Chapter 1

September 480 I.C., Westerland

They were in the upstairs linen closet, the one at the end of the hall with the family’s bedrooms, and Ansbach had his hand over Lotti’s mouth, trying in vain to stifle her laughter. From all sides, the sounds of the other servants rang muffled through the plaster walls: heavy stomps all around as people moved furniture, and orders yelled to the maids and footmen by the housekeeper and butler respectively drifted up through the floors as the servants’ lunch break ended, and they all returned to work. He thought they had more time, and either the time had passed by without his notice, or the servants’ lunch had been abridged. The house, preparing for the family’s return to their Westerland estate, was in chaos, and Ansbach, who should have been heading back to his squadron, was in the long and narrow closet, with his uniform pants around his ankles and Lotti’s black skirt rucked up around her waist. 

“Do you want to get caught?” he tried to say, but this only made her laugh harder. She leaned on the shelves, her elbows bracing her on the family’s stacks of soft sheets and winter quilts. Ansbach wasn’t sure how she still had breath with which to make noise, bent at the angle she was. Almost everything he did made her giggle— it was a trait of hers that lived directly on the precipice between endearing and annoying. 

“They already made all the beds,” she said, peeling Ansbach’s hand away from her face and threading her fingers in his. Her hands were rougher than his— years of kitchen work, lye and hot water, had calloused them beyond repair. “Nobody’s going to come in here.” She punctuated this with a laugh. “But hurry up, hurry— oh.”

That, at least, was something he could comply with, and it at last made her giggling stop, as she squeezed her eyes shut and crushed his hand in hers, her hot breath coming in fits and starts across his knuckles. His other hand— he wanted to touch her, but her dress covered every part of her that he could reach, and he didn’t want to leave any evidence by messing her long brown braid by sticking his fingers in it. So he, too, grabbed a fistful of feather-down quilt on the shelves, just for something to do with his hand. He pinched the monogrammed Braunschweig family crest between his thumb and forefinger, and the silk wicked up the sweat on his palm.  

When someone’s footsteps passed the hallway and stopped in front of the closet, the momentary terror struck him in the same place as desire did, if cold rather than hot, and he finished with a stifled breath. In the moment, he pulled the quilt forward off he shelf enough that it dislodged the packets of lavender tucked inside it, one of them falling down and hitting Lotti’s head. She managed to keep her composure until Frau Alburg, the housekeeper, said, “And those flowers can go by the windows. Be careful with that vase! Be careful, I said!” and trotted back off down the hallway.

The momentary danger passed, Lotti giggled again, finding the ability once more. “You’re going to bring the whole house down on me,” she whispered. She pulled away from him, and her skirt fell back down, though her undergarments remained around her ankles. She picked up the lavender packet that had fallen to the floor, and tossed it at him with a grin. He let it hit his chest, but caught it before it fell all the way to the ground. Not sure what to do with it after that, he put it in his pocket as he pulled his pants up. He wasn’t self conscious, but he was eager to get out of the closet. The voices of the flower arrangers outside had quieted, footsteps heading back downstairs, so it was an opportunity for them to slip out, if they were quick.

“We should get out of here,” he said. “They’re going to be looking for you in the kitchen if they’re all done eating.”

“You’re going to have to make it up to me later,” Lotti said, fixing her garments and checking her reflection in the narrow and warped glass of the window. 

He wanted to ask when that would be, but didn’t say anything. The reason they were in the closet, and only now, was because it was the only moment they had managed to snatch together in the months he had been on the planet. Their relationship, like her laughter, balanced on the edge of flirtation and frustration. She shared a room with two other girls in the servants’ quarters, which were kept strict watch over by the housekeeper, and he lived in the barracks, a three mile walk away. They saw each other a few times a week, maybe, at most— always in public, usually in town— stole a few words here and there. He bought her a drink at the pub at lunchtime once, and she was only able to drink a quarter of it before checking the clock and realizing that she had to run back to the manor house or risk a severe reprimand from the cook.

