Aelinna Reads the Stars

The royal observatory at Vextar was on the eighth floor of the south tower. It was the smallest functioning observatory in any kingdom of Celesterra. It had been built at the king's grandfather's request for the small private use of the royal household, and it had been, since the grandfather's death, used principally as a winter storage room for the upper galleries. Aelinna had, at the academy at Avarath, learned more about the use of glass than she had ever, until this week, expected to apply in her own kingdom. She had not, in her years at home, climbed the eighth floor of the south tower for any reason. She climbed it now.

She climbed it the night after she had read Vesper's letter, and she climbed it again the night after that, and she climbed it on the third night, and on each of the three nights she carried with her, under her cloak, the bronze instrument the academy had given her at the end of her first year — a small careful planetary clock, Avarathan in design, brass-fitted, calibrated by her own hand in the careful way she had been taught.

On the second evening, the captain Tomas had stopped her at the foot of the stairs.

He did not, on the sentence, react. He had served her mother. He had served, since her mother's death, the small careful private hours of the princess's discipline. He looked, briefly, at the small bronze instrument barely visible at the inside of her cloak, and he did not, in the looking, remark on it.

He inclined his head.

"Your highness."

She went up.

She did not, on the first night, set up the bronze clock. She used the small palace glass.

The small palace glass had not been used in twenty years. She cleaned the eyepiece herself. She cleaned the objective. She had brought, at her own provisioning, a small phial of the polishing oil the academy used. She applied it. She sighted on the three reference stars Vesper had named, and she watched them, on a clear winter sky, for the first of the three hours she had set herself.

She saw nothing on the first night. Nothing measurable. The three stars were where Vesper had described them. They moved across the small careful arc of the eyepiece's grid in the small careful way the grid expected. They did not, in any of the three hours, hesitate.

She came back on the second night. The sky was clear. She set up the bronze clock alongside the glass. She sighted. She watched for three hours.

In the second of the three hours, on the bronze clock, the third reference star paused.

The pause was not visible to the unaided eye. The pause was not visible in the glass. The pause was visible only on the bronze clock, in the small soft drift of the third reference star's mark against the engraved arc the clock kept. The mark, which had been moving in the small smooth way it had been moving for an hour, did not move for the space of three of the clock's beats. Then it moved again, and resumed its rate, and did not, in the remainder of the hour, pause again.

She wrote it down.

She came back on the third night. The sky was clear. She set up both instruments. She watched.

In the first hour, the second reference star paused. In the second hour, the first reference star paused. In the third hour, the third reference star paused — for the same length, three of the clock's beats, in the same direction, eastward, as Vesper had described.

She wrote each down.

She closed the observatory at the end of the third hour, and she did not, in the closing, allow her hands to shake. They shook anyway. She placed them on the rim of the small workbench at the eyepiece's base and she pressed them flat against the wood, and she breathed, the slow small careful three counts she had been taught at the academy when an instrument's reading had, in any of her training, given her a result her training did not have a category for. She did not, on the third night, have a category for what the bronze clock had told her.

She had two kingdoms' worth of readings. She had one of them in her own hand. She had measured, with a small instrument from her own student days, the same hesitation Vesper had measured with a forty-three-year career.

The stars did hesitate.

She walked back to her rooms in the small slow careful pace of a princess who had, in a single hour, decided that she would not, for the foreseeable seasons of her life, sleep in the manner she had slept the previous year. She closed the door. She laid the bronze clock on the desk. She did not, for some time, sit.

She wrote a letter.

She wrote it once, by the lamp at the desk, in the small careful hand she had been raised to write in, addressed to the only person she could think of who might, in any chamber of any kingdom, have the standing and the honesty to read the bronze clock's readings without filing them at the rear of the year's section behind the trade ledgers. She wrote the letter. She read it. She burned it.

She wrote it a second time. She read it. She burned it.

She wrote it a third time. The third time, she changed two sentences. She made the language slower, the questions softer, the conclusions less explicit. She did not, on the third writing, name the kingdoms. She did not, on the third writing, name the bronze clock. She did not, on the third writing, name Vesper. She named only the measurement, the direction, and the dates. She read the third draft. She did not burn it.

She sealed it.

She did not, in the sealing, use her own signet. She used a small private seal her mother had left her — a seal her mother had, in her own life, used only for personal correspondence, and which had not, in any of Aelinna's nine years since her mother's death, been pressed into wax. She pressed it. The wax took the impression. The impression was clean.

She did not, by morning, address the letter to her father.

She did not, by morning, address the letter to her brother. She did not address it to the Lord-General. She did not address it to the chancellor.

She addressed it to the Astronomer Royal of Avarath.

She set it on the desk under the bronze clock. She extinguished the lamp. She lay down, finally, in the small narrow careful posture of a princess who had decided that the kingdom in which she had been raised had become a kingdom that did not, in any of its formal practices, have an instrument equal to the question her bronze clock had asked.

She slept, badly, an hour.

When she woke, before dawn, she did not look at the letter on the desk. She knew the letter. She had written it three times. She knew, by the third writing, what the kingdom's correspondence wing would, if the letter were brought to it, do with the letter. The kingdom had, in the matter of stars, decided that it was not in a position to know. The kingdom would, by the small steady operation of its own administration, file the answer behind the trade ledgers and decline, in the slow careful way of a country that had begun to be afraid of its own shelves, to read it.

She sent, instead, for Tomas.

He came at the fifth hour, in his standing-watch coat, with the small soft step of a captain who had been roused at an hour the captain had been preparing all week to be roused at.

He did not, on the description, react.

He waited a count.

She inclined her head. She picked up the letter from the desk. She handed it to him. He took it in both hands, in the small careful way of a captain who had taken state letters from her mother for fifteen years and had never, in any of the fifteen, lost one.

He did not, on the question, smile. He had not smiled at her since her mother's funeral. He looked, briefly, at the bronze instrument on the desk.

"Then I will tell the kingdom that the princess has, in the seasons since her return from Darklume, taken to going to bed early."

She inclined her head a small further fraction. He bowed. He went.

She sat at the desk in the small slow careful posture of a princess who had, in three hours of the bronze clock's quiet work, become the keeper of a second of her kingdom's two ledgers. The first ledger would be kept by the chair in the long hall, by the council in its stone chamber, by the chancellor in his correspondence wing. The second ledger would be kept by a princess in a south tower, with a small bronze clock on her desk and a letter ridden out before dawn by a captain who had served her mother, and the two ledgers would, from that night on, run side by side through the kingdom in two different inks, and the kingdom would not know, for some time, that one of them belonged to it.

The kingdom, on every reading, was no longer a kingdom that had one set of measurements. It was a kingdom that had two. The two were, on this night, three small beats apart on a small bronze clock — and three small beats, in the small careful reckoning of the discipline, was the distance at which a star had decided, against the convention of every sky the kingdom had ever read, that it would no longer move at the rate the kingdom had assumed for it.

The stars had hesitated.

The princess had measured.

The chronicle, on every register the night could keep, had begun to count by two.