He crawled out from under the road and out of the ditch.  Water held his pants against his legs, and his shirt was damp as well with sweat.  The heavy sun cast a warm glow on the stones in the ditch, and on the city trees planted along the brick sidewalks.  The buildings in this housing edition were mostly one story, quaint but finely crafted.  It wasn’t a city of skyscrapers, so now, after the Cataclysm, it wasn’t nearly as full of rubble as Thyrion.

What it did have, however, what all cities shared in common in this newly-ordered world, were broken windows.  Boarded windows to keep thieves away.  Grass that needed to be mowed.  And in the middle of the rampant grass:  plots of recently overturned earth—makeshift graves, decorated with landscaping stones or wooden planks or, in some cases, a teddy bear or a toy truck.

Falcon Point was fortunate in that it benefited from an old aqueduct system that brought water into the city without the use of any magic-powered pumps.  The people had water.  In the two weeks since the Cataclysm, wide-scale starvation had not yet set in, and disease had not yet gained too strong a foothold.  These people’s biggest threat was from each other.  And they knew it.  Some of the buildings had been torn to pieces for salvage, and some of that salvage material was used to build walls around backyard gardens and palisades around their front yards.  A number of front doors had crude drawings of swords carved or burned into them, a sign that the house was protected by the most advanced weapon in the world.

Jaysynn wandered around the town through what remained of the day, seeing the sites.  When he was out of the suburbs and into the industrial quarter, he took to the rooftops.  He wasn’t in his Watchman’s garb—he was wearing cotton work clothes from top to bottom—and he wasn’t doing the Watchman’s work—he had no backpack and no bread or medicine.  Instead he was acting as a spy, watching the city and its people—the people Vac said he wanted to save from Thyrion.

When the first traces of darkness came, more people took to the streets, like rats coming out of hiding.  They scurried about, some of them perhaps going to check on friends or relatives, and some of them going to steal from strangers.

He watched them for a time.  He moved about to see the different types of people coming from different types of homes.  As he traced the city, he spotted another spy, a man crouched behind a garbage can listening in on a conversation.  Jaysynn scurried along the flat roof of a three-story apartment building so he could hear what this darkly dressed man was learning.  Soon he spotted an old but healthy man talking to a boy, twelve or thirteen years old.

“Your father shouldn’t send you off in the night like this,” said the old man.

“He said he had to stay home and keep watch over the place—and keep my sister safe.”

“You ought to just move in with me,” said the man.  “Then we’d all be safer.  But listen now.  You hurry on home.  Keep that loaf of bread safe.  And when you come back for more in a couple days, bring your dad and sister with you, you hear.”

“I’ll tell them,” said the boy.

“Good.  I love you.”

“I love you too, Grandpa.”

The boy looked over his shoulders and then hurried off, half-running down the narrow street.  When he passed the trash can, the other man stood up and chased after him.  The boy saw him and tried to run harder, but it was no use.  The thief was an athletic young man, maybe 18 or 20 years old, and soon he grabbed the boy by the shoulder and dragged him down into the pavement.  As Jaysynn dashed across the rooftops and down to the street, the man pulled at the boy’s shirt to get at the bread that he’d hidden underneath it.

With the bread in hand, the young man took to his feet and started running—but he’d picked a bad direction.  He took a few quick steps in the direction Jaysynn was coming from, but when he saw another young man bolting after him, he turned around and started running the other way.

He was fast, but, having abandoned his escape route, his sense of direction was lost.  He ran without knowing where to go, glancing down alleys as he passed.

As Jaysynn drew nearer, one stride at a time, he started looking for a move to tackle the thief without seriously injuring him—without sending the full speed of his spring downward into the roadbed.

But before it came to blows, the thief held up his hands (a loaf of bread in one of them) and slowed his pace.  “Ok.  Take it,” he said.  “It’s yours”

“I don’t want it for myself,” Jaysynn said.  “You stole that bread.”

“I know,” the young man said.  He dropped down to his knees and was nearly in tears.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t want to.  I’m a good kid.  I always been good.  But I got to eat and my family got to eat.”

Jaysynn glared down at the youth, “That little boy’s family has to eat, too.”

The young man looked up at Jaysynn.  His eyes were watering and his lips quivered.  He tried to speak, but couldn’t find words.  In his heart, Jaysynn wished he had the resources of a prince or an emperor.  He wished he had bread of his own to give, but he had nothing.  He hadn’t eaten anything himself all day, and he felt the temptation to take the loaf for himself.

“I’m going to take the bread back to the boy,” said Jaysynn.  “But, listen, there’s got to be some way of getting through this.  Not just for you, but for everyone.”

The thief handed over the bread.  “Not everyone’s gonna make it,” he said.

“Look, I had a friend,” Jaysynn said.  “Someone who was getting into a lot of trouble, doing some illegal things, to try to feed her family.  So I found her a job at a bakery.”

“There’s no jobs no more, mister.”

“I know,” said Jaysynn.  “But there’s got to be more for a young man to do than just steal.  Forget about getting a job for right now and think about how you can make work for yourself.  Times have changed, right?  So you adapt.”

“Work’s good for nothing,” said the young man.  “Money ain’t no good.  Some people are buying it up like crazy.  That’s what my old man was doing, and that’s why we got no food.”

“Then forget about money,” Jaysynn said.  “Try to think of a way that you can make something people need for trade, for barter.  Maybe there’s some way you can make food.”

“Out of what?” said the young man, “this?”  He scraped a handful of pulverized rock dust from the road bed and sprinkled it back onto the road, then looked up at Jaysynn with dark eyes.  He went on, “You told me to adapt.  Well I already adapted.  I steal bread from little kids now.  That’s the only honest work there is these days.”

“You’ve got to find a way to do better,” Jaysynn said.  With those stern words, he walked away, hoping he would be able to find the boy again.  If not, he would return the bread to the old man.  But as he walked, he felt a tug on his heart for the young thief.  So, without another word, he turned back around and tore the bread in half, giving the smaller portion to the thief.

The thief also said nothing in return, but bowed humbly, grateful to receive a part of the stolen meal.

Jaysynn realized that this was no solution, and that there was no solution to such a problem in such a world as this.  His heart swelled with sorrow, but when there is someone to blame, sorrow ferments into anger.  Jaysynn could feel the bubbles rising as his blood turned to venom.  He did not know why the world was in ruin, or what conspiracy had driven that young man to steal a loaf of bread.  But he knew the name of one guilty man, and with every clenching of his heart, his body filled with heroic hatred of that name.

He made his way down the street and knocked on a door.  He was greeted suspiciously by the old man and the little boy.

“I was able to recover some of the bread,” he said.  “The thief made off with the rest.”

“That scoundrel!” said the old man.  “What kind of monster would steal from a child?”

Jaysynn shook his head.  “Don’t blame him,” he said.  “The man responsible for this is Xander Dracon.”

“The Thyrian?”

“That’s right,” Jaysynn nodded.  “But try to stay strong.  If I can do anything to set things right, I will.”

“Well, then bless you, sir,” said the old man, shaking his head.  “And who are you, anyway?”

“General Dracon is… one of my unruly subjects.”

A smirk crept across Jaysynn’s face.  He nodded at the man, who was dumbfounded by his response, and walked away.

The old man leaned out the door and asked, “How’s that?”

But Jaysynn walked on and soon bounded up the side of the building, where he disappeared into the night sky.

