Emuund glared up at the Night-Light as if it had personally offended him, and then returned his eye to the telescope’s eyepiece.
“Featureless. Completely featureless. How?”
He looked away again, and his sketchbook seemed to mock him with its emptiness. But what was there to sketch? Unlike the moon, which showed its usual half-face for the winter and moved through the sky against the stars in a nightly pattern that was easily explained by the mathematics of orbital motion, the Night-Light was a true mystery. It was unquestionably further away than their world was from the sun, so it should have a slower orbit, as per the law of gravity that every other known object seemed to obey, ranging from the smallest comets to the largest planets.
However, it didn’t. It remained at opposition to the sun relative to his world… mostly. Some very precise measurements in the last few years by the royal astronomers of Sloviori had shown that it was almost imperceptibly orbiting an imaginary point on the line between the sun and their planet’s center, tracing out gentle loops over a period of weeks… around what was apparently an empty point in space.
“You all right?” Haannes asked from his spot further down the rooftop by his own telescope.
“Just… what is the Night-Light orbiting?” Emuund grumbled. “It has no features, when we’ve seen clouds and craters on other bodies out there, and there’s nothing for it to orbit!”
“I have not the slightest clue,” Haannes said with a shrug, not moving from his eyepiece. “Although I do have to say that I’m partial to the ‘invisible planet’ theory.”
“You mean the theoretical object that only pulls on the Night-Light and doesn’t affect our own moon, or any of the other objects in orbit?” Emuund rebutted. “That theory was disproven fifteen years ago when that comet passed through the region and it wasn’t affected.”
“Yes, but then what is it orbiting?”
“Gaaah!”
“Here, why don’t you give a look at Kilia?” Haannes said. “It’s particularly gorgeous at the moment. Relax, draw some sketches, and then get back to pounding your head against the wall.”
“Gladly. At least there I can be of some use.” Emuund reoriented his telescope; this was his first winter with this particular one, and he adored it already. It had a curved silver mirror measuring almost a foot across instead of the outdated eight-inch glass lens of his old one, which he’d passed down to his nephew. Kilia was easy to spot, with its red-salmon coloring, and he had it in his eyepiece a few moments later.
“Gorgeous…” he breathed. The planet, which was the third one out from his own world, was marked by great belts of clouds and storms, and had an intricate set of rings banding around the planet’s equator. Unlike Nephaas, Kilia had a modest tilt of only eighteen degrees from its plane of orbit, but that was still enough to see the rings in all of their glory as they cast shadows on the surface of their world. Several of Kilia’s moons were also visible—and they orbited according to the laws of gravity, as the hundred and more years since their discovery had shown!
He looked at the Isurn Gap between the two largest sets of rings; the thin black line was stark against the red and white of the rings above and below it. “I wonder what causes that?”
“What?”
“The Isurn Gap.”
“I was just reading up on that, and one theory that seems to fit is orbital resonance,” Haannes said. “It’s at the right distance from the planet that every two orbits at that distance would match up to one orbit of Golea, so the moon is pulling the particles out of that gap.”
“You still think that the ring is made up of particles?”
“It has to be. A solid ring wouldn’t be stable.”
“You mean like how the Night-Light doesn’t seem to orbit anything?”
“Fair, but how many exceptions to natural laws are we making here?”
“As few as possible, I suppose.” He mused. Yes, over enough time, the gravity of the moon would pull out any little rocks from that ring, just like how the tides here on their world went in time with their own moon…
He looked away from his eyepiece and up at their moon. It was nearing ninety degrees away from the Night-Light, meaning that they were closing in on Mid-Winter. The general structure of his world’s orbital mechanics came up, almost as a model as he visualized it in his mind. The moon, orbiting over Nephaas’ deeply tilted equator, and the Night-Light, somewhere far beyond. Right now, the summer in the southern hemisphere would be reaching its height, with great storms that would blow northward from the south pole as the oceans steamed. It all worked so nicely, like clockwork.
Looking back through the eyepiece, he tried to just soak in the beauty of the far-off planet. It was fascinating to think that the gap in the rings could be from the influence of the moon, impacting its fellow orbiters…
The realization struck him like a blow, and he pulled away from the eyepiece.
“Everything all right?” Haannes asked.
“Yes! I just—I need paper and pen and a counting frame!” he said as he started to hurriedly put away his telescope.
“Check inside. I think Raavi left some in his desk.”
“Yes, yes!”
