Chương 160: Chapter 181: Skydown Crossing

My Sixthday got started early, I got up and headed downstairs to see Nathan off, as we had agreed some weeks back. He was bringing Filita Coltorn with him, so she could see some friends from back home, she had gotten lonely. He does not officially view her as a love interest until next year but I think his birthday party is when he first notices that he might. In the original version that happens in a dance hall in Hearstcliff. This time he gets his sixteenth birthday party at Meadwhite Castle. With the family.

I'm great with that, it is a friendly gesture on my part that doesn't require me to see anyone face-to-face. Best of all, it gets him out of the city. At this point it's official, I can't afford to have him anywhere near my plans unless I'm willing to kill him. And if there were only eight or nine reasons why I can't do that, I would consider it. But there are so many reasons why I can't just... deal with him, and be done with it. Best I can do is get him out of town while I'm working.

After that, heading over to my birthday venue, the August Address, and checked that things were setting up correctly. Banners, streamers, band, and food. I was still using my favorite caterers and tonight's selection was slivers of duck meat with a lemon-pepper sauce over a wrapped rice bed, or a hearty breaded mushroom topped with a melted cheese, or there were crisp tarts with a vanilla-strawberry filling. I like the kind of food that surprises you and makes you want another just to sort through the sensations.

I head back to the Academy, time to get the next errands sorted. I sauntered down the hallway of the residence hall, checking room numbers until I found the right spot. I paused, and let my senses seep in. The place seemed right, but I can't be entirely sure. There's a human-shaped blank space wrapped in clothes sitting at the desk, hunched way over in shrimp-pose and clearly working hard. My knuckles rapped three times, crisp and professional.

"Who is it!?" Gala yelled from inside.

"Just me," I called back.

"I'm working on it!" she yelled back.

"I understand, I'm not rushing you," I called back, leaning my head against the door. Blatant lies, I want her to be finished right now. This is important. She sounded quite irritated with me.

"This is hard! I've got no reference for this, no templates! I'm building from first principles here! And this is an extremely difficult job! I'm raising my rates after this!"

"That's fair," I replied, calling through the door. If she could make what I had asked for, she had earned twice what I'm paying her. I am sick and fucking tired of having people shut off my sorcery. I become way too helpless way too fast when that happens. I'm learning my lesson. I'm getting equipped. I don't need magisters disabling me a third time before I decide to push back. But, things like this are exactly why I'm keeping a scrivener on retainer.

I don't need to solve everything myself, that's what money is for.

"All right, I'm just checking. And straighten up, you'll hurt your back like that." She yelled something inarticulate, but she did straighten herself. Now I'm back to my own dorm room, and now it's time to pick everyone up for our day out: I'm finally bringing the gang to Skydown Crossing. After weeks, nay, months of gentle nudging and needling, I have relented to the friendly pressure and agreed to show off my provincial hometown. I braced myself for the ribbing about being a farm girl from the sticks.

So now the conundrum: do I dress down a little bit and play into the jokes I'm expecting? Or do I glam up a little and push back against it? What decided me was Skydown. I never want any of those people to think I'm ashamed of them. I went with something simple but a strong use of family colors, white trimmed in red, with thick red bands of frothy lace at the collar and sleeves to set off my own color. Elica was dressed to show off, she had been gleefully shopping after her card table recovered the family finances.

Vancy was dressed down in something she probably thought was rustic. Larianne was trying not to make a stir, she was dressed entirely in medium black instead of dark black. Nunxio was sitting this out, but Larianne had volunteered to partner with Rinnie so that Elica could bring Yheta, and I brought Enefiat Trazom. They had both been to this place several times before, and might have their own experiences to revisit Skydown Crossing.

Vancy brought some suave and vapid guy I've never seen her with before who never turned up again, and never contributed anything to the conversation. I forgot his name as soon as he was around a corner. Just a completely forgettable chump. And no, he's not Nathan in disguise or something. Sometimes boring people happen. We stepped out of the portal in the usual spot, I always used the small square next to the church, in the shadow of the pub's awning.

