She spoke to Jax in a gentle voice. “Please accept my apologies, Governor Ironbridge. I will discuss Lyode’s behavior with her on the walk back. We’ll straighten this out.”

He reached down for her injured foot, bending her leg at the knee so he could inspect her wound. “Can you walk on this?”

“Yes.” The position he was holding her leg in was more uncomfortable than the gouge itself.

“Very well.” When he let go, his fingers inadvertently scraped the gash, and she stiffened as pain shot through her foot. She held her silence and slid off the stag, taking care to land on her other foot.

As she limped over to Lyode, bi-hooves scuffed behind her. Turning, she watched the riders thunder up the road to Argali.

Jul, the sun, had sunk behind the trees by the time Kamoj and Lyode walked around the last bend of the road, into view of Argali House. Legend claimed the house had once been luminescent pearl, all one surface without any seams. According to the temple scholar, who could read bits of the ancient codices, Argali House had been grown in a huge vat of liquid, on a framework of machines called nano-bots, which were supposedly so tiny you couldn’t see them even with a magnifying glass. After the house was complete, one was to believe the machines simply swam away and fell apart.

Kamoj smiled. The old scrolls were full of absurdities. Jax had shown her one in his library that claimed Balumil, the world, went around Jul in an “elliptical orbit” and rotated around a tilted axis. This tilt, and their living here in the north, was purported to explain why nights were short in summer and long in winter, fifty-five hours of darkness on the longest night of the winter, leaving only five hours of sunlight.

One year consisted of four seasons, of course: spring, summer, fall, winter. More formally, they called it the Long Year. A person could be born, reach maturity, wed, and have a family all within one Long Year.