Teddi Lundegard was an empathic telepath, which I imagined made it really easy for most of her patients to let her know what was going on in their lives and how they felt about it… they could just open up. My mind was hostile terrain to living, mortal creatures who were of the material plane. Any direct contact with a plane-touched mind could have adverse effects on a subtle artist, but a demon’s mind contained elements that were directly inimical to mortal life.

I was mortal enough that indirect contact… like picking up thoughts and feelings leaking from my head… was largely safe, though I’d been told it could be uncomfortable to be around me when I had a lot on my mind. Shielding against such background noise was a natural knack for most telepaths, but something that could impede the mental healing process.

Teddi had a magic item that worked like a filter. It didn’t keep everything out… that was the difference between a filter and a shield, I supposed. With guidance from some think tank back on the coast she’d learned to do a sort of indirect scan… was how she’d explained it, though I was pretty sure that a gorgon’s gaze actually did transmit through reflections and the mirror thing was a myth that dated back to before it was common knowledge that gorgons needed to turn their petrifying glare on in the first place.

The session rooms in the mental healing office were designed to be comfortable and relaxing, and as a result they were homier than the dorms most of the university students lived in, which hadn’t been. Over the summer they’d evidently been remodeled. The room that Teddi had used had been something like a large and open living room, with the feel of a cabin or lodge complete with comfortable furniture and a great big fireplace. She was still using that room, or a part of it. It had been cut in half.

It seemed like she’d opted to give up more of the office part of the office in order to keep the sitting area comfortable.

I’d opted to sit on the floor, and Teddi had done the same. She’d cut her hair short over the summer, and without so much weight holding it down the remainder had gone all curly. I complimented her on it because it seemed like an easy way to start talking.

“Thanks,” she said. “You look like you’re growing yours out?”

“I guess maybe by default, at first,” I said. “Now I kind of feel like I might like to see it a little longer, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

“Well, you know, most salons have a glamour mirror that can show you what it would like, and different ways to wear it,” Teddi said.

“What I really mean is that I wouldn’t know how to do anything with it,” I said. Teddi nodded. The subject of my grandmother and her thoughts on hair, vanity, and utility were an old subject between us. “Though I guess… well, I’m becoming friends with this G&D student who does effects with her hair. I don’t know if she does regular styling or not, because with her own she goes for sculpting and bright colors… but I could ask her advice. And Two could help me. She’d love that.”

“You say that with less… resignation… than you might have before,” Teddi said. “As I recall, you weren’t a fan of Two fussing over you.”

“No,” I said. “But she’s mostly over her phase of wanting to make me into a copy of her. She still treats me like a doll, but… I don’t think she has a dichotomy in her head between people and things. She believes she was just a thing before she was freed, but becoming a person didn’t make her stop being a thing, if that makes sense.”

“I’m sure it makes sense to her,” Teddi said. “It doesn’t need to make sense to me.”

“It makes a kind of sense to me,” I said. “She’s taking me shopping for clothes this weekend. Nicki… that’s my new friend… might be coming, too. I have to ask her. But, anyway, Two’s a bit better about things like compromise now.” I gestured down at my shirt. “Like this top. It’s me… like me, embellished. But still me.”

“She got that? It’s nice.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s not something I’d wear day-to-day, especially when I’m in a fighting class five days a week, but it’s something that I can at least see myself wearing on purpose.”

“You’re suitemates now?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And I think it’s going to work out better in the long run than being roommates, though we’ve kind of got to find a balance, I think, between living on top of each other and only seeing each other at meals.”

“Maybe you could join some of the groups she’s involved with,” Teddi said. “I can’t think of a campus bake sale I saw last year that she wasn’t part of.”

“I don’t think she belongs to all those groups,” I said. “She just likes bake sales.”

“Still, that’s something you could do with her,” Teddi said. “But I know what a difference it can make, being adjacent to someone instead of sharing space with them… up through last year, we all shared offices here. Now I have my own little sanctum.”

“Yeah, I noticed you’ve been remodeling,” I said.

“Well, the mental healing department’s budget has about doubled in size,” she said. “But demand has more tripled or quadrupled, so…”

“Isn’t that kind of… alarming?”

“I don’t think anything has happened to make people need our services more in particular,” she said. “It’s more that people are more aware of the opportunity, and less reticent about seeking help. That’s a good thing. We’ve been somewhat… underutilized for most of the time I’ve been here. That’s one reason I didn’t mind taking on the cases that my colleagues felt less comfortable about handling. That, and I thought everyone was entitled to the same care. But it wasn’t a hardship, it was just work… the kind of work I’ve wanted to be doing all along.”

“In retrospect, it does seem a little weird to wait two days to get in,” I said.

“I hope you would have said something if it was urgent,” Teddi said. “I can tell you’ve been talking around something since you sat down… I mean, if I wasn’t empathic, the fact that you said something about my hair would have been a dead giveaway. I don’t mind playing catch-up, Mackenzie, especially when we haven’t seen each other for months. But is there something important?”

“Yes,” I said. “But when I contacted you, iit didn’t seem too… time-sensitive. I mean, it’s an ongoing issue, but by definition that means it’s not going anywhere.”

“You know that things can get worse if you ignore them.”

“Yeah, I do,” I said. “This isn’t exactly something I can ignore… I guess I’m looking for something more like a consultation than our typical healing sessions. I was actually wanting to talk more about mental defense than anything else..”

“Your father?”

“Yeah, he’s been back,” I said.

“Well, like I’ve told you before, the kinds of defenses you’re looking for… they’re really more your domain than mine,” she said. “The subtle arts aren’t magic like you know it. I can form a shield of thoughts around another person or even a space like a room, but that’s my thoughts… when I’m not there and not focusing on them, it’ll fade. There’s no way to weave that into an enchantment that will make it stay.”

“But magic can affect thoughts in similar ways to your thought-shield,” I said, pointing to the circlet she wore.

“It can,” she said. “It’s just not my particular area of expertise. I did look into it a little, in case that the assertive dreaming and forced waking you practiced didn’t do the trick. There are potions that prevent dreaming, but dreaming is a part of the mind’s natural healing and defenses… going too long without doing it will make you more vulnerable to outside influences. There are amulets that encourage good or peaceful dreams, but I haven’t found anything that suggests this would prevent someone from coming into said dreams. There were some more possibilities, like astral seals, but they didn’t seem necessary… did he bother you more over the summer?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I went a long time between visitations… anyway, it’s not him alone that’s brought me here.”

“You’ve been having other visitations?”

“One,” I said. “Or visitor, multiple visitations. It’s… complicated. When I contacted you, I was looking for a way to tell if someone had been in my head. Preferably an early warning system, but even something that let me know for sure, after the fact…”

“So you’re not sure if this new visitor is real, or just a dream?”

This was the part that I’d been reluctant to broach. Dee was also a patient of Teddi’s, and while that could make it easier to explain the owl-turtle thing, we could also get into awkward territory because of confidentiality issues.

