Landar lay face down on the fluffy feather stuffed cloth. Her body was on fire again.

A gentle hand stroked her hair down her back in a way much reminiscent of the same event one year ago. Only this time, she wasn't bitter.

Her mother sighed, "so, are you satisfied now?"

Landar hissed as her mother rubbed a raw spot on her legs. Winning still hurt just as much as losing.

Her mother sighed again, "if you were hurt, you should just have said so. " Her mother unveiled the bottle in her sleeve and dabbed at her wounds with a light cloth.

Landar winced, only partially in response to the stinging alcohol on the back of her ankle. She hadn't seen any medicine when she came in nor had she asked for it. But her mother seemed to know that she wouldn't say anything.

"I won, finally," Landar said.

"He won't count it as a real victory," Cato said, from the corner where he was sitting, "if you say he's concerned about power, a shield penetrating bolt certainly doesn't count. "

"Are you trying to help solve this or not?" her mother snapped at him.

Cato frowned, "I'm just pointing it out. "

Her mother shook her head. Cato shrugged.

"What are you talking about?" Landar asked, "isn't this the first time you've met?"

"He understands," her mother said, rubbing more alcohol on her ankle. Landar bit down a yelp.

"We're both trying to solve this misunderstanding with your father," Cato explained. Good, he knew that keeping things from her just made her annoyed.

But that made no sense. "What misunderstanding?" Landar demanded.

"You have this strange idea that your father is trying to make your life difficult," Cato said.

"It's not a strange idea," Landar snapped, turning her head to face him, "it's the truth. "

"Doesn't look that way to me," Cato said.

"Your father just isn't honest with himself," her mother added.

Cato paused and looked at her mother in surprise for a moment. Then he shrugged, "I guess that's one way of putting it too. "

Landar could feel her breath escaping between her clenched teeth in a very unladylike hiss. Something her father would definitely scold her for but she was beyond caring. "Huh? How could you even say that!" Landar half yelled then coughed as her lungs disagreed with her exertion, "So what about all those times he drags me into a fight just to assess my power? What about his unreasonable demands trying to run MY life?!"

She meant to state that more forcefully but her magical exhaustion was getting in the way. That last part came out as more of a strangled squeak than she would ever admit.

"You aren't completely wrong," Cato said, tapping his fingers and looking at her mother, "how do I say this?"

Her mother looked back, "he sees things differently. "

"Ah! Yes," Cato nodded, "you and your father value things differently and even express what you want differently. But you misunderstand his intentions if you think he's out to get you. Just that both of you have different definitions of the term. "

Her mother considered the words then bowed shallowly from where she sat, "a good summary. "

Landar stared at Cato, trying not to feel as if her entire world was crumbling under her. What... what in the world was he talking about?

"Imagine you had a son," Cato said to her, waiting until she nodded as she engaged in his little thought experiment. "Now imagine he's growing up nicely, learning alchemy from you and starting to make his own inventions," he waited for another nod, "and then, suddenly, he finds a nice girl in Inath, say the daughter of a prince or something, and throws away all his magic and runs off to Izalice to court her. What would you say?"

"I would let him go," Landar stared.

Cato thought for a moment then nodded, "and then when the girl doesn't pay attention to him, he comes crawling to you asking you to use your position as say, the most famous alchemist of Inath, to help him get her attention. Maybe he wants a nice magical toy for a present. Then what would you do?"

"Huh?" Landar wondered if she appeared like that to Cato. No, no way, she never asked her father for even a single telin. "I would ask him to make his own toy," Landar said, "don't come crawling to me if you decide to go your own way. "

"Ah, but you see, there's the difference in values," Cato looked at her mother again for confirmation as he talked, "if you did that, your father might grumble about your choice in nobles, maybe he would prefer you focused your attention on an Iris boy from the main family, but he would support you. And if say, the noble took exception and decided to abuse his position to get you in trouble with the Knights, you would find the political weight of the Iris clan behind you. Even now, even when you clearly don't like your father, he will still back you in the Order of Knights if you truly got in trouble. "

It was starting to make a twisted kind of sense but how twisted it was! Landar snapped at the invisible lines that pulled at her but her simmering anger found no purchase, not when they were lines of logic and she hadn't mastered the art of deceiving herself. She didn't need Cato to lay it out for her, her mind would fill in the gaps all by itself.

