The afternoon following New Year's Eve with Jack and the rest of the state school crew, I awoke in my family home in Sunmount with a dreadful hangover. Being closer to thirty than twenty by a hair now, I could not take my liquor the way I had in my younger days. That, and I was now unaccustomed to drinking, because the responsibilities of captain in the Integrity Office did not leave much time for the kind of revels one found in the lower ranks of the service.

  My mother and my sisters had very kindly left me be as I slept in well past the time that the Boll family is typically up and active. Close to noon, when I fully roused myself and resolved to put the weariness behind me, I drank two glasses of stream water and bathed myself in the family washroom. Then I dressed in fresh linens, which my eldest sister had washed for me in kindness, and knelt in prayer at the family shrine in the main room of our modest home.

  It was a cold, clear day, but the windows were nonetheless open. We Wylders are often teased for not minding the cold, and I must admit there is in fact some truth to it. There's a certain hardiness, whether from culture or blood I do not know, which allows us to brave what most Paxanans would consider unacceptable frost.

  Invigorated by the January breeze, I gazed at the suit of furred, antlered armor that hung proud from the center of the shrine. An axe and a flintlock rifle were below it, weapons that had been used in fierce combat against Paxana’s own troops in the time when the Wyldmen had not yet been illuminated by the light of the emperor. Reverent with imagined scenes of that time long gone, I shut my eyes and began my prayer.

  "Noble forefather," I said, addressing the ancestral spirit of the House of Boll, "Guardian of this home, thank you for protecting my mother and father and my brothers and sisters in my absence. I carry my sword as you carried your axe to protect and bring honor to my homeland. On the line of battle, you answered the call of the Wyldman elders to your last breath against Paxana."

  I felt some need to address this in prayer, since prayer was one of the only circumstances where I could be frank about our failed independence war without drawing looks of suspicion from my Paxanan peers.

  "You did not humiliate our line with surrender. You fought to the death and died with honor. Help me keep the strength to live by your example, even as I fight for the Calendula Throne you resisted. And when I meet you at the deathgate and you welcome me into the everafter, let me have done enough in my day for you to say that I kept the flame alive."

  I thought of going on, though I was not sure how to proceed, being rusty in prayer from so many months away from the home shrine. It was the sound of light steps behind me that made me pause and raise my head. Turning, I saw my mother approach.

  I think of my mother always in terms of colors, checkerboard red and white, in woven reeds, spirals and bears and other patterns sewn into her gownrobe. A Wylder gownrobe is not like a Paxanan gownrobe, not exactly. It has far more intricacy to the design and far more life.

  "You look like him," she said. "Your great grandfather. I remember him old when I was young."

  I rose upon realizing we had not caught up in two days. It was easy to spend all my time out and about mucking in the mountains with my brothers and sisters while my mother tended the home. In this moment, I realized more effort on my part was deserved by the hardworking, gray-haired lady before me.

  "Mother, I was going to walk the temple gardens. Would you join me?"

  She hesitated.

  "My knees aren't what they were, and I usually catch the eleven o'clock comedy hour with Quintus on Radio Paxana."

  "We have a radio now?" I asked. In the days that I had lived in that home, a radio would have seemed an unthinkable extravagance.

  She nodded and looked bright. "The pottery's doing well. People still want handmade sets for entertaining and holidays, even if the restaurants are going for the factory junk. We have some export clients, too. Someone wrote us from Kaichura for twenty pieces. Kaichura, all the way across the sea. Can you imagine that?"

  "I'm not surprised. It is the best," I said to her.

  She glanced over to the kitchen where I indeed could see a gleaming new radio on a table. "Will you stay for the show?" she asked.

  I paused. I felt I owed my mother my time, but the trivialities of radio comedy programs were not to my taste. In my head, I made note to come and see her again in the evening. Then I stood. "I think I could use the fresh air," I said. "I need to work on my swordsmanship."

  "Oh, I cleaned it for you," she said to me, and presented me with my own officer's saber.

  "I thought one of the boys had taken it," I told her, accepting it with two hands in the reverent pose. "Thank you."

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  "It's beautiful," she said to me.

  This was high praise coming from a Wylder woman who had long been taught to respect only the axe and reject the slender curve of Paxanan swords.

  I faltered. "It's never been tested in battle."

  "It's well made," she said. As an artisan, she knew materials, and she had clearly spent some time with it during the cleaning. "It won't fail you."

  I returned it to its military sheath and kissed her head.

