Chapter 24: Aldric's Choice

The rain had not stopped in four days.

Aldric stood at the window of his administrative office and watched it come down in grey curtains across the settlement's central yard, where two militia members were moving a stack of salvaged timber from one covered area to another for reasons that had not been explained to him and that he was not going to ask about, because there were things a governor could know and things a governor needed not to know, and which was which had become a more complicated calculation than he'd expected when the word *governor* had first been applied to him.

He had been awake since the third hour of the morning. The filing Veyra had submitted sat on his desk behind him, weighted with a river stone Pia used as a paperweight because the desk had a slight westward lean that sent loose sheets to the floor. He knew the document's contents without looking. He had read it four times yesterday, twice before the assembly session and twice after, and each reading had produced the same sensation — not quite surprise, not quite recognition, but the feeling of watching a skilled opponent execute a move you had studied in theory and had not quite believed would happen in practice.