The office was how he had left it that morning. The lamp in its place, and the east window had already passed its hour of afternoon light.

Aestrith was on the couch with the book in her lap and the crutches leaned against the furniture arm. She did not look up when he came in.

"This page is useless," she said.

He set the ledger on the desk and opened it. "Which one?"

"The one about the border of the gravity field."

She turned a page without ceremony. "It says the precision drops off at distance. Fine, I know that. It says the point where it starts to drop is different for each ambient. Also fine, then it says the drop happens because the field has ’natural limits of coherence.’ It spends three sentences explaining like I’m supposed to know the hell the term means." 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

Beorn sat down. The quill moved across the margin.

"Coherence means the field is whole. At the border, it stops being stable."

"I know what the word means," she said.

"Then you understand the page."

She looked at him with an expression that screamed the information was technically correct and completely useless.

Beorn simply shrugged, "The passage is circular. It drops off because it loses coherence, and it loses coherence because it drops off."

"That’s not what it says."

"It’s exactly what it says."

He added another line in the margin and did not push the point further.

She held the book without reading for a moment. "There’s another page after it, about how different materials respond to the field. It accounts for size and mass and whether something is iron or stone or timber."

She turned another page, this time actually looking at it.

When she spoke again, it was to the page, not to him. "But it says nothing about what happens when another kind of power is close enough. When I used the field in that room with Mab, I could sense her light inside it the way you feel a hot stone through a glove. That’s not anywhere in the book."

"That’s because how these powers interact with each other is outside my knowledge."

She considered it. "Then we need to research it? How do you call it again,"

"Empirical research."

"Correct, we do that."

Beorn wrote one line in the margin and circled it. She had already returned to the text.

He looked at the circle for a moment, then turned back to the working page and the administrative pending issues.

"We need a steward," he said.

Aestrith did not look up. "All right."

"Eadric was responsible for the administrative work between this office and everything below it."

He tapped the ledger once. "Without someone in that role, I’m wasting valuable time with tasks that should not require me."

She turned a page.

"What kind of person?"

Beorn exhaled, knowing how difficult the search was, "Unaffiliated, reliable, someone who can make routine decisions without coming here for every one of them."

She was quiet for a moment.

Then she said, "I don’t know anyone."

"I figured," he said. "I’m just naming it aloud."

She went back to the book. He wrote a note in the ledger and drew a line beneath it.

"There’s also the census."

He continued, as if talking about it made it easier, "The last proper count of Ashmark’s population was more than a decade ago. Every decision the administration makes about food rationing, housing, and labor is built on numbers that predate the refugee influx, the conflict, and every change of the past year, not mentioning prior events."

She looked up.

"How wrong is it?"

"I wouldn’t be surprised if the records don’t have even half of the city population."

"Then why you don’t proceed with it?"

He marked another note. "That’s the harder problem. I cannot proceed with a census without a steward, unless I plan to spend my entire days cross-checking the numbers for reference and auditing them. One problem feeds the other."

She watched him for a moment.

"So the steward comes first."

"If we can find one."

She returned to the book. He kept writing.

"At least the revenue is increasing."

Beorn said. "Of the three mines, two are back into normal production, and the third one is currently being dealt with by Harr and sixteen men."

He turned a page in the ledger. "We’ll still be on red for a while but the foundry progress shows promise. Then we can go into the next step of industrialization and built up an economy."

"And you won’t need me there anymore?" she asked.

"I will." He moved the page again. "But for a different task."

She had her finger in the book to hold her place.

"Which you will do me the favor of explaining it now?"

"Sure, of course."

He paused, then added, "To put it simply, you will start to create the machinery to replace your previous work." He did not say how much yet. "That will permit us to increase production exponentially."

She nodded once and went back to reading.

"What we are producing? Glad you asked."

Beorn continued by himself, "The next step is a firearm with a longer barrel. Imagine what the pistols can do at thirty feet, this one would do at three times that distance. It cannot be built until the boring machine is reliable, which you will help in the future."

She rolled her eyes and looked up.

"How much stronger this new weapon is?"

"Strong enough to completely replace crossbows."

He turned the page. "Crossbows are still better for accuracy over distance, but training a crossbowman takes months. Training someone to load and fire one of these takes days, and this is still only a primitive design, there’s much to improve."

She did not add anything to that.

The army expansion was Godric’s work, and the wall and street improvement programs were Cerdic’s. Both were moving without requiring the seat for anything except payroll. He noted them in the ledger as confirmed and ongoing.

He had nearly reached the end of the page when Aestrith looked up from the book.

"There’s also the Sinbound kindergarten," she said.

She named it with a snicker and went back to reading.

There were six extra people now, finding their footing in stone rooms with real locks on the inside of the doors. The light that had filled one of those rooms days ago had come from the youngest of them, and she had looked at her own hands afterward as if she had never seen them before.

He wrote "Sinbound" at the bottom of the page and circled it.

Then he kept writing.