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  　The music coming from the open windows across the lawn-strings and horns and a harp-was filling his head with purpose, swelling his chest with pride to be chosen by Dalton Campbell.

  　The Minister-the future Sovereign-had to be protected.

  　Quietly, with light steps, she climbed the four steps up onto the dock. In the dim light, she looked around at the deep shadows, stretching her neck to peer about. Fitch swallowed at how good-looking she was. She was older, but she was a looker. He'd never looked so long and hard at an Ander lady as he did at her.

  　Morley made his voice come out deep in order to sound older.

  　"Claudine Winthrop?"

  　She wheeled expectantly toward Fitch's friend, standing in the dark doorway. "I'm Claudine Winthrop," she whispered. "You received my message, then?"

  　"Yes," Morley said.

  　"Thank the Creator. Director Linscott, it's important I speak with you about Minister Chanboor. He pretends to uphold Anderith culture, but he is the worst example we could have in his post, or any other. Before you consider his name for a future Sovereign, you must hear of his corruption. The pig forced himself on me-raped me. But that is only the beginning of it. It gets worse. For the sake of our people, you must hear my words."

  　Fitch watched as she stood with the soft yellow light from the windows falling across her pretty face. Dalton Campbell hadn't said she was going to be so pretty. She was older, of course, and so not someone he ordinarily thought of as pretty. It surprised him to realize he was thinking of someone so old-she looked almost thirty-as attractive. He took a slow, silent breath, trying to tighten his resolve. But he couldn't help staring at what she wore, or more accurately, at where she wasn't wearing anything.

  　Fitch recalled the two women in the stairwell talking about such dresses as the one Claudine Winthrop wore now. Fitch had never seen so much of a woman's breasts. The way they heaved as she wrung her hands had his eyes popping.

  　"Won't you come out?" she asked in a whisper toward the darkness where Morley waited. "Please? I'm frightened."

  　Fitch suddenly realized he was supposed to be doing his part. He sneaked out from behind the barrels, taking careful steps so she wouldn't hear him coming.

  　His stomach felt like it was in a knot. He had to wipe the sweat out of his eyes in order to see. He tried to breathe calmly, but his heart seemed to have a mind of its own. He had to do this. But, dear spirits, he was more than afraid.

  　"Director Linscott?" she whispered toward Morley.

  　Fitch snatched her elbows and wrenched her arms behind her back. She gasped. He was surprised at how easy it was for him to keep her arms pinned behind her as she struggled with all her might. She was confused and startled. Morley shot out from the dark, once he saw that Fitch had her.

  　Before she could get much of a scream out, Morley slugged her in the gut as hard as he could. The powerful blow nearly knocked both her and Fitch from their feet.

  　Claudine Winthrop doubled over, vomit spewing all over the dock. Fitch let go of her arms. She crossed them over her middle as she went to her knees, heaving violently. Both he and Morley stepped back as it splashed the dock and her dress, but they weren't about to get more than an arm's length away from her.

  　After a few long convulsions, she straightened, seeming to have finished, and tried to get to her feet as she struggled and gasped for breath. Morley lifted her and spun her around. With his powerful grip, he locked her arms behind her back.

  　Fitch knew this was his chance to prove himself. This was his chance to protect the Minister. This was his chance to make Dalton Campbell proud.

  　Fitch punched her in the stomach as hard as he dared.

  　He'd never punched anyone before, except his friends, and that was only in fun. Never like this, not for real, not deliberately to hurt someone. Her middle was 【创建和谐家园】all, and soft. He could see how much his fist had hurt her.

  　It made him feel sick. Made him feel like throwing up, too. This was the violent way his Haken ancestors behaved. This was what was so terrible about them. About him.

  　Her eyes were wide with terror as she tried over and over to suck in a breath, but couldn't seem to. She fought desperately to get her wind as her eyes fixed on him, like a hog watching the butcher. Like her Ander ancestors used to watch his.

