A Bloom in the North Read online

  "The pefna-eperu and the Head of Household often have business," I said.

  "Which they discuss in brief meetings during the day in the Head of Household's office," Hesa said, mouth quirking. "Not all night in the Head of Household's bedroom."

  "What if you're a terrible pefna-eperu?" I asked. "One so delinquent I have to dress it down frequently?"

  "In your bedroom!" Hesa said, laughing finally. "Now that gossip I truly wouldn't want to be part of."

  I drew it into my arms, and it glanced at the door before permitting itself the indulgence. I didn't blame the eperu for its resistance to the intimacy... if we were caught, it would suffer far worse than I would. But I was glad it chose to step into the embrace anyway, and we rested against one another, grateful to have reached a place of relative safety at last. Against its stained hair I said, "We can't live without this."

  "No," Hesa agreed after a long moment. It sighed. "No." I heard the smile in its voice. "Let me... let me think about how to do it safely. Give me some time."

  "Not too long," I said.

  "No," it agreed. "Kiss me and let's go down to eat."

  This time I threaded my fingers through the hair at its cheek and held it in place for my mouth, and whether that was more torment for it or for me I couldn't say. But when I let it free, Hesa sighed out a warm breath and said ruefully, "We definitely can't live without this."

  I laughed against its hair and let it go before me, down to the communal meal.

  I slept alone that night and didn't particularly enjoy it, but I'd slept alone most of my life and thought a few more months of it wouldn't hurt me. Certainly it was preferable to sleeping alongside Darsi. That thought was enough to give me a carefree night and I woke refreshed and ready for the work. After washing I went down the ramp to the first floor's common room, and there found Darsi and Hesa already awake and finishing their meals.

  "Good morning," Darsi said. "Do you need me today, Pathen? There's so much to be done here..."

  "No," I said, checking the hearth to see what was available. "I'd like to talk to Thesenet privately before we settle into town. What will the two of you be doing?"

  "What won't we be doing," Darsi said with a sigh.

  "The empire is working our fields," Hesa said. "We're in the middle of negotiating their handing that task to us for management. We don't have enough eperu to work the entire grant so we'll have to borrow some of their labor, but at very least I want our people supervising the work. The fewer Claws we have on our property the easier we'll sleep."

  "And there are schedules to assign," Darsi said. "Hesa's in charge of the eperu, of course, but I was the one who scheduled the emodo when we were in het Kabbanil. That's not even touching all the things that still need to be bought for this house, food, furniture, basic supplies..."

  "Caravans, rikka, materials for the emodo to use to make something we can actually sell," Hesa continued.

  "That seems like a lot," I said. "You're sure you don't need help?"

  "We do, yes," Hesa said. "We need you to finish the legal work that establishes the House and to convince Thesenet that we are good citizens of the Stone Moon empire so we can work in peace."

  "That's right," Darsi said. "We'll do the parts that will result in soiling we can actually wash off in a bath. You can do the parts that no bath will make you feel clean after doing."

  I flicked my ears back at him and said, "Such kindness, Darsi. I almost have the sense that you don't like me."

  "Don't be ridiculous, Head of Household," Darsi said, ducking his head until he had to look up through his forelock to simper at me. "You're the star in my night sky."

  I snorted. "Don't overdo it."

  "Anything you say, beautiful hunter," Darsi said, and refilled his cup of tea from the pot by the hearth before walking out. Hesa watched him go, ears flat against its faked mane. In the silence that followed I ladled my breakfast into a bowl and filled a cup with the tea, sat down.

  "Pathen, he—"

  "Don't finish that sentence," I said. And then laughed. "Let him cavil, Hesa. Neither of us likes the situation. The least I can do is ignore his complaints."

  "Easily said for you," Hesa said. "I'm the one who's going to have to work with him all day...!"

  I grinned and it rose, and though it didn't kiss me I felt its hand trail over the back of my shoulder as it passed me on the way out.

