The rain came down hard that evening, and nearly half the children at Little Red Pony Academy never showed up at all.
Iris Marlowe lingered inside the academy, watching the storm through the window, waiting for any break in the weather so she could push her cart out and start working. The drizzle thickened into sheets, and for a moment the steady drumming on the eaves carried her back to her old village in Fourrivers, when she and her family had bent over the paddies under skies just like this. Back then, weather had been a god you bargained with. Sun meant work. Rain meant rest.
On the construction sites she had prayed for rain too. A drizzle cooled the bones; a downpour bought her and Byron a rare day off together. They would huddle inside their little flat, buy a few cheap vegetables,
