Hal’s birthday fell in the dry month, when fireworks were permitted.
The court assembled on the west balcony after dinner. The children stood at the rail with a clear view; the adults arranged themselves behind by precedence, which took longer than the seating chart it replaced. Dors stood at the back, inside the doorway, where the light from the launches didn’t reach.
The first volley went up. Gold, then white. The court applauded the correct amount.
Raven was at the rail between two ministers’ daughters. She watched three volleys, then turned around and surveyed the balcony, row by row.
“Where is Aldric?”
There was a pause.
The minister’s wife behind her leaned down. “He must be feeling poorly, dear.”
“No. I saw him yesterday. In the garden, with Tomas.” Raven turned back to the rail. “They were holding hands.”
A volley went up. Red, breaking into smaller red.
The minister’s wife straightened. Someone near the drinks table asked someone else whether the wind had shifted.
Hal stood with his glass at the height it had been, and looked across the balcony at the doorway, for the length of the next launch.
Dors met the look. Her hands stayed clasped. She did not move.
The finale ran long. It had been budgeted generously.
Raven watched all of it. She noted that the blue ones were the loudest and the gold ones lasted the longest.
By the next ceremony, the children’s places had been reassigned. The change appeared on no agenda. Raven’s new position was near the doorway, at the back, beside her governess. No explanation was given.
The tooth came out during breakfast, into a napkin, without ceremony. Raven brought it to Dors.
“Deciduous,” Dors said, and spelled it on the tablet. “You have twenty. The roots dissolve on schedule and the permanent teeth displace them from beneath. The gap is a construction phase.”
Raven looked at the tooth on her palm, then at the word on the screen.
“Some households exchange the tooth for a coin,” Dors said. “The tooth is placed under the pillow at night. By morning it has been replaced. Parents perform the exchange.”
“What’s a coin?”
“A metal disc. Currency, before currency became numbers. People carried them in pockets and counted them by hand.” She wrote coin under deciduous. “The custom predates the tablet you’re holding by a considerable margin.”
Raven examined the tooth. The root end was hollow where it had dissolved.
“If parents perform the exchange,” she said, “who performs it here?”
“That would require arrangement.”
Raven considered the arrangement. She had nineteen more coming out. The other lower front tooth was already loose. This would occur nineteen more times.
The second tooth came out soon enough. Raven put it under her pillow.
The control needed a place where nothing moved.
Her father’s bedroom was on the family corridor, kept but not used. Nobody had reassigned it. The cleaning rotation entered once a week and moved nothing.
Raven went in the afternoon, between lessons. The curtains were half drawn. The bed was made in the old style, corners squared.
The desk by the window had two wide drawers. She opened one.
Navigation charts, a stack of them, soft at the edges from handling. Their island, the water around it, depths marked in fine numbers. She lifted the top charts to make a space, and a piece of paper slid from between them.
One line, handwritten.
I have loved her as much as I could.
Raven read it. She read it again. It did not say who wrote it, or who “her” was. The handwriting was not her father’s — his was on the charts, in the margins, small and slanted. This was rounder.
She held it for a moment, then put it back between the charts where it had been, at the same depth.
The tooth she wrapped between two pieces of paper from the desk tray, and set it beneath the charts, at the bottom, where the drawer’s contents would hold it flat.
She closed the drawer and squared the chair.
In the morning there was a coin under her pillow — an actual disc, metal, older than the custom’s revival, procured from somewhere.
The coin went on the shelf in her room, next to the strip of folded paper and the wound length of string. The shelf was small, by her bed. Things on it were not to be moved. The staff had learned this without being told.
The control tooth stayed where it was. She logged the start date on the tablet.
The experiment was expected to run for years. That was fine. She had time, and eighteen more teeth.
Navigation entered the schedule the term Raven turned six. The court maintained a training vessel for it — low, gray, mostly battery, with a cabin console that displayed the boat’s position to four decimal places at all times, in case anyone doubted.
Dors taught the console first. Then, per policy, she taught everything the console replaced: bearings, the hand compass, dead reckoning, the tide tables, the island’s depths in fine numbers on paper charts. The policy was hers. Nobody had reviewed it.
“The console is faster,” Raven said.
“It is. Speed is one property an answer can have.”
They ran the exercise on a still morning inside the harbor line. Dors took the boat out and held it steady off the third buoy, throttle at idle. That was the extent of her involvement.