  I spent a profitable morning in Transactions seeing to the House's administrative needs. Most of the documents had been prepared in advance of my arrival but all of them needed my mark, and that included all hundred-odd contracts for the Jokka I'd employed. Their records had been sent ahead but the agreements were not legal in het Narel until they'd been witnessed and filed in the local branch of Transactions. As I made my way through each contract I thought of Abadil, for the documents I was signing now were expensive wooden rounds and had no doubt been copied from wax tablets sent from het Kabbanil's Transactions office. These wooden rounds were painfully expensive, and had only begun to see wider use after the Stone Moon made better record-keeping a necessity. Up until very recently the contracts kept in a Transactions office were on either wax tablets or stone, depending on the length of the contract, with some older records copied onto rare bits of vellum or fabric. Paper would revolutionize this process in a way I could barely imagine, but I wagered that Abadil could imagine it and already had.

  My errand in Transactions took several hours, but when I'd finished it the emodo assigned to House Asara's filing handed me a stone to paint. This custom was as old as the first settlement when the nomad who'd decided to found het Serean set down the first rock in the foundation of the clan's dwelling. Ever since we have announced our intention to settle with a rock, and eventually those stones came to be displayed in the town Transactions office so that visitors could see at a glance how many Houses called that town home. Het Narel had several hundred, if I was any judge: the Great Houses were represented by rocks the size of my joined fists and there were perhaps twenty-five or thirty of them, and the remaining Houses ranged from the size of pebbles to stones the size of my palm.

  The stone the emodo handed me was the size of a Great House's, which told me a great deal about Thesenet. More, in fact, than the large estate. A rich House might decide to buy a large estate even if it had few people to fill it, after all. But for Thesenet to have told Transactions to set aside a stone this size for me when I'd only brought a tenth of the people needed to qualify for one....

  I countered with my own bit of arrogance, and drew for Asara's symbol a circle above three vertical lines on a horizontal: a sun and three Jokka, male, female, neuter. We would be the day that washed the Stone Moon out against the brightness of the sky.

  I had just finished this when a messenger appeared, seeking me.

  "Ke emodo," he said. "The minister's compliments, and would you join him at the cheldzan shervel in the Green for lunch."

  "Tell him I'll be along shortly," I said. "I'm just about done here."

  "Very well, ke emodo."

  I finished the administrative work and received for my trouble a silk strip with the House's sigil on it and the Stone Moon's permit information for display at the door, along with promises of official House tokens. I thanked the employees for their time and attention and went to meet the minister.

  I'd been shown the Green during our tour; unlike het Kabbanil, het Narel had only one district for the wealthy and powerful and their storefronts were all concentrated there, along the edges of a roughly octagonal courtyard and park. The latter had given the area its name and must have represented a great show of luxury when water had been harder to come by; a garden without utilitarian purpose would have been unsupportable anywhere else. The Green was even separated from the rest of town by a delicate metal gate: another ostentatious display given the dearth of metal. I let myself in and passed the Jokka idling on benches or strolling past in search of this expensive perfume or that bit of jewelry and presented my
self to the cheldzan shervel. Like the rest of the Green, this particular meeting-place was exclusive and rich; in this case, it had furnished its interior in more wood than I'd seen since policing the Great Houses of het Kabbanil. The people inside were lavishly dressed in finery even Laisira's emodo would have been hard-pressed to find fault with... but Thesenet was not among them. I found out why when one of the employees conducted me up a narrow circular ramp: he was on the roof.

  And such a roof! It had been converted into a garden with herbs, fruits and vegetables in decorative clay pots along the edges; when the breeze whispered through those fronds, they brought the scent of spices and a piquant, fresh, green smell that made breathing seem easier.

  There were three tables and only one of them was occupied. I joined Thesenet and admired the view; we were three stories up and from our vantage we could see the entire park, the octagonal path circumscribing it, and a good number of the roads leading to the grand Houses. The glow conferred by the pale, clear autumn sunlight made the scene look bejeweled.