  　"We're here to give you a message," Fitch said.

  　They'd agreed Fitch would do the talking. Morley didn't remember so well what they were to tell Claudine Winthrop; Fitch had always been better at remembering.

  　She finally got her breath back. Fitch hunched forward and landed three blows. Quick. Hard. Angry.

  　"Are you listening?" he growled.

  　"You little Haken bastard-"

  　Fitch let go with all his strength. The wallop hurt his fist. It staggered even Morley back a step. She hung forward in Morley's grip as she vomited in dry heaves. Fitch had wanted to hit her face-punch her in the mouth-but Dalton Campbell had given them clear instructions to only hit her where it wouldn't show.

  　"I'd not call him that again, were I you." Morley grabbed a fistful of her hair and savagely yanked her up straight.

  　Arching her up so forcefully made her breasts pop out the top of her dress. Fitch froze. He wondered if he should pull the front of her dress back up for her. His jaw hung as he stared at her. Morley leaned over her shoulder for a look. He grinned at Fitch.

  　She glanced down to see herself spilled out of her dress. Seeing it, she put her head back and closed her eyes hi resignation.

  　"Please," she said, panting for breath toward the sky, "don't hurt me anymore?"

  　"Are you ready to listen?"

  　She nodded. "Yes, sir."

  　That surprised Fitch even more than seeing her naked breasts. No one in his whole life had ever called him "sir."

  　Those two meek words felt so strange to his ears that he just stood there staring at her. For a moment, he wondered if she was mocking him. As she looked him in the eye, her expression told him she wasn't.

  　The music was filling him with such feelings as he'd never had before. He'd never been important before, never been called "sir" before. That morning he'd been called "Fetch." Now, an Ander women called him "sir." All thanks to Dalton Campbell.

  　Fitch punched her in the gut again. Just because he felt like it.

  　"Please, sir!" she cried. "Please, no more! Tell me what you want. I'll do it. If you wish to have me, I'll submit-just don't hurt me anymore. Please, sir?"

  　Although Fitch's stomach still felt heavy with queasy disgust at what he was doing, he also felt more important than he'd ever felt before. Her, an Ander woman with her breasts exposed to him like that, and her calling him "sir."

  　"Now, you listen to me you filthy little bitch."

  　His own words surprised him as much as they surprised her. Fitch hadn't planned them. They just came out. He liked ? the sound of it, though.

  　"Yes sir," she wept, "I will. I'll listen. Whatever you say."

  　She looked so pitiful, so helpless. Not ah hour ago, if an Ander woman, even this Claudine Winthrop, would have told him to get down on his knees and clean the floor with his tongue, he'd have done it and been trembling at the same time. He'd never imagined how easy this would be. A few punches, and she was begging to do as he said. He never imagined how easy it would be to be important, to have people do as he said.

  　Fitch remembered what it was Dalton Campbell told him to say.

  　"You were strutting yourself before the Minister, weren't you? You were offering yourself to him, weren't you?"

  　He'd made it clear it wasn't really a question. "Yes, sir."

  　"If you ever again think of telling anyone the Minister raped you, you'll be sorry. Saying such a lie is treason. Got that? Treason. The penalty for treason is death. When they find your body, no one will even be able to recognize you. Do you understand, bitch? They'll find your tongue nailed to a tree.

  　"It's a lie that the Minister raped you. A filthy treasonous lie. You ever say such a thing again, and you'll be made to suffer before you die."

  　"Yes sir," she sobbed. "I'll never lie again. I'm sorry. Please, forgive me? I'll never lie again, I swear."

  　"You were putting it out there for the Minister, offering yourself. But the Minister is a better man than to have an affair with you-or anyone. He turned you down. He refused you."

  　"Yes, sir."

  　"Nothing improper happened. Got that? The Minister never did nothing improper with you, or anyone."

  　"Yes, sir." She whined in a long sob, her head hanging.