Today, when he came to the manor to ask the housekeeper about arranging the soldiers’ plans for greeting the duke, she stood in the servants’ hall down in the basement, listening as she chopped potatoes, and stared at him from behind Herr Ketter’s back, meeting his eyes for as long as he could stand it. When Herr Ketter walked away, she asked if she could give him some lunch, before his long walk back to town. She gave him a plate, and he sat in the servants hall and talked while she peeled carrots, until the rest of the servants all came down in a great bustle. While the rest of them were eating their lunches— Ansbach hardly remembered how it had happened, the sequence of events had fallen directly out of his memory the moment Lotti gripped his wrist— she pulled him upstairs. She aimed for the master bedroom, the duke and princess’s room, but when she put her hand on the door, he tugged her a little way further, to the linen closet. It was safer there, marginally, at least until the moment when they had to leave. He hadn’t anticipated this much, but, caught up in the moment like he often found himself, things progressed, leaving his control.

“I’m sure you’ll see me when we’re on parade,” Ansbach said.

“You won’t have a chance to get away,” she replied. “I’m going to— I’ll figure something out.” She laughed. “We’ll find time. I want to see you— really. Properly.”

“You’d better get back downstairs,” he said. He hated how perfunctory he was, but she didn’t seem to mind. She turned around and tugged his uniform shirt back into position. “I’ll wait here for a minute. We shouldn’t be seen together.”

“Oh, you are paranoid,” she laughed. “It’s not like you’re a stranger. It wouldn’t be that odd for you to want to see how the house has been kept.”

This only made Ansbach more aware of the danger. “I don’t think half of them downstairs recognized me,” he said.

“I didn’t at first, either. Not until you— well,” Lotti said. She cut herself off— it had been clear that she had been about to mention the funeral, and changed her mind. But she added, appreciatively, “You certainly aren’t fifteen anymore.” 

Nothing he could say to that. “You should go.”

She lifted his hand, pressed it to her cheek, and then her lips for a moment, and then turned for the door. She stuck her head out, saw the coast was clear, and then vanished. Once she was gone, Ansbach slumped back against the shelves of linens. Her absence came as something of a relief. Whatever these frantic few minutes had been, he regretted them already, as he usually did when he allowed himself to get caught up in things. He shouldn’t have gone along with it, not as far as it went.

He should have straightened out the rumpled bedding— if the housekeeper came in here, some maid would get a scolding for sloppy work— but he didn’t. Instead, he fingered the lavender sachet in his pocket, then put it to his nose. The smell was powerful and nostalgic, the little square of scrap flannel sewn up around last season’s herbs. He deluded himself into thinking that he recognized the fabric, something out of his mother’s own scrap basket, a cut up old shirt she had worn, but this was a lie. He tucked the sachet back into his pocket, listened carefully at the door, and then left the linen closet. He took the back stairs, the servants’ stairs, down, but left on the ground floor without re-entering the basement hall. The one footman who passed him, squeezing by him with a rug rolled up in his arms, didn’t spare him a second glance or a greeting, though Ansbach knew his name and face quite well. Without Lotti dragging him through the house, and without a task to perform, his familiarity with the manor made him feel even more like an intruder, and he hurried outside. 

In the back, the gardeners were hard at work on the bushes, and there was someone on the roof of the manor home re-bricking one of the chimneys. No one was paying him any attention at all, and so he took the long way around the building, heading further back towards the trees, to the stables and kennels. The stables were busy— boys whose names Ansbach didn’t know were preparing the horses for their master’s arrival: checking all the tack and braiding their manes. 

The kennel was empty of men, and so Ansbach walked inside, then leaned on the low fence to check on the hounds. The dogs didn’t care that he was there; he was beneath their notice, just another servant in a rotating cast. He didn’t even attract the attention of the bitch with spotted forelegs and curlier hair than the rest. It took him a moment to spy her in the yard, to the point where he wondered if she was still there. It seemed that in the years since he had left, she had had litters of pups, and now her russet curls were plentiful among the spry yapping and trotting bunch. There she was, off at the edge of the fence. She was old now, grey around her muzzle, laying in the far corner of the kennel-yard, where the well-trod dirt managed to retain stubs of wild-wheat grass, and the shadows of the trees didn’t quite reach, leaving just a patch of watery sunlight.

