Cassa had always watched politics. It happened around her, all the time, games and disputes and squabbles between the members of her family, and between her family and other families, and between servants and guards and people standing on the streets, complete strangers, talking to one another as she passed them by. Politics was everywhere, and Cassa didn’t especially care for it, but she tried to understand it all the same. She paid attention, without seeming to. She tried to work out what was actually happening, and who wanted what, and what their actions really meant, on a larger scale.
She understood how politics was, and what it was, and how it was played. She had been around it all her life, so even though she didn’t especially enjoy the game of it, not like some of her family did, she knew how it was done. She understood the game, and what to do, and she could play as well as most people, when she wished to.
Which was why she was probably going to end up, one day, being tricked by her grandmother into caring about her inheritance.
Exactly as she was being tricked into it now.
Cassa had always watched politics, and now she began to watch fishing, too. She watched fishing because fishing was going to be her wealth, her power, and the source of leverage which would one day give her the Middletower.
She took fishing as seriously as she did politics, which was to say, utterly seriously. As seriously as she took her morning practices with Konstantin, and for the same reason. It might one day safe her life.
That first afternoon, she went back to Birdport with Jogan, with a few of the household guards to watch over her. She went, and stood on the family’s dock, and listened while Jogan showed her boats and nets and a warehouse and crates of dried meat, and explained everything the fisherpeople did.
He explained it all over again, while they stood in front of the things he spoke of. While Cassa met people, and tried to remember their names, and was told what exactly it was they did.
Cassa listened, and made Jogan tell her everything about how fishing worked. She made him explain, and then explain again, until she began to think she understood. Or at least, until she understood enough she wasn’t going to upset anything by mistake, not right away.
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Islands in the Sky
FantasyMagic disappeared. Magic returned. And then, the world ended. This is our world, but not our world. It is a world of islands, floating in the sky. Once there was magic. Then for a time, there was none. And then there was magic again. Once, long ago...