  　Fitch pulled her handkerchief from her sleeve. He dabbed it at her eyes. He could tell in the dim light that her face paint, what with the throwing up and crying, was a shambles.

  　"Stop crying, now. You're making a mess of your face. You better go back to your room and fix yourself up before you go back to the feast."

  　She sniffled, trying to stop the tears. "I can't go back to the feast, now. My dress is spoiled. I can't go back."

  　"You can, and you will. Fix your face and put on another dress. You're going to go back. There will be someone watching, to see if you go back, to see if you got the message. If you ever slip again, you'll be swallowing the steel of his sword."

  　Her eyes widened with fright. "Who-"

  　"That's not important. It don't matter none to you. The only thing that matters is that you got the message and understand what will happen if you ever again tell your filthy lies."

  　She nodded. "I understand."

  　"Sir," Fitch said. Her brow twitched. "I understand, sir!"

  　She pressed back against Morley. "I understand, sir. Yes, sir, I truly understand."

  　"Good," Fitch said.

  　She glanced down at herself. Her lower lip trembled. Tears ran down her cheeks.

  　"Please, sir, may I fix my dress?"

  　"When I'm done talking."

  　"Yes, sir."

  　"You've been out for a walk. You didn't talk to no one. Do you understand? No one. From now on, you just keep your mouth shut about the Minister, or when you open it the next time, you'll find a sword going down your throat. Got all that?"

  　"Yes, sir."

  　"All right, then." Fitch gestured. "Go ahead and pull up your dress."

  　Morley leered over her shoulder as she stuffed herself back in the dress. Fitch didn't think covering herself with the dress, as low as it was, showed much less, but he surely enjoyed standing there watching her do it. He never thought he'd see such a thing. Especially an Ander woman doing such a thing.

  　The way she straightened with a gasp, Morley must have done something behind her, up under her dress. Fitch surely wanted to do something, too, but remembered Dalton Campbell.

  　Fitch grabbed Claudine Winthrop's arm and pulled her ahead a couple of steps. "You be on your way, now."

  　She snatched a quick glance at Morley, then looked back at Fitch. "Yes, sir. Thank you." She dipped a hasty curtsy. "Thank you, sir."

  　Without further word, she clutched her skirts in her fists, rushed down the steps, and ran off across the lawn into the night.

  　"Why'd you send her off?" Morley asked. He put a hand on his hip. "We could have had a time with her. She'd of had to do anything we wanted. And after a look at what she had, I wanted."

  　Fitch leaned toward his disgruntled friend. "Because Master Campbell never told us we could do anything like that, that's why. We was helping Master Campbell, that's all. No more."

  　Morley made a sour face. "I guess." He looked off toward the woodpile. "We still got a lot of drinking to do."

  　Fitch thought about the look of fear on Claudine Winthrop's face. He thought about her crying and sobbing. He knew Haken women cried, of course, but Fitch had never before even imagined an Ander woman crying. He didn't know why not, but he never had.

  　The Minister was Ander, so Fitch guessed he couldn't really do wrong. She must have asked for it with her low-cut dress and the way she acted toward him. Fitch had seen the way a lot of women acted toward him. Like they would rejoice if he had them.

  　He remembered Beata sitting on the floor crying. He thought about the look of misery on Beata's face, up there, when the Minister threw her out after he'd finished with her.

  　Fitch thought about the way she'd clouted him.

  　It was all too much for him to figure out. Fitch wanted nothing more right then than to drink himself into a stupor.

  　"You're right. Let's go have ourselves a drink. We've a lot to celebrate. Tonight, we became important men."

  　With an arm over each other's shoulders, they headed for their bottle.

  　CHAPTER 20

  　"Well, isn’t that something," Teresa whispered.

  　Dalton followed her gaze to see Claudine Winthrop haltingly work her way among the roomful of milling people. She was wearing a dress he had seen before when he worked in the city, an older dress of modest design. It was not the dress she had worn earlier in the evening. He suspected that beneath the mask of rosy powder, her face was ashen. Mistrust would now color her vision.