Ansbach looked at the dog, tracing the thinness of her ribs and the weariness in the set of her head. Her eyes were half-closed, and when a younger dog took a corner too tightly and careened into where she lay, she didn’t even snap at him, just lifting her head and then setting it back down again as the other dog ran off. Ansbach had trained her, before he left, teaching her a few simple things. Nothing anyone else cared about: shake hands, sit, stand up and open the latch of the pasture with her nose. No one cared much about what the dogs knew, as long as they would chase the foxes and keep out from underfoot of the horses, and so long as no one was teaching the dogs to fight each other, no one minded if boys around the estate took them out from the kennel every so often. The duke, or one of his ancestors, must have said it was allowed at some point, maybe only because he liked the sight of it. The mental image, of Ansbach’s former self in country clothing with a hound tagging at his heel was so bucolic that his lip twisted in disgust. 

Ansbach looked across the kennel at the dog, who didn’t lift her chin off her paws to acknowledge him. He wondered if she still remembered the tricks, and thought about whistling and calling her by name to come over. But as he opened his mouth, he realized that he had no idea what the dog’s name was, or had been. The forgetfulness was mutual. He turned away, and the running dogs, who had previously been ignoring him, bayed at his departure and snapped their jaws at the fence: quarry escaping.

Ansbach started down the long dirt road into town. The manor house was on a hill, so the walk back was easier than the way he had come, so long as he was careful in avoiding the rutted, mud-filled holes in the path. When he passed the small cluster of buildings where the upper servants lived, those married and with families who didn’t stay in the servants’ quarters in the main house, he averted his eyes, and studied the forest instead, contemplating its unusual layout.

Westerland was a rich colony planet, having a good base composition, and it had taken terraforming well, after they used asteroids to saturate the atmosphere and ground with carbon. That had been a long time ago. The first people settled it several hundred years ago, three hundred? He wasn’t sure. Generations, anyway. 

In some ways, it was similar to Odin: the temperature ranges it experienced in the settled regions were only ten percent different, if he had to put a number to it. The gravity was proximate as well, though Westerland was a larger planet by a fraction, giving him a mild childhood advantage he carried with him when he left for Odin. The seasons on Westerland were longer, though. Summer stretched on for eight months, and winter lasted just as long. It made his memories of childhood feel cramped and small: almost an entire year, age eight, spent in the depths of winter, another passed in bloom— though he must have grown, the hazy world of recollection gave him no indication of it. 

The days on Westerland were longer, too, by almost six hours.When he arrived in the capital as a student, Ansbach found it impossible to get to sleep when everyone else did, and he credited some of his early academic successes to using his stolen wakefulness to study, and his early failures to feeling like he should be asleep in the middle of class time. Returning to Westerland, he was again out of sorts, though when the commander on the planet described without blinking the twelve hour shift that would be Ansbach’s daily lot, he stiffened his back and accepted it with a, “Yes, sir.” It was fewer hours than the footmen worked, in any event.

But the differences between Westerland and Odin were clear, even in this forest around the manor that tried to emulate the capital as best it could. It was very obvious when walking down the road: the trees, planted in neat rows, formed a moire pattern in his peripheral vision, a disconcerting evenness despite the undergrowth that tried to disguise it. The trees were thick with age, but they had been planted so deliberately however many years ago, and it was impossible to disguise that evidence of human hands. Ansbach presumed that on Odin, once, long ago, the forests had looked similar. Many hundreds of years more had given them time to grow wild, or at least naturalize themselves to their environ.

It was one of the things that had given him away at school, aside from his provincial accent, which he had worked hard enough to stifle that he almost was undetected. He was a strong horse rider, familiar with the animals from years of peering into the Braunschweig stables, and taking the horses for their exercise when the family didn’t feel like riding. But he was a rider used to running through arrow-straight rows of trees. During rides on Odin, heading out with his classmates, he flinched at the way his horse moved and tried to control her path too much— a classic tell of those who had never ridden in the capital, with its wild growth. He had been laughed at for that, and far too late thought it would have been better to pretend not to know how to ride at all. His efforts to recover some of his pride had been stupid— shameful even in immediate hindsight. Plenty of students had no idea how to ride.