*     *    *

Jaysynn slept on a flat rooftop, a place where no one in the city could see him, and no one could reach him without a bucket lift or a sixty-foot ladder.  He spent the bulk of the next day sitting on that roof, just him and the sky and the sun, fasting for lack of food, and meditating on the next moves, the next subtle turnings of Lomara.

Last night he had called Dracon one of his unruly subjects.  It felt impossible.  It felt like the words of a child who said he could throw a stone a hundred miles.  But it also felt good.  Though it was a flight of fantasy, Jaysynn also felt it was somehow true.  It was true that the world had been crippled, and that Dracon was a guilty man, and that Jaysynn had inherited the throne of a nation that still lived.

But the old customs of the Kyzer Dynasty were dead.  The structures that ran the empire had crumbled.  The old rules were out, and if Jaysynn had a role to play, he knew that it would be in a different world.

All this talk of Thyr, too—the firstborn of Elthor—that was a broken myth.  All the talk about Elthor, too.  The dream of Elthor was broken with the breaking of the wells.  So Jaysynn told his thoughts to the sun, his only companion.  Not that he believed the sun was a new god.  If there had been a dog on the roof, he might have talked to the dog.  If a child, then he would have talked to the child.

But all he had was the heat that poured down on the asphalt, the vital source of every wood and meadow, the limitless empire of light.

Whatever I do, he said in his heart, I won’t leave Kyrie in the dungeon.  I don’t know what tomorrow holds, what I will do then, or who I will be.  But tonight I will free her.

The sun, perhaps out of respect for Jaysynn’s will and compassion, did not waver, but went on with its everlasting burning.

He folded those words inside the drawing and then ran back through the Well to the graveyard fence, and through the graveyard to find Kyrie’s cell.  He didn’t know how he was going to find her, but caught sight of torchlight spilling out of one of the dungeon windows.  He ran up to it, and when he heard the footsteps of the guards and saw the light growing dimmer, he looked inside to see Kyrie tied at the wrists and lying on the floor.  And he heard her sobbing.

He wanted to call out to her, to talk to her as he had snuck an illegal conversation with her in the camp.  But now the risks were too great.  He threw the note in the cell, just in front of her.  Her hands were tied behind her back, and the light slipped quickly out of the room, so she wouldn’t be able to read it until dawn, but the message was delivered, just the same.

In the dim light of a distant torch, Jaysynn saw her head turn toward him, but he backed away from the window before they saw each other’s faces, leaving her in the ever-growing darkness of her cell.

He knew he had to go.  He could feel the night growing heavier.  He could feel his heart rate accelerating and his temperature rising.  As he backpedaled away from the window, a group of soldiers came around the corner and one of them yelled out, “There he is!”

Jaysynn took off running, and the men were after him, running hard.  He was quick with his movements, but many of them were running a faster sprint through the moonlit graveyard, and none of them had hiked ten miles that night, so they were fresh.

When he reached the fence, they were almost on him.  He hurdled it in stride and so gained a little ground on them.  From there he ran hard down into the Well.  His footing was not always sure, but in desperation he ran down the steep slopes faster than they were willing to, and was soon deep inside.

This was not a circular crater like the Jalseian Well.  It was not a majestic canyon like the one in Thyrion.  It was once the mountain lake of magic, with fingers creeping out in all directions, and much of it cutting into the side of the mountain.  Now that it was destroyed, it was full of rubble from small avalanches, but it was also full of caves, caverns, and below-the-surface channels.  One deep pit was once an ancient spring from whence the substance of magic rose from the middle of the world to come to Falcon Point.  Islands had once stood in the middle of the Well, and now they were great mesas in the middle of a wasteland.

And this, though not the urban environment that Jaysynn was most familiar with, was the perfect landscape for his skills.  They had almost laid hands on him at the edge of the graveyard, but in here, Jaysynn was quickly up a hill and down another, scaling rock walls and dropping from them, and leaping across canyons too far for his would-be captors.

It was not a fast place to travel, but Jaysynn moved through it as quickly as anyone could.  When he was on the other side, the darkest hour of the night was past.  The sun was still a ways from rising, but the sky was growing lighter east of the mountains.  He climbed out of the rim of the Well and left the soldiers behind him, scrambling around in the blackened badlands.

From there, Jaysynn continued to run through the city until he was on the verge of collapse.  He knew he had to get far from the Well or those same soldiers would eventually find him.  At last, barely able to stand, he crawled down into a roadside stone ditch—used to transport waste water out of the city.  He climbed into a place where the ditch disappeared under a crossroad.  At that time the sun was fully risen, but in his covered ditch, just big enough for a squatting body, with gray water running over his ankles and along the seat of his pants, he fell asleep.

It was a hard-earned sleep, but unlike his rest in the refugee camp, this one did not wash away the worries of life.  It was a fearful sleep.  Even though he was desperate for it, it was a watchful sleep:  he could not submit himself to rest.

Yet it was a long sleep.  When he awoke, it was late afternoon.  He had escaped a dungeon to find rest in a cramped stone ditch, drenched with the refuse of the rebel city.  But he knew where he was, and he knew why he was there.

It wasn’t for freedom that he escaped:  he had never been free, except as the Watchman, so it was a virtue that hadn’t crossed his mind that night.  It wasn’t for comfort or survival.  He was as likely to survive by working with Vac as he was by making a life for himself in this hostile new world, and as for comfort—he was sitting in the filth of an enemy people.  And he didn’t escape in order to protect the secrets of Thyrion (what little he knew of them).  He wanted justice of the same kind that Vac wanted.

His reason for escaping was something different:  he escaped because there was a crack in the wall.  It shouldn’t have been there.  The guards should have studied the cell more carefully before putting such a high profile prisoner in it.  And if there was a crack in the wall, maybe his escape was a work of fate.  And if it was a work of fate, maybe the crack itself was a miracle.  And if a miracle of fate were possible, then maybe Jaysynn had waiting for him, somewhere on the outside of that prison cell, a destiny.

The administrators of Falcon Point did not waste lamps or torches on lighting their jail cells.  These had been strung up with lighting in the days of magic, and in fact laws dictated that prisoner’s cells had to be lit.  But now resources were simply too scarce.  Laws had also dictated that prisoners be given daily access to showers, laundry facilities, and three meals a day.  That was a different time.

In the basement of the Old Fort, it became painfully clear how quickly the centuries had fallen away.  This was a medieval dungeon, and those who were unfortunate enough to be held here when the cataclysm struck withered with newfound neglect and malnourishment.  In a few more weeks, diseases would become established in this prison that would never leave, but would pass from one inmate to the next, claiming life after life for generation after generation.  Soon every sentence would be death, not by hanging, by guillotine, by burning, or by stoning, but by starvation and sickness in a dark hole in the ground.

Not that this new age would be more cruel.  It would simply lack the extravagant wealth required to run humane prisons.

The guards threw Jaysynn into the dungeon underneath the Old Fort and left him on his hands and knees while they marched down the hall, carrying the torchlight away with them.

Before getting to his feet, before reflecting on what he might do next, Jaysynn worked to get his hands out from behind him, slipping them around his legs and under his feet while he lay on his back.  They were still bound, and he had little hope to undo the knots any time soon, but at least his hands were in front and not behind.

Once the last traces of the guards’ torch vanished, Jaysynn could see only blackness.  He felt his way around the room, running his fingers and the thick flesh of his palms along the cool rock floor and across the mortar lines until he found the wall.  He stood up and kept his hands against it, sliding his feet slowly along the floor looking for a bed.  But before his slinking toes found any piece of furniture, his hands found something in the wall.