  　People from the city of Fairfield, their eyes filled with wonder, gazed at their surroundings, trying to drink it all in so they might tell their friends every detail of their grand evening at the Minister of Culture's estate. It was a high honor to be invited to the estate, and they wished to overlook no detail. Details were important when vaunting one's self.

  　Patches of intricate marquetry flooring showed between each of the richly colored rare carpets placed at even intervals the length of the room. There was no missing the luxuriously thick feel underfoot. Dalton guessed that thousands of yards of the finest material had to have gone into the draperies swagged before the file of tall windows on each side of the room, all constructed with complex ornamental tracery to hold colored glass. Here and there a woman would, between thumb and finger, test the cloth's high-count weave. The edges of the azure and golden-wheat-colored fabric were embellished with multicolored tassels as big as his fist. Men marveled at the fluted stone columns rising to hold the massive, cut-stone corbel along the length of the side walls at the base of the gathering hall's barrel ceiling. A panoply of curved mahogany frames and panels, looking like the ends of elaborately cut voussoirs, overspread the arched barrel ceiling.

  　Dalton lifted his pewter cup to his lips and took a sip of the finest Nareef Valley wine as he watched. At night, with all the candles and lamps lit, the place had a glow about it. It had taken discipline, when he first arrived, not to gape as did these people come out from the city.

  　He watched Claudine Winthrop move among the well-dressed guests, clasping a hand here, touching an elbow there, greeting people, 【创建和谐家园】iling woodenly, answering questions with words Dalton couldn't hear. As distressed as he knew she had to be, she had the resourcefulness to conduct herself with propriety. The wife of a wealthy busines【创建和谐家园】an who had been elected burgess by merchants and grain dealers to represent them, she was not an unimportant member of the household in her own right. When at first people saw that her hu【创建和谐家园】and was old enough to be her grandfather, they usually expected she was no more than his entertainment; they were wrong.

  　Her hu【创建和谐家园】and, Edwin Winthrop, had started out as a farmer, raising sorgo-sweet sorghum grown widely in southern Anderith. Every penny he earned through the sale of the sorghum molasses he pressed was spent frugally and wisely. He went without, putting in abeyance everything from proper shelter and clothes, to the simple comforts of life, to a wife and family.

  　What money he saved eventually purchased livestock he foraged on sorghum left from pressing his molasses. Sale of fattened livestock bought more feeder stock, and equipment for stills so he could produce .rum himself, rather than sell his molasses to distilleries. Profits from the rum he distilled from his molasses earned him enough to rent more farmland and purchase cattle, equipment and buildings for producing more rum, and eventually warehouses and wagons for transporting the goods he produced. Rum distilled by the Winthrop farms was sold from Kenwold to Nicobarese, from just down the road in Fairfield all the way to Aydindril. By doing everything himself-or, more accurately, having his own hired workers do everything-from growing sorgo to pressing it to distilling it to delivering the rum, to raising, cattle on the fodder of his leftover stocks of pressed sorghum to slaughtering the cattle and delivering the carcasses to butchers, Edwin Winthrop kept his costs low and made for himself a fortune.

  　Edwin Winthrop was a frugal man, honest, and well liked. Only after he was successful had he taken a wife. Claudine, the well-educated daughter of a grain dealer, had been in her mid-teens when she wed Edwin, well over a decade before.

  　Talented at overseeing her hu【创建和谐家园】and's accounts and records, Claudine watched every penny as carefully as would her hu【创建和谐家园】and. She was his valuable right hand-much as Dalton served the Minister. With her help, his personal empire had doubled. Even in marriage, Edwin had chosen carefully and wisely. A man who never seemed to seek personal pleasure perhaps had at last allowed himself this much; Claudine was as attractive as she was diligent.