He was coming up on the small town now. Time, as it always seemed to here, slipped away from him, and the hour walk passed without him noticing in his contemplation. The trees of the planted forest thinned into undergrowth, and then to fields still stuck with hardy stubble of last autumn’s corn, yet to be plowed for the first planting of the new season. Away from the forest, sightlines were suddenly clear as far as the dimpled earth allowed him to see. Only carefully tended copses of trees, houses, buildings, and the plowed sides of rolling hills covered the landscape. The town, ahead, was barely more than a cluster of buildings huddling for warmth: barracks, fuel station, church and attached graveyard, general store and marketplace, school, the one multi-functional government office, pub and dance hall, houses. Oddly scentless grey smoke rose from every chimney, then was snatched away by the wind.

The dirt road that ran down the main street and broke one field from another stretched its arm far to the east, disappearing in the brown plain. It headed off down towards the coast, towards the largest city on the planet at the sprawling river delta. That was many miles away, and where Duke Braunschweig’s ship would land, sitting in the water like a fattened duck. They would come by aircar to the house when they arrived. Tomorrow, or the day after.

The family didn’t like the coastal city, though it was named for the duke’s great-granduncle: Orrensburg. Out of its million or so inhabitants, none provided the pleasant company that Odin afforded, and the noise of the city was intolerable, even if it was less than half the size of the capital city on Odin. Orrensburg was all industry, mostly factories operated by Phezzanis: churning out fertilizer and a few other products that were needed to make life on Westerland liveable, and packaging and processing the products grown on the planet for sale. The city was almost half the population of the planet— all the rest was spread out over small towns like this one, with only as many people as could reasonably support the surrounding sprawling farms. 

The spaceport in Orrensburg saw regular traffic up and down of merchant ships, almost all Phezzani as well. As a child, Ansbach had seen them in the night sky, like the inverse of shooting stars, tiny dots of light rising up from the horizon until they vanished into the clouds or galaxy above. They hadn’t interested him much when he was young, but after returning to Westerland as an adult, when he came out at night to smoke, he would lean against the eastern-facing barracks wall and watch them rise. Not like he had any intent of going to Phezzan.

The barracks was a plain, weatherbeaten concrete building, and one of only a few in town with a radio array and solar panels adorning its roof. The southern face was more weatherbeaten than the rest, and the weathervane on the peak of the radio array indicated why. The handful of official vehicles that the soldiers kept were parked quiescent off to the side. Ansbach hadn’t even thought of asking to use one for his jaunt up to the manor house. Although he was a lieutenant, and it would have been ridiculous for Captain Maron to outright refuse his request, it would have been odd for him to even ask. There were horses in the stables a little way behind the barracks, and he might have taken one of those without even asking, but he didn’t mind the walk up to the house. There was very, very little to do in town, and so if he felt like he was wasting his time walking, it was time that would have been wasted regardless.

Ansbach scanned his fingerprints on the barracks’ rear door, and it opened with a rusty clunk, letting him into the hallway that held the bedrooms and bathrooms. The hall deposited him at the other end into the mess room, with tables and a kitchen on one side, and a few ratty couches on the other. 

Inside, it was stiflingly warm. In the kitchen area, the huge stove that heated the building had its door open, and one of the enlisted men, an eighteen year-old named Marchand, was using the fireplace tongs to feed it the smooth, black, brick-shaped fuel bars that heated every fireplace and kitchen in every house on Westerland. Without much in the way of trees (or wild-growing greenery at all) on the planet, and no buried oil or coal, all the heating fuel had to be manmade, extracted from the carbon in the atmosphere. Some people would burn the corn stalks, but that couldn’t serve everyone or last the whole long winter. It was, Ansbach thought, a true confluence of policy and necessity. There was no one who could survive on Westerland without this fuel, and so it was a way for the Braunschweig family’s estate manager to keep the populace under control, dependent on the few electrified factories that kept churning it out.

“What are you doing, spaceman?” Ansbach snapped at the soldier crouched in front of the fireplace. And then, in a slightly milder tone, “Isn’t it hot enough in here?”

The boy stood up hastily. He was taller than Ansbach by almost a handsbreadth, but that didn’t make him any more confident when he responded. “Sir! I’m f-freezing. Since my watch last night I’ve been— I’ve been—” He rubbed his nose with the back of his hand.

Marchand was scared of him, that much was easy to see. Ansbach had heard him laughing and talking with the other men plenty of times, and he never stuttered then. In the whole time Ansbach had been living in the barracks, this was the first time the two of them had ever spoken one on one, and it flustered him.

