The count's wagon came through the farm gate at the front of his column, the fifteen soldiers on war horses spreading to either side with the practiced formation of a retinue that had done this before. The official rode alongside the wagon with the upright posture of someone who derived satisfaction from the formality of his own position.
The count stepped down from the wagon.
He was a heavy man in his sixties, dressed for display rather than function, with the specific quality of someone who had held authority long enough that he had stopped distinguishing between what people showed him willingly and what they showed him because they had no choice. He looked at the farm with the assessing eye of someone inventorying value. He looked at the house — the expanded farmhouse with its good stonework and its double the original footprint — and his expression adjusted upward. He looked at the family standing in the yard.
He looked for longer than was polite at Mira, and then at Lyra.
He looked at the family as a whole and the assessment settled on something that resembled mild confusion.
'I am looking,' he said, 'for Edric Voss. The landowner.'
'That's me,' Edric said. He stepped forward with the composure of a man who had dealt with difficult people in business negotiations and knew which face to show them.
The count looked at him. He looked at Mira. He looked back at Edric.
'The records indicate you are thirty-four years old,' he said.
'Thirty-four, yes,' Edric said.
The count's eyes moved over him — the face that looked twenty-one, the posture of a body that had been significantly upgraded and had had months to normalize the upgrade. He looked at Mira again, who stood beside her husband and looked the way Mira had looked since February, which was extraordinary and effortlessly so.
The count gathered himself. 'There have been reports,' he said. 'From several sources. This family has sold unusual materials — monster-grade, high quality — through multiple markets. There have been accounts of remarkable animals on this property. And there have been observations —' he paused, '— regarding the appearance of this household. Specifically, that its members appear to have grown considerably younger over the past year.' He looked at Edric directly. 'On imperial authority, I am here to understand how this is possible.'
Edric's expression was the expression of a man who was genuinely confused by an absurd question and was being patient about it. 'We are just farmers,' he said. 'However, we've been very fortunate this year with our herb gathering, trapping, and hunting. Good land, good forest, years of learning the territory. The monster meat — we've eaten it as part of our diet for some time. It keeps you strong.' He gestured at his family. 'You can see we're in good health.'
The official beside the count leaned forward. 'The penalty for deceiving nobility —'
'I'm not deceiving anyone,' Edric said, with the specific quiet tone that was more effective than volume. 'I'm answering the question I was asked.'
The official's eyes moved across the family, the particular restless inventory of someone looking for leverage. They stopped on Lyra. With her long silver hair, delicate features, sharp silver blue eyes, and fair skin, she was like a fairy in the sunlight.
Arthur saw it happen. He saw the calculation that followed.
'My lord,' the official said to the count, 'that silver-haired girl. She has a remarkable quality about her. She will be an extraordinary woman in a few years.' He smiled in the way of someone who considered this a pleasant observation. 'Surely a place could be found for her in your household. One of your sons would benefit from —'
Mira moved. Not toward the official — she had enough control for that — but the sound she made was the sound of a woman who had received something that had gone beyond what she was willing to receive quietly.
'Over my dead body,' she said. Her voice was level and absolute and contained several centuries of maternal instinct compressed into four words.
Arthur's hand was already collecting mana. He held it.
Edric put his hand on Mira's arm — not restraining, steadying — and looked at the official with the expression he used when he had assessed a person and reached a conclusion and was now deciding what to do with it.
'My daughter,' Edric said, with a patience that was itself a statement, 'is not even nine years old. She has been ill for much of her life and is not yet of age. Any conversation of this kind will wait until she is of age, and I would ask that we not have it again before then.'
The count looked at Lyra. At the silver hair, the height, the specific quality she had acquired from months of dragon meat and black pills and the particular combination of her parentage. 'Only nine?' he said, apparently genuinely surprised.
'Eight,' Edric said.
'Remarkable,' the count said, and moved on with the ease of a man who could care less.
He looked at Mira. 'You look considerably younger than your listed age,' he said. 'Both of you do. How do you explain such things?'
Mira produced the pills from her pocket with the specific timing of someone who had been waiting for this moment. She set two in the count's palm with the manner of a woman sharing something she was rather proud of. 'I've been making these for some time,' she said. 'It's a recipe I developed — herbs from the spring growth, a preparation process that takes most of a day. They help with energy and they have some healing properties, nothing dramatic.' She looked at them with the fondness of a craftsperson looking at their work. 'I have wondered sometimes if they might account for how well we've all been keeping. My, what luck if they do!'
Arthur's eyebrow twitched.
The count looked at the pills. He looked at Mira. He looked at the pills again with the expression of a man whose aging mind had been hoping for something more dramatic and was now recalibrating toward something he could actually use.
'I will have these analyzed,' he said.
'Of course,' Mira said warmly. 'I'll write out the recipe before you leave. It's really quite simple if you know which herbs to look for. The spring growth is key — they only come up properly in spring, which is why production is limited.'
'Yes,' the count said. He was already holding the pills with the proprietary quality of someone deciding what they were worth to him.
He turned to his captain. 'Inspect the property.'
◆ ◆ ◆
Clara was at the door.
She had been at the door since the convoy arrived, in the specific position of someone who had decided where the line was and was standing on it. The captain looked at her with the reflexive assessment that men like him applied to pretty things.
'Step aside, girl,' he said. 'You do not obstruct official inspection.' He looked at her more closely, the way the official had looked at Lyra, with a similar calculation. 'Quite a looker. Step aside before you cause yourself trouble, sweetheart.'
Clara's foot came down on the step with a sound that was quieter than it should have been for the effect it produced.
'You cannot barge into our home uninvited,' she said. 'This is our property. We have paid our taxes. We have done nothing wrong. You ride in here with your horses and your swords and your — ' she paused, collecting a word, '— your attitude, and you act like you own everything you see, and we are supposed to just —' she tapped his chest with one finger, '— just let you.'