A deep crack.  He could stick his fingers and half of his hand into it.  He traced it up and down.  It ran through the floor as well, but less prominently, and it was hidden from his feet in a line of mortar.  But on the wall it was broad and deep, and seemed to get only bigger as it ran up above his head, and above where his hands could reach.

And gradually, he was able to see it, to focus on this one line that was darker than the other shadows that covered the room.  He could see the shapes of the stones in the walls.  On looking around the room, he could even see a cot, and the bars of his cell, all nearly saturated in darkness.

With his eyes now, he followed the crack above his reach, and saw that it led to an opening in the wall.  Not a hole, but a barred window.  The damage may have been hundreds of years old, but more than likely it was caused by a tremor at the time of the Cataclysm.  Maybe the guards weren’t even aware of it, and maybe they had thrown Jaysynn in a bad cell, in one that had a back door.

If so, Jaysynn thought, it was incredible fortune.  A miracle, even.  “Okay, Elthor,” he said.  “I’ll try it.”

He stuck both his hands in the crack.  His palms faced out, putting pressure on the stone, as if he was going to pull the crack apart and make it wider.  But in reality that pressure was to hold his weight.  He worked his feet along the crack in a similar manner, and in no time he had scaled the wall to the height of the window, where he grabbed one of the bars and looked around.

Outside his window was a graveyard where the first kings of Falcon Point lay beside the modern heads of state whose pictures lined Vac’s office.  It was bordered with an iron fence on the far side, and on the other side of that fence was a great pit that used to be the Remirian Well.

Jaysynn took the view in at a glance, mostly scouting out ways to stay hidden while running across the graveyard—if he could get out.  But he turned his immediate attention to the window itself.  The crack had again found the mortar between stones, and one of the bars was set into that ancient cement.  The crack separated the walls from one of the bars, so it was entirely free at the bottom.  At the top, however, it was as secure as it had ever been.  It stuck into a hole drilled into one of the stones, and that hole had been sealed with mortar.  But, Jaysynn thought, it might be possible to break it free from there.  Since it was secure at the bottom, the builders might not have thought they needed to attach it as firmly at the top.

It was worth a shot.  So Jaysynn let go of the bar he was holding and quickly grabbed onto the loose bar—with both hands, because they were too tightly bound for him to hold two different bars.

He did not get the opportunity to twist the bar free, however.  The crack apparently extended above the window as well, and as soon as he grabbed the bar and held his weight by it, the stone above the window broke loose.  Jaysynn fell backward from the window, and the stone came chasing after him.

He tried to take the fall smoothly, but without good use of his arms it wasn’t easy, and he still took a blow to the back of his ribcage when he hit the stone below.

The rock that fell just missed him, but it made a loud clap when it hit the ground.  Jaysynn didn’t know if there were any guards near enough to hear it—he couldn’t see any torchlight—but he knew he didn’t have time to feel pain.  He quickly scaled the wall again, sucked in his lungs and squeezed through the gap in the middle of the remaining bars.

In his short glance across the graveyard he had memorized the steps he would take, and he followed them now, through trails of shadows cast by trees and towering monuments, until he was over the fence and in the Well.  The edges of the Well behind the graveyard were gently sloped, and he ran in deep enough so that his head was invisible beneath the edge of the burnt-out banks.

Deeper in this Well was a maze of cliffs and canyons, but Jaysynn stayed near the edge, running just below the rim until he was away from the castle yard and in back of some old mansions which had more and bigger cracks than the Old Fort.  There he climbed out and spied on the graveyard, but no one stirred.

He waited for some time to see what kind of search operation might be coming for him, and as he waited he worked the knots, pulling with his teeth and scratching them against broken bricks along the edge of an alley until at last he was free.

Then he pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, a rough sketch of a bread oven that Kyrie had drawn for the projects man earlier that day, and that had wound up in his pocket after being passed among the three of them a number of times.

He climbed back into the Well and found a charred piece of rock.  He scraped it along the surface of the paper until all the smoke was rubbed off the point, then found another rock to finish the job.  It was slow work, but his message was short:  “I am still here.”

Vac’s heavy gaze was on the guards until their huddle around Jaysynn broke up and they made their way to the door.  Coonhil closed it behind them, and remained standing at the front edge of the room.

“Have a seat,” Vac told Jaysynn, stretching his hand toward a chair off to the side of the desk.

Jaysynn looked into the man’s face trying to read something in those dark eyes, that unshaven jaw, the gray lines in his hair.

“You were taken out of bed to go on a ten mile hike,” Vac said.  “Take a seat.”

Jaysynn sat.

The governor patted his pockets until he found a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.  He lit one and took a draw with his eyes closed.  Relaxation visibly spread through his face and his body.

“I’d offer you one,” he said, “but you don’t smoke, and it’s a lousy time to get hooked.”  Another puff.  “You never got along with Shar.  Your favorite book is Fields of Sand.  You were never any good at math.”  Vac walked over toward his desk and he went on, “You touch the tip of your nose whenever you’re about to sneeze.  When you walk, you always start with your right foot.  If given the opportunity to run, you will escape, because you’re an accomplished tracer.”

“What are these—assassin’s notes?” Jaysynn asked.

Vac opened his top desk drawer and produced a combat knife in a fine leather sheath.  “When you arrived in my brother’s camp…” he held up the knife, “this and a change of clothes is all you had in your pack.  It’s a Thyrian military knife, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” said Jaysynn.

“But you were never in the Thyrian military, were you?”

Jaysynn took a deep breath.  He could see where these questions were leading, but had no way to change their course.  “No,” he said.

“Then where did you get this knife?”

“I had access to as many of those as I wanted,” Jaysynn said.  “And I needed a knife.”

Vac put the knife back in the drawer.  He tapped his cigarette on the lip of the ash tray and walked back over to where Jaysynn sat.  “Don’t lie to me about the things I already know,” Vac said.

“It was a gift,” Jaysynn said.

“From Xander Dracon.”

“Who was a close friend of the family,” Jaysynn added.

“And who personally trained you in the Thyrian art of tracing.”  Vac was calm as he spoke.  There was no anger, no cruelty in his voice, not even a note of pride at having pinned Jaysynn with the truth.  He went on, “And that same Xander Dracon is now the head of state in Thyrion.  He kept you alive with the promise of making you emperor.  That was his plan, and yours, too:  to kill the whole world and rise to the top of the rubble.  But when it succeeded, he pushed you out.  You ran for life.  What I want to know is, why did he do it?”

“It sounds like your spies don’t have all their facts straight,” Jaysynn said.  He could feel Vac setting traps for him, and knew he would get caught again if he weren’t careful.  He couldn’t be sure of what to say or do, but his instincts were clear on one thing:  he should lie.  “Dracon was never a part of any plan—at least not that he shared with me.”

“Then who?  Your father?”

“No,” said Jaysynn.

“Then do you deny the possibility that established leaders in Thyrion had anything to do with the Cataclysm?”

Jaysynn thought for a second, careful to find the answer that would tell the governor nothing.  “I think I would know something about it if that were the case,” he said.

Vac nodded to himself in thought.  “I don’t know what I expected from a house of liars,” he said.  Jaysynn gave no reply.  “The only reason Falcon Point has fared as well as it has is because we never trusted your family or your empire.  And now here I am trying to get truth out of you.”

He wanted to give a speech, but he wanted to do it slowly.  He straightened his back a little and peered about the room, at the pictures hanging on the wall, the past leaders of Falcon Point.