  "Beautiful, isn't it?" Thesenet said. "We encouraged everyone to convert their roofs into garden spaces where they could. That was when I first arrived and we were fighting a potential famine. Every bit counted."

  "Beautiful and useful," I said, and poured myself a cup of tea from the pot between us. "One of the most salutary combinations."

  "I'm gratified that so many have kept on with the habit, even now that the danger's past," Thesenet said. "It means I've finally broken the people here of their assumption that water is precious and rare."

  I glanced at him, but he was looking out over the Green. The satisfaction on his face, though... that was unmistakable, and leading.

  "The climate here would seem better suited to growing, so long as the wells work," I said.

  "Oh yes," Thesenet said. "And we're experimenting now with keñalad."

  "Say again?" I said.

  He grinned then. "Don't recognize it, do you."

  I frowned and scoured my memory. Then said, "A group of bearing trees? A field of them."

  "Yes!" he said. "We've had some seeds from Neked Pamari, of trees with edible nuts and fruits, and we're going to try cultivating them the way they did in the Mystery Age."

  And that's how old the concept was; no one had collected enough seeds to make an orchard since then, and who would have the water to feed that many trees outside Neked Pamari's confluence of rivers anyway? And even that great forest's rivers were drying.

  "You really are ambitious," I said.

  "You have no idea, ke Pathen," Thesenet said. "And I have a hope that you might play a part in my plans."

  I lifted my brows. "Go on."

  Thesenet paused for a Jokkad to bring us our first course, a plate of steamed dumplings, and once he had gone said, "How much do you know about the Stone Moon's entrance into het Narel?"

  Thinking of Abadil's cageyness, I said, "Very little."

  "My predecessor mishandled it," Thesenet said, refreshing his cup of tea and sticking one of the dumplings with a skewer. "So badly the emperor had him executed on the orders of his advisor. When I arrived, the town was still smarting from the outrages dealt it by Nelet. The provisional minister appointed to hold the town until my arrival did his best to smooth over those outrages, but the truth is... the people of het Narel were justified in their angers, ke emodo. Nelet made a mess of things. He made the Stone Moon the enemy, not just in seeming, but in reality." Thesenet looked out over the town again, his eyes narrowed and a breeze tugging a strand of light hair around his throat. "His work here was complicated by the role of the Void's avatar, but even so there was no excuse for his ineptitude."

  I heard in Thesenet a twin to the anger I'd held for Darsi when he'd inherited the management of House Laisira and felt an uncomfortable empathy for the minister... uncomfortable because I knew the reason I'd been so angry was because I didn't want to have to punish Laisira for Darsi's failure. I didn't want to think that Thesenet, too, wanted to protect het Narel from the harshness of the punishments exacted on the Jokka by the empire. Hoping that would blind me to the much greater possibility that Thesenet was more likely my enemy than my ally.

  "Het Narel has so much potential," Thesenet said. "We are situated in the middle of the empire. We have good access to water now that the wells are down. Our climate is good for growing. We sit on a major crossroads to the rest of Ke Bakil's existing hets. And we aren't bound by hills or mountains or forests we can't cut down. We can grow in a way het Kabbanil and het Serean can't, not easily. We should be the trading nexus of the Stone Moon. And all that was set back years by Nelet's mismanagement. If he hadn't died, I'd have killed him myself for how hard he's made my job."

  "You seem to have it in hand now," I said, watching him.

  "Yes," Thesenet said. "But it's taken me years, and we're not where I'd hoped we'd be by now. Which is where you enter in, ke Pathen. Have you decided what you'd like to do with your House yet?"

  "We have a... research project," I said at last. "My people believe it will work, but they're only now trying it."

  Thesenet glanced at me, head canted.

  "Paper," I said. "They want to make cheap, long-lasting paper from grass. They believe they know what to add to the fibers to make it work."

  Thesenet's ears splayed. "You're serious?"

  "They certainly are," I said, amused. "So I must be too."

  "If they can manage that..." Thesenet said, and I could see him working through the possibilities, the little twitches of ear and eye as if hunting prey in a forest dense with it. Shaking himself, he said, "That's a worthy goal. Do you have anything in mind for what to do in case it takes longer to develop than planned?"