Also, Dee had made it sound like Teddi didn’t quite believe in the owl-turtle thing as an entity in its own right. It was possible that hearing confirmation from a second person would assuage her doubts, but it was also possible that she’d maintain her existing skepticism would win out.

“You know Dee… Delia Daella… right?” I said.

“I know Dee,” Teddi said.

“You know about her, um… owl-turtle thing?”

“You’ve been dreaming about it?”

“No,” I said. “Not dreaming about it, really, as such.”

“…I take it that Dee has shared with you some of her theories about its nature,” Teddi said.

“They aren’t just theories, Teddi,” I said. “It’s been in my dreams… and sometimes maybe skulking around them. I’m pretty sure of that fact now, but the confirmation comes from a questionable source, so it wouldn’t hurt to be sure.”

“Okay,” Teddi said. “Let’s maybe start at the beginning.”

“That would actually be last year, when things got weird and the ambassadors from Ceilos were here to protect Dee and the other underworld students in Harlowe Hall,” I said.

“Just before you started seeing me,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “The underworlders had this creature from the outer planes who was…”

“The big, sightless fish thing,” Teddi said.

“Yes,” I said. “And one night it turned its attention to Harlowe Hall in a way that sort of… messed up the rules of dreaming in a way that made spontaneous dream-sharing possible.”

“…my instinct is to say that that’s impossible, but I guess I don’t know what sort of effects a cross-planar distortion might have,” Teddi said. “I am skeptical of the existence of the owl-turtle thing as more than a construct of imagination because as a telepath I’m aware that dreams aren’t an actual ‘place’ or ‘thing’, they’re just thoughts… with all the weight of thoughts and usually with less coherence. The idea of a dream object or creature having any persistence outside of a dream… well, it’s the same problem you’d have with a psychic enchantment.”

“Yeah, the owl-turtle thing actually pretty much said that itself,” I said. “That’s there no ‘world of dreams’ it exists in or anything like htat. But it has the coherence that a very literal and coherent mind could give it. Two’s mind is… okay, I think if you could look inside her skull you’d probably see something that’s a lot like a brain. But her mind was made by a human, and it was made to be very… task-oriented. So if you or I dreamed and in the dream there was… a filing cabinet in the corner of the room… it might just be a thought that says ‘there’s a filing cabinet there’ and we just sort of fill in the details, but Two’s mind would actually create a filing cabinet and define its properties.”

“That sounds plausible, from what I know about golem psyches,” Teddi said. “Which I admit is not much. Audra and my family’s other house golems aren’t as mindful as Two. Still, though… I know you’re not really in a position to know, but do you think it’s possible that Dee herself is reaching out subconsciously in her sleep?”

“Do you think she’d be able to do that without a reaction between our minds?” I said. “Extraplanar influences, demonic tendencies… I’m pretty sure you know better than most people what my mind can do to a telepath who wanders in, and Hissy was awake when she tried to read me.”

“Yes, but Dee’s a more powerful and better trained telepath,” Teddi said. “Hissy’s a more efficient communicator, but that would work against her… she could have had as many as four or five separate channels open between her mind and yours.”

“How much of it is Dee acting under some kind of heavy psychic impression from Two and how much of it is an actual thing in itself, I really don’t know,” I said. “But for now it’s more useful for me to take it at its word that it’s real. And that night was the first time I encountered it… and the only time, until recently.”

I gave her a rundown of the way my dreams had been going, including the cat-and-mouse games between the owl-turtle thing and the man, and the effects they’d apparently had on my sleep those nights.

“I have to tell you something and I want you to know I’m only saying it because I’m being completely honest,” she said.

“I, uh, kind of expect that,” I said.

“Well, it’s been a few months,” she said. “Anyway, if you were anyone else and I weren’t more aware of your history, I’d be wondering about your fantasy life right about now.”

“My fantasy life involves things like getting rich for designing the next big TV, or being collared… or knights riding around on motorcycles, though it’s been ages since I had time for that,” I said. “This stuff… night time cloak-and-dagger, tangling with Law agents… it’s not the sort of thing I’d ever wish for. I mean, there have been times I’ve wished for my life to be more exciting, or to involve some sort of, you know, conflict… who doesn’t want to be a hero?”

“I think some people would prefer to be a villain,” Teddi said. “But most people want, at least, to be a pivotal figure in the story of their lives.”

“I don’t want to be the bad guy, but I really don’t feel particularly heroic,” I said. “I feel… well, actually, I just feel really put-upon. I’m sure that sounds… I don’t know what it sounds like. But I feel like I’m being intruded upon and inconvenienced for a bunch of stuff that I really… okay, I actually know how to explain exactly how I feel.”

“Okay.”

“Ever since she got back, Steff has been telling people this story about me fighting some sort of dread lord or something,” I said. “It’s really just Steff being Steff… and in a pretty innocuous way for Steff, but I find it more frustrating than I probably should. It’s just the idea of my school year and my social life being interrupted because somebody’s got some kind of evil master plan that I have to foil… in a book or TV show, it would all kind of neatly fit together, but my life doesn’t have room in it for fighting evil. So it’s like, I don’t know what my father wants and I wish I didn’t have to care, because I don’t have time to deal with him. I don’t want to ‘vanquish’ him or come up with a plan to stop him, because I don’t think I should have to.”

“I think that’s valid,” Teddi said.

“But he’s my father.”

“That doesn’t make him your responsibility,” Teddi said. “When he manipulates you, he’s making himself into your problem, but there isn’t an actual tie of obligation between the two of you. And it’s fair to resent him for that.”

“You know, it’s funny, but I actually worry about that,” I said. “I hate him and I’m sure he’s evil, but now that we’re talking about it… I feel kind of petty about resenting him, and it’s hard to feel petty and fair.”

“Well, he is a person,” Teddi said. “Not necessarily a good person and not a person you need to have in your life. But it’s hard to ignore the fact that he’s a person, or turn off your normal emotional responses to people. That doesn’t mean you owe him anything. You can feel bad about cutting someone out of your life but it doesn’t make it the wrong thing to do, just like you can feel sorry for someone without being obligated to help them.”

“He keeps trying to convince me that he has nothing but my best interests at heart,” I said. “But he’s… pushy. When he pretends to care about me, it reminds me of the old comedy cliche where the guy is told to be quiet and he goes on a monologue about of course he’ll be quiet when he’s told to be quiet. You know?”

“I do,” Teddi said. “You’re talking about someone who shows every sign of ignoring your boundaries and no sign of respecting you. You’ve never asked me if I agree with your decision to shut him out, but I support it completely. Whatever you have to do to establish a boundary…”

“I’m not sure you’ll agree when I tell you what I did,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“I asked a guy I sort of know with access to his government file to slip it to my grandmother,” I said.

“Do you regret it?”

“No,” I said, and if I sounded surprised it was because I was. “You know, I was pretty sure that once I started explaining this to someone outside my life I’d be like ‘What have I done?’, but really… no, I don’t regret it. It was something to do, a way of striking back. I did it.”