“Do you know why so many of my guards have swords?” he asked.

Jaysynn said nothing, but stared up at him from his seat.

With a glance, Vac could see the anger in the young man’s eyes, and he knew that Jaysynn was waiting for another trap, another lie, another carefully calculated piece of manipulation.

But Governor Vac went on, each man trying to outmaneuver the other’s mind:

“It’s because we saw the theories coming out of Jalseion.  Instability in magic.  Mutability of the substance.  We saw the new experiments.  The explosion of isolated magic samples.  This wasn’t possible ten years ago.  Now it was happening by mistake as the great scientists of the day pioneered new ways of manipulating the lifeblood of the world.

“So my men and I got together and said, ‘what if people develop a way of building a bomb out of magic?’  And we spread a little propaganda around the city, encouraging responsible citizens to dig bomb shelters and stock them with food.  Those that did are still eating today.  And we said, ‘what if people develop a way of triggering these explosions—of exploding batteries remotely?  They could shut off our lights and shut down our factories and render our guns useless.’  So we taught our people that the way to cherish the heritage of Falcon Point—the heritage of the city of Freedom—was to buy swords to hang on their walls as decorations.  So we’ve got good weapons all over the city.  And now the best methods of swordsmithing are lost, gone with the wells.  That puts us in a pretty good place if this Cataclysm brings in a war—or an age of wars.”

“I’m sure you’re delighted that you can benefit from this,” Jaysynn said.

“When the rules change, your highness, we adapt.”

“So you knew this was going to happen.”

Vac grabbed Jaysynn by the shirt and lifted him to his feet.  He raised his voice for the first time:  “If I knew this was going to happen I’d have followed your army all the way back to the Heart of Thyrion.  I’d have killed your whole family to stop it.  I’d have put your father’s head on a platter.”  He pushed Jaysynn back down into the chair.  “Did you know this was going to happen?  That’s what I want to know.”

Jaysynn did not answer.  He turned his face away and pulled his eyes tightly closed.  His lips quivered.

Vac’s palm struck him on the cheek and the sound of the slap echoed on the castle walls.  “You damn crybaby,” he said.  “Answer the question.”

Jaysynn gave no reply, and Vac struck him again, and more silence followed.

Coonhil took a few steps toward the center of the room and gave a polite reminder to the governor:  “His family is dead, sir.”

Vac backed away from the chair and brushed his upper legs off with his hands, as if he’d gotten them dirty.  Like his brother, he had a tone for business and a tone for sincerity.  “Right.  Of course,” he said, beginning to grow calm. “It’s easy to hate family.  Everybody does.  You did.  But it’s hard to stop loving them.  It hurts to go through what you’ve been through.  I’m sorry kid.  Look, I don’t like you, but I’m trying hard not to be a jackass.  I want to see justice, but your well is just as ruined as ours is.  And I guess I want revenge, but every looter and vandal on every street in every city in the whole world is already dishing that out.  The world is being wiped clean right now.  And who knows—if people like you and me can keep our heads—I mean if we can keep from getting killed—then maybe we’ll live long enough to see, you know, a good life.  So just tell me this much:  is Thyrion planning to attack us?”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Jaysynn said.

Vac turned ferocious again in an instant.  He struck Jaysynn once more and shouted, “Dammit.  Don’t you realize I’ve got spies that can tell me something as obvious as that?  Alright, get the guards back in here.”

When Coonhil opened the door the guards quickly filled the room and stood around Jaysynn’s chair and seized him.  They lifted him to his feet, but Vac held up a hand to stop them.  He looked Jaysynn in the eye and said, “I realize your life has probably been turned upside-down more than anybody else’s by this little disaster, so I understand that you don’t want to tell anything to the head of Falcon Point.  But listen—what I want is simple:  I want to protect my neighbors and my friends.  I want to protect the kids on my street.  To me, those are the people that need protected, not dead men like your father or tyrants like Dracon.  And the more I know about the invaders—the people who attack my city unprovoked—the better I’ll be able to do that.  So I suggest you take our little Cataclysm as an opportunity to reflect on your loyalties, and to consider whether I’m really such an evil man—and to consider whether it makes sense to help me save the lives of some of the innocent, everyday people out there.  If not, I promise I will take the blood of my people out on you.”

He looked to his guards and snapped his fingers.  “Alright, I’m done,” he said.  “Bring his girlfriend in here.”  Then he turned to Coonhill.  “But you interrogate her.  My blood is bubbling and I don’t want to hit a woman.”

He began to dream.  A crown was laid on his head, and he was seated on a throne, and a man clad in black pulled the throne from under him and set it ablaze.  He ran, still wearing his crown.  Then a man with a whip for a tongue made him stick his head in an oven to fetch out a loaf of bread.  His robes burned and he had the dress of beggars, but the crown, unblackened by the flames, was still upon his head.  Then men seized him and struck him and spit upon him and threw him in a cage.  He became a silhouette, curled up like a fetus, but the crown was of dazzling gold.

“He’s the one,” a voice called out.

Jaysynn sat up in his bed to see the room flooding with armed men, men with swords on their hips and torches in their hands.

“What’s this about?” Jaysynn asked, sweat beading on his forehead.

“You’re being transferred,” said one of the men.  They grabbed him by the arms and pulled him out of the bunk, dragging his feet across the floor for a few feet before he could react and walk in pace with them.  Soon the intruders were out of the room, their light vanished with them, and the other men in the bunkhouse soon shut their eyes again and returned to the delights of a good sleep after a hard day’s work.

Once outside the bunkhouse, the men drove Jaysynn to the ground and held his face against the dirt.  They then tied his arms behind him and told him he was either going to go on a long march, or he was going to get dragged for ten miles.

Then they stood him up and their feet started moving—and his, too.  The gate at the entrance to Tarc’s camp was open, and when these men were through it the guards stationed in the towers pulled it shut again.

“Where are you taking me?” Jaysynn demanded.

The answer to his question was a fist to his gut.  He fell to his knees.  The torchlight blurred together with the darkness and with the outlines of the men.  One of them spoke, but Jaysynn couldn’t see or feel who it was.  “That was your one warning.  Every time you speak, a rib is going to break.”

The men pulled him to his feet again.  They held him in the air by his arms and carried him along, dragging his feet along the ground, until he began to walk again on his own.  His legs were weak from the blow, but he fought to keep up with the pace they set.

The warning was well taken, and for the remainder of the hike, not a sound was heard except for the huffing of a dozen soldiers on a fast-tempo march.  They extinguished all but one of their torches as well, so very little was seen either.

The moon, which grew smaller each night, cast little light on their path: the tree roots at their feet were hidden in shade and the stones before them were invisible obstacles.  The camp was on something of a plateau, but the further they got from it the rougher the terrain became—yet Jaysynn’s captors slowed their pace for nothing.

One of them stumbled when he ran the front of his foot into a stone.  He cried out and then laughed.  “Our feet will all be bloody tonight,” he said.

It was not a joke that this man was sharing with his friends.  He had said it for Jaysynn’s sake, to cut the young man to the heart.  It is easy to forget about pain, and this man wanted to remind him of it.  It is easy for the mind and body to grow numb and suffer no more.  After six miles or so into their trip, Jaysynn’s feet were miserable.  They’d been crashing into rocks for a couple hours now.  And now he remembered their terrible pain.  And thinking of the pain in his feet made him realize how badly his legs burned, how much his side stung, and how heavy were his lungs.