Looking closely at him, Marchand’s cheeks were flushed, and there was a sheen of fever in his eyes. It was probably a flu, the same one that half the barracks had come down with, one after the other, over the past month or so. Ansbach had hoped they were done with it; apparently, they were not. There was no point in telling the boy to rest or see a doctor, since that would only get him in trouble with Captain Moran. Ansbach frowned, then sighed. “Come with me.”

“Sir?” 

But Marchand followed him, obedient and timid as a lamb, and Ansbach opened the door of his own narrow room, barely wider than the bed itself. The room had once been a pantry closet, and stripes of unpainted concrete marked where shelves had once circled the wall. They had been hastily removed, the cans and other pantry goods relocated to the basement. Ansbach was an officer, an extra one that the outpost didn’t need, and as an officer couldn’t share a room with the enlisted men. The captain had absolutely no desire to share his own room. So, the pantry had been converted. 

Ansbach opened the footlocker at the foot of his bed, and pulled aside his neatly folded clothing to reveal his treasure: a pharmacopeia he had brought with him from his stop-over on Odin after his last posting, for whatever little good it had done him. He shook six pills out into his hand, then held them out to Marchand, who hesitated before accepting them. There was a bright suspicion in his eyes, as though the common drugs were something sinister, and he glanced into Ansbach’s face, trying to figure out if this was some sort of trap, to get him in trouble with the captain.

“It’s a fever reducer.” Ansbach held up the bottle, showing the clear blackletter label with the company name. Not that Marchand would recognize it— despite being a soldier, ostensibly a spaceman, he had never been off of Westerland.  “Take one now, one before you go to sleep, two as soon as you hear that the duke has landed. You fall over when we’re on parade, it makes us all look bad.”

“And the other two?” he asked. At least he knew how to count. 

“In the mornings, if you’re still feeling sick.”

“Yes, sir.” He hesitated, then said, “Thank you, sir.”

Ansbach scowled and kicked his trunk shut. “And not a word to anyone else— I’m not a pharmacist.”

“Can I ask—”

“What?”

“How many you have left, sir?” The question was offered so timidly that Ansbach thought it hadn’t been what he was originally planning to say.

“No, you may not ask,” Ansbach said. The answer hardly mattered. The effective shelf-life of his painkillers and fever medicine and sleeping pills was measured in a few years— he feared he would be on Westerland far longer than that. Giving a handful to Marchand was a better use for them than trying to keep them for himself. He wouldn’t go through this many pills in a decade. When he needed more, he could probably buy more in the city, but even with his officer’s pay, medicine was expensive in the colonies, as was everything else.

“Thank you again, sir.” Marchand wanted nothing more than to escape this conversation.

“Have you seen the captain?” Ansbach asked. “I need to tell him about the duke’s plans to meet us.”

Marchand rubbed his nose on his sleeve again. “Was out doing his ‘spection, I think.”

Which meant that he was walking around town, with the intent to stop in the pub. The captain, just like the rest of them, had very little to do. The barracks and its contingent of soldiers, for how many people actually lived in town, was comically oversized as a policing organ, and the captain was comically overranked to lead it. Everywhere else, Braunschweig’s troops on the planet were all working as the only organ of government— a local peacekeeping and administrative force. In Orrensburg, there were enough people around that a large force was necessary to have, and in the small towns there would be just a handful of soldiers, four, five at most. They resolved petty disputes and collected taxes, and stopped problems before they could escalate to the attention of the estate manager. 

The outlying town of the manor house was an exception, with their forty enlisted men, as the soldiers there formed what amounted to a personal guard detail for the Braunschweig family. It was a coveted position: easy, safe, and a pathway for advancement for anyone who should wish it. Most of the men assigned to it had paid some kind of bribe to slip their name into the duke’s ear, to get him to sign the paper that would assign them to the detail. If Ansbach remembered correctly, even the family of the timid and sniffling Marchand had scraped something up to pay the estate manager. Ansbach could hardly complain about the process; he had been a beneficiary of it, or something like it. He just disliked the role, and he steeled himself for the question he was about to go ask the captain.

He dismissed Marchand, who went back to pulling a chair up as close to the kitchen stove as he could without getting burned. Ansbach left to find Captain Moran.

