wetdin."
The doors came open from the centre.
They had let no sound through from the room beyond. The change as they opened made the soundproofing immediately apparent.
Lilianna went in.
Aldrick did not.
She had expected one person in that room. There were five.
The chamber was perhaps sixty feet long, with a ceiling twenty-five feet high and carved panels all the way round showing the Empire doing the things it would like to be remembered for. At the far end, a wall of windows gave onto endless white pasture under low grey weather.
The fire had been built up at some point and had since burned down to a bed of red embers. On the long table lay a chart, annotated in three different hands, and one closed folder, and a tray. The tray held a coffee service and rather more used cups than there were people to have used them, several of them cold, one of them with a saucer laid across the top the way a person does when they mean to come back and then do not. Two chairs stood out of alignment at the far end, pushed back and not returned.
The room smelled faintly of coffee and smoke, and nobody in it was smoking.
Lilianna registered all of it in the way one registers weather. It did not occur to her, then or for several hours afterwards, to ask what time the meeting had actually begun.
Sir Arthur came round the table at once, both hands out, radiating the enormous unembarrassed warmth she had watched him deploy on the broadcasts at the opening of provincial bridges.
"Your Grace. At dawn. In January. I am a monster, I know it, and I intend to make it up to you with pastry."
"First Minister."
"Arthur, please, at this hour. Nobody can be titled before nine; it isn't decent." He was already steering her forward. "You know General Dugu, I think."
Lilianna's composure held.
It held because it had been built for precisely this, and because eleven months of training now stood between her face and everything happening behind it.
General Beatrice Dugu rose from the chair by the fire, in a dress uniform that suggested she had not slept but had nonetheless found time to press it.
The youngest general in the history of the Empire. Every profile ever written of her said the same thing, and the school editions said it in italics: the daughter of an immigrant, proving through her ability that social mobility within the Empire was alive and well.
It really is her! I can't believe it! In person!
And then Dugu bowed to her.
Not a nod. Not the collegial half-inch of one officer to another. The bow of a commoner to a peeress of the realm, correct to the degree, held for the correct interval.
"Your Grace."
For one absurd instant Lilianna wanted to say no, please don't—which would have been a catastrophe, a public humiliation dressed as modesty. So she did not.
"General." She inclined her head to precisely the depth the difference required, and made her voice warm, because warmth was the only thing she had to give. "I have heard so much about you. You are a hero in every sense of the word."
Surprise flickered in the general's dark eyes, then vanished.
"You are too kind, Your Grace," Dugu said with a polite smile.
And Lilianna, who had spent the past six months admiring Beatrice, entirely failed to notice the irony that the two of them had just spent four seconds quietly wishing to be each other across a distance neither could cross.
"And Sir Reginald you will not know," Arthur said.
The man rising from the second chair was tall and immaculate to a degree that made the room feel underdressed. He looked as though he had been awake and cheerful for a great many hours.
"Chief Inspector Sir Reginald Foxworth. Reggie, Your Grace, if you can bear it." He bowed over her hand with the gravity of a knight in stained glass. "I should tell you that I have read the account of the Merchant's Row action four times, and that I have bored several dinner tables with it."
The most celebrated detective in the Empire! Lilianna thought.
"You are very kind, Sir Reginald."
"I am not, particularly. I am accurate. People mistake the two constantly."
And then the fourth person came out of the window bay, and her carefully assembled architecture wobbled for the first time.
"Uncle Gerald," she said, before protocol could get hold of her.
"Lilianna." The Duke of Redwood crossed the room in four strides and took both her hands.
His grip was dry and strong and entirely unhurried. "You are frozen. Sit near the fire, such as it is. I have made the same journey and I intend to complain about it later, at length, to anyone who will hold still." He smiled warmly as he spoke.
The warmth went through her like brandy, sparking a faint hope.
Then came the nervousness of facing someone whose opinion could shape her future happiness.
Margaret had sounded her out in December, over tea. Nothing had been proposed. Nothing had been accepted. A situation had merely been described, in the third person and the conditional: that there was an attachment; that it would not be broken; that the woman in question could not bear children; and that a wife in such a household would find her position secure, her sons the sole heirs of the house, and her husband's affections shared.
Lilianna had said she understood the arrangement. She had said, with a steadiness that surprised her at the time, that she thought she could live inside it.
