[b]The Adair Estate[/b]

Nevin sat where he always sat. He spent most of the time in his rocking chair, so much that the caned seat had molded to the shape of his buttocks. His room had the air of a place that was well occupied. It smelled like dust, and sweat, and piss - though the piss could not be helped. After he was cut, his bladder lost its resiliency. The quilts on his bed were draped over the side, failing to touch the floor only because several stacks of books on the ground managed to prop them up like tent canvas resting on poles. A stained blanket was draped over his legs. A small table stood next to him, where he kept an inkwell, quill, and a half-melted candle. 

He held a wooden plate of food in his lap. He took his dinner in his room most of the time, preferring the comfort and solitude of his own company. It wasn't much - a dried heal of cornbread, a slop of fish chowder, and a brace of pickled sausages from the old world to supplement the bland New World fare. Ships came in from the old world occasionally, delivering supplies that the colony could not produce and new souls to live in exile with them. The Usurper King expected goods in return, but all Uponhill had been able to give him were a few tons of clapboard.

The food did not taste like much. He ate it lethargically, half consumed by philosophical ponderings, and the memories of a happy childhood he still pined for. Life had not been good to Nevin Adair, and memories were sometimes his best refuge.

His self-imposed exile from the world had began to wear on him, and at nineteen his body had atrophied. He was thin, his flesh flabby with baby fat. His face was long and jowled, his copper-colored hair was a stringy mess, and he wore the wisp of a mustache that he managed to grow despite what had been done to him. 

After dinner, he spent the remainder of the afternoon watching the sunset over the farm. He could see the rough wooden spire of the newly built Ethahnist temple poking over the treeline. That was where Uponhill was, only a few miles away. They had spent the winter there, and he had hated it. Their apartments had been cramped and smokey, and the illness that burned through the new colony had worsened their misery. It had hit his Aunt Maude the worst. She had been in the room next door, a violent cough torturing her and she weakened and worsened. Hearing her cough all night and day had worn at his nerves. They knew she wasn't go to make it when that cough cave way to slow, rasping rattle. He could still remember that sound, and the dread it had instilled in him. She went silent, and then she died.

No more than the temple spires could be seen from the Adair farm though. From his window, the rest of civilization was the small farm framed by miles of tree-thick wetland. What he preferred to watch was the farm itself, and the people who lived on it. The late afternoon was when all the work was done for the day, and everybody settled into doing what they enjoyed doing. He watched his cousin Desmond leave the farm. He would walk to Uponhill, where he would drink and tell war stories as he liked to do. He watched his sister Braithe, five years younger than he was, teasing the farm-boys she always consorted with. She had always enjoyed the company of boys over girls, even when she was a child, but adolescence had came with new games. She liked to brag that she was better with a musket then most of her friends, though her mother never let her hunt so she only practiced on targets painted on trees. She also drank with the boys, and shared crude jokes. 

She liked to play another game, one that only a few knew of and kept secret for her sake. When it got closer to dark, and their mother retired for the evening, she would take a boy far enough into the woods that they were out of eyesight, and they would play dice for forfeits. The winner was rewarded with the right to leave the way they came, and the loser lost their clothes. At least, that was the way it was in theory. Nevin only knew because he had heard rumors, and because he was often awake to hear the loser return. It had always been the boys - running nervous, trying not to be seen, and searching for the place she had hidden their clothes. Always behind the woodshed. Nevin supposed that, when his sister did manage to lose, she must have been allowed to dress before she returned. How would it have looked, after all, if the daughter of the Gwynda Adair came rushing out of the woods, naked and bedraggled, after people had seen her walking into those same woods with a farm boy? Maybe she would receive a tongue lashing, but what sort of punishment would the boy get? She had that unfair advantage, and it seemed she didn't mind using it.

The others settled into their same routines. They started bonfires, and opened clay jugs of corn whiskey, which they mixed with water to make their little supply last. They talked, and told stories, and laughed. If their meager drink had any effect, they might dance or sing. And Nevin would sit in his room, staring out the window and watching. He didn't mind too much. This was the way things had to be, and he knew how to keep himself occupied. The thinking arts were his game now.

It was at this time that he truly appreciated to new world. During the day, their new home brought them illness, meager rations of tasteless food, and a general lack of everything. At twilight though, when the sun was dipping past the horizon, he felt as if he was peaking into the utopian days of the legendary past. The air became chilly and wet. It smelled of smoke, and trees and mud. The forests became dark and shadowed, but the western half of the sky lit up as if it were on fire. It glowed red and orange, fading into pink, before flagging its decent with bruised purple. When the sun had disappeared entirely, the stars came out to dominate their cosmos. The stars! Nevin had not known so many stars existed until they were out to sea. At home, everything was lit up with gas lamps, so much that their light dampened the stars. Out here though, in the frontier wilderness, there was nothing to hide the starlight. 

Sometimes, Nevin thought about rejoining the outside world. He had tried before, but those times had only left him bitter. He had, in some ways, lost his life the day they stole him from his prison cell and announced his sentence in that dank prison infirmary room as the surgeon prepared his scalpels. The horror he had felt in that moment had been strong enough that he could still feel its echoes when thought back to those days. It had been a feeling of arriving at the gate of infernal hell preparing for your eternity. It had frozen him, and when they began to cut, he had lost consciousness.