But, but! She frowned into her bed, each little scene of her father she recalled to fuel her anger was met with a chattering little voice, a traitorous voice, that filled in the blanks that she hadn't even known existed. Landar sighed, she would have to do a lot of rethinking.

She glanced up at her mother and saw her looking almost predatorily at Cato.

"Amazing," her mother said. What. Her mother looked down at Landar with a smile, but continued talking to Cato. "I knew she would find someone who could understand her," her mother sighed happily, "you do in ten minutes what her father couldn't in ten years. I'm impressed. "

Cato smiled back, "we have similar styles of thinking. Your husband doesn't. "

"Mm," her mother looked Cato up and down, "speaking of husbands and hypothetical sons, when am I going to get a rebellious grandson to whip back in line?"

Landar could see Cato's smile freeze in place.

"I wonder what the price for bird eggs are like this year," her mother wondered.

"Mother!" Landar yelped, only to meet Cato's sudden confusion. She kindly explained, "an Iris tradition. We boil the eggs in red dyed water and eat them to celebrate a girl's p-pregnancy. "

"Just make sure that you actually get married first," her mother's smile didn't touch her eyes, "I would hate to have to use my Sword. "

Cato blinked and looked at Landar, "is that another figure of speech?"

Landar shook her head, "mother's more powerful than I am too. "

Cato gulped and nodded, "I'll... keep it in mind. "

Dear Minmay,

Borehole has reached a depth of one hundred meters. Progress on the easy parts has been quick and we have set up the first steam engine to pump the water out. This is the first time a steam driven water pump is being used in mining operations and the experimental setup has taught the miners a number of new techniques they say are usable to reach deeper iron ore deposits. The commercial viability of depending on a steam engine to get plain iron ore might be questionable however, the engine at the top of the borehole consumes fuel at a ruinous rate.

Cast iron casing support for the walls has begun. The percussive driller design Cato helped introduce at the university has been most instrumental to the bracing works.

Magical density measurement has shown a definite increase. A little below Cato's projection but within range. Enough to net a small positive output from the 'pipe' enchanted into the wall, but not enough for commercial output.

Labour rotations have met with some dissatisfaction. It is getting dangerous at the bottom and I am being asked for more pay. Do I have permission to use additional funds?

In your honour,

Arthur

Dear Cato,

Wood planer is a success. I myself have never seen such identical tables being produced by people hardly qualified to be apprentices. Even if they're really just four sticks, four nails and a board.

I still can't work out what's your secret though. The woodworkers in Minmay, who don't really have a guild as more a loose association, have tried to replicate your work but even when their planers are better than this experimental factory's unit, they can't get it either.

No seriously, what manner of magic are you using and how do I get it to work for my canning operations? Interchangeable table legs might not sound as shiny and awesome as bowgun shafts but you have no idea how much money I will save if I could just get my can lids to fit all the time.

Kalny

Dear Kalny,

I suspect the planer has nothing to do with it. It makes manufacturing easier but the real improvement is in the process. I think.

You have to thank the Recordkeeper at the university for giving me this idea.

The Recordkeepers have dedicated training methods for standardizing how their records are kept. You are surely familiar with how an Inath Record looks virtually identical to one written in Minmay. They even teach their apprentices how to hold their quills.

I took the same idea for the table making process. A woodworker outlined the steps and refined the process, then we taught the process to the workers, who you note have only very basic knowledge of woodworking. As long as they follow the steps and perform the measurements and calibration appropriately, I see no reason why the entire table factory would require more than one woodworker in total. Who only has to be there in an advisory and quality control role.

You should have seen the processes. They're a small booklet almost forty pages thick and there should be at least six copies in the factory. Of course, your food canning operation would require it's own distinct process documents.

I expect that as the workers get more familiar, the woodworker might not even be required. It should be possible to document and train a quality control operator just as well as the normal workers.

I shall proceed with the ironworking factory when I return.

Cato

Oono, head of the Iris clan and the Chancellor of Minmay sat across each other, smiling in the polite way that wasn't really smiling.

"So, I am given to understand that you are proposing a mutual reduction in import taxes. How does that benefit either of us?" Oono nodded at the businessmen lined up against the wall, and a separate nod at Cato, "I can understand they would owe you a favour for that but to give up a primary source income must be insanity for a mayor. It is impossible. "

Minmay put down his cup, "import duty is no longer a primary source of income for Minmay and most of my region. "

Oono merely raised a grey eyebrow. His greying hair and slightly hunched back made him look old, but the confidence in his power was anything but frail. And he wasn't that old anyway.

