At Home with AI

Aldric had been married three years when the court began, quietly, to count.

Nobody counted aloud. It appeared instead in the shape of small revisions: a line of succession recirculated for review with no changes proposed — a document reissued so that people would read it again. The neighboring tribe’s envoys, who had come yearly since the wedding, came twice that year. The physician’s visits to Aldric’s household increased and were all logged under general welfare.

The arithmetic was simple and everyone performed it privately. Aldric and his bride Sable had produced no child. Hal had one son. The son had no successor. Below the son, in a wing kept to the side, was a girl of nine who had been filed, six years earlier, under Quarters, resolved.

Raven noticed the change before she understood it. It was nothing she could file — no single event, no discrepancy. It was a drift in how the court held her. A steward’s clerk who had for years routed past her door began, without instruction, to pause at it. Her name started appearing where her title had been: not “the princess” in the third person of official distance, but “Raven,” spoken by staff who had never used it. New clothes were made for her more often.

At a function that spring she was seated one place higher than the year before. The seating chart offered no reason. Hal had signed it, as he signed all of them.

She brought the observation to Dors, in the only form she could give it.

“The staff are different with me.”

“They are.”

“Why?”

Dors considered the question, and the person asking.

“Positions in a court derive from more than title,” she said. “Some derive from what the court expects to need. You are being treated according to a future that has not been announced and may not arrive.”

“Because Aldric has no child.”

Dors did not confirm it. She did not deny it either.

“Is that good?” Raven asked.

“It is not yet anything. It is a change in the weather. Weather is worth observing, not worth trusting.” Dors returned to the log she had been reviewing. “Note it. Do not build on it.”

Raven noted it. In the uncategorized file, one line:

They’ve started saving my name.

---

The pool lay on the south side of the school, open to the sky. Raven had been swimming in it since she was three.

She swam well. Her stroke was efficient, her breathing regular, and she could cross the pool underwater on one breath, often enough that the instructor no longer counted. What she could not do was enter head-first.

The mechanics were not the problem. She had watched the dive a hundred times and could describe it: the angle, the entry, the line of the arms. She understood that the water would take her and give her back. But every time she stood at the edge, she could not move.

That afternoon the pool held a mixed group: younger children in the shallow end, some upper-school girls at the deep end, and Sable, who had come with them and stayed in the water, floating on her back with her hair fanned dark around her.

Dors stood at the far side of the pool deck, in conversation with the instructor about scheduling, her eyes on Raven the entire time in the way she had of appearing not to look.

Raven was at the edge, kneeling on one knee. She had been in that position for a while.

Sable rolled off her back and came upright, water running off her brown shoulders. She looked up.

“Are you going to dive?”

“I’m considering it.”

“You’ve been considering it for a few minutes.”

“I’m being thorough.”

Sable laughed — an unguarded sound that carried and made two of the upper-school girls look over. She moved a few strokes out from the wall, and turned back, feet touching the bottom.

“How about this,” she said. “I’ll stand right here, and you dive to me. I’m not going anywhere.”

She stayed where she was, at a distance Raven could measure, and waited.

Raven measured it. Two body lengths, maybe less. She put her arms up.

Then she went.

The entry was not clean. Her hands broke the surface first and the rest of her followed at an angle her instructor would have corrected, and the cold came up over her scalp and closed over her. Underwater everything went quiet all at once — the pool noise gone, the deck gone, the whole loud afternoon replaced by a low hum and the sound of her own pulse. She was moving downward and forward, still carrying the speed she’d brought with her, and her open eyes registered blue, the tiled floor tilting past, the wobbling line of light.

Then the water began to give her back. She felt it under her ribs, the lift, unhurried and total. She did not have to swim for it. It simply took her up.

She came out into air and noise and light with her mouth open. She grabbed the nearest solid thing — Sable’s arms — and hung there gasping and grinning with water in her eyes and hair flat to her skull.

“I did it!” She turned toward the far side, still holding on. “Dors! I did it!”

The instructor had stopped talking. Across the water, Dors had turned fully around.

“Well done,” she said.

Then she looked at Sable, and nodded once. Sable, who was still holding the nine-year-old, nodded back.

Raven let go and swam a loop out and back, because she had to do something with what was in her chest. Then she climbed out and did it again. And again.

---

The next morning, the class ran on its schedule.

The essay assignment was one page, on any recent observation. Raven wrote hers on the dive — the silence underwater, the blue, the way the water gave her back. She revised it twice, cut the last sentence, and submitted it. Dors read it, changed one comma to a colon, and filed it without comment.

Chemistry followed. States of matter, the tablet warm on the desk, water on the board in its three forms — Dors wrote them in chalk, per policy. Raven copied them onto her screen. Then geometry, then the midday break.

The day continued, each period arriving on time and leaving nothing behind.

The window hour was at four.

Raven took the long corridor from the classroom wing — past the kitchens, where the corridor narrowed and the traffic was carts, trays and staff moving at working speed. She walked it every day. It was the fastest route, and nobody in it ever asked her anything.

A man came out of the kitchen doors with a service tray, turned to let a cart pass, and lost the stack. Two plates went off the edge. They broke on the stone, loudly and completely.

A moment of stillness. Then motion resuming — the man already crouched and gathering.

He was young — new, or newish; Raven did not know his face. He got the large pieces onto the tray fast, and it would have been over, a swept floor and a note in the breakage log, except that a woman in a supervisor’s apron had come out of the kitchen at the sound. She took in the broken plates, the man crouched over them, and then — she saw who was standing in the corridor. Her face changed.

“You,” she said to the man, and her voice had acquired an audience. “Stand up. Do you know what these cost? Do you know whose corridor this is?”

The man stood. He looked at the supervisor, and then, following her sightline, at Raven, and understood.

Raven stood in the corridor with her tablet under her arm.

The corridor waited.

“What does the breakage log say?”

The supervisor looked at Raven, recalculating.

It was the man who answered, still holding the tray.

“First breakage of the month.”

A beat.

Raven nodded and walked on. The corridor resumed behind her. She heard the supervisor’s voice, reduced to its working size:

“Clean it up. Mind your hands.”

---

Harry was at the window at four, mid-inventory of the courtyard — the gardener had acquired a new wheelbarrow and Harry had opinions about the turning radius. Raven sat at the small table and did not take out the tablet.

He noticed by the third remark, and let the narration wind down.

“You’re somewhere else.”

“They’re looking at me.”

“Who is?”

“Everyone.” She had her hands flat on the table, and told him what happened.

Harry hung at the sill. The wheelbarrow crossed the courtyard below, unaccompanied by commentary.

“You resized it,” he said. “That’s the job. People stand near power and everything around them inflates: prices, punishments, plates. You’ll be walking through corridors doing arithmetic on other people’s mistakes for the rest of your life.”

“I didn’t ask for it.”

“No. It came with the name they’ve started saving.”

Raven sat with that. Below, the gardener parked the wheelbarrow badly. Harry visibly declined to mention it.

“It’s heavy,” she said.

“It’s heavy every time. The trick nobody tells you—” the screen flickered, something crossing it too fast to read “—is that it never gets lighter.”

They stayed at the window through the hour. He gave her the wheelbarrow material after all, gently, until her hands came off the table and the tablet came out. The day resumed at its own size.