And Margaret had put down her cup and said the true thing, which was that Philip was the difficulty. Not the woman. Philip. That he was the most loyal creature she had ever produced and that loyalty in him did not divide; that when he gave himself to something he did not keep a portion back for later; and that this was, unfortunately, why the mistress would have to remain.
Lilianna had gone back to her rooms afterwards and sat on the edge of her bed in the dark for forty minutes.
Because there it was, the whole shape of it, and it fitted so exactly that it was almost funny. A four-month fairy tale had taught her precisely what an easy promise was worth. Philip's refusal to divide himself was the only proof she had ever seen that a man could give his word and then simply keep it, regardless of circumstances, at a cost, with nobody to hold him accountable and nothing to gain.
It was exactly the quality she wanted in a husband. After all, what good was a marriage if one's spouse left at the first sign of trouble?
Yet it was exactly the reason why she could not have him to herself.
She had seen it herself, in any case, and had not needed telling. At the bicentennial, in the wreckage afterwards, when the quad was full of burnt filth and shouting and stretchers, she had watched a fair-haired woman come running through all of it with her veil forgotten somewhere behind her—and had watched Philip Redwood turn and receive her embrace as though two thousand people and an entire imperial ceremony had quietly ceased to exist. And Natalia had not hesitated despite the filth covering Philip.
She sat down by the fire, arranged her hands, and assumed the expression of a young woman receiving coffee.
The fifth person she did not see until she had already sat down.
The woman sat at a small side table set back from the fire: tall and slender, with her red hair pinned up and glasses on. An open notebook lay before her, four or five pages already covered in a hand as regular as printing.
She rose, came forward, and curtsied—not deeply, but properly, with the small precision of someone who had looked the form up once, years ago, and had never since needed to look it up again.
"Your Grace. Dianna. I keep the notes in this house, because nobody else is permitted to." A glance at the tray. "Which means I also pour. The coffee is mine. The number of pots is Sir Arthur's."
"They are convictions, Dianna."
"They are a quantity, sir, and it is not a small one."
Lilianna laughed before she could stop herself, and was rather glad she had.
Dianna poured for Lilianna first, then the Duke, then Sir Reginald, then General Dugu, with the First Minister served last as the host. She followed the prescribed order without hesitation, observing every formality. Lilianna couldn't help feeling nervous at being served before the Duke, but protocol required it and she had learnt to accept it. Then Dianna set the pot down, returned to her table, and picked up her pen.
No servants, Lilianna thought. Not one, in the whole room. Eight men in the courtyard and a comptroller with a staff, and inside this door a Chief Inspector, a general, a duke, a First Minister, and one woman with a notebook who has been trusted with all of it.
She revised, on the spot, her estimate of Miss Dianna by a considerable margin.
She had come prepared to be asked for her five votes.
The answer had been ready since December: they were promised, they had been promised freely, and Aunt Margaret had her word.
Nobody asked.
Arthur sat on the edge of the table and looked towards Dugu.
"General," Arthur said. "Tell Her Grace what happened at Marabendia."
Dugu did not consult a paper.
"One entity," she said. "Summoned. Operating from a fixed installation approximately nine hundred miles behind the battle lines. It communicated directly with every frontline soldier and coordinated the entire invasion. It processed every piece of information in real time, providing each soldier with immediate updates to their tactical instructions." A beat. "The Republic did not defeat Marabendia. It outmanoeuvred Marabendia before its army could even formulate a coherent response."
Lilianna sat very still.
"In short, a Familiar coordinated and directed Marabendia's subjugation in real time, finishing the job before the country could properly respond," the Duke added warmly.
A Familiar had been given autonomous authority to direct a war?
Before Lilianna could ask more questions, Arthur chimed in.
"And all the great powers are doing the same," Arthur said. "They are handing over time-sensitive, high-stakes decision-making to specialised Familiars operating without human oversight. Arussia started it, but the Republic has taken it to a whole new scale." He stood.
"The world is changing far faster than we can comprehend."
He moved to the window.
"So here is my observation.
"Money goes where the future looks most certain. Today, money flows mostly into two places, and neither of them is here. If that continues, we shall find ourselves precisely where many empires found themselves near the end: enormously rich in things, and enormously poor in the capacity to put them to use or defend them. And when a nation has resources but little productive capacity, and a military built for the last war—" He spread his hands. "Its resources do not stop being used. They simply start being used by someone else. They become fuel in somebody else's engine.
"And that somebody else will write the history. In the history, it will be called constructive consolidation."
He said it perfectly pleasantly.