“Do you think it’ll accomplish anything?”

“At the very least I hope it will give him something to worry about other than digging around in my head and trying to run my life,” I said. “I don’t know if anything will come of it. It’s like trying to hit someone with a double ricochet. But I felt like I had to do something… I was angry at the time I decided to do it, but it was a pretty calm rage, considering. I don’t think it’s a revenge thing.”

“I think we might want to explore that further, but I did have a thought pop up from my head and I wanted to share it before I forget,” Teddi said. The wording was unusual, but professional telepaths tended to be more specific about where thoughts originated. “Depending on the exact channel that’s being used to enter your mind, something like my filter circlet might impede entrance… it’s not exactly a cheap or common magic item, but I don’t have a pressing need for mine outside of my sessions with you. And it is mine, not the office’s. If you would like to borrow it for a few nights to see how it works… I think it’s got a good chance of keeping out Dee’s owl-turtle, because one way or another it’s using her natural telepathy.”

“How about my father?”

“I’d file that under ‘it could work’,” Teddi said. “From what you’ve told me about him, though, I think his way in is deeper and more… well, I suppose I’d say ‘primal’. That’s what’s going to make him hard to keep out.”

“Then I think I’m going to decline,” I said. “If I could keep both of them out, I would, but the owl-turtle thing is more benign, and it makes him nervous. He doesn’t understand it, and that scares him a little. When I contacted you I was hoping to get some help in dealing with it, but now… now I’m starting to think about making a deal with it.”

“Is that really wise?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Dee’s pretty sure it means well, though. This isn’t a matter of the lesser of two evils or the devil you know… I definitely know my father better, even if I don’t know him well. It’s more of a choice between evil and not evil, or the devil I know and the… anomalous dream-thing I don’t. But the owl-turtle thing just wants to exist, and it doesn’t need to hurt anyone to do that. That, and Dee thinks it might be some sort of representation of self-awareness.”

“Sounds like her theories have evolved,” Teddi said. “She told me it was an avatar of annoyance.”

“It’s… hard to like,” I said. “Dee thinks that’s because Two didn’t like it, so ‘unlikeable’ is part of its make-up.”

“I don’t mean to treat your life like it’s a subject for a paper, but this is pretty interesting,” Teddi said. “I think I might be able to help you more if I knew more… and maybe I could help you and Dee both if I actually observed this owl-turtle thing. Would you mind passing along a message that I’d like a chance to talk to her about it some more?”

I wondered at the fact that Teddi had doubted Dee’s reports of the owl-turtle thing but I’d apparently trusted mine. That probably had little to do with her or me personally, though. It was just a matter of one person telling her a crazy, impossible thing being easier to write off than two.

“I don’t know how she’ll take that, but I can pass it along,” I said.

“That’s all I can ask,” Teddi said.

Alone with Ian and me in our suite, Amaranth frowned and chewed her lip when I told her in detail about the dream and the conversation that had followed it.

“I guess it was kind of… drastic,” I said when I finished. The word seemed a little inadequate, but it really only seemed that way when I tried to explain it to someone else. Inside my head I understood what I’d done and why.

“Well, yes, it might have been better to wait and think about your options before going straight to something so… irrevocable,” she said. “I’m not saying you did the wrong thing, baby. Just that you could have waited to be sure it was the right one.”

“When I picked up my mirror, I didn’t think I’d actually be putting anything into motion,” I said. “I just felt like I needed to do something, even something small and symbolic like finding out how to get a hold of Kent, while I was still feeling all… well… while I was still capable of doing something. I think if I had gone back to sleep and waited until later I probably would have found it easiest to do nothing and just wait for my appointment with Teddi.”

“Would that have been so terrible, though?” Amaranth asked. “I mean, not only might she be able to give you other options for keeping your father out, but she could have been a sounding board for the whole Law plan.”

“Maybe… but, Amaranth, I feel like I did the right thing,” I said. “I don’t know how it’s going to turn out. I don’t know if it’s the best thing. But I’ve had a great day and I feel good about what I did.”

“Then I’m glad you did it,” she said. She sat down on the bed and patted her lap. “Come here, baby, and I’ll get you ready for bed.”

That apparently entailed a torturous make-out and teasing session that heavily involved my nipple piercings and a lot of light, ticklish touches from the ends of her nails around the inside of my thighs.

Amaranth knew better than anyone how easy it was to set me off. I almost came three times while Ian watched. She knew exactly where the edge of that particular cliff was located, and she knew how to push me right up to the very brink of it before yanking me back from it. She got me panting and left me there… and I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard myself pant before. I hoped it sounded better farther away from my skull.

At the very least the sound couldn’t have been too distracting because Ian finished once just from watching… well, I think his hand helped, but under the circumstances I think that was the least that could have been expected. He was nearly hard again by the time Amaranth released me to take care of his needs, which I did without complaint.

One thing that had to be said about the whole denial thing: his sex life was definitely improving by any measurement.

Mine was… harder to say. The climax had always been more of about release and relief for me than simple pleasure. It was frustrating to have Amaranth work me up and then kiss me on the cheek and turn and walk away… but somehow that frustration made it all the more fulfilling for me to put my needs aside and get down on my knees in front of Ian.

It felt more like service, like a real gift I was giving him.

It was hard to explain, which made it all the more awkward when I found myself trying to do so to Nicki in class the next day. We’d sort of drifted in the topic of my sex life, ironically because I’d been asking her about what she would look for in a girlfriend. She didn’t really know what she liked, sexually, so she turned things around back to me.

“So, wait… Ian can just decide that you don’t get to get off for a few days?” she said.

“If that’s what he wants,” I said. I manged to say it without blushing, though I did incline my head. It felt more like a token of submission than embarrassment, though it was at least a bit of both. “It’s not a regular thing with us. I mean, it hasn’t been. We kind of just started it… I think we’re both getting to a place where we’re confident enough to try that kind of thing. Who knows where it’ll go?”

“Do you actually enjoy that?”

“I’m… learning to appreciate it,” I said, after some consideration. I didn’t want to sound like it was bad, but I felt like I’d only just barely brushed the surface of the good.

“More so than you would an actual orgasm or three?”

“No,” I said. “They’re… different styles of good. Good in different ways. It’s not something that could replace actually, you know, having sex all the way. Like I said, we’re just trying it, but now that you’ve got me talking about it my feeling is that in the long run it’ll kind of be like… like not having the same thing to eat every night. you know?”

“So you are into it?” she said.

I laughed a kind of sputtery laugh, that kind of came out my nose when I tried not to be too loud during class. Nicki seemed to provoke this reaction from me… in this case I wasn’t laughing at anything she’d said and I certainly wasn’t laughing at her. It was more that the question was unexpected. Normally the unexpected would make me freeze up for a moment.

With Nicki… I really couldn’t say what the difference was, but it was there.