He was reminded, too, that his body was still sore from his run into Falcon Point two nights ago, and that his body had not slept well for three days.  And that all of his pains were magnified by the fact that his arms were bound.  His shoulders ached from it, but also his whole movement was thrown off, making the work that much harder.

The thought of his aching body reminded him how much worse off he would be with a broken rib, so he kept his mouth shut and pushed on.

Soon they reached a road, and it quickly led them into the edges of a city, of Falcon Point.  They passed through the board homes, even shoddier than the bunkhouses in the camp.  As they walked on, the homes grew bigger and their materials, stronger and straighter.  At last their march led them past the buildings of brick and mortar, and of hewn stone.

They did not rest until they had come into the Old Fort, climbed the stairs, and arrived at a closed door where two more guards were posted.

“The prisoner is here,” one of the guards called out as he knocked on the door.

The knob turned and the door opened.  The man who had done it stayed out of sight behind the door, so what was revealed to Jaysynn and the guards was a big room, a long desk, and a broad man.

This man stood up, held out a hand cordially to his visitors, and greeted them, “Jaysynn Kyzer, Emperor of Thyrion—welcome to the arms of your enemy.”

“Tarc?” Jaysynn asked.

“Not at all,” said the man.  “I’m Vac—Governor Vac.  Tarc and I are both the spitting image of our father.  But you will find we’re two very different people.  For example, he thought a person’s past didn’t matter—that he could utilize anyone.  I, on the other hand, think that people should hang for the crimes they committed yesterday, or ten years ago, or, say, two weeks ago.”

“I had nothing to do with the destruction of the wells,” Jaysynn said.  His arms were bound and his body was weary, but against all reason his stance was strong.  He was as bold as a non-Select child challenging the heir of Thyrion to a duel.

“You were the youngest of Thorynn’s sons, were you not?”  Vac walked around the desk and leaned on the front of it.

“You wouldn’t ask if you didn’t know.”

Vac nodded.  “The last in line for the throne.”  He stared at Jaysynn and Jaysynn stared back.  “And in this great disaster, every single person that stood in your way died.  And you survived.  Explain that.”

Jaysynn took two steps closer, anger in his eyes, but the guards grabbed him and threw him down.  They pressed his head against the floor and put the weight of their bodies through their knees and onto his legs and shoulders.

“None of that,” Vac said, waving the guards away with a hand.  “I trust you ran him hard.  There’s no need to beat him on top of that.”  The guards looked up at him.  “Well, let him up.”

They released him, and helped him to his feet at Vac’s instruction.

“Now you may leave,” Vac told his guards.

“But, sir—”

“You’ve tied good knots.  You’ve exhausted him.  Coonhil will still be here.”

The next morning soft sunlight spilled in through the windows of town hall, across the planks in the floor and across the array of papers on the desk.  The oil lamp was smoldering.  And Tarc was slouching in his chair, his eyes closed behind his glasses and his mouth hanging open.  His lungs were so big and his breathing so slow and deep that the back of his chair rocked and squeaked with every breath.

When a knock came at the door he sat up with a start.  “Come in,” he said, wiping his chin dry with the back of his hand.

Jaysynn walked in the door.  “You said I was to report here this morning.”

“That’s right,” said Tarc.  “The special projects man should be here soon.  What time is it anyway.”  Tarc leaned back to look out the window as Jaysynn answered.

“About a quarter till seven, I suppose.  Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” said Tarc.  He lifted at his glasses to rub at his eyes, and then looked down to notice a spot of drool on his lapel.  “And yourself?”

Made over by sleep deprivation, Jaysynn looked ten years older and wearier.  “I’m ready to get moving,” he said.

“Good,” said Tarc, tiredly.  “That’s what I like to hear.”  He brushed at the damp spot on his clothes and then cleared his throat.  “Listen, Elric.”  He had switched into friendly mode.  “As one rule-breaker to another, let me tell you, your life is in danger all the time…. And if you wake up, say, tomorrow morning, and everything is not what you wanted it to be, just…take note that you’re alive.  Be thankful for it.”

Jaysynn stood not far inside the doorway with a questioning gaze.  “Are you trying to tell me something?” he said.

“Nothing in particular,” said Tarc with a slow shaking of the head.  “Just some general advice.”

Jaysynn took a deep breath.  “Do you know who I am, sir?”

“Yes,” Tarc said.  Jaysynn exhaled.  His shoulders fell.

“You’re the man who’s going to start my bakery,” Tarc went on.  “As for who you were yesterday…” he tapped his pointer finger on his chest, “I don’t care.”

Jaysynn nodded thoughtfully.  “I get the feeling there’s something you’re not telling me.”

“Dammit.  If I had more to say I would have said it.  Now shut up and take a seat until the projects man shows up.”

Jaysynn moved toward a chair against the wall, but before he was in it another man came in the door.  He was young, energetic, with the enthusiasm of a salesman, and carried a binder of papers that appeared to be much more organized than anything within Tarc’s reach.

“You must be Elric,” he said, shaking Jaysynn’s hand.  “I’m Martynn.  Today we’ll be taking a look at the site where the bakery will be built and talking about its size, its layout, and the equipment you’ll need.”

Tarc stood and said, “If you need me I’ll be in the back room.”

“You look like you could use it,” said Martynn cordially.  He turned back to Jaysynn and went on: “I understand you have someone you want working with you.  Should we consult her about the building details?”

“Yes,” said Jaysynn.  “She will know more about it than me.”

The door shut behind Tarc, and Martynn’s voice grew quiet and his face, which had so far been a fashionable smile, turned suspicious.  He glanced about with his brow drawn tight and tension in his cheeks.

“Now that he’s out of the room,” he said, “there’s a message I was asked to deliver to you—from one of the higher-ups.  He says, ‘I can take you back where you belong.  Meet me tomorrow night under the branches of the cottonwood.  Elthor… Elthor be praised.’  That’s what he said.  He didn’t tell me another word.  I even asked if you would know what all that meant, and he just said it was nice weather and walked away.  And that’s fine with me.  I don’t want to know about any secrets that might get me in trouble.  Tomorrow night under the cottonwood.  That’s what he said.”  He became loud and happy once again.  “Now let’s find your helper so we can start laying out this building, what do you say?”

So far this morning Jaysynn had been told that he might wake up somewhere strange tomorrow, and that in two nights he should meet with, apparently, someone who would take him back to Thyrion.  His enthusiasm toward the project was dwindling.  He wanted now to get caught up in the intrigue, to figure out what was at play behind the scenes, but found he was too exhausted for all that.  They didn’t seem like personal problems:  They seemed political.  They seemed Imperial.

He didn’t have the strength to care.  So he looked at the day ahead as a day of labor, and followed the project man to the work site.

Martynn’s notes told him right where to find Kyrie, who was excited to hear the news that she and Jaysynn would be running a bakery.  They spent much of the rest of the day on a grassy knob, the future building site, making drawings and laying out walls by stretching ropes across the ground.

At the end of the day they went back to the town hall, where Martynn turned over the final drawings to Tarc.  He also took a short stack of books from one of the other rooms and handed them to Jaysynn.

“We don’t have much of a library,” Martynn said, “but we’ve gotten our hands on a few pieces of practical literature.  This is everything we have on site that talks about large-scale baking.  You’ll do some unskilled construction work until this thing is built, but you’ll also have a little time to study.  Good luck.  I’ll be in touch.”