"Our forefathers built all of this," he went on, with a gesture that took in the panelling, the carved cavalry, the carved bridges, the carved trees, "upon the proposition that they were bringing civilisation to savages. And they did organise things. That part is true, and it is not fashionable to say so, and I shall say it anyway. They laid rail. They cleared harbours. They took resources producing almost nothing and made them produce a very great deal.
"Whether the natives received a fair share of what was subsequently produced is, I would suggest, highly debatable." A small shrug. "Fairness varies enormously between eras, and between the man holding the ledger and the man on the other side of it.
"I observe only that we have historically been the ones holding the ledger.
"That is not a law of nature."
Lilianna kept her face entirely still and drank her coffee.
Am I supposed to be hearing this?
She had watched Arthur on the broadcasts for years—the grave voice, the folded hands, the pause before the difficult sentence, the apology to the nation that sounded unrehearsed. She had watched her uncle be the granite embodiment of reformist thought: the merchant's son who had restored an ancient dukedom, and who had gone on the evening news to condemn his own grandson rather than be seen sheltering him. And here, in a soundproofed room early in the morning, they all appeared to be rather different.
At the side table, Dianna turned a page without any sound at all.
"Which brings me to the matter of dormancy," Arthur said.
"They will be sure to bring it up after the vote on the Ascension Bill," said the Duke.
"Indeed." Arthur's voice did not change. "There will be a proposal. Not this session; the spring, I should think, dressed as a safeguard, sponsored by extremely respectable people. Whatever else the House of Wetdin does with its five votes, I should be grateful if it never voted to put Her Majesty to sleep."
Lilianna's cup did not move.
She was back in her aunt's penthouse, several months earlier, the pool steaming behind them, Clara laughing that hard, bright, breaking-glass laugh.
"Put her to sleep. My darling, they wish to unload the only loaded weapon in the house because the neighbours find it upsetting to look at. A sleeping guardian deters precisely nobody. If we ever need her, it will be too late to wake her. At the speed the world operates now, whoever comes for us will have finished the job and gone home before the waking process has even begun."
She had thought at the time that it was a rich woman's opinion, held for reasons of temperament.
But after Marabendia, it appeared to be an obvious statement of fact.
"You have my word for it," Lilianna said aloud.
"I am glad," said the Duke of Redwood, with a hint of amusement in his voice.
She looked up and found him smiling at her.
Part 3
Cold radiated from the wall of windows, their vast expanse out of keeping with the ancient house around them. At some point, Arthur's shoulders had drawn in half an inch.
Dianna set down her pen, went to the chair by the door, came back with a heavy grey coat, and put it over the First Minister's shoulders from behind without a word—the way a person does a thing she has done four hundred times and stopped counting somewhere around the fiftieth.
"Thank you," Arthur said, and did not turn round.
"You will get the cough again, sir, and then I shall have to move Thursday."
"You would enjoy moving Thursday."
"I would enjoy it enormously. That is not the point."
She went back to her table. Lilianna watched the whole of it with surprise.
Then Arthur said, in the exact tone of a man recalling an errand before the post goes:
"Reggie. Regarding the ongoing Heartlion case."
Foxworth set down his cup.
"Would it be fair to summarise your tentative findings as follows?" Arthur continued. "That the Marquess of Heartlion was killed in his own gallery by a summoned being constructed for the purpose. That this being was called into existence beyond the reach of this Realm's law." A pause of exactly the correct length. "That it was directed by an organisation operating outside Avalondian law. And that the Marquess was targeted because his research threatened the monopoly on Familiar infrastructure held by the organisation's benefactor. However, the benefactor's identity must remain classified pending confirmation. That is the responsible course. Have I understood you?"
The room was very quiet.
Lilianna, who had spent eleven months learning to hear what was being done to a sentence, heard the whole of it go past her and did not, at first, understand what she had heard.
Every clause seemed precise yet open to more than one interpretation. Each sentence said a great deal while leaving something essential unnamed.
Arthur's eyes went, very briefly, to the side table.
Dianna's pen was already moving.
"Your understanding is exact," Foxworth said.
That was all. He did not qualify it, and he did not soften it, and he did not add the word however, which, for some reason, Lilianna had expected him to say. After all, Reginald was renowned for his precision and attention to detail as a detective.
"Good," Arthur said. "I shall be careful to say no more than that should I be asked on a staircase by a man from one of Ashbourne's papers with his hat in his hand. After all, I would hate to misrepresent the constabulary."
