“Did you know,” Reverate Shanwick began, “that the northeastern ceral estate—the estate you and your family have been given stewardship over—has the growing capacity to keep two of the Passbound Cities fed for an entire year?”
“I hadn’t ever thought of it in those—”
“Kendai and Pomay, specifically,” Shanwick continued as if Josen hadn’t spoken. “Kendai is relatively small, but their ceral consumption per capita is substantial. Their island is small, as I’m sure you know, and doesn’t leave much space for agriculture. Pomay’s population, on the other hand, is nearly three times that of Kendai, but the agricultural output of the Heleb Plains also makes the Aristonia far less dependent on ceral supplements to keep her people fed. In the end, the two cities require a roughly equivalent supply of ceral to keep their people fed—over a million people between the two, necessitating a little over a quarter of the available ceral endowments each year.”
“That is a … humbling thought, Arch Solon.”
“The late Reverate Oak, your father,” Shanwick clarified, as if Josen needed the reminder, “was a remarkably thorough man.”
“Thank you,” Josen said, taken off guard by the sudden redirection. The way the Arch Solon had said it, it could have been a compliment or just an idle observation. Was the Arch Solon just babbling? She wasn’t that old yet, was she?
“He had an amazing eye for detail, for seeing important details other men took for granted. It didn’t make him very popular—or a very good father, unless I miss my guess. Too analytical, too harsh in his judgements.” The Arch Solon shook her head, as if to shake away the tangent. “It did, however, make him a very successful Steward. Your father, he seemed prepared for anything. Nothing ever seemed to catch him off guard. I’m sure you can see how that would benefit a man in his position. Your position, now.”
“Of course, Arch Solon.”
The Arch Solon stopped at the bottom of the stairs and turned to face Josen, face serious.
“It’s a gift you seem not to have inherited. Since you arrived in Ceralon two months ago, just in time to be named Reverate in your father’s stead, you have been caught by surprise at every turn.”
Like right now. Josen struggled to keep the surprise from his face. “It has been a trying few months, Arch Solon. Trying to make up for six years in a few weeks has proved trying.” He smiled, trying to add some levity to the statement.
Arch Solon Shanwick laughed, though Josen didn’t think it was because he actually managed to be funny. “I have no doubt. You’re a likeable enough young man, and well intentioned, I think. I have no idea where you were or how you spent your time these last six years, though not for lack of trying.” Despite her age, Shanwick’s eyes were hard and intense, though not cold. Those hard blue eyes held him, not searching like before, but penetrating. “What I do know is that I will not stand idly by while you let your stewardship, and a vital food source for more than a million of the Faceless God’s precious people, come to ruin at your hand. Not by incompetence, not by intentional misconduct, not by apathy, Reverate Josen Oak. The root cause matters little to me. Prove your ability to carry the weight of your Stewardship, or I will remove you.”
Arch Solon Shanwick didn’t wait for Josen to respond—which was for the best, as Josen had no response. Shanwick let her guard lead her out Berden’s front door, leaving Josen behind, standing dumbly on his own, trying to process.
“So much for no one noticing,” Josen said to the empty hall.
Chapter 21
Being one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world was, in Josen’s admittedly limited experience, a lot of starving work. Among his various and sundry responsibilities—organizing and inventorying and more signing than any one person should ever have to do—were the stupendously onerous dinner dates with his mother. Not that eating dinner with his mother would have been altogether unpleasant by itself, but the insufferable woman never came alone.
She had apparently come to the conclusion that the only way to keep Josen from disappearing again was to get him married off and settled down. Josen had no plans to either marry or settle. In fact, beyond this ceral season, he very little in the way of a plan at all, though every piece of paper he signed pushed him that much closer to running away again.
And so Josen’s biweekly dinner with his mother had become something of a battle of wills. His mother seemed intent on testing the full spectrum against Josen’s will, from Kendanese spiced beef and rice with a stunning tall blonde without a brain, to light broth-and-nothing soup and lavender cheese from Jurdon with a redhead who, when she smiled, tended to bite her lower lip in a very. . . inviting way.