Raven took three bearings — the light tower, the water stack, the south point of the breakwater. She laid the string across the chart, walked the angles through, and boxed her position where the three lines crossed. The triangle they made was small. She measured its center and wrote the coordinates on the tablet.
Then she checked the console.
The console’s position and hers disagreed by eight-tenths of a nautical mile.
She looked at the chart, then the screen. The margin was small enough to be her error. It was large enough to be someone else’s.
She reported both: the console’s position first, then her own.
“Resolve the discrepancy,” Dors said.
Raven re-shot the three bearings. The same numbers came back. She re-walked the plot, checked the string for stretch, redid the arithmetic in the margin. Her triangle held, small and stubborn, eight-tenths from the official answer.
She sat with it. The instrument was the court’s. It displayed four decimal places. It had a housing, a mounting bracket, and a boat built around it.
It also, she found, had a menu.
The service log was three screens deep, indexed by date. Calibration was listed as a scheduled item, annual. The last entry was a service flag, logged and unresolved. The unit had reported itself out of tolerance. The report had been filed. Nothing had followed it.
Raven read the flag again.
“The console said it was wrong,” she said. “In the log. Nobody looked.”
“Now record your position,” Dors said.
Raven wrote her own coordinates into the exercise log, and under them, the discrepancy, the flag, and its date.
They ran back inside the breakwater. Dors filed a maintenance notice through the boat’s terminal that afternoon. It was acknowledged automatically, assigned a queue number, and, according to the log Raven checked a month later, remained in the queue.
The request arrived at the education office on a Tuesday: all lesson plans, current term, for the unit assigned to the princess. Scope of instruction, materials, hours. Routine review, the memo said. There had been no review in the years prior.
Dors submitted the file the same afternoon. It included the navigation curriculum, the analog methods policy, and the exercise logs, among them the harbor exercise with the discrepancy, the service flag, and its date.
The review took eleven days. The findings, when they came, ran to one line: instruction confirmed within scope. No irregularities noted.
On Hal’s terminal that month, the review file sat one entry above a second file, larger, versioned in the manner of documents assembled by committee: the marriage contract. Aldric, to the second daughter of the neighboring tribe’s high family. Terms, precedence, the schedule of visits, the banquet plan. Both files closed the same week.
The flower girls were fitted in pink, except Raven.
Raven was informed that pink was what girls wore. She observed that the boys’ attendants wore blue, and that blue was therefore available. The seamstress escalated. The escalation traveled, found no one willing to own it, and came back down as a compromise nobody remembered proposing: Raven walked in blue, at the end of the line, where the color read as intentional.
At the banquet she was seated at the head table. There were diplomats; there was the other tribe’s royalty; there was an order of precedence, and the princess belonged in it. Hal had signed the seating chart himself.
Raven counted the hall from her chair. The head table, the long tables, the faculty’s table by the far wall. Aldric sat beside his bride and smiled the correct amount. The bride’s family toasted. The court toasted back.
Raven counted twice. Then she slid down from her chair, passed behind the toasts, and crossed the hall to the faculty’s table, where Dors sat at the end.
She leaned in.
“Where’s Tomas?”
“I don’t know.”
Raven stood beside her at the edge of the hall. She was just about to head back when the host announced the arrival of the entertainer, and the door to the banquet hall opened.
“Ladies and gentlemen, what a lovely evening — and what a hall! The acoustics in here are wasted on toasts.”
It was a unit on a hoverboard. It entered at speed, banked over the second long table low enough to disturb the napkins, and completed a full rotation above the dessert service, all the while listing slightly to the left. The listing did not appear to affect the flying, though it did lend every maneuver the character of a recovery.
The bride’s family looked at Hal. Hal looked at the protocol officer. The protocol officer looked at the booking, which was in order.
The unit did a second rotation, slower, over the head table, and dipped in something adjacent to a bow.
“Your Grace. Your other Grace. Small Grace in blue —” it paused over Raven “— excellent color.” The screen on its face displayed, “Bold seating.”
The performance ran forty-seven minutes while the booking specified thirty. No one stopped it. Everyone applauded at the end.
Raven did not laugh at the jokes. She watched the listing. On the tablet, later that night, she recorded the entertainer’s rotation count, the drift angle, and one observation with no category assigned:
It noticed the blue.
At Home with AI 
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