And Lilianna understood, with a small cold clarity, what the notebook was for. Not a record of what was decided. A record of what was asked. In eighty years, when the file was opened, this exchange would occupy four lines in a hand as regular as printing showing that the First Minister had put a question to the Chief Inspector of the Imperial Bobbies, and that the Chief Inspector had answered it, and nothing else at all.
"And I daresay one or two of their Lordships will find the technical part of the argument considerably easier to follow than they did in October," Arthur said. "It is a difficult subject. Anchorages, capacity thresholds, native manufacture—a great deal of technical detail to wrestle with. I have found it opaque myself for eleven months and I am told I am clever."
He straightened and dusted nothing off his sleeve.
"It is remarkable, though, how one's mind sharpens when the subject under discussion becomes tied to one's own wellbeing. After all, a man may examine a bill for a decade before voting and call it responsibility when the consequences of delay rest safely beyond his gates. He will not vote that way when those consequences could fall within his own gates on some dark night." A shrug of great mildness.
Lilianna had come to that room expecting to be asked for her support, and left it with a completely different understanding of how the history in her textbooks was shaped.
Part 4
The house had spent the whole day pretending to be calm.
Margaret had gone up to town on the eleventh with four trunks and a diary. The Duke had gone north the day before and had not said where. That left Long Stones to the sea, to a skeleton staff who had polished things that were already clean, and to six gentlemen of the Aristocrat Protection Agency who had played cards below stairs since four and had stopped keeping score at about seven.
In the east study, Philip Redwood had been at the long table since half past two.
Not the desk. It was too small for all the documents he had before him. The long table held everything at once, and everything at once was what he needed.
The Bill as amended, annotated to the point of vandalism.
The First Schedule, on the conditions of a licence.
The Second Schedule, on the housing of a seal: wards, register, the specification of the room.
The Third Schedule, which contained the whole of Natalia's future.
Beside them: the deed of the Redwood Estate Trust; a chartered engineer's letter, unfavourable; a builder's elevation of a low stone outbuilding drawn by a firm in Yortinto that had been given a client reference and no name; the February flight schedules; and a plate of sandwiches that had come down at six and had not been touched.
Lydia came in at nine with two more volumes and no expression whatsoever.
"The consolidated statutes to 1958," she said, setting them down. "And the 1911 Act on the possession of dangerous weaponry and machinery, with the amending instruments bound in at the back. I would not trust the index. Somebody in the Stationery Office has been creative."
"Thank you."
"You will want the sixth section rather than the fourth." She turned the top volume round for him and opened it without looking at the page, which Philip noticed with surprise. "The fourth defines the possession offence. The sixth is what the court may do about it, which is the part nobody quotes, because it is dull and because it is where the teeth are."
Philip sat back.
"Lydia."
"Master Philip."
"Three days ago I asked you to find me somebody in Albecaster who could read schedules."
"You did."
"And the next morning you came back having read them."
"I came back having read them twice," Lydia said. "A governess is largely a person who reads things that other people find too tedious to finish. It is not a distinguished skill. It is simply that most people stop."
She said it lightly. It went past Philip entirely, because he was looking at her pencil marks—small, upright, regular as printing—where she had written, in the margin beside a long-repealed subsection of the 1911 Act, note: repeal not retrospective; see 1937 instrument, obtained under protest.
She annotates repealed law, he thought. Who annotates repealed law?
Somebody who has had a reason to, said the System, from a leather armchair that had not previously contained a woman in a barrister's wig, a formal gown, and a miniskirt. Do carry on, Host. Ignore me. I'm only here in a supervisory capacity.
You are here because you like watching me suffer.
Those are the same thing.
She dissolved into warm air, taking the wig with her, and Philip returned to section six.
"All right," he said. "Tell me if I have it wrong. The Bill makes an Anchorage lawful if it is licensed, and Avalondian-owned, and Avalondian-operated. It does not say who may hold the licence beyond that. It does not say the holder must be a company, or a ministry, or a person of standing. A trust may hold it."
"A trust may hold it," Lydia agreed.
"It does not say where the building must stand."
"It does not."
"And Arthur has secured the repeal of the illegal-summoning law. Under the Third Schedule, all Familiars summoned before commencement, and their summoners, receive an automatic amnesty, whether or not the Familiars are subsequently registered."
"Yes."
"So the past offence will be pardoned automatically. I will no longer face a death sentence for having summoned her."