“Well, I’m not out of it, I guess?” I said. “I mean, I don’t want to give you the idea that I’m reluctant or I’m just putting up with it for his sake… I’m not sure how I’d feel about it all the time or long-term, but it’s… a new experience. I’ve never had a chance to get used to having sex every day for a long period of time in the first place. In some ways, I’m getting more attention than usual. It’s not something I would have picked for myself… but it’s not something I’d turn down.”

“But you… you told him to do this, right?”

“No,” I said. “It was all his idea.”

“I thought that the whole sub thing was supposed to be voluntary?”

“It is,” I said. “I’m his sub, voluntarily.”

“So, would you normally tell him what you want and then have him make you do it?” she said. “I mean, that’s the impression I’ve had… the sub has the power.”

“Um… I think maybe some people do it like that that,” I said. “Maybe. I don’t really know. And, if I’m completely honest, there are some elements of me wanting someone else to take charge for the stuff that I want but I’m self-conscious about doing for myself… but really and truly, one of the things that I want is for someone to take charge. Period, and for real.”

“Oh,” she said. “Um… oh.”

“I have a feeling like I’m disappointing you,” I said.

“Oh, it’s not that,” she said. “I mean, not you, personally. I just had an idea about how the whole d-and-s thing worked that I guess was wrong… I’m not sure it’s something I can support.”

“Why not?”

“Well, you don’t have any control. It just seems really… unequal. One-sided.”

“The basic idea you were describing sounds one-sided, too,” I said. “I mean, you thought someone was calling all the shots for the other person. That’s still true.”

“Yeah, but it seems less squicky to think that the person who’s tied up or being whipped or whatever is the one in charge. You know?”

“I could see that,” I said. “But… if I wanted to be in charge, I wouldn’t want to be tied up. So to speak.”

“So… do you think you could ever be dominant?”

“N-no,” I said, with only a small sputter. “When I’m at my most confident… well, confident and self-aware… is when I’m most submissive. The times when I’m confident and really assertive, I have a small tendency to sort of be a bit of a clueless bitch. I don’t think there’s a lot of talent there waiting to be harnessed.”

“I can’t picture you being a… you know, bitch,” Nicki said, and it was adorable how much her voice dropped in volume when she said the word. “But then, I have a hard time seeing you as submissive. I guess that’s part of why it made more sense to me that you would be the one calling the shots?”

“You know, I’m really happy to be a passenger,” I said. “I’ve never really had a lot of feeling of control in my life, but I’ve also not had a lot of security. This gives me a feeling of both things at once.”

“I just don’t think I could do it,” Nicki said, shaking her head. “I mean, I’ve had dirty-tingly thoughts about women in leather with thigh high boots and whips, but it’s mostly thoughts about having sex with them while they’re slightly bossy, and maybe calling me, you know… names.”

“I can understand that,” I said. “I’m fond of… names, myself.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“A little bit,” I said. “But if you knew how rarely I’m the most experienced person in these conversations you wouldn’t blame me.”

“I’m not in-experienced,” Nicki said. “I just have had… different experiences. Then you have.”

“Well, most people have,” I said. I noticed that Professor Stone was kind of looking our way, so I added, “Let’s finish this conversation at dinner?”

“Okay,” she said. She was blushing. “I’m not like… I mean, I know you said I was welcome, but sometimes I like to eat lunch at different times, and…”

“Hey, you don’t need a reason to join us or not,” I said. “Real friendship isn’t an obligation… that’s something I learned from Puddy.”

“That doesn’t seem like something… oh,” she said.

After having spent a whole hour in Coach Callahan’s class the day before mostly trying the same couple of things and having my classmates catch on, I decided to spend the Thursday evening session working on feinting and faking people out so I could get around their defenses instead of powering through them all the time.

I figured that was the sort of thing the coach wanted to see from me… ways of handling situations where my usual tactics wouldn’t work or where my strength wouldn’t be such an overwhelming advantage. My strength and the speed it gave me still provided me with some benefits, because I could whip my staff around and reverse direction really fast. I wasn’t really great at it to begin with, but I picked things up as I went and I didn’t have to even be haflway good for another day.

As a half-immortal half-demon, I didn’t sweat much, but I still felt a little unnecessarily grubby after the unusual workout. I didn’t really have time to head back to the tower and take a shower, especially when I might need to eat in hurry to make my appointment with Teddi afterwards. There were shower facilities somewhere in the athletic center, but it would be a dry day on the plane of water before I ever set foot in them. I decided to just head back and change into a nicer, cleaner top.

I had a fitted T that had been a gift from Two. It was black, but it had a little bit more of a v-shaped neckline and some… reflecty-rectangle… things… making a kind of checkmark pattern around it. I didn’t wear it very often because I had a feeling I’d break the whatevers off of it if I wasn’t careful, and I was never careful… but I figured I could be careful enough for one evening.

As I carefully didn’t hurry to meet the others for dinner, I wondered if Nicki would say anything about the change. I really didn’t want to give her the wrong impression, that I was the kind of person who’d change clothes just for dinner.

It turned out that I’d had no need to worry, though, because she didn’t show up. Two noticed and appreciated it, though.

“I like that shirt,” she said. “It looks pretty nice on you.”

“You gave me this shirt,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Amaranth helped me pick out. She said it was more to your taste than my first choice. Otherwise it would have been nicer. You and your friend Nicki and I should go shopping sometime. She could help me convince you to wear more colors that are… colors..”

“My wardrobe is the most diverse it’s ever been, thank you very much,” I said.

“Yeah, ever since you bought that third pair of jeans things have really taken off,” Ian said.

“I have m… I do have more than three pairs of jeans,” I said. “I just… when I find a pair that I like, I get more of them. It’s more about comfort than appearance.”

“We could put sequins or rhinestones on the duplicates to make them more distinct,” Two said.

“I have only two questions,” Steff said. “Where would these sequins go and what would they spell?”

“On her pants,” Two said. “I have not thought about words. They could say… Mack’s Jeans?”

“There will be no writing things on my pants!” I said.

Ian gave Amaranth a meaningful look, and she smiled.

“I think we have some say in the disposition of your pants, baby,” Amaranth said.

“You didn’t say if you wanted to go shopping,” Two said.

I thought about it. It was in Two’s nature to keep herself busy, she had a wider circle of friends than I did, and since I wasn’t dating her and hadn’t needed her help with mental invasions we really hadn’t seen a lot of each other so far during the school year. And I had a feeling Nicki would be flattered to be asked along for her fashion expertise.

“Okay,” I said. “Well, we’ll have to ask Nicki, obviously… and I’m going to be kind of occupied this weekend.”

“With me,” Steff said. “And I think this sounds awesome. I can take you out for a little walk… I still remember our first time hitting the town.”

“Then it’s a date,” Two said. “But not a date-date, except between Steff and Mack, and maybe Mack and her friend Nicki, and maybe Mack and her friend Nicki and Steff.” She paused and her face scrunched up as she worked her way through the various permutations. “It is perhaps substantially but not entirely a date-date, pending the acceptance of Mack’s friend Nicki.”

“Two, you’re one of a kind,” Hazel said.