Martynn left and Jaysynn and Tarc remained in the building.  The light coming through the windows now was indirect, the soft light of late evening.

“Have a good night, sir,” Jaysynn said as he reached for the door, holding his stack of books in one arm.

“Oh, yes,” said Tarc.  “Of course.  Um…thank you.”

Jaysynn turned the knob, but waited for Tarc to say something more, but he was absorbed in his work, blotting names out of his books and adding other names.

A gentle push, the door was opened.  Jaysynn walked across the dust and to his bunkhouse.  He was beaten by the day and by the last two nights.

But just as Tarc had worked himself to exhaustion the night before, had sacrificed true rest for the camp at his command, and had at last fallen asleep in his office chair; so Jaysynn labored over his bakery.  It was a little thing, a paltry responsibility compared to what Kyrie believed was his true purpose.  But somehow he found he could care about a little thing more than a big one.  So, ready for sleep as he was, he picked up one of the books that Martynn had handed him and read about oven temperatures until the words drifted into space.  The moon rose and the last traces of light disappeared from the room, and at last he fell asleep.

Jaysynn stood almost at attention, not in deference to Tarc’s authority, but because that posture was the surest way to keep his emotions out of the room.  “You’ve made your point, sir.”

“Not quite,” said Tarc.  He paused for a minute.  He leaned back in his chair with arms crossed.  “Do you know what a rule-breaker is?”

“You tell me, sir,” said Jaysynn.

“A rule-breaker is a visionary.  And…” he shrugged and went on, “depending on what type of visionary he is, he either accomplishes great things or he gets his head cut off.  Now, I’m a rule-breaker myself.  Do you know what rules I’m breaking?

“You’re stripping men and women of their freedoms for your own benefit.”

Tarc smiled.  “Well said.”  He leaned forward again and went on, speaking quickly and directly, “But you’re soft pedaling:  I’m running a damn slave camp.  I’m paying people nothing but their daily bread.  And I’m using their labor to establish businesses that will all be running strong when this city gets back on its feet.  I’m using this catastrophe—and the suffering and desperation it’s created—to get ahead.  Two weeks ago if you’d told me about someone doing what I’m doing now, I’d say to cut his head off.  But today I’m the biggest humanitarian on the whole mountainside.  I changed the rules.  That’s how we Falconer’s live:  we change the rules, or the rules change on their own, and we adapt.  Now, from one rule-breaker to another, I ask you:  what is your vision?”

“I don’t have a vision,” Jaysynn said.

“I don’t like dancing around to get a question answered,” said Tarc.  “You snuck out of the camp and you went to the city.  Think about it a minute and then tell me clearly what you were doing or what you were looking for, or you’re going to be one of those rule-breakers that loses his head.”

“I don’t know,” said Jaysynn.  “I wanted to see what it was really like.  What the problems were, if there was work for the people, if there was food.”

“You thought I was lying—you thought you’d be better off there than here?  Is that it?”

“No,” said Jaysynn.  “I just wanted to know what kind of trouble there was, and if there was a way for people to make it out of it.”

“So you’re some kind of bleeding heart, then?  Or are you looking for lost sheep so you can be a shepherd?  You want to lead?”

“I don’t know if I want to lead,” Jaysynn said.  His posture slackened a little.  “I know I want to help the people that are suffering.”

Tarc nodded.  His posture, too, grew a little less tense.  He had spoken honestly before, but it was a businesslike honesty.  Now his voice was less terse, almost rich:  “The only thing to do for people is lead them,” he said.  “That’s the only help.  That’s what they want.  They used to say to give people hope.  Give them a sense of self-worth.  Give them education.  Give them love.  Whatever.  Anyway, that’s all yesterday’s bullshit now.  Give them a leader.  That’s all there is now.  Are you that kind of visionary?”

The flame on the oil lamp flickered.  The room was not bright, it could hardly have been bright enough for Tarc to read his paperwork.  And here he was, staying up through the night watches to see if Jaysynn was a leader.

“Why are you asking me this when I jumped your fence?” Jaysynn asked.

“I don’t know,” said Tarc, still with his new, warm voice.  “You’ve got the shoulders of a leader.  You’re a military man, I’m guessing.  We found a Thyrian military knife in your gear—and you were tracing.  That’s who we’re at war with, by the way.  Or that’s who we think we’re at war with.”

“And still you’re asking me to be a leader?”

“You came back,” said Tarc with a shrug.  “If you were trying to infiltrate the city, which is what the Governor is so afraid of, you would have stayed there.”

“What if I’m trying to infiltrate the camp and sabotage the food supply?”

“Then you wouldn’t have needed to see the city for yourself, and you wouldn’t have blown your cover just a few days after arriving.  Look, I told you I’m a rule-breaker.  You were Thyrian military.  I don’t care.  Now you’re a refugee.  You abandoned a life that wasn’t working out.  If you’re some kind of radical, I want you on my side and not against me.  That’s all there is to it.  Now are you a leader?”

Jaysynn thought back to his talk with Kyrie earlier that night.  If she saw him now, she might think he was making a deal with the devil.  But she would still want him to say yes, he was a leader; he was made for bigger things than grunt work.

“I don’t know,” he said.  “I think I could be.”

Tarc’s warmth passed instantly.  “Well, don’t think about it.  Just do it.”

“What are you looking for, exactly?” Jaysynn asked.

Tarc stood.  “I told you I’m trying to start businesses here.”  He started pacing around the room.  “I don’t have any grain in the fields, but I’ve got a little stored, and my boys found a lot of ground barley near an abandoned mill—they’ll start shipping it in first thing in the morning.  I’d like to take over operations of the mill and I’d like to start a bakery.  Those are a couple options.  You know anything about baking?”

“Not really,” Jaysynn answered.  “Well, a little.  And there’s a girl I want working for me.”

“Alright, then it will be all women.  And you’re not going to lay a finger on any of them.”

“Right, fine.  I wasn’t planning on it.”

Tarc wheeled around and tipped his head toward Jaysynn.  “I didn’t ask about your plans,” he said.  “Don’t do it.”

Jaysynn told him who the girl was, and Tarc told him what needed to be built and when.  But they spared the details.

“And what did you say your name was again?” Tarc asked abruptly during their discussion.

“Um…Elric,” said Jaysynn.

“Well, Elric.  Come see me in the morning.  I’ll hook you up with a special projects man who will help you get things rolling.  For now, you need to get to bed.

Jaysynn took a breath, relieved that the night was over, yet disappointed that it had to come to an end.  He had the energy of a young visionary, but the exhaustion that comes with far too little sleep, from being pulled out of bed, from staying up to talk to Kyrie, from running into Falcon Point the night before.  It was adding up.  Yet plans would run through his head all night:  he would have a terrible time falling asleep.

“Yes, sir,” he said in deference.  “Have a good night.”

Vac nodded to him, and Jaysynn left the room

Shortly after, Captain Mile returned.  He had circled the building  as soon as he left and had been waiting in the back room.

“Well?” he said.

Tarc walked back to his desk and took a seat.  He picked up his reading glasses and put them on, slowly and deliberately, then adjusted the bridge so it sat on just the right ridge in his nose.

“That was him,” said Tarc.

“Should we send word to your brother?” said the captain.

“Why?” said Tarc, looking down at his papers.  “He would just have him killed.  But I’ll get some good work out of him.  A good leader is worth more than a decent bounty.”

The guard stepped around the corner of Tarc’s desk, close to his side, and softened his voice:  “What about the others?”