"Yes." Lydia's hands were folded. "Registration is a separate requirement. The Bill brings unregistered possession under the 1911 Act, but the registration deadline is not in the Bill. It will be fixed by regulations, and the regulations will be made after commencement by a minister who has not yet been appointed to make them. There are eleven places in that Bill where the words as may be prescribed are doing work that ought to have been done by the draftsman. That is not sloppiness, Master Philip. That is a decision."
Philip rubbed his eyes.
"So we plan for a door that hasn't been built yet."
"We plan for a door somebody else will build, and hang, and hold the key to."
He pulled the elevation across the table.
"Then here is what I have. The licence is applied for by the Redwood Estate Trust. The building goes up on the west side of the orchard at Redwood Estate, eighty yards from the pond. It is small. It is impeccable on paper. The engineer objects to the specification at length and I will pay him so handsomely that he will sign it anyway. The seal goes into it if we register her, because the Act requires a registered Familiar's seal to sit in a licensed Anchorage. There is no way around that requirement. And the application is lodged in Yortinto."
"Not in Albecaster."
"A registrar in Albecaster will have one file on his desk that too many in the Empire would like to read." Philip tapped the schedule. "A provincial registrar in Yortinto will have a file that many couldn't care less about and a pension he intends to collect, so he will prefer an uneventful career."
Lydia looked at the drawing for a moment.
"And that is the part which will not survive contact with Her Grace," she said.
"I know."
"Her Grace's strategy is visibility. Tie Miss Natalia to this house, tie this house to the Empress, and make the cost of touching her prohibitive."
"I know. And it works, right up until the day someone decides that harming her is a useful way to weaken the Duke's political position for their own ends." Philip put the pencil down. "Grandmother asked for a conversation and she will get one. But I want the plan ready before I start that conversation, because Grandmother seems to prefer solutions to problems."
"Very well. I will see to it, Master Philip." Lydia gave a quick bow**, went to the door, and left**.
Then a thought occurred to Philip.
He quickly wrote a single line at the top of a fresh sheet and underlined it twice, marking it for further examination.
What is the penalty for not registering at all?
Later that night, Natalia came in without knocking, because they had stopped knocking after that passionate night.
Philip heard the door and did not look up, because he had found the offences clause and it was arranged in the deliberately restful order that statutes use when they are hiding something. Then he registered the smell of hot lemon and burnt sugar, and looked up after all.
Natalia was carrying a tray with both hands.
She was also wearing a dress he had never seen, in leopard-patterned silk that fitted her the way water fits a glass, and Philip's attention was immediately hijacked.
"Master," she said. "You have not eaten."
"I—" He cleared his throat. "No."
"I have brought a remedy and also a bribe."
She set the tray down on the only clear corner of the table and Philip looked at what was on it.
It was a lemon tart. It was, so far as he could see, a perfect lemon tart: the pastry pale gold and even at the rim, the curd set to a clean sheen, the whole thing sitting on the plate rather than slumping into it.
"You made this."
"The lemons are from the Atrium. Mr. Beale permitted me six and gave me eight." A small pause. "This is the fourth. The first three were educational. The Agency men ate the third and told me it was excellent, which cannot be true, as it had some structural deficiencies."
Philip took a bite, and then stopped moving.
"Natalia."
"Is it acceptable?"
"It's better than the kitchen's."
Her face lit up with pure joy.
"I have been practising," she said gleefully.
"Since when?"
"The second of January." She looked at the tart rather than at him. "I found that I wished to make you happy in as many ways as I could. I do not know the reason. I stopped looking for the reason, which Miss Lydia says is a sign of improvement."
Then she came round the table, took the pen out of his fingers, put it down, and sat down in his lap.
She did it without asking, without apology, and with the faint air of somebody who had established a precedent and intended to rely on it. One arm went round his back. The other crossed his chest and settled.
Ninety-four.
She logged it and said nothing.
Eleven garments had now been tested under controlled conditions. The white nightgown had produced a mean elevation of nine beats. The green wool with the buttoned collar had produced four, which was not the fabric's fault. The leopard silk, at a distance of two metres in a lit room, had produced twenty-two, and it had produced them before she spoke, which meant the variable was the garment and not the conversation.
She had not told him about the ledger. He would find the ledger sad, and it was not sad. It was the only instrument she had ever been given for measuring whether she was making him happy enough.
"What are you working on?" she asked.
The question was only partially necessary.
It had taken her rather less than a second to scan all the documents on the table. She already knew what he was working on. Only the details were missing.
She could have asked about his progress rather than what he was doing.