“That’s our pseudowench,” Steff added.

The men seated around the semicircular end of the table jumped at the sound of her voice, a motion which they quickly turned into rising to their feet.

“Please, be seated,” she said as she sat down in the comfortably plush wing-backed chair.

Thrones were out of fashion in Magisteria, a fact for which she and her aging husband were grateful. They could choose comfort and have it read as populist humility.

She laid the file folder she’d brought with her down and opened it, then put on the platinum-rimmed spectacles that she didn’t strictly need.

Even if her vision had required correction, there were any number of less visible ways of achieving that effect, even permanently. But the visibility of the prop was the point… the most acceptable way of making her husband appear younger was to make herself seem older.

“Now, as ranking members on the Senatorial Committee on the Salarium and the chief military adviser to the committee, you were asked here to discuss the spending figures for next year,” she said. “We have received and considered your proposals and I would like to start by saying that I find them interesting, but not compelling.”

“Has the emperor seen them?” one of the men asked

“Senator Varence, the reason I invited here is so that you might have a chance to make your case in person, to persuade me with lively debate where dead letters and numbers failed,” Vera said. “In other words, to see if you could impress me. You are not off to a good start.”

“Madam Empress,” the senator said, “I do beg your pardon. I had no intention of slighting you. It is simply that your husband might better understand the needs of the modern military… not because of any deficiency on your part, of course, but simply having to do with his greater familiarity with the situation. Had we but known that our budget proposal would be read by you, we might have couched it in terms more bent to your understanding.”

“My husband and I are in the habit of discussing matters of state with each other,” she said. “When I sit before you, senator, you should not assume that he has not seen and weighed in on the matter that is before me… nor should you assume that just because you have dealt with him in the past, it necessarily means that I was not acquainted with the matter and my opinion had no weight.”

“Of course. I meant no disrespect,” the senator said. “But… our requests on the military’s behalf have rarely met with anything other than a swift approval. When we do find ourselves being turned down and we find ourselves being turned down by you…”

“In the first place, nothing has been ‘turned down’,” Vera said. “It simply hasn’t been approved yet, and you are in danger of squandering an opportunity here.”

“Really, now,” the senator on one end of the curved side of the table said.

“Really now what, Senator Aldin?” the empress said.

“Really, now, do you need to hold up to hold up an important military appropriation and call us out of the chamber to engage in this… this… petty display of power?”

“Senator Aldin,” Vera said. She got to her feet. The man in uniform rose at the same time she did, though slower. The other two senators were up a second later. Senator Aldin looked around at the sound of chairs scooting backwards, and then got to his feet. The empress continued. “I am the imperatrix of this imperial republic. My power is hardly petty and you would know if it were on display. My request of your presence is nothing more than the routine exercise of said power, on behalf of the nation I command and protect. You will all remain standing in my presence, as a reminder of that.”

She sat back down.

“Your majesty, I apologize for my colleague’s… brusqueness,” Senator Varence said. “The usual courtesy for men of our rank…”

“Is rescinded until you and your colleagues can remember the usual courtesy for persons of mine,” Vera said. “Consider this a primer on the subject of pettiness. Gentlemen, the reason this appropriation request did not meet with as swift and immediate approval is because it goes beyond all previous ones in scope and scale. When you ask for things that are obviously reasonable and prudent, you are given them without question. If you thought this meant you were being given a blank check, that is your own error and one I am here to correct. Now it is possible that your recent request was necessary for reasons you did not see need to articulate, or it’s possible that you over-reached in your excitement.”

“I will not be talked to like a school boy!” Senator Aldin said.

“Then you are excused,” she said.

“The entire senate shall hear of this outrage!”

“Good,” Vera said. “But you might want to register your grievance early, as I understand that there is quite a wait for members of the public…”

“The public? I am an Imperial Senator…”

“No,” Vera said. “You are being dismissed from imperial service, and thus more or less freed of the obligation to ever be lectured by me again.”

“B… but…”

“Unless you would care to go stand with your nose in the corner silently while I address your colleagues,” Vera said. “In which case you will retain your rank and title, though not your committee seat. You must forfeit something for forgetting that when you address me you are addressing the imperial power and the whole of the Imperium.”

Senator-For-The-Moment Aldin opened his mouth and then, in a moment of uncharacteristic wisdom, closed it and retreated to the corner without another word.

“You know, in the days when the emperor’s wife was just the empress consort and not an empress in fact, I doubt very much that a senator would dare to treat her the way you gentlemen treat me,” Vera said to the remainder of the group. “After all, to do so would be seen as an insult to her husband. When I assert myself as equal to my husband, I get neither the respect you would give to him, nor the respect I would have received as his property.”

“Your majesty, Senator Aldin has behaved atrociously,” Varence said. “I will not say one word in support of his conduct. But surely you must realize that by insisting on equal treatment, you give up some of the, well, natural protections accorded to femininity. We men do not respect other men automatically or as a matter of course. We test each other, we feel each other out, we size each other up… respect is given to a lady as a matter of courtesy… but for a man, or I should say, for a person, respect must be earned.”

Vera said nothing for the space of several seconds. She simply stared unblinking into Varence’s smiling face until the grin began to fade around the edges.

“Senator,” she said. “Let me lay out a proposition for you. I shall have a diviner and a telepath brought in. I will put to them the question of whether you and Senator Aldin ever have treated or ever would treated my husband the way you treat me in order to judge whether he deserved your respect as emperor… if you would test any male emperor you were sworn to serve as you test me. If the answer is yes, I will sign your appropriation. In fact, I will sign ten blank reams of paper bearing the official seal and allow you to fill them with whatever best suits you at your leisure. But if the diviner and the subtle artist do not agree that you are telling the truth… well, then I shall dust off the hoary old book of laws that describes the punishment for lying to the imperial power and we’ll do whatever it says. How does that idea suit you?”

“Your majesty’s point is well-taken, but perhaps you discount the possibility that your husband earned our respect before we ever met him.”

“No, I don’t,” Vera said. “I’m quite sure there’s something about him that guaranteed him more respect, sight unseen, than I can hope to have from you, no matter how many displays of power I lay on. Gentlemen, I will say again and for the last time: we… and I speak here as the voice of the imperium… are unconvinced of the merits of your proposal for the next year’s funding allocation for the military. To be specific, we are concerned about the shift in spending from arcane warfare to troop build ups, and the apparent lack of interest in maintaining domestic fortifications and transportation infrastructure.”

“Your majesty, I share your concerns,” the third senator said. “I will not say a word to defend the proposal, and I would like it noted that my name did not appear on it. I appreciate your courtesy in asking me here as a ranking member of the committee, and if you’d like to know my thoughts on the subject I will be happy to share them.”

“Thank you for making your stance plain, Senator Simons,” the empress said. “If your colleague or the good general could be roused to say something for it, perhaps you can rebut them. Sirs, the impression I get is that you are preparing to go to war but with little thought to defense or to the logistics of deployment within our borders. I do not pretend that my expertise on military matters is equal to yours… nor is my husband’s. That is why we have a standing committee on the salarium.”