The captain's face went red.
Thomas appeared. Not from anywhere dramatic — he had simply been nearby and was now standing beside Clara with his hand closed around the captain's wrist in the specific grip of someone who had decided the wrist needed to stop what it was doing.
'Don't,' Thomas said. One word, correct weight.
He looked at Clara.
She looked at him. Something in her expression that was not quite the emotion she had been running on, landing differently because Thomas was there.
'Let them pass,' he said quietly. 'You made your point.'
She held the door for one more moment. Then she stepped aside.
◆ ◆ ◆
Ten soldiers walked into the farmhouse.
Arthur watched through Shadow's positioning inside the house — the copies he had placed before the convoy arrived, small and still in the shadows of the expanded rooms. The soldiers moved through the space with the expressions of men who had been sent to inspect a farm and were confronted with a farm that looked like a minor noble's estate.
The leather furniture. The fireplace running at the correct warmth. The kitchen with the magical stove, which one soldier touched and pulled his hand back from as if burned by the temperature management enchantment activating. The size of the rooms — the doubled family room, the proper hallway, the staircase to the upper floor.
The count had followed his men inside.
He stood in the center of the family room and turned slowly, reading the value of what surrounded him in the way that came from decades of assessing what things were worth. He looked at the stove. He looked at the cold-light panels. He looked at the furniture.
'How did you come by all of this,' he said to Edric, who had followed them in.
'Built it or purchased it,' Edric said. 'Over several years. We've had good seasons.'
The count looked at the cold-light panel in the ceiling, which was running at midday intensity. His expression was the expression of someone who had seen magical lighting before but had expected to see it in castles, not in a farmhouse north of Thornwick.
Arthur saw the soldier at the kitchen counter at the same moment the soldier saw the jar.
It was a simple jar, ceramic, sitting where a household savings jar would sit, containing coins — gold and silver, a modest amount, the kind of sum a farm household might accumulate over a careful season. The soldier looked at it. He looked at the room. He looked at the soldiers around him, all occupied with their own inspections. He picked up the jar, turned so his body blocked the sight line to the count, and began to pocket the contents.
Arthur cleared his throat. Loudly. From across the room.
'Mommy,' he said, with the voice he used for situations that required performing his age, 'the man is taking all of our savings from our money jar.'
Every head in the room turned. The soldier froze with coins in his fist, the pouch at his hip now containing what was no longer in the jar. Arthur's spell — quiet, targeted — had already worked a small hole in the seam of the pouch. The coins fell from his pockets and hit the floor in a cascade that was significantly louder than coins usually managed when they hit stone.
The silence lasted a long moment.
Edric stepped forward. He was not loud. He had never needed to be loud.
'We paid our annual tax in full,' he said. 'Your men came to inspect our home and are now robbing us, your people? Is this how you rule over us? My daughter was threatened in terms I will not repeat in front of my children.' He looked at the count directly. 'Is this how the count treats his people.'
The count looked at the soldier. He looked at the coins on the floor. He looked at Edric.
He had the specific expression of a powerful man who had been put in the position of having to respond to a legitimate complaint in front of witnesses, which was a position that powerful men did not enjoy.
'Return it,' the count said to the soldier. Flatly.
The soldier collected the coins from the floor in silence and put them back in the jar. His expression was the expression of someone who understood that a punishment was coming and was calculating its shape.
The count looked at Edric. 'He will be dealt with,' he said. 'You have my word on that.'
'I appreciate it,' Edric said, with the composure of someone accepting a statement at face value while reserving judgment on whether it was true.
Then the captain appeared at the hallway entrance.
He had three soldiers behind him, and between them — laid out on a cloth they had apparently taken from somewhere in the house — were several items from the property. The magical stove's control crystal, which one of them had pried loose. A cold-light panel removed from the wall of the upstairs corridor. And one of the smaller enchanted warming stones Arthur had built into the guest room, dug out of its housing.
'My lord,' the captain said. 'Found these throughout the property. Magical equipment, enchanted beyond anything a farm family would ordinarily possess. We thought you should see them.'
Arthur looked at the items on the cloth. He looked at the holes in the wall where the panel had been. He kept his expression exactly where it was.
The count's eyes changed. The calculation that had been running behind them shifted into something more focused.
'These belong to us,' Edric said. His voice was still level. 'They were built by my son. They are not available for inspection or removal.'
'Magical items of this quality,' the official beside the count said, 'may be subject to assessment under the —'
'They are on private property,' Edric said. 'We have paid our taxes. We have broken no law that I am aware of.'
The count looked at the items. He looked at the family. He looked at Arthur — at the seven-year-old boy standing in the kitchen doorway who had apparently built enchanted equipment that his men could not identify the origin of.
He was quiet for a long moment.
'Return them,' he said to the captain. 'Carefully. And repair whatever you damaged removing them.'
The captain looked like he had more to say. He did not say it.
The count looked at Edric. 'These items will require a proper assessment,' he said. 'I do not have the appropriate specialist with me today. I or a representative of my house will return for a formal visit.' He paused. 'Within the month, I would expect.'
'We will be here,' Edric said.
'Yes,' the count said, looking at the family one last time. 'I imagine you will.'
He took his men and his wagon and the recipe in his pocket and left.
The farmyard was quiet.
Arthur watched the convoy through Shadow's feed until it cleared the farm gate. He kept a copy on the underside of the count's wagon — thumbnail-sized, patient, already feeding.
'Within the month,' Thomas said.
'Someone more prepared than him,' Arthur said. 'With someone who knows what magical equipment looks like and how to value it.' He looked at the wall where the panel had been. 'We have some time.'
They went inside and he closed the door.
❧