It's an open enough space, and nobody ever leaves any carts or anything parked there. It's not the center of town by any means, but it's just sort of where I've taken to setting my landing pad. I stepped out with Trazom's hand in mine, and he was towing Rinnie, who had Elica's hand, who was guiding Yheta, who was tugging at Vancy, who had taken hold of whatsisname. Everyone decided by common consensus that Larianne was not a hand-holding type.

We all stepped out, and we caught our balances and blinked away the phantom suns. I closed the void up, and we sort of milled around until our vision came back. The blinding was not as bad for anyone that had not been inside, their eyes were better adjusted than ours, so they recognized us before we could see them. The people of this town know what it means when an impossibly-bright spotlight spontaneously opens on the street.

"Morning Princess, fancy you here on a Sixthday."

"Your ladyship. Who're your friends?"

"Princess. Good to see you."

"You're running early, Princess, you're not due 'til tomorrow!" I started identifying people by voices, even while I was blinking furiously to get my sight back.

"Ah, Missus Kinneman, how are you? Goodman Quota, I'll introduce you in a moment. Is that Cazzie Sevver? Hang on, Vancy will want to talk to you. And Madame Cycmi, you shouldn't tease, you were nodding right along when Hatchil was telling me to come around more often!" By the time everyone had their eyes working, I was in several conversations, and had set Cazzie to chatting with Vancy about perfumes.

I introduced Goodman Quota to the whole group, and then scolded Madame Cycmi for razzing me, and we both laughed it off together. Rather than walk through the town to get breakfast I brought us all straight into the public house that was right here. The front was open, like an icehouse, and we were able to walk straight in and get a table near the front so we could see people going by.

Vancy lagged a minute behind because the local girl had questions about setting up her own perfume shop, and everyone took a breather as they transitioned between the portal and the town. Vancy spoke up.

"So, none of these people have, like, a provinces accent? They barely have more accent than you do!"

"I don't have an accent," I pointed out. The others glanced at each other.

"You don't have much of an accent," Trazom said. Obviously a lie.

"Certainly less than most residents of Hearstcliff would assume." Yheta had slid chairs out for Elica and then for me, in the order we reached the table, and now was hovering behind his own seat. He was the one to explain to the others, leaning down just a bit.

"It's because the minstrels and players always exaggerate accents to make them obvious that it's the character's accent and not just the actor, which becomes a form of mockery." He made a wry face, acknowledging that this is an unfair source of mirth and belittlement.

"So that means people that don't know the accent think they know what the accent sounds like. Please excuse me, I'll be right back, I'm going to put our orders in." Yheta's been on very good behavior the last few months, but I still get just an extra shot of adrenaline every time he walks into the room and I have to fight not to tighten my eyes whenever I look his way. He's probably under the belief that he's close to being forgiven. But I'm not going to take my revenge until after he's let his guard down.

I want him to forget what he's done before I take that pound of flesh. The day I don't need him anymore is the day before he dies.

"The people here sure are taken with you," Elica said, with a neutral tone of her voice that made me wonder what it was she was really thinking about that. Mean girl's gotta mean.

"Quite friendly," she added. I decided to take this at face value, even though I'm sure that's the farthest thing from her social-intrigue-driven thoughts.

"Well, they see me every week and I'm not the one that sends tax collectors," I joked.

"I go to the commoner's church, I get the commoner's appeal." I spotted some folk I recognized, we waved to each other as they walked past.

"Those weren't commoners," Elica said, flicking her fingers to gesture towards the square we'd just come from. I tilted my head back and forth.

"We call them citizens here. Or townsfolk. Sometimes subjects. I just used the term I thought you'd be familiar with." She started, stopped, made a face, started again.

