The Storm Before
Four families hold power on this continent, and each one has a different kind.
My family, the Ashvanes, has the North and the cold. My father can freeze a river in August. It is useful about twice a year, and it is the reason no army has crossed our passes in four generations.
The Greystones have the East and they bend metal with their hands. Every good sword on the continent comes from a Greystone forge, including the ones that will be used against them.
The Monshalls had the Central territory, where they made things grow. Their orchards fruit twice a year. I have seen a Monshall girl bring a dead rosebush into flower with a single touch.
The Howells have the South and the mind. It is not a power you can describe, but you can certainly feel it. They can make you see what is not there. A man can sit across a table from a Howell and watch his own house burn, and smell the smoke.
A century ago a Howell ruled all four territories. People here still lower their voices when they talk about those years. He was mad, and he liked to be feared. He did not need a reason to show a man his children drowning. He did it at dinner, to guests, to see their faces.
He lost the continent. The accounts disagree on how, and every family tells the version in which its own ancestors behaved well.
After him there was quiet. The four families traded what they had to. We sent timber and furs south, the Greystones sent steel, the Monshalls sent grain and fruit, and the Howells sent wine and kept to themselves. Nobody visited anybody. It worked for a hundred years.
This spring the South stopped trading. The wine did not come, and nobody came to collect the timber. Greystone wrote south and got no answer. They sent a man, and he did not come back. Then they wrote to us to ask whether we knew what was happening. I know all this because Stella reads our father’s letters and tells me what is in them.
My father sent a courier of his own. He pays his couriers twice the usual rate. He does not mind Stella reading what other people write to him, but he will not have her reading his answers, and a man paid double does not hand a letter to a girl who smiles at him. His couriers always deliver, and they always come back. This one did not.
Michael Howell is the madman’s great-grandson. He is twenty-nine. In June, with no warning and no declaration, he took the Central territory. It cost him no battles and, as far as I could learn, no soldiers.
I was at home when it happened, and I was not there by choice. All my life I had wanted to leave the North. I have no power, and the people here are as hard as the weather they command. Our mother came from a fishing family on the coast, with no gift in the blood, and people said I took after her.
At twenty-one I talked my father into letting me study in the Central territory. I was in my third year of architecture and land management.
I liked it there. In the North I am the Ashvane daughter with no cold, and people look at me a moment too long. At the university almost nobody had a gift. Nobody looked at me at all, and I had not known how restful that would be.
I came home in May, a month early, because the cook wrote to tell me my father had lung fever and had been in bed for three weeks. He had not told me himself. When I arrived he said it was tiredness and that the cook should mind her kitchen. He coughed through the whole sentence. He was thinner than he had been at midwinter. I counted the buttons on his coat that hung loose and said nothing, because he hates being counted.
I do have one unusual ability. It is less than what people expect of an Ashvane. I feel storms before they arrive, sometimes days before.
It starts under my breastbone, a pressure that sits there and gets heavier. No Ashvane has ever had it. We make cold. We do not predict anything.
By the time the wind rises, I have usually moved the horses to the inner stable and told the men which fence to brace. By the time my father notices the sky, I have been waiting for hours and I am bored.
Nobody here counts it as a gift. What good is it to know a storm is coming, they say, if you cannot stop it. They stopped asking how I knew when I was eleven, after I was right about the hail.
That was a long time ago, but I still remember it. Rowan, our groundskeeper, stopped next to me at the stable wall and squinted at the clouds.
“Pass by morning,” he said.
“It will last two days, and there will be hail.”
He grunted and walked on. Rowan has been wrong about the weather for thirty years. It has never once lowered his opinion of himself, and I admire that.
My father came out a few minutes later with his hands in his pockets.
“You could wait inside,” he said.
“I’d rather see it come in.”
He stayed next to me until the rain started.
The storm lasted two days. The hail took part of the south fence. I had said the east one would go. I am good at when. I am less good at where.
I spent most of it in the stable, and I have spent most storms there since. My mare stands quiet through lightning. She does it when I am with her, and only then. The stable boys thought she was a calm horse until she bit one of them.