“Well, your majesty, you are largely correct in your understanding,” the general said. “But we did think about those things. We thought about them and decided they were less important. The wars we fight next will be fought far from home. The phrase ‘the best defense is a good offense’ applies here. If we can keep the conflict outside our borders by building up our offensive capabilities… well, that’s better than paying for defense and rebuilding.”

“And if an enemy attacks us here all the same?”

“We’ll attack them first. Elsewhere.”

“I’m asking what you would do if they come here.”

“Ma’am, we would do everything in our power to prevent that. This is a military objective and I don’t plan for failure.”

“You know, I like domestic military spending,” Vera said. “Because it so often does double duty… we built up the highway system in order to facilitate the movement of legions, and commerce benefits. We build up garrisons and armories, and decades after they’re no longer needed they’re serving as libraries and town halls and banks. That’s to say nothing of the dividends from military investments in geomancy, enchantment, and healing. These are all things you cut from your budget in order to pay for more boots on the ground. Tell me, general… in your opinion, is the next generation of battles going to be fought by men running at each other with swords?”

“The infantry has always been the backbone of imperial power.”

“Your knowledge of the past does you credit as a military historian,” Vera said. “I understand that your position is something of a minority within the Hexagon.”

“As an empress, I’m sure you understand that we don’t decide things by popular vote,” the general said. “Ma’am. My viewpoint is representative of the most senior officers of all branches.”

“Who are the oldest and most entrenched in their thinking,” Vera said.

“If I may please break in with a thought?” Senator Simons said. The empress nodded. “Thank you, your majesty. Many in the intelligence community… I am friends with members of some key committees there… as well as some of the up-and-coming military thinkers believe that there is wisdom more in pursuing dexterity than strength: smaller, nimbler legions with specialized yet flexible capabilities, supported by powerful magic and ready to be deployed anywhere at a moment’s notice. This would not only make us better able to face those overseas threats that the general is so keen to face overseas, but it would leave more money in the vaults for domestic matters.”

“That is close to my own thoughts,” Vera said. “Gentlemen, this is how we shall proceed. Three scenarios shall be devised, drawn from current events in the world. You, Senator Varence and General Pembroke, shall draw up plans for how your ideal military would meet the threats described. Senator Simons, you will liaise with your own preferred military thinkers and determine how your ideal force would handle them. In order to avoid favoritism, each of your groups will be in charge of creating one scenario, and the other shall be issued by the Palatium. What we will be looking for here is solutions for probable real-world scenarios, so be careful not to accidentally prove that your army would be ideal for facing threats that are uniquely custom-tailored to it.”

“Your majesty, a fair test would require Senator Simons to have his proposal on the table,” Senator Varence said. “He could wait until the scenarios are before him and then tailor his forces to them.”

“And we would look critically upon such an overwhelming level of extreme specialization,” Vera said. “The point of this test is not to see which army ‘wins’ but to get a feel for how they would handle a range of likely threats… and your purpose should be to provide the Imperial Republic with the army it needs, not to rack up points for yourself or show up a colleague. Gentlemen, the game we are playing here is the game of state. We win when we keep the beacons burning for another hundred years. We lose when our empire falls to a thousand thousand factors that no one noticed or paid attention to at the time. Be competitive with each other. Be ruthless! Senator Simons, if you think the budget proposal for the next year falls short of actually protecting our shores in some way, submit your own rival one. Just remember why you are doing so: to remove the gaps in our collective armor, not to expose the gaps in each other’s.”

“You want war games?” General Pembroke said. “Hell, we can do war games. We have a whole wing full of analysts who do this kind of thing all day.”

“I’m happy to hear that,” Vera said. “And general, in the interest of a robust competition, you will not deny any resources to Senator Simons that you use for yourself.”

“Of course,” the general said. “I have my own team already picked out. He can take who he needs.”

“Your majesty, if I may make one suggestion?” Simons said.

“What is that?”

“We’re going to have two extremely partisan teams, try as we might to avoid it,” he said. “I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing… but in the interest of ruthlessly examining and repairing flaws, why don’t we have each team run the scenarios for both armies? Perhaps General Pembroke and the committee chairman will be more willing to see flaws in my team’s strategy, and vice-versa.”

“A worthy suggestion, happily adopted,” Vera said. She clapped her hands and got to her feet. “Gentlemen, you have your assignments. Get to it.”

“Set an alarm for your first class,” Ian suggested after I helped him relieve a sort of debilitating cramp that’s apparently caused by watching your naked girlfriend talk tough to government agents. “Your first class isn’t until like ten, right? You can get way more sleep that way. I’ll tell everyone at breakfast why you aren’t there.”

“Okay, but… everyone?” I said. “I mean, tell Amaranth…”

“Well, Dee might already know,” Ian said.

I waited a few seconds to see if she’d respond from the other room, but she didn’t.

“I think she’s become pretty reflexive about throwing up a wall of silence when you stay over,” I said. “Anyway, if it’s just people from the suite and Steff, yes, tell, but otherwise, just say I didn’t sleep well.”

“Okay, but I can’t always tell when Two’s friend is there.”

“I guess Hazel’s cool,” I said. “But seriously, don’t talk about this stuff in front of Nicki.”

“Not that I think it’s a good idea to spread this around, but you want to start by keeping secrets from her?”

“I don’t want to scare her off,” I said.

Ian headed back to his own room so he wouldn’t wake me up when he got up, and I settled back down for a few more hours of sleep, mercifully dreamless and mercifully alone.

I didn’t like to skip breakfast because it would be an easy habit for me to acquire. Not having my usual plates of sweet and savory goodness at the start of the day wouldn’t leave my stomach grumbling for the rest of the morning or my body crashing later in the day. Breakfast was a treat for my senses and a chance to socialize rather than a physical need. The intermingling of my immortal and mortal heritages meant that I didn’t actually need to eat or perform any of the other functions associated with eating.

But getting up for breakfast gave me one more chance to see my friends during days in which we’d all be off doing our own things. It gave me a chance to start waking up a little bit earlier than I needed to, so I could be sharper and more alert during my morning class. I didn’t have much advantage over the fully mortal in that department. Some diabolists have stated that demons could go longer without sleep than humans could with fewer adverse effects, but that aside the basic need was the same: about eight hours about once a day.

With the sunlight that managed to sneak in around the edge of the curtains and the sounds of life echoing all around the hallway, I didn’t manage to sleep all the way until my alarm. But with the suite all to myself and nowhere else to be, I was able to enjoy a long, hot soak in the tub… my first of the school year.

I’d had a complicated relationship with the shared bathroom in Harlowe Hall. I’d loved hot baths and showers, but the longer my first year went on, the more the bathroom had felt like hostile territory. It wasn’t just that I’d actually been physically attacked in them. Being in them meant I was sharing space with people who hated me, who felt threatened by me and were a threat to me because of that.