  Two hours later, I had made my way to the gardens alone, and I stood on a deep oak wooden bridge over a lily-padded pond. It was made to look old, almost medieval, but I knew for a fact that it had been funded only a decade ago by industrial money. The money of heavy industry was most closely concentrated in Paxolite and Archcove, but there was still a little bit of it trickling into the smaller towns here and there. I knew in time there would be nowhere in Paxana untouched by the march of capital.

  With the stone on my bare chest, I trained with the saber, going through both ritualized stances and the more practical combat methods I had been taught in officer school. I wore my olive officer's trousers and belt, and no shoes. Even in the chilled air.

  After a little bit of this, I noticed a man approaching. He was grayed all over, wearing a vest and turtleneck sweater. I recognized him warmly as Jack Clearwater Sr., one of the aforementioned industrialists. He was father to my good and generous younger friend, Jack.

  "Junior tells me I should call you Captain now," Jack Sr. said to me when he got near enough to speak without a shout.

  Once again I sheathed my saber and turned to bow to him. "You've fed me at your table a hundred times, sir," I said. "You can call me whatever you like."

  Seeing that the man was not just passing by, I stepped down off the bridge and we shook hands. "Congratulations, son," he said to me. "I hope you had a good time last night."]

  "I did, sir," I said to him. I considered thanking him directly for bankrolling our evening, but I thought better of it. Matters of personal family finance between Junior and Senior were best left unmentioned by outsiders. Turning from me, Jack Sr. looked out at a couple of state school beauties in pink gownrobes walking along the lakeside. "Any of these southern small town girls catch your heartstrings?" he asked me, hopeful.

  "I'm only here a few days," I said back. "I'd rather see my friends."

  He turned back to me. "Aren’t you cold?"

  "I am."

  "By design, then."

  I nodded. "Yes, sir."

  The older man accepted this. He accepted my bare feet and bare chest and Wylder ways. My advancement in the Army with a clean record at a young age was more than enough to make me seem a stand-up citizen to him, even with the Boll idiosyncrasies we'd carried from the north.

  We walked down the garden path with no one else around. "I take it you're acclimating to the cold for your next assignment," he said. "You told me once that you try to adjust to the cold if you know they're sending you somewhere with a chill."

  I was surprised he remembered this. It had been long ago that I said it. I suppose one doesn't get far in business without being an attentive listener. Unable to speak about my upcoming mission, I hesitated, searching for words. He saw straight through me in that moment.

  "And I take it," he added, "from your silence that it's classified."

  I chuckled at his intuition. "I always suspected one doesn't make it in business without a gift of insight," I said back to him.

  The man clearly had designs, although I did not yet know what they were. "Well," he said, "I'll lightly suggest you prepare for a change in plans. I'm having your reassignment postponed."

  This struck me as exceedingly odd. The man was only a private industrialist, after all. "I wasn't aware that Paxcorp had the power to dictate IO postings."

  "We do not, but Deputy Secretary Shorston has some sway, and he happens to be a buddy, so I called in a favor."

  "I see," I said.

  "Now I'll call in another," Jack Sr. went on. "I need your help, Murdoch."

  I watched him as he unfolded a carbon-copied document and presented it. Taking it in hand, I read it silently. It was an intelligence report from what office I did not know detailing a plot being furthered by unknown parties to foment war with the nation of the CCNCU to the north.

  "Is this legitimate, sir?" I asked. We had fought the CCNCU twice before, before they had fallen for the allure of the cult-like Clementic faith. The prospect of fighting them a third time in the throes of their Clementic fervor was alarming indeed.

  "Men I trust say it is," said Jack Sr.

  "Who's behind it?" I asked, meaning the plot and not the intelligence report.

  "Army officers," said Jack Sr., pointing to the document itself.

  "That's all you know?"

  Jack Sr. cleared his throat. "They call themselves the Rekindler Group. We don't know who or how many, but we need to stop them."

  I swallowed. I was not entirely thrilled to be put in this position by a friend. "You understand I'm obligated to share this intelligence with my superiors."

  "I understand you're obligated to proceed with your investigations in a manner which will not risk sharing classified information with the enemy," said Jack Sr. All pleasantries in his tone had given way to a deadly serious demeanor. "Since your suspects would be within your own officer corps, I think you would do best to keep your circle tight, Captain Boll."

  He was making himself as plain as he could. I found it unlikely that my own Integrity Office superiors might be participants in treason, but nonetheless I took his warning to heart.

  I folded up the document and prepared to pocket it when I saw him reach out his hand. "Best if I keep that," he said, "if you've put it to memory."

  I had, and so I handed it over. "I can't promise you any news while I look into this," I said, "but I will be looking."

  "That's all I can ask, son," said Jack Sr. "Hope you weren't looking too forward to time in the snow."