"Cato over here has described to me a system of taxes based on land leasing and earned income," Minmay continued, "it does cost quite a bit in supplies and personnel for Recordkeeping but the good records make dodging the tax more difficult. Furthermore, it has also helped grow my finances along with the demands of an expanding city. "

"The mayor does not require more income, this town is not growing, unlike your city," Oono pointed out, "to take more would invoke unhappiness. "

Cato shuffled forwards along the floor as Minmay looked at him. "Sir, the farmers in your region have not brought in their primary harvest yet, but I am sure you have already received news of the size of the harvest in the Minmay region. The same applies to the farms in the Central Territories. "

"Indeed, we have noted the new price of food and are positioned to buffer the volume," Oono noted, "however, you are mistaken if you think those are my farms. My second cousin is the mayor, not me. "

"Which is why he is not here, yes?" Minmay smiled.

Oono smiled back, "he might owe me some uncountable number of favours for letting him marry out of the Six. But come, we should not be talking of this with the King so nearby. So, why do you think this bountiful harvest will result in our town growing again?"

"When the price of food crashes, and the farmers find that they can't sell their excess," Cato explained, "they will come to look for work. Peasants who usually worked on the farms for their living will be out of one. Minmay city has already experienced this. When your internal markets begin to grow, import tariffs will not be enough to cover what is needed to administer the towns of the Central Territory. "

Oono looked at Minmay, who nodded, "that is also something my city has experienced, at great cost. "

"I have heard of the Firestorm, yes," Oono nodded, "but what of the other problem? This town cannot implement such a thing that you call income taxes. Property tax is doable, perhaps with great difficulty. But a tax on earnings is impossible. "

"It depends on an expanded recordkeeping service," Minmay said, "the Recordkeepers of Minmay have been recruiting. "

"Perhaps some expertise could be shared," Oono countered.

The Chancellor and the head of the Iris clan eyed each other.

"Shall we discuss the details?" Minmay said finally.

Cato scribbled another equation across the pages, trying to coerce the numbers into making sense. Some simplification and substitution later, he ended up with a positive number equals to zero. It didn't require calculating the number out of the constants to know something had gone wrong.

"Bah," Cato threw down his pen.

That caused Landar to look up and wiggle over from where she was lying down to peer at the sheets of algebra. She recoiled faster than a wound spring. "What happened?" she asked, putting away her algebra practice exercises.

"The Ironworkers sent me the results of the latest experiments on the steam engine," Cato explained, "lifting force, fuel consumption and temperature measurements. I've been trying to calculate the conversion rate between heat energy and magical energy and therefore the energy content of magic. And it's not making any sense. "

Landar raised an eyebrow, "so what went wrong?"

"Well, when I tried to factor in the back pressure the compressing magic exerted on the enchanted walls, then based on the heating value of magical power units, the equations get all messed up," Cato ran over the series of equations checking them for errors. But they were unlikely to happen after three separate calculations on different days with different starting points. And they all ended up in the same contradictory result.

Landar shrugged, "I'm still learning algebra, so I'm not even going to pretend to understand your thermodynamics. "

Well, he wouldn't expect any help from her anyway. Not yet.

Cato rolled over on the straw mat flooring. He had been skeptical of it at first, but the packed straw had been woven tightly and didn't have the same prickly feel. Plus, the mats were soft and warm, compared to wood or stone floors. It wasn't quite like a carpet but Cato supposed this was Inath's equivalent.

That was why Landar and him were lazing on the floor in one of the smaller buildings of the guest wing that had been allocated to them. The gentle rays of the sun shining past the doorway and gentle breezes going through the room would have lulled many people to sleep, the quiet chirping of birds in the garden accompanied by the bubbling of the artificial streams only added to the peaceful atmosphere. Cato could almost understand why the Iris were so crazy about these indoor gardens.

Cato was having none of it however. This last problem provoked by the Ironworkers' letter was causing him to almost tear his hair out. The peaceful environment had muted that to vague grumblings and lazily rolling back and forth on the floor.

"You know," Landar said after he threw away the fourth attempt, "from what I understand, these equations are the same as logical statements, yes? So if the equations don't work and you haven't made mistakes, then clearly the problem is in your assumptions. "

She put away her practice book and faced him directly.