He wasn’t hard to find, standing outside the pub and smoking, watching everyone who walked by, which wasn’t many people. He saw Ansbach coming from a ways away. The captain was in his fifties, broad shouldered, with tobacco stained finger tips and receding brown hair. He needed glasses, but never wore them. He kept them in a case in his pocket and took them out only when he needed to read something, which was rarely. Unfortunately, even if he couldn’t see Ansbach’s face clearly from a distance, he could identify the smear of silver on his chest as the only other officer’s uniform in town. He tapped his cigarette against the railing of the pub’s porch as Ansbach approached, sending little embers to die in the mud.

“I’ve been wondering where you went,” Moran said. “I was looking for you.”

“Sir,” Ansbach said, stopping to salute. “I was at the manor house.”

“And what for?”

“I wanted to ask them when and how we should meet the duke and his family.”

Moran tapped his cigarette on the balcony again. “What is there to ask? We always do the same thing.” 

“Plans could have changed.”

“The butler would phone if they had.” He took a drag of his cigarette and said, “So, what did they say?”

“A small contingent should meet them in Orrensburg with the air car. They’ll greet the command in the city, and then drive the family back here. Herr Ketter has already arranged a truck for their effects. Everyone else should greet them at the manor in dress uniforms.”

“So, the same thing we’ve always done.”

When it seemed like Moran was awaiting a response, Ansbach said, “I wouldn’t have known. I haven’t been assigned here very long.”

Moran laughed. “You’ve seen it before.”

“It’s not a thing I would have remembered.”

“No?”

“No, sir.”

Moran’s cigarette had burned down to almost his fingers. He stubbed it out on the railing, then patted his pockets to see where his tin of rolling papers and tobacco had gone. He pulled out his glasses case first by mistake, and put it back in his pocket with an annoyed twist of his lips, then gave up the search for the cigarettes.

He hadn’t dismissed Ansbach yet, so Ansbach steeled himself for the question he had to ask. “Sir, I was wondering if I could go meet the family in Orrensburg?”

“No,” Moran said. “There’s no need for that.”

“Are you going, sir?”

“Yes. I have an errand in the city, anyway. I’ll take care of it before they arrive.”

“And I couldn’t accompany you?”

“If we have two officers, isn’t it better if one stays here?” Moran asked, his voice very dry. “I don’t want us stepping on each other’s toes.”

“Of course, sir.”

He still hadn’t dismissed Ansbach. “You know, Cartier, I don’t want you up at the house. It’s not really your place.”

Ansbach’s skin crawled at the use of his first name, childish and demeaning. There was no point in asking for a reason why he shouldn’t go to the manor, nor any point in protesting. “Yes, sir. I understand.”

“Good.”

“Is that all, sir?”

Moran patted his pockets again for his cigarette case. He found it this time. He didn’t answer the question but rolled a cigarette, by touch and instinct rather than by sight. “Care for one?” he asked, and held it out to Ansbach. “Or are you still smoking that Odin stuff?”

“I’m trying to quit,” Ansbach said. “It’s an expensive vice out here.” 

“On an officer’s salary? Not so bad. Here.” He proffered it again. Did he think that it was a gesture of magnanimity? Ansbach took the offered cigarette.

“Thank you, sir.”

“You can go.”

“Oh, sir, I should tell you— Marchand has the flu.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Moran said. “It’s a cold. He’ll be fine for parade.”

“Yes, sir.”

Moran waved him away. Ansbach trudged off back down the road, headed for the barracks again. He leaned in his favorite spot, the eastern wall, which was warm from where the stove abutted it on the inside, and reasonably sheltered from the wind. He lit the cigarette, and could feel Moran gloating about it. Not too good for Westerland’s finest, are you?

Maybe that wasn’t the implication. Maybe the captain had simply been trying to be generous, after denying Ansbach the thing he wanted. Maybe it wasn’t an attempted slight, but a botched apology.

The captain was wary of Ansbach, jealous of his education, prideful of his own position, and fearful that Ansbach was trying to edge him out of it. That was obvious. It was obvious, too, that the captain had warned the enlisted men to stay away from him. This had been clear for months, but it was only now, with the family’s return after a long absence, that it had become something Ansbach needed to contend with, rather than ignore.

It didn’t matter, he tried to tell himself. Let them all think what they liked about him. The cigarette, more paper than tobacco, smoldered between his fingers.