Those dark days after his father's execution had been nothing but terror. Nevin had been lucky in some ways. He had been allowed to keep his life. Even in being cut, he hadn't suffered the worst. The first few punitive castrations had been conducted out in the open, on the steps of the National Palace where the executions were taking place. Several had been done this way, until a nine year old boy bled to death from his wounds. That must have been too much for the loyalists, and they decided to move the maiming of innocents to the hidden recesses of dungeon infirmities. 

Infection had followed. He nearly died, suffering first in the dungeon cells and then in the cabin of the ship that would deliver them to their new home. His sickness kept him from laboring in the construction of the colony, and when they moved to the farm his mother insisted he avoid work. 

That did not mean avoid everything, though. That detail was his addition.

People looked at him like a victim now. He was a cripple, of course. A cripple of the worst kind. And when he tried to forget it, or when he thought that he might be able to overcome the pity of others, his bladder would give out and his breeches would soak with his own stinking water, and the pity and shame came flooding back. Solitude was easier, and he had his books and his thoughts to keep him company. 

Fretting about old wounds was an easy way to lose a night. He pulled a match from the silver tray on his table, struck it, and lit the candle. It was time to read.

His reading this week was the Codes of Breno. Breno the Assizer had been the third King of the Wensee Dynasty that ruled Tirnu before they absorbed Sorset. Breno had spent his reign in a political the strong-minded Cal's of the hinterlands over the right of the crown to pass laws that would effect the entire realm. It had been tradition until that time for local Cal's pass their own laws, their loyalty to be shown by tribute and arms rather than jurisprudence.

Breno succeeded, and his unified Codes of Law had been a tool in that victory. It was ponderous reading. The details it covered included nearly every imaginable scenario. If a farmer seeks recompense from another farmer who's cattle has damaged his crops, an Assizer would assess the worth of the damaged crop and offending farmer would be required to repay that amount in product by the end of harvest, whether that be in milk, cheese, beef, or living animal. If a man was caught sodomizing an animal, he was required to pay the worth of the unclean animal to its owner. The animal would then be hogtied and tossed into a lake or river, while the man who had sullied it would be flogged in public. Theft was nearly always punished by hanging, as was murder, but maiming was to be responded to with maiming. And not, like with most cultures, with the criminal receiving the same wound as the man he maimed. In Tirnu law, the victim chose what his assailant lost.

There was a knock on the door. It seemed late for that, and he looked out his window to make sure that it was as late as he thought it was. The sun had set a long time ago, and the farm was covered in pitch black. The song of toads and insects had long taken the place of the people, who had all went to bed.

"Yes?" he said timidly. He marked his place with a ribbon and delicately closed his book.

"It is Brodric." a voice answered. Of course. The Steward was his own man, and he hardly kept normal hours.

"Come in." Nevin replied.

Brodric was the type of person who had been born to live on the frontier. In his late forties, his age was only shown by the pepper of white in his mousy brown hair. He had a bushy chinstrap beard, uncut hair sticking out under his hat, and simple buckskin clothes. His hat was made from the pelt of one of the tiny deer that lived in the bogs of the New World. It was grey-brown fur, trimmed to fit his head. The thin, rough strips of pelt that had been the animals legs were crossed and pinned to the front and back of the hat. For Brodric, the pins that held these legs in place were in the shape of brass owls.

"I was unsure if you would be asleep." Brodric said. He spoke quietly. He already had a soft, deep voice, so that when he whispered it was almost impossible to hear him. 

"I don't sleep that well." Nevin replied. "Or early. My mother was looking for you earlier. She thought that I might know where you had gone."

Brodric smiled. "I was hunting. Brought down five pheasant, went in to town to trade three of them." he said. "I think that, by now, she can do for a while without my advice."

"She doesn't like what she doesn't control." Nevin replied. 

Brodric nodded. He began to recite. "There are that we command upon. Most of all, there are that upon we are restrained. Wisdom is knowing and abiding by these laws." It had not been a question, but Brodric looked at Nevin for an answer.

"Clevacus" Nevin replied. "His third address to the philosophers in Croton." Crotonese history was one of his favorites. Croton had been an ancient city state on a swampy peninsula in the southern part of what was now Antoinne. Their borders had never grown far beyond their city, but their vast trade network and the advances they had made in mathematics and rhetoric had made a mark history that could not be forgotten. Clevacus, Publius, Porfavorica, all sat on the pantheon of the world's intellectual heroes.

"Very good." Brodric nodded. "The works of ancient Croton are becoming rare now that Aenda's lackeys think they are subversive. Republicans and Plutocrats scare them, I am afraid. However..." he reached into his coat and pulled out a book. "I was able to get you this."

Nevin's fingers looked like translucent spider legs as he grasped the book. "Wude's Collected Histories of the Folkmoot." he said. "This is a rare tome. You bought this in [i]Uponhill[/i]?"

"You would be surprised what exists in the New World. A lot of embarrassed intellectuals have ended up here." Brodric replied. "I have my own copy, as it happens to be. This one is yours."

"Thank you." Nevin said. "Thank you much."

Wude was said to be the first true historian, compiling his work nearly one thousand years ago, collecting every small detail he could find about the open-air style of government that had been so common in ancient times. What he had ended with was a book detailing every meeting he had attended, every interview he conducted with the officers of those meetings, and the minutes of those who had taken the habit of recording their meetings. The complete version was a series of twelves volumes that was hard to find, but the condensed version explored the most indicative details. It was an excellent gift.