Veekidon drove the crest post into the hard ground of Orefaria at first light, and the iron head of his father's spear rang against the stone beneath. The post carried the painted shield of his family, blue and red under gold scrollwork, with his name lettered on a carved ribbon. He set it at the center of the ground he had walked and chosen. Around him stretched flat earth and a clean stream, and no other claimant to argue the line. He wore the trikus-fur dress he had cut and sewn himself, his red nails bright on the spear haft, and he meant this ground to be a place where men like him could live in finery without hiding. His three companions watched from the wagon. They had followed him out of towns where a stranger had once grabbed his arm in the market and told him to strip. Veekidon had put that man on the ground. No one had spoken to him that way since. Now the four of them had six weeks, maybe less, before the storm season came off the hills and turned bare earth to a lake. They tried the walls first. Veekidon marked a square around the crest post with stakes and cord, four towers at the corners, an iron gate on the near side. He and his companions cut stone from the outcrop above the stream and dragged it down on rollers. By the end of the second week they had one course laid on one side. He measured the courses against the sky and did the count. Eight hands could not raise four walls before the rain. If they kept on, they would sleep in mud and watch their stone sink. He stopped the wall work at dawn on the fifteenth day. He walked the square and drew a new plan in the dirt with the butt of his spear. One building, he said. Long roof, steep pitch, a covered room in the middle, a squared tower at each end for stores and sleeping. Build it across the line where the gate would go, so it became the gate. Finish the perimeter later, in seasons that allowed it. His companions argued the change through the morning. By afternoon they were cutting timber for the ridge beam. They raised the hall in five weeks. The purple slate went on the roof the day the first clouds came in low from the north. Veekidon stood inside the covered room with rain on the windows and his crest post visible through the arch, still upright, still alone on ground that was otherwise open on three sides. They had a roof. They had no wall. The storm would pass over them tonight, and in the morning anyone walking the flats would see exactly where he lived and what he had not yet built.