Josen just wanted a quiet dinner tonight, a chance to forget the scolding he had just received at the hands of the Arch Solon. Maybe his mother would be alone tonight, and this could just be an informal, relaxing dinner, but it wasn’t likely.
Josen walked past the greeter with a nod, the woman returning the smile and a soft wave. “They’re at your usual table, Reverate.”
“Thank you, Helianna. Did the Acholle boys bring in anything fresh through the Pass this morning?”
“Crabs and squid caught out of Chessay Bay this morning, Reverate.”
“Perfect. Have our server start us with two fried squid plates. And a bottle of something cold and sweet. Surprise me. Thank you.”
“Josen, dear,” his mother said as he approached the table. She stood and opened her arms for a hug.
He indulged her, a grin on his face. It was difficult for Josen to reconcile the mother he ran away from six years ago—who had seemed at the time both overbearing and distant, on top of perpetually disappointed—with the clever, kind, radiant woman in front of him. Josen knew the change was in no small part due to the difference between a teenager’s view of his mother and a man’s, but that only got him halfway there. His mother, as his seventeen-year-old mind saw her, was stressed constantly to the breaking point, Josen’s adolescent thieving tendencies often pushing her over the edge. More than once she had forbidden her father, Grandpa Markise, from spending time with Josen at her husband’s request—a demand both Grandpa Markise and Josen patently ignored. They both thought Grandpa Markise’s reminiscing to Josen about his time as Arch Protector, hunting down legendary outlaws like Lukas Thorne and Silver Dania, was corrupting Josen’s mind.
Josen’s father had been right, of course, but that hadn’t made any difference to a teenage boy. All Josen saw was his mother weeping, shouting at the man who understood him better than anyone else in the world. In hindsight, he could see the kind of pressure his mother must have been under, caught between a father she couldn’t control, a son she wanted to protect, and a husband she yearned to pacify. She had been handed the impossible task as mediator between two men—both giants in their own right—and a willful boy, all of whom she loved. It was something of a miracle that she managed to outlive two of them.
She released Josen from the embrace with a frown. “What did you do to your hand?” she asked, taking Josen’s bandaged right hand in her own. “Did you have Master Roetu look at it?” She tisked, inspecting Josen’s makeshift bandage. “No, he does better work than this. Fool boy.”
“It’s fine, Mother,” Josen said, drawing his hand back. “I smashed it just before the Basin Council meeting and haven’t had time to see the doctor yet. I wrapped it myself.”
“Clearly.”
“It’s nothing to worry about. It’s feeling better already.” And it was. He had been sure he had broken it when he smashed it between the barrels, but the swelling was going down already, and the pain was definitely better.
“Fool boy,” she said again, not unkindly, as she readjusted the wrappings.
“Mother, maybe you should stop babying me and introduce me to the lovely lady you’ve seated at our table,” Josen said without taking his eyes from his mother.
“I suppose. Josen, this charming young lady is Alia Nicoa. Alia, this is my son, Reverate Josen
Oak.”
“A pleasure, I’m sure,” Josen said as he seated himself. He had been avoiding looking at her up to now but had run out of excuses without being blatantly impolite. No reason for that. He smiled and turned his attention to his mother’s dinner guest for the first time, raising a glass of water as he did.
And nearly spilled it all over himself. Seated directly across from him was a stunning woman in a yellow dress. And he recognized her. It had been weeks, it had been dark, and she had been dirty and terrified, but it was unmistakably the girl from night of the cattle stampede.
“Alia,” he said with a grin. “Glad to see you’ve recovered. In spectacular fashion, I might add.”
Her mouth—she had a cute little mouth—quirked in a close-lipped half smile. “I have, thank you. And thank you again for rescuing me.”
“Don’t oversell it,” Josen said. “You hardly needed rescuing.”
“You’re kind. But I assure you, that’s not how it felt at the time.”