"Yes, but which assumption is wrong? That's the key question," Cato said, "one of the equations here is wrong but I don't know which. "

"Anything you know based on experiment cannot be wrong," Landar pointed out, "that's what you wrote on empiricism. Are there any assumptions of yours that aren't based on experiment?"

"You mean, I can place as much confidence into my measured results as I have confidence in my experimental setup," Cato clarified, "but even taking it from that direction doesn't help. How do I know..."

He trailed off as he mentally examined all the equations again. There was one that he hadn't run an experiment on actually, he had inherited it from his high school textbooks after all. delta U equals Q plus W. It was just too hard to run an accurate calorimetry experiment without proper tools.

"Thought of something?" Landar said, seeing the twitch under his eye.

"Yes," Cato sighed, "I never quite thought of it that way, but perhaps magic doesn't conserve energy. "

He started to work backwards across the equations, starting from what he knew about magical power and the steam engine, and meeting in the middle where the equation would have existed. The same error popped up of course.

That equation was a description of the first law. But if that equation didn't hold, then... then the only thing preventing the Ironworkers from generating free energy was the fact that their steam engine was rather inefficient. Atmospheric engines tended to be that way, but neither Cato nor the Ironworkers wanted to risk using high pressure boilers without sufficient hardened steel. They were building one, carefully in an isolated site far away from Minmay city, but the last Cato had heard, they were still trying to get it to work.

Free energy was a tempting idea but Cato had better make sure it was really free before he started to abuse it. After all, if one didn't know where oil came from, fossil fuels were like free energy until they ran out. He didn't want the world to 'run out' of magic. For that matter, the same thing applied to his hole in the ground.

Hm, by Noether's theorems, the first law of thermodynamics was related to the time symmetry of the system. So either the system was open and energy was coming from somewhere else he hadn't considered, or magic really contained a non-time reversible process. Well, if he could find a non-time reversible process, then that answered the question.

"Excellent, I have another test for them to perform now," Cato grinned, "or at least, once they have a high pressure boiler efficient enough to actually try to generate infinite energy. "

The gardener looked out the rows of trees and sighed. The unnatural quietness of this experimental field made him uncomfortable. He scratched his head and sighed again before heading out.

The compost he added to the roots of each of the bushes wafted their pungent smell but that was not what was bothering him. The jagged leaves of the bushes were hard and stiff, sticking out from the short central stem in a protective shell of sharp edges.

Leaves wouldn't cut through gloves though, so the group of kids moving their way down the lines reached through the leaves to pluck off the hard tiny globules wedged in the center of the plant. Part of the daily harvest.

It was these pearly droplets that the palace wanted. The gardener wondered it was for, the Queen hadn't said other than that this plant had been mentioned in some of the more obscure and older stories. It had been found from some unknown place and given to him to grow.

Maybe it was for a necklace but why would anyone want so many beads harvested every day was a mystery. Still, the kingly sum of rimes that was his budget bought a very precise number of questions. Zero.

Vorril grunted as he examined the crate of oblong droplets. The magical signature was weak but definitely noticeable when gathered into a large quantity. The milky white balls had been mentioned as mana drops in the ancient recovered texts. Some kind of failed Tsarian experiment to gather natural magic. Vorril hadn't seen how the plant had been a failure but he supposed that such a tiny amount of magic must be a pittance for the Tsar.

It had been a good idea to send out those parties to look for the plant. Finding it growing in the conservatory in an ancient Tsarian ruin was only possible due to the meticulousness of Flowers of Arcia. That party might not be the very best at combat but they wouldn't miss even the tiniest clue. And they were still good enough to take care of themselves. To be frank, they would have done a better job than the Hero at finding the Sword. And not get pulled into slave rebellions.

Amarante was getting rather insufferable though, now that one of her stories had turned out to be useful. Sure, the story had correctly placed the ruin at the Tevan Volcano in zombie territory past the Passage of Kirita. Sure, it was even correct that the plant was magical. But Vorril would rather eat his own sword than admit her stories had done some good.

All the other stories that had send River of Light and Vesant Ball on wild dangerous chases deep in hostile territory weren't mentioned.

Still, they now had a source of magic. Mana crystals were well and good but they were a small and limited resource. This bush wasn't.

Vorril let the handful of pearls fall through his fingers, a grim smile on his face. Magic circles, spell cannons, bowguns and those guns Morey was making. The military applications of these devices were endless and Vorril was quite sure the Academy alchemists could come up with some new ideas.

It was long past time the Order of Knights got their own toys.