Leigh Kimmel says:

Today is the opening of Parliament. It is also the day I must present myself to be formally installed as the new Earl Pharos of Association Point.

As the son of a younger son, I was never supposed to inherit. So Grandfather made no objection when my bereaved father handed me over to his housekeeper at the Chatham Lighthouse, unable to bear seeing the echoes of my mother in my features.

That choice ensured that I would be properly cared for, but it also meant that I grew up among those who still recalled the old Yankee Republic, which once stretched along these shores of an ocean that is not the Atlantic. They have not forgotten how the hated Empire invaded and sacked towns up and down the Cape, how in the days after the fall of Chatham, a foolish young magus opened the world gate to bring in an army under the Stuart king, who had been fleeing Cromwell’s Roundheads.

Even after all these generations, there’s a great deal of bitterness that the Stuart king didn’t help their ancestors restore the Yankee Republic and raise the Stars and Stripes once again over the statehouse in Chatham. But my foster mother would not betray her promise to my father, and she did me no harm. Instead, she saw to it that I was raised among the fishermen and whalers of the Cape, people who still treasured the memory of what they had lost.

Were it not for the deaths of my father and my uncle, it would’ve made no difference. Perhaps I would’ve become a lighthouse-keeper, or captain of a rescue company in one of the shore stations. Instead, before I could accustom myself to the idea of being my grandfather’s heir, he too passed from this mortal coil.

So here I am, feeling very much a stranger among these men who are supposed to be my peers. At least the nature of our family’s holdings and traditional duties mean I will not have long to remain here in Mandarkeel, the ancient city the Stuart king made his capital. The Pharos, the ancient lighthouse at the tip of the Cape, has as its neighbors Yankee towns.

My people.