"Those really were peasants? Those people that spoke to you?"

"I suppose?" I said. I was distracted again by a passing child.

"I mean, that was a shopkeeper, a clerk in the alderman's office, a thatcher's daughter and a farmer's widow. They're not, like, serfs or something." Elica looked uncomfortable. She started looking around her suspiciously, as if starting to realize that I had not put her in an aristocrats' pub. Vancy's face was an O of astonishment.

"But, the fabrics! The colors! Their manners! Their teeth!" I shifted in my seat.

"Well, the town has declined a little since the duke moved his family away, but the local economy is still strong." Trazom cleared his throat because apparently I wasn't following the conversation very well.

"Ah, ladies? This is normal for Meadowtam. I've played a fair few towns here and every city, I've seen. It's true." They looked at me for confirmation. I nodded to give them that confirmation. Oh. I thought they were being critical of my people and were disappointed. They're actually surprised and impressed. And I missed it. I had to offer thanks to Trazom because he caught it when I missed it, and straightened things out before I said anything to embarrass myself.

"Well, sure," I said.

"Once you exclude financial-sector figures and tax inflow, Meadowtam is the most materially prosperous duchy there is. One duchy that produces half the food for seven duchies, four marches and two protectorates? The numbers tell the story, a lot of money comes through here. People get taken care of." Yheta came back to the table, bringing a bowl of buttered rolls. Elica was craning her head to look up and down the street, more intrigued now.

"Yes, but, where have you put your beggars?"

"Where have I what my what?" I said. After that it fell to Yheta to gently explain to Elica that beggars, urchins and the destitute poor was not an inevitable fact of the human condition. For a minute she seemed like she was struggling to understand, but then she seized on the idea of alms as being a form of begging.

We had to explain the difference, that this was not a mendicant with a cup jingling for coins, but that the local leaders would gather resources and bring them around to the homes of those who needed help.

"You let them have homes?" she said, quite surprised. So now we had a lot more things to explain to her. That conversation lasted through breakfast, and without saying anything directly Yheta, Trazom, Vancy and I all started moving to bracket Elica so she would not speak to any of the residents directly. She was guaranteed to blurt out something horrifyingly demeaning and presumptuous. In her lands, every peasant dropped to the ground to genuflect immediately. In Skydown, people smiled when they saw me.

Rinnie was looking at me with an expression I have never seen on her before. I'm not sure what it was, I usually just see a seething glare or a cold stare pointed my way, for anything else I barely recognize her face. It might have been... less unfriendly? I brought the whole group around, to show off the grain mill and the saw mill, and all my favorite bakeries.

"I'm glad to see your sweet tooth was not something you found in Hearstcliff," Elica said, sampling the sugared pastry. She licked powdered sugar off her fingertips. Trazom chuckled.

"She and I literally met because of cookies." I'm okay letting them rib me about that, I'm just glad that there's not more mockery about farm life and ignorant yokels. I figured out why that was when I brought them to the local public library. Larianne recovered first. She turned to me with a not-quite-inscrutable expression and said, "Books? Just to borrow?"

"Well, sure," I said.

"Nobody has enough room in their home for all the books they would want to read, right? And printed books are expensive, hand-written ones are more expensive. So instead of everyone having some books and sharing them around all hodgepodge, we put them all in one place and we've got an organized system for how we loan them out." Well, this is the conversation where I found out, after sixteen years (this very day!) that public libraries are not a common thing in Hearstwhile and that Meadowtam is very much the exception to that rule. Good thing, too; if this duchy hadn't had public libraries I'd have had to fight to get them built. It wasn't just Elica- Rinnie, Larianne and Vancy were just as surprised to find out that even relatively small farming towns like this one had a library.

But Trazom, who was widely traveled but rarely looked in-depth at any one community, was also surprised, he did not realize this was common here. Yheta was used to it, he was raised here, and he helped me carry the explanations. Meanwhile Vancy's date converted oxygen into carbon dioxide. Or maybe the other way around. Personality of a houseplant, that one. I never mentioned Zhudten to them, the village that I'm the lady protector over.