When the South took the Central territory that easily, I think I was more disappointed than the people who lived there.
My books are still in that room. So is my good coat. I have written four letters since then. One went to my professor and three to the girls I got along with, Elisabeth, Andrea and Varnia. No answers have come.
People here say the Central families were cowards. I watched those families for two years, and I watch people carefully. They were comfortable, which is different. No one had asked them to choose anything in a hundred years. I have thought about how he did it. A Howell can show a man his orchards on fire. He can show him his daughter safe at a Howell table. I think he showed each of them the one picture that would make them open the gate, and I think he knew which picture to use. An army I would understand. I do not know what to do about a man who wins before anyone has drawn a sword.
So the whole summer I rode, and trained, and wrote letters. Twice in the last month I rode out to the waterfall at the far edge of our land. It is four hours each way and no one has ever followed me there, which is most of what I like about it.
The morning the letter came, I was in the yard with the guards. It had rained in the night. I had felt that one coming too, the afternoon before, and had the washing brought in. Nobody thanked me for that either.
Nobody taught me to fight. I sat on the fence and watched the guards train every morning from the age of nine, because I like to watch people and they were the most interesting thing on the property. By sixteen I knew that the captain dropped his left shoulder before he swung, that Harn closed his eyes when he blocked, and that the tall one never guarded his knees.
I asked to join. For two weeks they pulled every strike and smiled at each other over my head. Then I waited for the captain’s left shoulder and put him on his back in front of the kitchen staff. The cook laughed so hard she had to sit on a barrel. After that they hit me properly.
That morning I finished with the swords, which I am good at and do not enjoy, and went to the far wall to throw knives, which I enjoy very much.
Stella found me there. She is eighteen, five years younger than I am. We have the same mother and the same red hair, and nobody has ever mistaken one of us for the other. Hers was pinned up with eleven pins. Mine was tied back with a strip of harness leather. She was wearing her good shoes in a wet yard before breakfast.
“You’ve hit that board forty times,” she said. “It’s dead. You can stop.”
“It hasn’t said so.”
“Ask me why I’m standing in mud in these shoes.”
I threw. The knife went in a finger’s width left of the last one. “You want me to admire them.”
“Father had a letter. It came before you were up.”
“He gets letters every day, Stella.”
“He read this one standing. Then he sat down and read it again. Then he asked for tea and let it go cold.” She folded her arms. “I made that tea.”
“Then I understand why he didn’t drink it.”
She looked at the knife in my hand, and then at me, and decided to let it pass. Stella picks her fights. She wins more of them than I do, because I take all of mine.
“Who sent it?” I asked.
“I couldn’t see the seal. He turned it face down when I came in.”
That stopped me. Stella has been reading his letters since she was nine. He stopped hiding them years ago, because she summarizes them better than his steward does. He had never turned one over.
“He hid a letter from you,” I said.
“From me. In my own house. I was insulted, and then I was worried, and then I came to get you, because you’re the one he can’t out-wait.” She looked at my boots. “You are also the one who will track mud across his carpet, and I’d like him to have two problems.”
I pulled the knives out of the board and thought about who would write to my father and frighten him.
A creditor would not. We owe no one. Greystone could have, with worse news than last time. A letter from the Central territory would have done it too, since nothing had come out of there since June. Or it was from the South, and the South had answered no one since spring. I did not like any of the three.
The last time my father kept bad news to himself, the bad news was a fever in his own chest, and I learned it from the cook. I had no plan to learn this one from the cook.
“Did he look ill?” I asked.
“He was doing sums on the blotter and crossing them out.”
I wiped the blades on my sleeve. Stella watched me do it and closed her eyes for a moment.
“I’ll go now,” I said.
“Change your shirt first.”
“He’s seen me in worse.”
“That is the saddest thing you’ve ever told me, and you say it every week.”
I went in as I was. She walked beside me and kept to the dry stones.
The pressure under my breastbone had come back while we were talking. I looked up before I went through the door. The sky was clear from the ridge to the river, with no cloud anywhere in it.
I looked twice to be sure.