“You’ve met?” Lady Oak asked. Josen thought she must have known, but the look on her face was all sincerity.
“We met, briefly, the night some of our cattle tried to tear down the Lower City,” Josen said.
“Well,” Lady Oak said, a pleased smirk playing across her mouth, “how fortunate you didn’t choose to stand me up today, dear son. I was half convinced you might with the seed being released today.”
“Prelims went fine,” Josen said. “I have no reason to think today would go any different. Fieldmaster Montiel will do a fine job without me.”
“Are they taking any extra precautions today?” Lady Oak asked.
“Not that I know of. Why?”
Lady Oak gave Josen a look as though she thought he was playing dumb. And she wasn’t wrong, but Josen didn’t really feel like talking work this afternoon.
“There was smoke out over the Shepherd estate this morning. You must have seen it,” Lady Oak said, refusing to be dissuaded.
Josen took a big bite of bread and tried to give his mother his best disinterested look.
“And I heard that the Chessian Revolution has officially claimed responsibility for several of the recent attacks,” said Lady Oak. “Don’t tell me it didn’t come up in your recent meeting. I know it did.”
Alia shifted in her seat. Having grown up in Chessay, she was no doubt sensitive to the Chessian troublemaker stereotype.
Josen sighed. His mother obviously wasn’t going to let this go.
“No one knows who’s behind the incidents yet,” Josen said. “If anyone at all. It could be a string of unlikely coincidences. Fires happen. Equipment breaks.”
“Oh son,” Lady Oak said, “don’t be naive. Fires don’t happen with this kind of regularity, not on accident.”
“Maybe not—like I said, we don’t know. But the Chessians? Like no one but Feramos ever makes trouble?” Josen asked. Josen actually agreed with his mother. There was no way this was anything but a deliberate act of sabotage this hardly seemed the setting to point that out. Besides, Alia was looking more uncomfortable by the second and Josen felt the need to voice the benefit of the doubt. “We’ll just let the Protectors do their jobs. They’ll know soon enough if the CRA is really behind this, but I don’t see the need to jump to that conclusion.”
“Even if it was, would you blame them?” Alia asked, voice firm.
Josen blinked in surprise. Lady Oak looked like she had been slapped.
Alia still looked uncomfortable, but she continued in a steady voice. “My family and most of the upper class in Chessay works hard to be just like the rest of the Passbound cities. They pretend everything is fine, that everyone is more or less happy in Chessay, that the rebels and the agitators are a tiny, unimportant minority. But that’s not really true. I also knew a lot of people growing up who don’t feel like everything is okay—a lot of people who feel dismissed and ignored and are tired of it.”
“You would think,” said Lady Oak, “that they would be grateful the Faceless had mercy and interceded in their time of need. The Church is the only thing that kept Chessay from starving to death forty years ago. No one forced them to abandon their pagan nonsense.”
“That’s not how they see it. The choice to profess a conviction you don’t believe or watch your children die of starvation isn’t a choice. It’s barely been two generations since the Five Years Famine, and a lot of Chessians don’t feel saved. They feel oppressed. They feel conquered.”
Lady Oak pursed her lips in obvious irritation.
“So,” Josen began hesitantly, “you’re saying that the CRA would be justified in sabotaging the ceral estates as . . . what? A protest?”
“I’m not saying this is the work of the Chessian Revolution,” Alia said, trying to walk back some of the agitation her comments were causing. “And I’m not trying to justify it even if they are responsible—”
“Clearly not,” Lady Oak muttered into her cup.
“I’m just … I don’t know,” Alia continued as if she hadn’t heard. “Like I said, some people, my family included, have adapted well to being Passbound. But many Chessians do feel oppressed. And ceral has become the symbol of that oppression.”
“They see ceral as oppressive?” Josen asked, sincerely caught off guard. Josen’s mother looked similarly confounded. “Ceral is life—literally for many people. The Church sells it for a pittance—at an enormous loss—so that the poor won’t starve. I’m sorry, I don’t even begin to understand. How is that oppressive?”