  "No," I said. "I assume you have a proposition."

  "I do," Thesenet said, and leaned toward me. "Warehouses."

  "Warehouses," I repeated, but now I suspected I was wearing a duplicate of his expression at my mention of paper. Most Great Houses kept their own goods in storerooms on their grounds and shipped them to other parts of the empire on their own caravans, or made temporary deals with other Houses to put their wares on those wagons. It was one of the major differentiators between Great Houses and small: smaller Houses could only afford to sell their wares in town now that the eperu-led caravans of earlier days had been driven out of business by the Stone Moon's licensing fees.

  "Warehouses," Thesenet said, satisfied. "Het Narel is the perfect place to pioneer a system of subsidized caravans. Houses would sell the empire their goods and we would send them on our wagons to the rest of the empire on caravans staffed by our own hires. We would keep those goods in our warehouse. And since we'll have paid for them ourselves, if there came a time when we needed those things—say, foodstuffs to stave off another famine—we would already have purchased them. We have the space for warehouses. We have access to roads and we're in the middle of the empire. Small Houses could grow rich if they could afford to send their wares to the rest of the empire. We could make that happen."

  "You want small Houses to become rich?" I asked, curious.

  "Of course!" Thesenet said. "The more wealth we produce, the safer we'll be. More wealth means more money we can set aside to grow food, to research innovations that will help preserve it. More money means we can afford to look for more sources of water. More wealth means we can support more people—"

  "Who will have to be born," I pointed out.

  "But we can have more children if we can afford it," Thesenet said.

  I leaned back in my chair, frowning.

  "If the smaller Houses grow richer," Thesenet said. "They can employ more people. They can feed more people. So long as we have the food and water and sanitation to support them. And we're working on that."

  "So these warehouses," I said. "Where does House Asara come in?"

  "Thanks to Nelet's mismanagement," Thesenet said, "there are precedents in het Narel for the empire contracting tasks to the Great Houses. I would award House Asara th
e contract to manage the warehouse initiative. That would entail overseeing the building of the first few, and then staffing them and the first caravans." He sipped from his cup. "You could give yourself a discounted rate for shipping your paper."

  ...and that would relieve us of the burden of having to build, staff and run our own caravans. It would also relieve the House of possible suspicion, as the wagons wouldn't be ours but the empire's, and Asara’s goods just another part of the whole being transported. And if we staffed the entire operation with the Jokka waiting in the wilds to finish their induction into House Asara....

  "I'll have to discuss it with my advisors," I said. "But I can confidently say you have intrigued me, Thesenet."

  "Then I can hold off on discussing the idea with anyone else?" Thesenet said, satisfied.

  "I think so," I said. "I'll have an answer for you in a week. We're still evaluating the work we've taken on with the crops behind the estate, plus we've been discussing hiring a few more people to fill out our rosters."

  "A week is fine," Thesenet said. "I hope between now and then you'll be willing to stop by House Rabeil's evening party? It would be a delight to introduce you and your lover to the other Great Houses of het Narel."

  "Count on us," I said. "I would like nothing better."

  We spent the remainder of our lunch discussing the minutia of interest to administrators... which were also of interest to me, given what we were planning for het Narel and the Stone Moon at large. So I listened attentively to discussions of the recent harvests, the management of the town's population growth, the investigation into whether the river could be renewed. As a discreet server took away the remains of our dessert, Thesenet said, "One more thing, ke Pathen. I have a permit here for House Asara directly from the Stone Moon seat, saying that you are to be made eligible for both an annual allotment of children and a permanent set of anadi for your House. In either case, you will need to visit the anadi residence... the once for your emodo to do their duties by the anadi, and again to select your females, if you want them. Perhaps we can schedule those visits soon? The breeding in particular should be done before autumn advances much further, as winter is the most salubrious time for pregnancies. The anadi take fewer mind-wounds in the cooler months."