That had been a big part of the appeal of a private bathroom for me. But once everyone else got moved in, I’d started deferring to the others’ needs. The fact that Two and Dee both might need to use the bathroom had kept me from staking a claim to it for an hour or more at a time.

I realized as I sat enveloped in hot water and suds and steam that this had been a mistake. It would be a total dick more to take up the bathroom in the morning, but I had spaced out my classes to make sure I had time to myself during the day. A daily soak was probably not in the cards, but I figured I should be able to manage it once or twice a week and be better for it.

A bubble bath wouldn’t make up for lost sleep, but it was definitely a better start to the day than stumbling out of bed, pulling on some clothes, and staggering off in the direction of my local hazards lecture. I’d left the door from the bathroom to our half of the suite open so I’d hear the alarm in my mirror going off which meant I could forget about the passage of time and just relax, something that I badly needed when I reviewed what had happened in the night… when I thought about what I’d done, what I’d said.

By the light of day… or the light of a windowless bathroom, anyway… my actions did not seem half as clever as they had at the time. Standing up to my father had felt good, but it might have been better to not let him know I was going to be working against him.

I felt that it couldn’t have been helped, though. If I hadn’t acted so defiant in my dream, I couldn’t have acted that way awake. There was no way for me to put on a meek front and just pretend to capitulate to him, because it wouldn’t have been a front. Basically I was a recovering capituholic. I had no resistance to the path of least resistance.

Anyway, it was done and there was no way to undo it. If I got back to Kent and told him I’d changed my mind, I had no doubt that I would have to pay dearly for him to consider recalling the arrow I’d loosed. Rather than worrying about where exactly it would land when it came back down, I decided to focus on the present and my immediate future.

Ian wanted to assert more dominance… the thought of that left me tingly in interesting places. Submission might have been a close cousin to capitulation, but it was far more useful and it left me feeling full of direction and purpose rather than adrift and at the mercy of the winds and tides.

What would it mean in practical terms? Right now the answer seemed to be sex more often but with fewer orgasms. Then I thought back to how he’d phrased his suggestion about sleeping in… forcefully and matter-of-factly. It had also been reasonable, though, and definitely the right move.

I could definitely like this.

As long as I was comfortable and alone, I decided to work on my breathing, too. It helped that the air inside the shower curtain was warm and smelled like cinnamon and vanilla. I closed my eyes, slowly pushed a breath out, and then even more slowly drew one back in.

Submission.

I’d always had an easy enough time throwing myself into my schoolwork when it was subjects I cared about and classes I wanted to be in. Other times it was a struggle… a struggle that could be managed, but one that was easier to manage when the rest of my life wasn’t giving me anything else to fight against. That didn’t seem like it would be the case for the next while.

Was it possible that I was overlooking an easier way?

My day would start nicely enough, but the rest of it was made up of classes I didn’t particularly care for, that I had as a result of obligations that were forced on me. Okay, I’d agreed to take this second class with Coach Callahan in order to save my grade point average during my first semester, but the chain of events that had led me there had started with the requirement to take a weapon proficiency class.

But neither her class nor Professor Swain’s was really all bad, and even if they had been completely pointless and terrible, I still had to get through them and I had to do so with a decent grade.

I breathed in and out and thought about how it felt to to be under the palm of Amaranth’s hand, to be under Ian’s control. I thought about how good it felt to be following a process, to be given clear instructions… to have clear lines of authority.

Professor Swain was my teacher. She didn’t want to cross over to the main campus to teach a delving class three times a week any more than I wanted to be taking one, but she did it all the same… she did it, and that meant she was my teacher. She probably didn’t get a lot of respect as a gnome among humans, but she was a professor and she deserved it.

Callahan… as much as she clearly relished what she was doing, something in her seemed to chafe at it, too. Possibly it was the effort it took her not to kill any of her students. Whatever it was… well, she seemed at least mildly squicked out when I acted submissively in response to her, but she’d never complained about the results.

I worked the way that I worked.

By the time the alarm ended my bath, I’d managed to work myself into a state of utter calm and confidence that I didn’t break my concentration or start blushing when Acantha stopped and stared at me as I came into her classroom… later than I normally would have arrived, but still a couple of minutes before class began.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“Not a thing that I can discern,” she said. “Did you sleep well last night?”

“Actually, no,” I said.

“Whatever you took for it agrees with you.”

“That would be a bath,” I said, and she laughed.

Somehow she seemed a lot more relaxed than normal, too. That probably had more to do with the fact that some of the more unruly voices were gone from the room and in their absence the rest of the class seemed slightly more willing to treat her more like a knowledgeable professional than a substitute teacher in elementary school.

Twice during class Acantha said something to me about my attentiveness to the safe handling procedures. Attentiveness was not something a teacher had ever specifically recognized me for. It felt good… not just like a compliment, but like praise. I beamed more than I blushed.

I thought it was a good sign, too. She’d given me a perfect score and extra credit on my first assignment for exceeding the bounds of it, but she’d also told me she wanted to see my ability to work within confines… or as she’d put it, to show her I could be prudent.

I was hoping to see Nicki at lunch, but she wasn’t there and Ian told me she hadn’t joined them for breakfast, either. Maybe she wasn’t an early riser, but I had a feeling she’d need a dose of reassurance the next time I saw her. Hazel and her suitemates were with us, and so I didn’t want to get into the whole subject of who knew what about my nocturnal dealings at the table. Amaranth told me that Ian had said I had something to tell her about, and she suggested we wait until the evening when we could do it behind closed doors.

That afternoon I wasn’t moaning in my head about having to go to Local Hazards… I wasn’t even telling myself that Eloise’s geomancy would make it worthwhile, though I was still looking forward to that. I’d say I didn’t have any feeling about the class itself one way or the other, except I did… I felt ready for it. Not happy and not grumbly, just ready. It was coming up and I was prepared for it.

“Hey there!” Eloise said when I walked in. “Looks like someone got up on the right side of the bed this morning.”

“Yeah, and it felt so good I did it again a few hours later,” I said.

“Well, you look like a thousand gold,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you walk in with your head like that.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Up,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

“Nothing wrong with keeping one’s eyes to the ground,” Professor Swain said. “You can miss a lot of things if you aren’t watching where you put your feet. Of course, you miss a lot covering your feet up, too.”

“I like to go barefoot,” Eloise said. “But human culture frowns on it.”

“Shoes are a conspiracy to sell more carpets,” the professor said. “You’d get years’ more use out of your carpets if you didn’t wear shoes.”

“You won’t hear me arguing with that. I don’t wear shoes inside my own home,” Eloise said. “But the university actually requires them.”

“Mark my words, someone is getting a kickback there.”

By the time it was nearly the end of the day, I was starting to feel a little self-conscious for the first time since I’d woke up… but mostly I was aware of all the things that were missing. I was used to having a certain amount of background anxiety, a nagging doubt that I didn’t belong in whatever place I was or that whatever I was doing, I was doing wrong. A full calendar year at college had diminished my fears and made them recede from the front of my brain, but they’d always been there.