But she had discovered that a great many of her difficulties resolved themselves if she simply did not.
So she asked, and she made her voice curious, and it cost her nothing, because she wanted to know what he would be comfortable with her knowing.
"I'm planning our life," Philip said. "After the vote."
Natalia tilted her head.
"Why?"
Genuine puzzlement, arriving from the one blind spot she had never been able to see round.
"Because the vote will pass," Philip said. "I've watched the arithmetic all week and I think it will pass comfortably."
"Isn't that perfect, then?"
He turned the Third Schedule so it faced her. "It provides you with a legal existence, but not legal protection." He shook his head. "They are not voting to give you a single right. Nobody has proposed one. They're voting to make you available, and afterwards your seal sits in a room with a keyholder, and a keyholder is a person, and people can be persuaded, and replaced, and outlived, and served with instruments they are legally obliged to obey."
Natalia's fingers had gone still on his wrist.
"Then what is the plan?"
"We go home," Philip said. "Yorgoria. Redwood Estate. The trust applies for the licence, the building goes up by the orchard, we file in Yortinto rather than Albecaster, and then we are extremely, aggressively boring for as long as we can in a land where the newspapers care more about inflation than imperial politics." He shrugged.
"But wouldn't the registration itself draw attention?"
"That's the part I've been at all day, with Lydia." He gestured at the volumes. "Because registering you means writing down, in a public record, what this entire household has worked hard to hide. The register is the confession—pardon or not. So I am trying to find out how quietly it can be done. Whether the trust can be the applicant rather than me. Whether we have to provide your real name and a description of your appearance." His mouth twisted. "You are, after all, a national sensation."
"You are also assessing the feasibility of not registering," Natalia said.
Philip looked at her.
"Yes."
Natalia went very quiet.
"Accepting the risk," Philip went on. "Building the Anchorage anyway, licensed and lawful and empty, and simply never presenting you. If the penalty for that is a fine, then I want to know the number, because a number is a thing I can prepare for. I can put the money aside on Thursday morning and never think about it again." He put his hand flat on one of the documents. "That's why I'm still reading at eleven at night. Because I don't think it is just a fine. Arthur has secured the repeal and the automatic amnesty, whether we register you or not. But the Bill puts non-registration under the old law against unregistered or unlicensed possession of dangerous weaponry or machinery. That law is still in force; most people have never bothered to read it. Section six contains a forfeiture provision that nobody has quoted since 1937. I need to know whether a fine and subsequent registration would be enough, or whether forfeiture would mean—"
He stopped.
"Whether it means my destruction," Natalia said.
"Yes."
The fire moved. Somewhere below, the sea took the rocks and let them go again.
Philip realised, distantly, that she had not blinked for some time. Then a tear slipped from her lower lashes and ran down her cheek in a straight line, and another followed it, and her expression did not alter by any amount he could measure.
"Natalia—" He got a hand up to her face. "Hey. What's wrong?"
"Nothing is wrong."
"You're crying."
"Yes." She caught his wrist and held it against her cheek, and her voice came out perfectly level, which was worse than if it had shaken. "You have spent hours reading an old statute in order to find a way to save me. Regardless of the price." A pause. "I just feel… so… loved."
"That's—Natalia, that's the least I could—"
"It is not the least. I have read the histories." She let go of his wrist and put her forehead against his, and stayed there. "Aristocrats have a habit of ditching a romantic partner the moment they become a liability."
"That is rather… cynical."
She sat back. She wiped her face with the back of her hand—inefficiently, twice, the way she had learned from watching Charlotte Foxworth do it while laughing—and then looked past him at the table, at the volumes, at the twelve inches of paper he had not yet reached.
Something moved behind her eyes.
"Master."
"Mm."
"Perhaps I could help you with the reading."
Philip snorted. "It's four volumes and an index that lies."
"Yes." Natalia's arms came back round his neck, and she leaned in, and her mouth came very close to his ear, and her voice went soft. "But you are going to take me upstairs tonight, and after a night of great pleasure, you are going to sleep very well." A pause. "And I do not require sleep."
Philip's ears went scarlet.
"You want to read four volumes of consolidated statutes while I'm—"
"Sleeping. Yes." She kissed the corner of his jaw. "If you leave them open where they are, I could give you the conclusion at breakfast."
"Natalia, that's—how long would that even take you?"
Natalia considered the question with every appearance of great care.
"Some time," she said.
She slid off his lap, took his hand, and drew him toward the door.