Working in a hole in the ground had made me ignorant of all these goings-on. But now that Jesry had let me know that my fraas and suurs were working so hard, I redoubled my efforts with the tablet. Stored on that thing I had all of seventeen clear nights. Once I got the knack, it took me about half an hour’s work to configure the tablet to give me the time exposure for a given night. Then, using a protractor, I would spend another half hour or so measuring the angles between streaks. As Jesry had predicted, some birds made slightly larger angles than others, reflecting their longer periods, but the angle for a given bird was always the same, every orbit, every night. So in a sense it only took a single night’s observations to make a rough draft of the census. But I went ahead and did it for all seventeen of the clear nights anyway, just to be thorough, and because frankly I had no idea what to do next. I could polish off one, sometimes two nights’ observations every time I got a chance to go down into that sub-cellar, but I didn’t get that chance every day.

By the time I finished, I had been at it for about three weeks. Buds were out on the page trees. Birds were flying north. Fraas and suurs were poking around in their tangles, arguing about whether it was time to plant. The barbarian weed-horde was marshaling on the riverbank and getting ready to invade the fertile Plains of Thrania. Arsibalt was two-thirds of the way through his pile of Paphlagon. The vernal equinox was only a few days away. Apert had begun on the morning of the autumnal equinox—half a year ago! I could not understand where the time had gone.

It had gone the same place as all the thousands of years before it. I had spent it working. It didn’t matter that my work was secret, illicit, and could have got me Thrown Back. The concent didn’t care about that. Certain persons would have cared a lot. But this was a place for the avout to spend their lives working on such projects. And now that I had a project, I was a part of that concent in a way I’d never been before, and the place was the right place for me.

Since Arsibalt, Jesry, and Tulia had their minds on other projects, I didn’t tell them about Sammann. That was a topic reserved for Lio when we were out in the meadow coaxing the starblossom to grow in the right direction. Or, since it was Lio, doing whatever else had most recently jumped into his mind.

We had reacted in different ways to the loss of Orolo. In my case, it was bloody revenge fantasies that I kept to myself. Lio, on the other hand, had become entranced by ever weirder varieties of vlor. Two weeks ago, he had tried to get me interested in rake vlor, which I guessed was inspired by the story of Diax casting out the Enthusiasts. I had declined on grounds of not wanting to get a blood infection—a weaponized rake could give you mass-produced puncture wounds. Last week he had developed a keen interest in shovel vlor, and we had spent a lot of time squatting on the riverbank sharpening spades with rocks.

When he led me down to the river again one day, I assumed it was for more of the same. But he kept looking back over his shoulder and leading me in deeper. I’d been on enough furtive expeditions as a fid to know that he was checking the sight-lines to the Warden Regulant’s windows. Old habits kicked in; I became silent, and moved from one shady place to another until we had reached a place where the bending river had cut away the bank to form an overhang, sheltered from view. Fortunately no one was there having a liaison just now. It would have been a bad place for it anyway: mucky ground, lots of bugs, high probability of being interrupted by avout messing around on the river in boats.

Lio turned to face me. I was almost worried that he was going to make a pass at me.

But no. This was Lio we were talking about.

“I’d like you to punch me in the face,” he said. As if he were asking me to scratch his back.

“Not that I haven’t always dreamed of it,” I said, “but why would you want it?”

“Hand-to-hand combat has been a common element of military training down through the ages,” he proclaimed, as if I were a fid. “Long ago it was learned that recruits—no matter how much training they had received—tended to forget everything they knew the first time they got punched in the face.”

“The first time in their lives, you mean?”

“Yeah. In peaceful, affluent societies where brawling is frowned on, this is a common problem.”

“Not being punched in the face a lot is a problem?”

“It is,” Lio said, “if you join the military and find yourself in hand-to-hand combat with someone who is actually trying to kill you.”

“But Lio,” I said, “you have been punched in the face. It happened at Apert. Remember?”

“Yes,” he said, “and I have been trying to learn from that experience.”

“So why do you want me to punch you in the face again?”

“As a way to find out whether I have learned.”

“Why me? Why not Jesry? He seems more the type.”

“That is the problem.”

“I see your point. Why not Arsibalt, then?”

“He wouldn’t do it for real—and then he’d complain that he’d hurt his hand.”

“What are you going to tell people if you show up for dinner with a busted face?”

“That I was battling evildoers.”

“Try again.”

“That I was practicing falls, and landed wrong.”

“What if I don’t want to mess up my hand?”

He smiled and produced a pair of heavy leather work gloves. “Stuff some rags under the knuckles,” he suggested, as I was pulling them on, “if you’re that worried about it.”

Grandsuurs Tamura and Ylma drifted by on a punt. We pretended to pull weeds until they were out of sight.

“Okay,” Lio said, “my objective is to perform a simple takedown on you—”

“Oh, now you tell me!”

“Nothing we haven’t done a hundred times,” he said, as if I would find this reassuring. “That’s why we came here.” He stomped the damp sand of the riverbank. “Soft ground.”

“Why—?”

“If I put up my hands to defend my face, I won’t be able to complete my objective.”

“I get it.”

Suddenly he came at me and took me down. “You lose,” he proclaimed, getting up.

“Okay.” I sighed, and clambered to my feet. Immediately he wheeled around and took me down again. I threw a playful blow at his head, way too late. This time he took me down a lot harder. Every one of the small muscles in my head felt as if it had been strained. He planted a dirty hand on top of my face and shoved off while getting back to his feet. The message was clear.

The next time I tried for real, but I didn’t have my feet planted and wasn’t able to hit very hard. And he was coming in too low.