She pressed down on Gyre’s stomach, and he let out an oof. At five, Maya was heavier than she looked, plump and broad-shouldered, with their mother’s light brown skin and curly crimson hair. Everyone said Gyre, darker and black-haired, took after their father.

“I’ll be consul, then,” Maya said. “Everyone still has to do what I say forever an’ ever.”

“You only get to be consul for a year,” Gyre said.

“That’s practically forever,” Maya argued. “An’—”

She stopped, and a moment later vanished from his field of vision. Gyre sat up, brushing dirt and dried vulpi dung off his back. All around him, yearling vulpi snuffled over the rocky ground, looking for tender green shoots. Yearlings were Gyre’s favorite age for vulpi, soft-furred and playful, before they grew into bristly, irritable layers and then huge, sedentary terminals. They didn’t take much watching as long as the gate to the pasture was closed, which was why he had time to fool around.

Even so, Gyre had a guilty moment while he made a quick count of the herd. He relaxed when he came up with the requisite thirty-three. He was eight and a half years old and had never lost one of his father’s vulpi, not even the time when the fence had washed out in the rain and six of them had made a break for it.

“Gyre!” Maya shouted. “Gyre, it’s a centarch! He’s riding a warbird!” She was standing at the fence with her feet on the second rail, leaning as far over as she could. “Gyre, you have to come see!”

“It can’t be a centarch.”

Gyre hurried to the fence, absentmindedly grabbing the back of Maya’s dress with one hand in case she leaned too far over. Maya was reckless, and often sick to boot, spending months with fevers and racking coughs. Keeping his sister out of misadventures was as much a part of his daily chores as tending vulpi. But her excitement was infectious, and he found himself leaning forward to get a better view of the cloud of dust coming down the main road. It was moving awfully quickly.

“It was too a centarch!” Maya said breathlessly. “I saw him an’ all. He had white armor an’ a blaster an’ a hackem!”

“Haken,” Gyre corrected. The legendary bladeless sword, weapon of the centarchs of the Twilight Order. “What would a centarch be doing here?”

“Maybe he’s come to arrest Billem Crump for being an ass an’ all. Dad said he was going to go to law with him if he kept picking those apples.”

Gyre pulled his sister back. “Centarchs don’t arrest people for stealing apples.”