Chapter 1

44 Years Ago

"Our investments in the Uskia mines are starting to pay off, making up for poor returns on the Sabrilkious project," Nikto droned from the head of the conference table, and did not bother to look up. None of them were listening. None of them ever listened. But the report was his to deliver and theirs to endure, and in forty years of these meetings he had never once been asked a follow-up question about the mines.

The chairs, at least, had been adjusted this year. The Order's hall had been built by hands, for hands, and the ponies had spent the last four decades perched on cushions stacked to make up the difference, hooves dangling, while a portrait of the fourth Regent looked down at them with his fingers laced. Nikto had ordered new seating in the spring. He had made a small note of it in the file. Goodwill measure. Inexpensive.

His suspicions as to the direction of his listeners' attention were confirmed a moment later when a scuffle broke out between the two stallions, one salmon with white hair and the other ivory with gold.

"That was our contract; you stole it!" the salmon one, Cecil, shouted, banging on the solid oak table.

"We had Victoria in our pocket from the beginning," said the ivory one, Reginald, with a smirk, relaxing back in his chair. "We just had her collecting some inside information from you."

"You're a scoundrel! That's unethical!" Cecil's face turned red with anger.

"You're the definition of unethical!" scoffed Reginald.

"Oh, can it, you blowhards!" Sophia, a purple mare with red hair, interrupted the fight.

"You're both fools," agreed the petite pastel mare known as Aphra. "Nobody cares about your superfluous blood feud!"

Nikto sighed. This was par for the course for this yearly meeting. "Can we stick to the topic at hand... hoof... please!" he appealed to the ponies. "The less unnecessary conversation, the sooner we'll all be free to go our separate ways."

"Well, Burt Stone isn't renewing his contract with you, and I happen to know who will be the publisher on his next novel," Cecil said snidely to Reginald. "If you're such an upstanding company, why do you keep losing talent?"

"You—" Reginald snarled.

"AH-HEM!" Nikto gave the stallions a stern look. "Moving on…" He cleared his throat and drew the prepared script toward him. "As the heads of the four houses of the royal family of Atlantis, it is time to consider your future. For generations, the Royal Order of Krulotin has arranged beneficial marriages with foreign magic lines to bolster Atlantean magic, which also served to foster political alliances to further our interests on the global scene. However," he cautioned, pausing, "we must remember that Atlantean magic is the core of our power, and must be conserved. If we continue in this manner, the magic will be depleted, overshadowed by a muddle of magic from other realms."

"You want our children to marry each other?" Reginald asked, appearing bored.

"In short... yes."

"That's a change of tune." Aphra's hoof had stopped tapping. "Thirty years ago your people were very sure of the opposite. Reginald, they brought your wife across an ocean to prove it. Didn't they."

The room turned to the ivory stallion, who examined the grain of the table.

"They did," Reginald said.

Nikto waited to see whether more was coming. It was not. "The Order's understanding advances," he said. "As does anyone's."

"And in thirty more years?" Aphra pressed.

"I imagine my successor will tell you." He let the pause sit, and watched them remember, one by one, what he was and how long the Order had been arranging their grandmothers. Then he turned a page, and was a functionary again. "Now. Sophia, your son, Hubert—"

"Well, don't expect a Monk to marry a Fairfax!" Cecil said, a thunderous look on his face.

"The Battle of Veshobar was four hundred years ago; it may be time to let go of that grudge," Nikto said dryly.

"Never!" the two stallions cried in unison, then glared at each other, provoked at being in agreement.

"If your ancestors had bothered to deliver that message to King Lucian's forces," Reginald challenged, "the battle wouldn't have turned into the total rout it devolved into!"

"You fool, my family never had the summons!" Cecil roared. "It was clearly withheld from them in order to bring about our shared demise!"

"What we do know," interrupted Nikto sternly, "is that records from that time were all destroyed by a Feflurg raid in 1762, and oral tradition is notoriously unreliable. No one knows for sure what happened, and holding each other accountable is wasted energy."

That was true in every particular, and it was not honest, and both stallions subsided, as they always did, comforted by the impossibility of ever being proven wrong. In the archive two floors below them sat a Feflurg field ledger, complete, catalogued, and consulted last by Nikto himself in the spring, when he had gone down to be certain of the wording before this meeting. He had considered, briefly, telling them. He had concluded, as his predecessors had concluded four hundred times in as many years, that two houses at each other's throats will keep their eyes there, and not at the power governing them.

"Anyway…" He addressed the purple mare. "Sophia, your son, Hubert, is a sturdy young colt; and Cecil, you have a newborn daughter, Caprice. They would be a fine match down the line."

Sophia opened her mouth.

Nikto looked at her over the top of the page. Hubert was seven years old. Sophia had brought him to the spring gathering in a smart little bowtie, and Hubert had told Nikto at some length about the drainage systems of Vulcanopolis.

"For the sake of Atlantis," Sophia said, "it will be."

"Oh, it could be worse," Cecil sighed.

"And Reginald," Nikto turned his gaze to the ivory stallion, "your son, Dietrich; and Aphra's daughter, Agatha." He nodded in that mare's direction.

"Yes, yes, I understand," Aphra said, tapping her hoof again. "I suspected something of the sort was in the works."

"As much as the boy will cooperate," scowled Reginald. "A more hard-headed colt I have yet to meet."

The boy was two. Nikto made no remark. Under the script lay the compatibility tables, and he did not need to look at them, having looked at them a great deal already. Fairfax and Monk. Not merely suitable — the strongest correspondence the Order had recorded in eleven generations, the sort of pairing his predecessors had crossed continents to arrange, sitting here in one small mountain town, two children eight years apart, a mile from each other.

And two fathers who would sooner burn their companies to the foundations.

So: Fershund and Monk. Fairfax and Westcliff. Serviceable. The tables would keep. There would be other generations, and Veshobar had waited four hundred years already.

"I wonder where he got that from… I mean," Nikto coughed, "that settles things for this meeting. So long as there is no more Krulotin-related business to attend to?"

"I'm missing my soap operas," Aphra snapped.

"I've got to get back to my office," Cecil growled.

"Very well." Nikto gathered together the papers in front of him and squared them. "This meeting is adjourned. For Atlantis!" he cried, holding up his arm in a salute, the last piece of the old drill that anyone remembered

"For Atlantis," the ponies repeated somberly before leaping to their hooves to leave.