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with royalty marrying one another’s cousins and grannies all the time, the ducal throne would go to Prince Heinrich of Zlobenia! There! Can you believe that? That’s why we never see her, right? And there hasn’t been a new picture all these years? Make you think, eh? Oh, they say she’s been in mourning ’cos of the young duke, but that was more’n seventy years ago! They say she was buried in secret and…
    At which point, her father had stopped the speaker dead. There are some conversations where you don’t even want people to remember you were in the same room.
    Dead or alive, the Duchess watched over you.
     
    The recruits tried to sleep.
    Occasionally, someone belched or expelled wind noisily, and Polly responded with a few fake eructations of her own.That seemed to inspire greater effort on the part of the other sleepers, to the point where the roof rattled and dust fell down, before everyone subsided.
    Once or twice she heard people stagger out into the windy darkness; in theory, for the privy, but probably, given male impatience in these matters, to aim much closer to home. Once, coasting in and out of a troubled dream, she thought she heard someone sobbing.
    Taking care not to rustle too much, Polly pulled out the much-folded, much-read, much-stained last letter from her brother, and read it by the light of the solitary, guttering candle. It had been opened and heavily mangled by the censors, and bore the stamp of the Duchy. It read:

    It was in a careful hand, the excessively clear and well-shaped writing of someone who had to think about every letter.
    She folded it up again. Paul had wanted medals, because they were shiny. That’d been almost a year ago, when any recruiting party that came past went away with the best part of a battalion, and there had been people waving them off with flags and music. Sometimes, now, smaller parties of men came back. The lucky ones were missing only one arm or one leg. There were no flags.
    She unfolded the other piece of paper. It was a pamphlet.It was headed “From the Mothers of Borogravia!!” The mothers of Borogravia were very definite about wanting to send their sons off to war Against the Zlobenian Aggressor!! and used a great many exclamation points to say so. And this was odd, because the mothers in the town had not seemed keen on the idea of their sons going off to war, and positively tried to drag them back. Several copies of the pamphlet seemed to have reached every home, even so. It was very patriotic. That is, it talked about killing foreigners.
    She’d learned to read and write after a fashion because the inn was big and it was a business and things had to be tallied and recorded. Her mother had taught her to read, which was acceptable to Nuggan, and her father made sure that she learned how to write, which was not. A woman who could write was an Abomination Unto Nuggan, according to Father Jupe; anything she wrote would by definition be a lie.
    But Polly had learned anyway, because Paul hadn’t, at least to the standard needed to run an inn as busy as The Duchess. He could read if he could run his finger slowly along the lines, and he wrote letters painfully, with a lot of care and heavy breathing, like a man assembling a piece of jewelry.
    He was big and kind and slow and could lift beer kegs as though they were toys, but he wasn’t a man at home with paperwork. Their father had hinted to Polly, very gently but very often, that Polly would need to be right behind him, when the time came for him to run The Duchess. Left to himself, with no one to tell him what to do next, her brother just stood and watched birds.
    At Paul’s insistence, she’d read the whole of “From the Mothers of Borogravia!!” to him, including the bits about heroes and there being no greater good than to die for your country.
    She wished, now, she hadn’t done that. Paul did what he was told. Unfortunately, he believed what he was told, too.
    She put the papers away and