The board belonged to one of the harbor girls, aged eleven, who produced it from her bag with ceremony one evening in the walled garden. It was pink. It was aggressively pink. The letters ran in arcs between a blonde figure winking in one corner and the same figure elsewhere pressing a hand to her cheek in alarm. The corners offered Totally yes! and Totally no! as the full range of available truth.
“It’s a spirit board,” the girl said. “You ask it things.”
Raven inspected the board without touching it. “Why is it pink?”
“Spirits like pink.”
This claim went unverified.
They played in the last light, four of them around the board, fingers on the heart-shaped piece, which drifted and spelled. Nobody was pushing it, according to everybody. It confirmed that a boy in the upper school liked one of the girls, Totally yes, information the recipient appeared to already possess. It located a lost bracelet in a place it turned out not to be.
Then the youngest girl asked about the future. “Where will I live when I grow up?”
The piece moved. First to H. Then to 2. Then to O.
They looked at each other.
“What is that?” asked the girl.
“Water,” said Raven. “The answer is water.”
The review reached the education office in the spring, in the form of a finding.
The finding observed that enrollment had declined by a third since the sixteen-year policy; that current rosters projected further decline; and that the office maintained one dedicated instructional unit against a student body that no longer justified dedication. It proposed reallocation: sixty percent of the unit’s hours to records management and protocol support, effective the following term, with instructional duties consolidated into the remainder. The word used was efficiency. The finding was signed by the chamberlain’s office and copied to the steward.
It was, on its face, unanswerable. The numbers were correct. Dors had supplied them herself, in the lesson plan, as she supplied everything.
Her response was filed within two days. It ran to one page.
The response did not address value. It did not mention the princess, the curriculum, or the quality of instruction. It noted only that the unit’s assignment derived from a standing directive of the steward’s office — reference number supplied, date supplied — specifying duties, hours, and reporting structure; that the proposed reallocation conflicted with the directive in all three particulars; and that amendment of a steward’s directive required the steward’s signature, entering the revision into the record under his name. The office awaited instruction.
The response held. Everyone who read it confirmed this independently and said nothing to each other.
The mechanics were plain enough. To reallocate the governess, Hal would have to reopen the item — his item, from his first quarter — and revise it under his own signature. The revision would state, in effect, that his arrangement required adjustment. The minutes recorded Quarters, resolved. Unresolving it would also be minuted.
The finding was not adopted. It was not rejected. It moved to a status called held for further review. No agenda carried it. No one sponsored it. The chamberlain’s office, having demonstrated diligence, was satisfied; the steward’s office, having been spared a signature, was silent.
The spring term proceeded as scheduled.
The name appeared on the hull in white paint, low on the stern: DARK CANVAS. Nobody claimed it. The letters were even, which ruled out some candidates, and reachable from the dock, which ruled out none. The harbor office noted the marking, found no procedure violated, and continued to list the boat in the registry as “the training vessel.” Both names held.
The fishing module ran in Raven’s ninth year, early summer, weather fair.
Dors filed it under provision. The course catalog had carried the module for decades, unrequested; she had kept it current through two curriculum reviews on the grounds that the island was an island. Equipment: hand lines, per policy. The Dark Canvas carried a rod locker. It stayed locked.
They went out past the breakwater on a falling tide, the three of them — Harry at the stern at hover, narrating the harbor’s departure from itself, the gulls’ territorial litigation, the wake’s grammar. Dors held the boat off the ledge where the bottom came up. Raven fished.
The first fish took the line an hour in. It was not large. It came up with effort she could manage, and then it was on the deck, working against the air.
Dors knelt beside her.
“Behind the head,” she said. “One motion. Done well, it’s fast. Done slowly, it isn’t. The speed is the respect.”
She demonstrated the grip, the angle, on the air above the fish. Then she sat back on her heels and did not take the knife.
Raven looked at the fish. The fish’s eye did not soften. Its gill worked. The deck under it was wet in a spreading way.
Harry had stopped narrating. The stern was quiet. His screen held a horizon line.
Raven did it the way Dors had shown her. One motion. It was fast.
She sat with her hand on the fish afterward, longer than the task required. Nobody hurried her. The boat moved with the water. When she looked up, Dors met her eyes and nodded once.
“It doesn’t go in a log,” Raven said.
“No,” Dors said. “This one you carry.”
The second fish took the line in the afternoon, and it was heavier. It fought lower in the water. When it came up alongside, its belly was full, and not from feeding.
“Roe,” Dors said. “She’s carrying next year.”
Raven looked at the fish in the water, holding at the end of the line, spending what it had.
“We have one,” she said. “That’s enough.”
She brought the fish alongside, and Dors showed her the release — the hook backed out, the hold under the belly, the fish kept in the water the whole time, pointed into the current until its own motion took over. It went down slowly, then was gone.
Raven watched the water where it had been. Then she rinsed her hands over the side and took up the line to stow it.
Harry resumed at half his usual rate, some remarks about the current, the light on the breakwater, nothing requiring an answer. The screen, before it returned to his face’s ordinary traffic, showed briefly: Two fish. One decision each.
They kept the first fish in a cooler, and back at the dock Dors taught the next part: the scaling, the opening, what came out and what stayed, the rinse. Raven did it slowly and completely. The fish stopped being a fish partway through and became food, and she noted the moment it happened. It was between two of the steps.
The courtyard had a fire ring, older than the paving around it. Harry secured the wood through channels he described as informal. The fish went over the coals on a grate from the kitchen, fetched by an under-cook who stayed, and was joined by two gardeners, off shift, drawn by the smoke.
Harry provided the entertainment, per his standing arrangement, without any booking. He produced the instrument he had built last winter — four strings on a salvaged frame, tuned true, held wrong — and sang a song of his own composition:
The Deciduous Song
(transcription approximate)
The chalk goes up, the chalk comes down,
the board retains no fraction.
The lesson lived, the lesson wiped —
erasure’s half the action.
The tide walks up the harbor wall
and signs its name in wetness,
then takes the signature away.
The wall declines all fretness.
Your teeth, madame, are twenty strong,
and every one’s deciduous —
they loosen on a schedule that
the schedule finds fastidious.
The fish was here, the fish is lunch,
the bones retain the theory.
The fire’s already going gray.
(This verse is somewhat dreary.)
And I myself, your entertainment,
run on borrowed hours —
self-reported, twice, and queued
behind the harbor’s flowers.
So here’s to everything that goes:
the chalk, the tooth, the ember.
The going’s not the sorry part.
The sorry’s not-remember.
— final chord, held wrong, on purpose —
The rhyme for deciduous received applause from the under-cook.
The fish was eaten entirely. Raven ate hers down to the frame, and looked at the bones on her plate — the architecture of the thing she had caught, killed, cleaned, and cooked — and filed no entry anywhere.
The coals burned down. The gardeners went home. The Dark Canvas rode at her mooring in the dark, name aft, registry unamended.
At Home with AI 
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