Page 3 of Ironhold, Trial One

“Oh, you know half the folk in the village pay you with food,” Benkan says.

“And that is why I have to live in a hovel,” my mother snaps back. “Now, out, you. I'm sure someone else will be sick or injured soon enough, and I don't have space for you to be here as well as them.”

“You’re a hard woman, Arla,” Benkan says. “Not like your daughter.”

“Aye, and don't you forget it,” she replies.

She shuts the door behind him as he goes. “Looks like fish tonight. Again.”

I smile slightly. “I don't know why you're complaining, Mother. You knew from the start that Benkan was probably going to pay in fish.”

She shrugs. “It would just be nice to think that for once, someone would pay us in gold or silver. You heard what he said about the Aetherian official coming around.”

“You think they’ll bother us?” I ask.

She nods. “Of course they will. A place like Aetheria doesn’t exist by being kind, or not extracting everything it can. It takes and takes, every part of the empire feeding the center. A whole empire named after a single city; what does that tell you, Lyra?”

“That the city is important?” I guess.

My mother shakes her head. “That the city isgreedy. That it’s a hungry maw that can never be fully satisfied. Most places, they have a city state, a bit of surrounding land, and that’s it. But Aetheria needs anempire. And its emperors are…”

She trails off, not finishing that thought.

“What about the emperors?” I ask. I know who Emperor Tiberius VI is, of course. No one who lives in the empire can avoid knowing that name.

My mother shakes her head. “There are some things it’s better not to talk about, especially when you live in a conquered land.”

I have a hard time thinking of Seatide as conquered, partly because it happened when I was a little girl, and partly because it is so out of the way that no one really bothers with it. From the little I understand, soldiers didn’t come ravaging through. Instead, a few officials showed up one day and simply declared that it belonged to the Aetherian Empire. They took a few people back to the city, but other than that, nothing much changed in terms of everyday life.

“Come on,” my mother says. “We need to finish cutting the herbs. After that, I know you’ll want to go out to the rock pools to listen to the fishes, but you should be careful with the Aetherians around.”

I smile at my mother’s characterization of what I do as “listening to fishes.” We both know it’s more complicated than that. I have a fragment of the magic that has allowed Aetheria to conquer the world. Out here, that is a rarity. My talent is nothing major, though, just enough to communicate with the animals I see. It is enough to turn a rock pool into a fascinating space, filled not just with life but with feelings and thoughts, intentions and hopes.

“I’ll be careful,” I insist, standing and smoothing my simple woolen dress.

“Even so,” my mother begins, but she doesn’t continue the thought, because in that moment, a young girl bursts in, flattening herself against the wall and breathing hard. She looks frightened. In fact, she looksterrified.

“What’s happening?” my mother asks. “It’s Ida, right? Gertha’s daughter?”

The girl nods, still not saying anything.

I crouch by her, looking her in the eye while I put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Did something happen? Something that frightened you?”

She nods.

“Something you're running away from?”

That gets another nod.

“Can you tell me what happened?” I ask.

It takes her several seconds before she says the words.

“A bear. A big one. It already ate someone! And it killed a soldier! Everyone was screaming and running and… this was the closest place.”

A bear is bad news. They grow big out on the coast, and there is little to challenge them. Normally they stay away from human settlements, but if one has wandered in, that's potentially very dangerous.

And it's a danger I can help with.

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