Having packed up his telescope, he went inside, barely taking the time to remove his coat and boots before going off to find the materials he needed. Sitting down at the kitchen table, he started by looking up in his reference book the figures he needed, and then began doing math.
“All right… so the orbit based on the mass of the sun is directly proportional to the product of the mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers…” he said, citing the law of gravitation. “Now… what happens if I add the planet’s mass to that of the sun?”
Ten pages of paper and several hours of furious math later, he had an answer.
There was a stable point a million miles further out from the sun, where his world’s gravity and that of their sun would add together.
He slumped in the chair, exhausted but exultant. He’d solved it.
He’d solved it.
The Night-Light orbited this stable point. He’d need to do more of the math, but if he was correct, he’d just solved the greatest mystery in astronomy for his age—how far away was the Night-Light, and how did it keep pace with his planet?
And if he knew how far away it was… then he could figure out how big it was in reality. It appeared to be just under a quarter the size of the moon, but was much, much brighter. Which meant that they could figure out how reflective it was…
He realized he was crying and wiped away the tears.
“I wish Raavi was here…” he muttered. “The kid would love this…”
But the boy was off somewhere, escorting that duke’s wife to the capital… and he'd left weeks ago. He just hoped that he wasn’t dead in a ditch somewhere. It would be awful to have to explain to his parents where their son had gone…
No, he was probably just holed up in the capital. Given the difficulties with traveling in winter, it was almost certain that they’d arrived and would be staying there until it was easier to come back. He’d probably be on the first canal barge come Spring, full of tales about the beauty of the capital by the sea.
He rose and got himself something to drink out of the icebox. A good beer proved handy, and he knocked it back, only to jump as someone pounded on the door. “Get out here! A courier from the capital just arrived!” he heard through the front door.
“What!? In winter?” Emuund demanded, but, his exhaustion forgotten, he ran to pull his boots and coat back on.
A few minutes later, he was down at the canal-head, where a crowd of the overwinterers had gathered around what looked strangely familiar—a copy of Raavi’s ice-boat.
Well, close to it, Emuund could see. It was smaller and lighter, with just two men in it.
Neither of them were Raavi.
The mayor came marching up, and the two men from the boat spoke with him before giving him a sealed sack in exchange for a signature. Then they were off down the canal, moving with incredible speed.
“I… I guess Raavi made it to the capital,” Emuund heard someone say. “And they liked his idea!”
“Good for him! I hope that he’s getting credit from the King for it!” someone else in the crowd commented, and they gave a little cheer. Their boy had done good!
Then they all turned to the mayor. “Any news?”
“Not that they told me. Just that this is mail, official and unofficial, for the town. I will look and see if there is anything of relevance and see to it that you all get your deliveries in short order,” the mayor said brusquely, but then he turned and looked down the canal, where the ice-boat had vanished already into the distance. Then he shook his head, and Emuund heard the mayor say quietly “Well done, lad. Well done.”
Shaking his own head, Emuund made his way back to the house. Just seeing the ice-boat made him relax. Raavi wasn’t dead or lost. Instead, royal couriers were using his design to travel through the winter. If that didn’t say so much right there…
The boy’s mother would be proud, and his father pleased and exasperated, and now Emuund couldn’t wait to tell them.
He’d gotten back to his calculations, cleaning them up and preparing them for publication, when Haannes came in. “Hoy! Emuund, you need to see this!”
“What is it?”
“News from the Royal Astronomy Society. So this Equal Night, we’re in for a treat!”
“Oh?”
“So someone has crunched the numbers and apparently, in three months, the moon will be in just the right place at just the right time that it’ll be between us and the sun. They’re calling it an ‘eclipse’.”
“I remember reading up on the idea. It was purely theoretical, wasn’t it?” Emuund said. “Just as a matter of probability?”
“Well, we’re going to have one for real, and it’s going to pass over our kingdom, Emuund!” Haannes looked like he was about to start bouncing from foot to foot. “Something that’s a once in a thousand year opportunity, and it’s going to happen right here! According to the math, it’ll be in a line across the Center Sea, and reach its maximum extent inland from here—in the duchy of Rechneesse.”
Emmund breathed out. “Wow. Let me see that.”
Just as Haannes handed him the paper, though, there was another pounding at the door. Emuund rose, wondering where his peaceful winter had gone.
One of the mayor’s staff stood outside. “Town meeting. Get going.”
“What is it?”
“We’re preparing for war.”
