For Darkness Shows the Stars

dear sister, are not a farmer.”
    Tatiana whirled around, and her face was contorted into an angry mask by the shadowy light. “You can’t have this, too, Elliot. I won’t be left with nothing.”
    “And what will you do with it?” Elliot’s voice remained calm. She prayed that her sister wouldn’t make everyone miserable out of spite. “How will you manage a farm?”
    “I’ll get help. I’ll hire . . .” Tatiana bit her lip. “It’s none of your business.”
    “What if it was?”
    Tatiana’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
    “What do you want, Tatiana?” Elliot asked. “Do you want to stay here, on this farm, for the rest of your life? Do you want to milk cows and count hay bales and tend to the Reduced women in the birthing house? You’ll have to, you know. You won’t have me here to do it for you anymore. Or do you want to live in Channel City and ride horses and get new dresses and be beautiful?” Beautiful and useless, Elliot almost wanted to add, but it would hardly help her argument.
    “I’m not giving you the estate,” her sister scoffed.
    “I don’t want you to give it to me,” said Elliot. She’d thought this through very carefully. “I want you to rent it to me. Just like we rented the Boatwright estate to the Fleet. Rent it to me, and go live in Channel City. Let me do with this place what I want. In return, I’ll give you enough money to keep yourself and Father in high fashion down in Channel City. He’ll still be Baron North, and you can be baroness, when your time comes.”
    “Father will never agree to that!”
    “That’s why I’m not talking to Father,” Elliot replied. Her father was angry, vengeful, vindictive. He’d hurt his own workers just to show them he had power. He’d keep an estate he didn’t want, an estate he couldn’t manage, just to punish Elliot.
    Tatiana’s desires were different. Elliot was hoping that they could align.
    Two days later, she got the answer she needed when Tatiana showed up on Elliot’s front lawn driving a cart that contained the wrapped remains of Elliot Boatwright.
    “Come, Elliot,” she said solemnly. “It’s time to put our grandfather out to sea.”
    ELLIOT WOULDN’T PRETEND IT was the memorial her grandfather deserved, and yet as she and Tatiana stood alone in the mist on the shore, watching the glowing pyre tugged out to sea by a rowboat filled with Reduced, she found she preferred it to any of the pomp that would have accompanied the Luddite-attended event a week earlier. Here, at least, she didn’t have to worry about strangers staring at her, reading worlds of meaning into every fallen tear and questioning whether she was a worthy heiress to her grandfather’s legacy.
    When the rowers were far enough out, they unhooked the ropes connecting the floating pyre to the boat and pushed it away. Soon, it would be picked up by the current and swept out into the deep, returning her grandfather’s body to the sea and the air and Boatwright ancestors of millennia past.
    The sisters stood in silence, watching the fire recede into the mist-swept waters. The only sound was their breath and the waves and the soft dip and creak of the Reduced’s oars as they rowed back to shore.
    “Chancellor Boatwright,” Tatiana said softly, almost to herself.
    Elliot looked at her. Was she speaking of their grandfather?
    “It suits you,” she went on. “I can’t say why. But it would not have suited me.” She gave a halfhearted shrug. “Though I often doubt Baroness North will, either, for all the time I’ve spent imagining it. I find it difficult to picture it on any woman aside from Mother.”
    Elliot remained silent, unsure of how to respond to such an admission. The rowers neared the shore as the mist began to burn away.
    “I am eager to go to Channel City,” Tatiana said now. “I know it will be a vast change, but I suppose I should accustom myself to change all over these days. Even here in the North. The Posts grow more powerful everywhere. Do you suppose Captain Wentforth will wait to marry Olivia until he returns from his voyage?”
    Elliot turned to Tatiana, but there was no malice in her sister’s expression. “I—I don’t know.”
    “I can’t imagine Horatio will allow him to take her with him. Not when she’s still recovering. Do you see her much?”
    “Every day.” Olivia never missed a music lesson.
    Tatiana nodded. “I have not visited as often as I should. She seems so odd ever since