“The others?” Tarc asked, looking up from his work.

Captain Mile swallowed his spit.  “Should we tell them?”

Tarc stood.  He was a large man, and physically powerful, with a spirit even bigger and darker than his body.

“Don’t ever speak of the others,” he said, his voice quiet but fierce.  “Not to me, not to any other man alive.  If I want them to know anything, I will think of it without any help from you.”  He looked over his reading glasses and into the guard’s eyes.  “Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir,” said the captain.  “It’s just that there is a substantial reward for…”

Tarc raised his fist and struck the guard in the side of the head.  The man fell at once to the floor and clutched his ear, blood spilling out from between his fingers.  His hat rolled across the floor in a half-circle and fell over, bottom up.

“Do I make myself clear?” Tarc asked.

“Very clear.”

“Good,” said Tarc.  “I’ll get you something for your head.”

He went into an adjoining room and soon returned with two towels.  The captain was still on the floor, and still a little dazed.

“There’s one for your wound,” said Tarc, throwing him a towel.  “And here’s one for the floor.”

He made his way back to his chair, readjusted his glasses, and pored over his notes while his captain held a towel on his ear and wiped the floor of town hall clean of his own blood.

A massive cottonwood stood just outside the fence and looked over the camp that night.  It dropped a thousand floating seeds, and also Jaysynn hurtled down from its branches.  He rolled along the ground when he landed and sprang quickly to his feet, then ran like rodent looking for cover until he made it to his bunkhouse.

There he closed his eyes and thought about how he was never going to fall asleep, kept awake by worrying that Kyrie was upset, and that maybe she had been right to challenge him—maybe he had accepted this place because that was easier than accepting his calling, his unexpected title.  But once in his bunk, he soon stopped turning in his bed and grew calm, and the worries of the long day washed away into blackness.

Just then the door opened and the light of torches flooded the room.  Jaysynn sat quickly upright.  The other men were slower to react.  They squinted and groaned.

Half a dozen guards entered the room, and their leader straightened his hat and spoke up: “He’s here now.”

They surrounded Jaysynn’s bunk and told him to get out of bed.

“What’s this about?” he said.

The same guard answered, “Don’t worry.  There’s no punishment here that’s so bad that you can’t get up and work the next morning.”

Beyond that, Jaysynn didn’t ask any question or make any complaint.  He just leapt out of his top bunk.  His bare feet landed on the floor boards without making a sound:  every inch of his body knew how to take a fall.

“Come along,” said the leader.  Two walked in front of him, two behind, and one on either side as they led him out the door, across the yard, and into the town hall.

This camp was far younger than the city of Falcon Point, and its headquarters was quite new compared to the Old Fort.  But in spite of its newness, it was not as comfortable as the castle in town.  Nor was it as majestic, nor as beautiful.  It wasn’t as proud.  Not as sturdy, not as strong.  It wasn’t even as stark.  It was just there.  Practical.  And that only for the next few years.

An oil lamp sat on Tarc’s desk and lit his face, its glow flickering off the lenses of his reading glasses.  A mass of papers was spread out in front of him, with a sheet or two in each hand.  He looked over his glasses to see his men with Jaysynn in their custody.

“Welcome back Captain Mile,” said Tarc.

The guard with the hat, with the sword on his waist and the dagger-shaped lapel pin, brought his feet together and saluted.

“I see you found him,” Tarc went on.  He looked back down at his papers and asked, “Did you give him a warning?”

“No sir,” said the captain.  “We thought you would want…”

“Don’t you think you should give him a warning?” said the boss.

“Yes, sir.”  Captain Mile bowed his head dutifully.

While Tarc checked over the numbers scribbled down in front of him, the captain held his hand out toward one of his guards, who laid his baton in his open palm.  Captain Mile raised the baton and took a swing at Jaysynn’s head.  Jaysynn instinctively stepped back, but the guards behind him prevented his movement.  He held up an arm to block the blow, and the blow sent a tingle from his fingers to his shoulder.  The guards then grabbed Jaysynn.  He realized that struggle would get him nowhere, so he did not resist.  Instead, with his arms chicken-winged behind his back, he readied himself to receive the blow.

Captain Mile handed the baton back to his subordinate and patted Jaysynn on the cheek with his bare hand.  “Relax,” he said.  “Just a warning.  Just something to get you thinking.”

The other guards released him.

“That’s enough,” Tarc said.  “Leave us alone.”  And the room was soon empty except for Jaysynn and the man at the desk.  He laid down his papers and placed his reading glasses gently on the top of the mess.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Um…Elric,” said Jaysynn.

“Sorry about your arm…Elric,” said Tarc.

Jaysynn looked down at his arm and back at Tarc, but said nothing.

“Those guys are just the same as you—just people that came here on the bus.  Well, most of them have been with me for a few years, but they were still the same: people trying to get away from a life that wasn’t working out.  My operation was quite a bit different before the Cataclysm, of course, but I still tried to get the most good out of all my employees.  Some of these guys worked a couple days in the fields and then started picking fights.  They just weren’t happy unless they were brawling.  So I decided that I would let ‘em do what makes ‘em happy—and I would make it work to my purpose.  Since I let one of them take a shot at you and five of them hold you down to show off how manly they all are, they’ll be satisfied for a week.  If I hadn’t let them do that, well then they would go pick a fight with somebody who didn’t do nothing wrong.  See, when somebody is too violent, that’s an easy problem to take care of—not only to solve it, but to utilize it.  But I get the feeling you’re a bigger problem than that.  You’re a rule-breaker of the worst kind, would you agree?”

“No, sir,” said Jaysynn.

“You left your bunk at night for an unsanctioned reason.  You left the camp.  I am probably correct in assuming that you went into the city—which is not only against the rules of this camp but also the laws of the city.  I am also reasonably certain that you’ve been in the women’s camp to see the girl that you were travelling with.”

“I’ve not broken the spirit of any of the rules of this camp or of the city of Remirion.”

“And that’s just it,” said Tarc, leaning forward now with an elbow on his desk and a finger pointed at Jaysynn.  “It’s not the place of a farmhand to decide which rules apply to him and which ones don’t.  That makes you the worst kind of rule-breaker and the most dangerous kind of employee.”

“Okay,” said Kyrie.  “Then how did you survive when you fell out of the Hall of Records?  Why didn’t Dracon or his men find you?”

“I got lucky,” Jaysynn said.  “I landed in a weird place.  Like this place right here: nobody can see us unless they come close.  Or maybe Dracon kept them away so they wouldn’t know what he’d done.”

“Jaysynn,” Kyrie wrapped her fingers around a link in the fence.  “You landed on the sidewalk.  Nobody could have ordered them not to see you.  You were safe because there was magic.  I could feel it.”

“What—so you were lying in bed thinking about me and you got some magic feeling?” Jaysynn stood.  “That’s not a miracle,” he said.  “That’s just a dreamy little girl.”

Kyrie did not stand with Jaysynn.  She was still squatting in the pasture, and her head was low.  “I was there,” she said.  “I was at the Hall of Records.  I saw you fall.”

“How did you know I was there?”

