Chapter 4: Building from Ash

The Eastern Flats were, as advertised, flat. And cold. And largely composed of hard-packed earth that had not seen a plow in forty years. Serephine's people looked at it with the particular expression of those who have already lost everything and are therefore not frightened by anything else. "Well," said Wren, the head engineer, planting her boots in the dirt and squinting at the horizon. "I've worked with worse." "When?" asked Marten, the head physician, genuinely curious. "Never. But I wanted to say something encouraging." They laughed. It was a tired, genuine, necessary laugh, and Serephine felt something loosen in her chest that had been wound tight since the volcano. She split them into teams. The engineers began surveying for water. The craftsmen started measuring timber from the dead forest at the Flats' northern edge — wind-killed trees, dry and ready. The physicians set up a camp clinic immediately, because cold and exhaustion and grief made people sick, and sick people could not build. Serephine worked alongside them. She had never been the kind of queen who directed from a distance, and she was not about to begin now. On the third evening, as she was helping to set foundation stones for the first permanent structure — a storehouse, practical before beautiful — a rider arrived from Valdis. A message from Lady Ceth, delivered with a curt nod and no warmth: *The council has been watching. They are interested. Keep working.* Serephine read it twice, then folded it into her breast pocket and went back to laying stones. On the twelfth day, they struck water — a deep, clean aquifer that the Valdis engineers had declared impossible to reach. Wren held up the first bucket with both hands like an offering. "We're going to be fine," she said. Serephine did not say what she was thinking, which was: *Yes. But winter is in eighteen days, and we still have sixteen families sleeping in tents.* She said instead: "Faster, then. We still have sixteen families sleeping in tents."