#
The snow crunched under Thamiyiba’s feet. Like the others with her, she carried a spear in her hands.
“There,” came the word from her group’s leader, Zaahur. “Another town.”
Thamiyiba squinted to peer through the darkness. Sure enough, a small settlement lay nestled in the valley between the rolling hills, a grove of oilsap trees on the northern edge, as was typical of these people.
Despite the suggestions of some, they had resisted burning those trees across all of their raids. A few of their people, who had been distraught at the loss of friends of centuries, had attempted to fire the groves, but they had managed to extinguish the fires before they’d caught and spread. It was bad enough what they were doing; there was no need to make it worse. They would be—had already been—spreading enough chaos and destruction as it was. Spreading more out of spite at their victims would be an even greater damnation.
Thamiyiba knelt with the others as Zaahur led the prayer. “Blessed be those who came before us, those who laid the trail for us to follow. Thank you to all of our ancestors, whose efforts raised us and enabled us. We shall follow in your footsteps, day by day, hour by hour, until the last, carrying our inheritors before us, so that they might know a better world.”
“A better world,” the group intoned, and rose.
As they trudged through the snow, Thamiyiba found her thoughts circling again. They gave thanks to their ancestors, but to the living of their people, they were the ancestors thus praised and thanked. Had her own parents and grandparents ever felt this conflicted? This confused and agonized at what they needed to do in order to survive? Seen a betrayal of their ideals in the name of continuing on?
But… if she didn’t… if they didn’t…
She remembered the Nightfest, the feast at the last rising of the sun before the winter. Her eightfold-great-grandchildren had looked at her with fear and worry, not knowing if they would see her again. Dressed in the fine tunics she had woven for them, the youngest squeezing a doll Thamiyiba had first crafted a hundred years before, and repaired anew for each generation, they had clutched their parents as they had gone down to the sleeping chambers… but not before each of them had given her an embrace and a blessing.
Her heart, which no longer beat, had broken at their fear and worry.
It was for them that she did this. It was so that they would survive and thrive from her efforts that she had first put her name on the scroll.
While no one spoke of it, it was an open secret among those who had seen their decades turn to centuries that the Oathbound needed to have ties to the living. As strong as principles were, one could not labor ceaselessly on behalf of principles. One needed a face, a family, loved ones on whose behalf they continued on, year after year, season after season, generation after generation. Because otherwise, one day, you would ask yourself why you were continuing on, spinning, weaving, herding, carving, painting, endlessly…
And one could say, for the sake of my tribe and my people all one wanted. And for some, that sustained for a while. But eventually, it would wear thin, and on the day when it broke…
There would be an empty spot on the scroll to be filled with a new name.
But for Thamiyiba?
She had sewn the wedding garments for all of her married descendants—all eight hundred and sixty-three of them. She had held them when they were born. She had anointed them when they passed into the company of the ancestors.
And she had assured the youngest of them that she would be there when winter passed.
She had made many oaths in her life, and intended to fulfill this one.
They reached the town, and began to search for those who were awake.
“Remember,” Zaahur said, “we pull back at the first sign of significant resistance, but if it comes down to it… don’t risk yourselves over them. We’re here to provoke, not slaughter.”
Thamiyiba nodded, and held the spear as she and the other spear-wielders moved together.
The overwinterers were easy to find, clustered in a few houses towards the center of the town, near a large building that had smoke drifting from a brick chimney.
A few Oathbound with massive hammers broke down the doors, and others smashed some windows and walls.
Inside, the Kalltii screamed and shouted, and there was a clangor of metal on metal as they fought back. They’d been warned, apparently.
Good. Thamiyiba still felt sick at the early attacks they’d been forced to stage, where they’d attacked an unaware populace in the middle of winter. It was dishonorable, a travesty, a violation of all that was good and proper…
And yet…
What choice did they have?
Still, as a building began to burn and they pulled back, Thamiyiba glanced back at the flaming structure.
All of her existence, she had made things. She had taken disorder and made order from it, whether that was a chaotic mass of fleece from a sheep, spun into yarn, dyed into colors, and then woven into the structure of cloth and fabric, or any of the other crafts she had trained in. It was the nature of the Oathbound of the Gehtun, the great contradiction of their existence—by binding themselves to death and decay, they brought life and order. While the world itself attempted to tear down everything they built, they defied the calling of death itself in order to rebuke chaos.
So it galled her that now she had become the sunderer in the winter night, bringing pain and death and destruction.
