For Darkness Shows the Stars

there had been fifty, but ever since the bad time, there were scarcely ten adult Posts to share between the two estates. Still, she knew her grandfather preferred this state of affairs to moving in with her father and Tatiana. Elliot liked to think that he wouldn’t have minded so much if it was just her.
    The Boatwright himself was seated on the porch now, and his good eye narrowed as she came up the path to greet him. “Good morning, Grandfather,” she said. “This is the day, you know.”
    He grunted at her and seemed to sink down into his chair. Elliot sighed. So it was to be an obstinate morning.
    “We talked about this, remember?”
    The good side of his mouth frowned, and he did his best to look confused, but Elliot was not taken in. The strokes had destroyed his body and his speech, but not his memory.
    “You know we’ve rented the house to those shipbuilders.”
    He stamped his good foot against the floorboards of the porch.
    “Grandfather, you can’t stay here. They need the room.” And we need the money. She almost added it aloud.
    But Elliot Boatwright was no fool. He made the sign the Reduced used for “father” and then the one for “mistake.” She cringed. Luddites did not sign to each other—it was a mark of the Reduced. For her grandfather to use signs in reference to Baron North was as good as an epithet in the mouth of a man who could speak.
    “My father did not rent out your house,” Elliot said, even if he had made it necessary. “I did. If you want to be mad, be mad at me.”
    The good side of her grandfather’s face smiled and he shook his head. No, he’d never be mad at her. She did what she ought, just as her mother had. Which was all well and good, but it still meant that her ailing, aged grandfather was losing the only home he’d ever known.
    She brushed past him into the house, where, sure enough, she found his trunks waiting by the door, just as she had instructed the Reduced nursemaids to do several days before. The house had been cleaned and aired, and vases of fall flowers stood everywhere, ready to welcome the Cloud Fleet. Elliot took a quick tour of the house, checking to see that all the linens were laid out on the beds brought down from storage, that the larder was stocked with food quite as good as the kind they had at the big house. Her father had been insistent that the visitors would not think the North estate lacking in opulence, even as he loudly complained about sharing his supplies “with CORs.” He’d even had ice delivered. Ice, this late in the fall, while Elliot was worried about how to keep the laborers in bread and coal this winter. She shook her head.
    Her father had kept her tutors until she was sixteen, just as he had with Tatiana before her. They’d received the standard Luddite curriculum: history, music, literature, religion, and art, but as to what she’d need to know to keep the estate on its feet—that was trial and error. That was luck. That was whatever she could scrape together on the side.
    Perhaps it would have been different had her father been raised to take over the estate, but it was her uncle who was supposed to be Baron North. Elliot’s father had never liked anything but horses and the comfortable trappings of the Luddite lifestyle. The North estate had been paying for his disinterest ever since her uncle’s death. Elliot’s mother had done what she could when she was alive—raised a Boatwright, she had her father’s work ethic—but she’d died four years earlier.
    At the time, Tatiana had mourned the fact that her mother’s death prevented them from traveling to Channel City for her debut, but Elliot feared worse than a deferred holiday. Her mother’s death left two estates in peril: the one belonging to Elliot’s invalid grandfather and the one her father had never bothered to maintain.
    Elliot had been fourteen. She hadn’t even been finished with school, but she had learned enough to know that only one thing mattered: the hundreds of people—Luddite, COR, and Reduced—who depended on the estates to survive.
    Down on the porch, the Reduced were fighting to get the Boatwright loaded into the litter that was to take him to his new home, and he swatted at them with his cane. Elliot stood by the window and shook her head. She hated removing him, but this was the only house on the estate suitable for someone of the admiral’s station. They could hardly put the Cloud Fleet in a Reduced cottage, and Elliot