“I’m not claiming that the Church or anyone else is being intentionally manipulative. It’s easy to see how many people see what you do in the Basin as an important work. But imagine what it must look like from the receiving end, particularly in Chessia. A famine half a decade long forces farmers from all over Chessay to abandon their fields and move to the capitol in hopes of work and food for their families. But there is even less food in Chessia herself, and no work at all for refugees in a city swollen far beyond what she can handle.”
“Then the Faceless God has mercy on the starving people of Chessay, providing what they cannot supply for themselves,” Lady Oak said.
“But when the famine passed and the rains returned, the farmers didn’t move back to their farms. The herders didn’t go back to their lands to reestablish their flocks. And why would they? The Church of the Faceless God provided food for a pittance, food they didn’t have to toil all summer in the hot sun to afford. And the Reveries are few and far between outside the capital. Who can afford the risk to move back out to their desolate farms in the hopes there was something still there to salvage? So, they mostly stayed. And the longer they stayed, the more they grew dependent on ceral and the Church. And the more dependent they grow, the more ‘Only believe, and I shall make you filled,’ sounds like ‘Do what I say, or I will let you starve.’ I guess what I’m saying is that I wouldn’t be surprised—”
“Reverate Oak!” someone yelled distantly, from the road it sounded like. Josen stood, the raised patio giving him a clear view of a boy vaulting off his horse as he reached the front steps. “Reverate!” the boy called again, not seeing Josen. It was Sam, Josen realized as the boy ducked into the restaurant proper. Someone must have pointed him in the right direction quickly because Sam appeared on the patio seconds later, heading straight for Josen.
“Whoa, Sam,” Josen said. The boy looked on the verge of panic, and Josen’s skin went cold. “What’s wrong? Is there a fire?”
“No, but it’s real bad, sir. Reverate, it’s the seed. Mistress Vale and Fieldmaster Montiel, they sent me to get you. I don’t know, but the Fieldmaster … He says it’s real bad.”
“Let’s go, then.” He turned back to the table. “It was a pleasure seeing you again, Alia. Mother, would you please escort her home?”
Alia smiled at Josen, and Lady Oak nodded. Josen rushed out of the restaurant with Sam fast on his heels, dreading what he would find when he got to Silo Hill.
Chapter 22
Josen passed cartload after cartload filled with crystalline ceral seed as he raced toward the hill. These first carts would be headed to the inner boundary farms, those farthest away from the central estate that would be ready for the first planting. Even with as little seed as had been allotted this year, some of them would have to travel a fair distance. The carts moved slow and needed to leave now to make it to their designated camps before nightfall. Josen pushed past these carts and approached Silo Hill at a full gallop.
What in the seven famines could wrong with the seed? Josen wondered. It’s not as if ceral seed could go bad. Ceral wasn’t edible until after the Pilgrimage, the Carter’s journey without the aid of the Passes from the Ceral Basin to Ceralon. Bird and rodents couldn’t eat it in its raw state any more than people could. It couldn’t even mold or rot.
Before this season, the idea of someone tampering with the seed had been as absurd as it going bad. The Church had built up such an air of mystery around ceral, that it had taken on an almost holy air. No one would dare tamper with it.
Except Alia had just destroyed that notion.
The silos, massive stone cylinders that held the ceral seed, were guarded at all times by the Protectors, armed and armored. Each silo was barred and locked down as if it held the soul of God himself, and no one but the Carters should have been able to open them—though a few guards had never stopped Josen. But what would a person do, even if they did manage to get past the Protectors, if they managed to steal a key or trick the locks?
Josen rounded the last switchback and crested the hill amidst the bustle of unloading seed from the silos and into wagons. Even in the chaos, three people stood clearly apart. Vale sat on the stone steps of a silo, face buried in her hands. Fieldmaster Montiel was red-faced and fuming. He wasn’t yelling, but Josen could taste his fury halfway across the hill. Montiel was generally an even-tempered man, but Josen had been the focus of his anger on rare occasions. It was a harrowing experience.
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