#
“Blessed to you are those who bring forth the life and the growth,” King Luitpoold intoned as he sat kneeling on the woven mat. He hummed in wordless vocalization as he threw another pinch of incense onto the brazier in front of him, making a small cloud of fragrant smoke appear in time with the chiming bell held by one of the acolytes. “Thanks be to those who bless the fields and the groves with fertility and spirit.” Another wordless intonation, echoed by those seated around him, and he threw in the next pinch of incense, again accompanied by the bell. “Thus we give thanks. Thus we mark the turnings of the years and the seasons. Thus we stand, as the next link in the chain, growing forth to tomorrow.”
“Thus we stand,” intoned the others. “Thus we give thanks.”
Luitpoold set the bowl of incense aside and bowed, pressing his forehead to the floor. “Thus passes the year.”
As the others echoed his words and followed his motion, the chamber felt as if it had grown damp and fecund; a smell like a forest after a rainstorm permeated the air. A shimmering of light seemed to be reflected in the smooth floor, but he did not dare look up; he knew what he would see, and he did not wish to offend the spirit. Not now, not when things were so dire for his kingdom.
The sensation passed, and Luitpoold rose; one of his aides helped him to his feet, and he looked out across the vast chamber that underlaid his capital.
Through some lost art he did not understand, the ceiling gave light when charged with Breath, but did so in a manner vastly different than the usual form of Breath-charged crystals.
And under those arcane lights stood something precious.
Bending over, Luitpoold reached down and examined the tiny seedling sprouting from the soil of its pot, and felt a thrill. No matter how many times he’d done this, no matter how many pots crowded the chamber, each with their freshly sprouted oilsap, conifur, or other baby tree, it always pleased him. His kingdom would grow, both in prosperity and in life. Come spring and the melting of the canals, these seedlings would be shipped out to every village, town, grove, and city in the realm, where they would be planted to add to the existing groves. Certainly they could plant their own—and many places did—but the trees that came from the royal nursery reportedly grew better, and were distinct from their fellows in hardiness and potency.
But that was for later, and first he had to make sure that they would have a kingdom to be planted in.
Leaving the underground chamber, he returned to the King’s Tower and was dressed in his robes of office by his attendants.
“So where do we stand?” he asked as his embroidered vest, the threads marking out the honors and ranks he held, was placed over his tunic.
His leading general, Conraad ava Eernst, bowed politely. “At the moment, damage from these barbarians seems to be light; generally, from the reports we’ve been given, they seem to be mostly probing for weaknesses. Mostly they come rushing in, attack, draw blood, and then retreat back out to the snows. Some fatalities, but mostly moderate to serious wounds are the worst we deal with.”
Luitpoold scoffed and held his arms out as his aides buttoned up his clothes. “Makes sense. Do probing attacks in winter, find out where the weakest places are, and then concentrate before the kingdom awakens and strike at those places. They have unmatched mobility in these conditions, after all.”
“At least they did, before we got our hands on these ice-boats,” Conraad said with a wry smile. “When Spring comes, we’ll be ready, mobilized in a way that we couldn’t have been without them.” He shook his head. “Why didn’t we ever come up with these before?”
“Because who has a major war break out in the middle of winter, where news and reports suddenly take on such magnitude?” Luitpoold said sourly.
“I know, sire. It was just a rhetorical question. I, for one, am blessing that young blacksmith boy.” He chuckled. “If he and the pirate end up coming back from their fool’s errand, I think that I would like to lay claim to the boy for the army and see what else he can cook up.”
Luitpoold scoffed. “If he manages to get back, we’ll speak. As far as I’m concerned, he’s either dead or lost in enemy territory. But at least before he went he gave us the tools to combat these raids.” He sighed. That was a letter he wasn’t terribly looking forward to have to write, but given the boy’s service to the kingdom, if and when it came to it, he would have to write to the boy’s parents, listing the accolades their son had earned in his short-lived service to the kingdom.
“You don’t think he and the Lady will survive?” Conraad asked. “She’s already shown considerable talent for survival.”
“Yes, she’s quite the mythologized pirate. And she is competent. And if she does manage to return with an armistice, I then have other problems. But I doubt it.” He shook his head… even as a small portion of the back of his mind was both annoyed and grateful that he wouldn’t have the excuse or reason to pin back Duke Rechneesse and his ambitions. But in the end, as annoying as the Duke was, his day would come. For now…
A war, on a flank he had always considered secure and safe, was burgeoning.
And it was time to prepare.
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