I drop by there fairly often to help out, but it's a long way from being ready to host the likes of Elica and Larianne. Skydown is where I go for church but Zhudten is the closest thing to my town and I don't want friction over this. The roads there are timbers laid out over mud, and everything smells like fish. It's basically what Elica thought Skydown was going to be.

I'm not embarrassed of Zhudten, but I feel like the girls might try to make me embarrassed of the place, and I don't want any of us in that position. That being the position where I get pissed off and say something that hurts their feelings very badly. We did not do a lot of stops or shops, there weren't a lot of attractions. I brought them around to check out a couple of dressmaker shops, a couple of charms-sellers, some jewelry. But a lot of what we did was just to walk the streets and take in the sights.

I did not want them to remember eight shopkeeps and a dozen aisles of merchandise, I wanted them to feel like they knew the place. We walked, we chatted, we pointed things out. We had lunch at a pasta place and I had mine with freshwater mussels and mushrooms in a spicy sauce. I do like mushrooms more than most. Our tour ended, not really by my design, at the north end, on a hilltop that looked across to the next hill. From here, you could see the bare foundation and remains of the brick fireplaces and chimneys.

The old gardens and lawns were replaced with food crops, parceled out to the farmers on the neighboring lands so they wouldn't go to waste. The old outbuildings were still there, the stable was untouched by time and combustion, but now it held plowhorses and drays instead of my mother's sleek sprinters or my father's agile hunting steeds. The locals had adopted it and converted it to their needs.

"That chimney on the far left," I said, pointing.

"Third floor. Fireplace, you see it from here? That's where my father and mother, and several of their servants, were huddled for safety. I managed to save them. It was close."

"I'm sure you did everything you could," Vancy said diplomatically. I scoffed a half-laugh.

"I did significantly more than that. I pushed way too far. It took the healers two weeks to restore what was left of me." Yheta nodded.

"Never the same after that." I did not need his help telling this story. Elica nodded as well.

"Was that when this whole 'grim purpose' thing happened?"

"Oh, no, she's had that forever. But the fire did... sharpen it." Yheta looked thoughtful, or just distant. He stood with his hands clasped behind him, staring at the empty space where my house used to stand, a place he had walked and danced in. Vancy was looking at the ruins, and the size of the building footprint, and how little there was left over.

"How many people died?" she asked me, keeping her tone low. She knew that was too much home for just one family.

"Enough that I didn't feel bad about what I did next," I said.

"Four years ago today. Really not that long ago. Around here, a recent memory. In the family history, current events. For me, just yesterday." My voice was kind of hollow and disconnected, but for some reason I couldn't fix that. The proper expression and inflection just weren't there. This was supposed to be a fun outing and I'm making it awkward. Great.

"But not your family?" Rinnie asked.

"No. Staff. Friends. People I didn't work hard enough- " and that was when my voice stopped working for a while. They gave me some time to stand there and sort out my words. It took a few minutes before I was ready. I sighed.

"Sorry. I just get a little sentimental. It's an anniversary, after all. Thanks for coming out here with me. I'm glad I didn't do it alone." Sometimes it's important to look back with clear eyes, directly at the problem. It helps remind us what we're doing and why. Where we're going and why that matters. It's probably not good for my mental state, but maybe that's something I just have to accept. Or worse. Maybe it's not just inevitable for me to live my life just a little broken and sick and unhappy.

Maybe it's necessary. After all, people who are mentally well do not do what I need to do.

"Come on," I said.

"It's time to get back to the school. I need to check on my preparations and make sure this party is my best ever." I sometimes feel like that was the moment I jinxed it to be my worst party ever. But realistically, I know now that the die was actually set months ago. There were enough reasons I should have seen it coming.