“You told me that’s where you were going.  So I went as quick as I could.  When I heard the window break and I saw the body falling, I knew it was you.  When you hit the ground, you put a crack in the pavement.  I thought you were dead.  But in an instant I knew that some miracle had protected you.  The guards saw it too, and they rushed to the place where you’d landed, and they stood right over the top of you, but they couldn’t find you.  Dracon was yelling from the window, ‘Where did he go?  Find him!’ And I could see you plain as day—from twenty or thirty yards away.  And then I knew that if I left, they would be able to see you.  So I stayed until morning.  I stood over you and watched  you– and the guards wandered past, yelling for me to tell them where you crawled off to, unable to see.  I was hiding you.  But it wasn’t me.  It was a power bigger than me.  And the women in the camp say that it’s Elethem.”

“I don’t know what happened that night,” said Jaysynn.  “All I know is that the whole order of nature that made magic possible is gone.”

“It’s not—it’s right in front of us.”

Jaysynn went on, “And the whole order that made me Emperor is gone—and that made it possible for me to be the Watchman.  It’s a world without bread.  A world without medicine.  This has been a tough pill for me to swallow.”  Jaysynn smiled at her.  “It’s been kind of humbling, you know.  To see how powerless I am to change the world.”

“Jaysynn, true humility is in acknowledging the truth that’s right in front of your face.  It’s in accepting your destiny rather than denying it.”

“I never had a destiny,” Jaysynn said.  “Even when I was prince.  My father knew it and Dracon knew it.”

Kyrie shook her head.

“But listen,” Jaysynn went on, not giving her a chance to speak up.  “I’m exhausted after spending most of last night running into Falcon Point and back.  We both need to get some sleep to keep our strength up.  You’ve got a lot of weeds to pull in the morning and I’ve got a lot of manure to haul.”

Kyrie gave him a disappointed look.

“Things will get better,” he consoled her.

“Wow,” she said, standing at last.  “It didn’t take you long to start parroting the boss man.  Forget the fact that you’re the emperor of Thyrion.  Forget the fact that some miracle or some act of destiny for some reason kept you alive.  And just have a good night and have a good time carting manure around in the morning.”

She walked away.

“Now hold on,” Jaysynn said, but she didn’t turn back.  A chain link fence and a row of razor wire gleamed in the moonlight, and the cicadas made a terrible racket.

“Are you going back to the men’s camp tonight?” she asked.

“That’s where I’ve got a bed,” he said.  “And Elthor knows I could use the rest.”  Kyrie looked down at her hands, and Jaysynn went on, “I’ve been hauling manure from one giant pile to another—we’re taking it from outside a horse lot to a field where it’s gonna be spread.  Some of the guys have wheelbarrows but there aren’t enough to go around, and I’m the new guy, you know.  I just partner up with somebody and we carry a big load of it on an old door.  I guess there’s a carpenter here who’s making wooden wheelbarrows, so I keep thinking I’ll get one, but they don’t hold up very well, so he’s got to keep repairing them and that means they don’t get built very fast.  How about you?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said.

“I mean what have they had you doing?”

“Pulling weeds,” she said.

“Yeah?  Like in a garden?”

“No.  It’s a field.  It’s huge, but we’ve got to do it all by hand.”

“How about your sisters?” Jaysynn asked.

“We’re all working together.  They’re doing well.  It’s tough on them, working hard all day in the sun, but I think they’ll…”

Jaysynn shrugged, waiting for her to finish.  When she didn’t, he ventured a guess:  “You think they’ll… like it?”

“Yeah.” She nodded.  “They might.”

“Yeah….”  Jaysynn waited for her to say more, or to ask about the men in her family.  When she didn’t, he offered it up:  “I’m not working with your brothers.  They’re picking stones out of pastures and stuff like that.  The guy that works with them seems really good with kids.  And your dad is holding up okay.  He’s…” Jaysynn cleared his throat.  “Hey.  Is there something wrong?”

“I don’t know,” said Kyrie.  “We’ve been here not even four days and we’re already okay with it.  I mean, this is slavery, right?  Isn’t that what it is?”

They listened to the frogs for a minute.

“Last night I went into the city,” Jaysynn said.  “There’s a lot of damage, you know.  The Well looks the same as ours.  Some of the buildings are in bad shape, some are okay.  It looks like there’s been a lot of looting and vandalism.  But they are in better shape than Thyrion.  There’s no doubt about that.  But it doesn’t change the fact that…all the jobs disappeared overnight.  Their economy was all mines and factories, and all their equipment is just dead.  People are scared, and a lot of them are hungry.  And I don’t have the royal pantry to share from.  I wish I could help, but there’s nothing I can do.

“Now, I think it’s pretty selfish of Remirion to not let refugees in the city, but I can see why they’ve got that policy.  If we were in the city, we would just be two more mouths combing the same garbage cans for food.  Frankly, as long as things outside are running the way they are, we’re better off in here.”

“But shouldn’t we be doing something to solve the problem?” Kyrie said, the tension of tears climbing her throat.

“We’re making food,” said Jaysynn.  “There are a lot of things people need right now, but if they don’t eat, nothing else matters.”

Kyrie didn’t look at him.  She breathed deeply once and then again.  Then she said, gazing past him and beyond the trees on the outside of the fence, “What do you think is your purpose in life?”

“To live another day.”  Jaysynn let out a quick burst of laughter, but it was nervous and feeble.  Kyrie shook her head and he answered again:  “My purpose is to help others by doing the best I can with what I’ve got.  Right now my purpose is to make sure there’s manure ready to spread so the fields will make a little better yield and a few more people will get to eat.”

“That’s the Emperor’s purpose?” she said, angrily.  “That’s the Watchman’s purpose?”

“Look,” said Jaysynn.  “When we first got here I was worried people would know who I was, and a lot of people recognized me—I know they did.  I got to thinking about that and I don’t know why I was worried.  There is no Emperor.  There’s no royal family.  There’s no Thyrion.  There’s no nothing.”

 “There’s no nothing?” Kyrie said.  “Well, I think you’re wrong about that.”

“Oh,” said Jaysynn playfully.  “So you think there’s not no nothing?”

“I’m being serious,” she said, and crossed her arms.  Jaysynn said nothing, but waited for her to calm down, for her shoulders to drop a little, and for her eyes to gaze up at the moon.

“Some of the women in the camp…” she said, “they say Elethem is at work.”

“Elthor, you mean,” Jaysnn corrected her.

“No,” she said, still looking up.  “Elthor is just a token of religion, they say.  Elthor is the god that made Thyrians better than everyone else.  They say he blew up two weeks ago and there’s nothing left but a hole in the ground.”

“Hmm,” said Jaysynn.  “I wish I could argue….”

“But they say there’s something bigger at work,” Kyrie went on.  Something that makes Elthor and Thyrion and everything else look like a joke.  They say Elethem saw how proud people got and he kind of started to laugh, and one little chuckle sent cracks through the land and toppled skyscrapers and blasted the wells to pieces.  I don’t know much about that.  I mean I don’t know if all this destruction is really for the good.  But I do know that there’s miracles going on.

“Before we got here one of the women got her foot run over by a cart—it slipped back down a hill when she was taking a sack of grain off of it.  Everybody heard it crunch.  She cried and said it was smashed to pieces, and blood soaked through her socks and shoes in no more than a second.  So they put her on a table and gave her a piece of wood to bite on while they took her shoe off.  And when they got it off, there wasn’t even a bruise.  No broken bones, not a break in the skin.  After they washed the blood away, all they saw was a nice, clean foot.  And since we’ve been here there was an older woman who was really sick but they made her keep working.  Well one day she…”

“Those days are over,” Jaysynn said.  “It’s easy to think that we see something like that—some trace of magic—just because we can’t make sense of the world without it.  We expect it.  But the age of magic is gone.”