For the first time they’d left me completely alone for the day. As soon as I realized that, I kind of felt like I was due to get completely knocked on my ass by life… but then, I’d already faced my father and a government agent who would probably have no qualms about killing me in my sleep if he had orders to or if he thought it would further his cause. I’d already had my wake-up call, and I’d dealt with it, gone back to sleep, and got on with my life.

Coach Callahan reminded me near the start of her class that she wanted to see me taking more chances… pretty much the opposite of what Acantha wanted from me.

“The point of class is risk mitigation,” she said. “You take the opening that’s in front of you, you end the fight without messing around. But I know you have enough brains in that skull to not lose sight of that for part of a week. What I don’t want is for you to get too comfortable while you’re using your demon strength to blow past defenses. So today, tomorrow… you find other ways to take your classmates out, and you figure out how to do it as fast and hard as the obvious way. Clear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said… which got me a raised eyebrow, but Coach Callahan was the queen of doing what needed to be done, and I needed to be in that head space to make doing what she told me to second nature.

I could think on my feet. I could solve problems. But when someone was coming at me with an axe or sword and the problem involved hurting them before they hurt me, I needed to be completely in the submission zone.

By telling me she wouldn’t be counting how well I did for the next two days as long as I pulled out something by Friday, she’d given me the freedom to experiment. I started by trying for less direct victories… making opponents come to me and knocking their legs out from under them and then finishing them while they were down. That was something that would have been completely against my nature if I’d been doing it for myself.

As it was, they went red before the second blow about half of the time that it worked… but I made myself follow through anyway, because stopping to see if the extra blow was needed was not what Coach Callahan wanted to see. It was not the point of the class. If they were red, my phantasmal weapon would pass through them like the phantasm it actually was. No hurt, no foul.

That’s not to say that it worked every time. I hit the floor sometimes, and some of my classmates were agile enough to avoid a low blow without losing momentum. I received my first jump-kick that day. Even though it was real and not phantasmal, I couldn’t complain because it didn’t harm me any more than an illusion would have and I think the girl who did it was probably reacting in the moment. It took me by surprise, though, and gave her enough time to finish me off.

By the half hour mark, my record for the day was four and three and my opponents were less willing to come at me. Since I wasn’t being graded, I tried throwing my staff at one of them. It spun into his sword with enough force to knock it out of his hands and send it flying, but I didn’t have a follow-up and he had my staff. He didn’t have enough strength or skill with it to score a quick victory with it, and so I was able to wrench it back from him after taking a blow to the head and one to my arm.

The arm injury kept me from doing a one-hit kill. I wasn’t coordinated enough to swing the staff in my off-hand very effectively.

I won that fight, anyway… eventually. I might have had a harder time letting go of my feelings about conflict and violence and just getting down to what needed to be done if I hadn’t been deep in my submissive state, but by the time I finished I was way out of it. Battering a guy into submission required me to let go of my own… my altered mental state was able to carry me right up to the door and even knock on it, but it couldn’t carry me through it.

Being purposefully submissive instead of just bending with the most aggressive source of pressure could make my life easier and better, but it seemed submissiveness was not going to be the answer to everything.

Even without any cliched catapulting into an upright position, it would have been hard to jerk myself awake without disturbing Ian given how close we slept.

“…who was it this time?” he said groggily.

“Him,” I said.

I slipped my legs out from under his and got a little shakily to my feet. The cold was bracing, or that’s what I told myself. I was moving with a purpose, if not a lot of balance. I’d told the man that I would make an alliance with anyone to keep him out, and apparently it was true.

The next time I saw the owl-turtle thing I would talk to it… not necessarily about any forays into hostile territory, as I thought that was likely to go nowhere, and it had probably been responsible for my restless nights. But if it could interfere with his visits into my head and help me shield things from his knowledge… well, that would be a start.

I wasn’t going to wait for it to pop up again, though, especially since that would require me to be asleep, and then it would be beyond my control whether it showed up, or if he did. If I could make a problem for the man in the physical world, it might just put enough of a stick in his spokesto keep him out of my head for a while.

“Who are you reflecting at this hour?” Ian asked, realizing that I was going for my mirror on top of the dresser.

Or I had been.

The transition from my dream… where I’d been fully awake… to the waking world… where I’d been asleep… had left me with a serious case of jelly-legs.

“You remember last year after Leda’s murder when I gave myself up to those guys from Law?” I asked, stretching out an arm to steady myself against the wall.

“No, actually that totally slipped my mind,” Ian said. “That was you?”

“Smart ass. The guy who delivered me to Embries. His name was Kent… Art,” I said. “Short for Arthur, I think. He has some stuff on my father I think might be useful.”

“Do you have his contact info?” Ian asked.

“No, but I know that as of last year he was a Law agent,” I said. “And he worked in the central provinces regional office, or however they’re organized. I think that would be enough to find him.”

“You’re not going to reach him in the middle of the… well, I guess it’s technically morning,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “But I want to see if I can at least find him in a directory or something… he could have been reassigned, or had his name and face changed, or who knows what. If I can’t find him, I guess I’ll start looking for a Plan B.”

“Why isn’t he Plan B?”

“Because that would leave me without a Plan A.”

My legs woke up enough for me to totter forward, grab my mirror, and then seat myself on the floor with a modicum of something that could almost be called grace. That last part had been more a matter of necessity than part of any plan, but once I was down I decided it was as good a place as any. I forced my breathing to slow again, remembering Dee’s meditation lessons.

The Department of Law could not by any stretch of imagination count as the good guys. They were the greater good guys. They were the order guys. In theory they existed to uphold the tenets of law and order, but in their view the preservation of the Imperial Republic itself was the best bet for preserving law and order, and they themselves were absolutely essential to its protection. Hence, they were somewhat ambivalent on the subject of actually following laws themselves.

But it was liked I’d said in my dream: I’d make an alliance with just about anyone.

And in this case, Arthur Kent would just be the messenger.

“Um… do you maybe want to put on a shirt or something first?” Ian asked.

“I’m not going to be talking to him,” I said. “Anyway, even the thought of dealing with these guys again would be enough to make my knees go weak, if I wasn’t already. I’d rather be as relaxed as I can be.”

I opened my mirror and focused on it. According to the timepiece display it was just a little past five, but I willed myself past that and to the ethernet. Modern communication devices didn’t require a lot of divination talent to operate, or else most people wouldn’t be able to use them. My unusually centered state of mind heightened my connection to it.

“Law offices,” I said aloud to help focus, and though I half expected to get offices where law was practiced, my focus was apparently sufficient to convey the concept of Law rather than the law. “Prax and Blackwater area. Agent Kent, Arthur.”

Mist filled the tiny mirror. I stared at it for half a second before I realized that it wasn’t conjuring up a list of results but connecting the reflection. Half a second later I was looking at the man himself, somewhat battered and weary looking.

“Yes?” he said.

“Agent Kent? It’s Mackenzie Blaise.”

“I know,” he said.

“Sorry… I wasn’t actually counting on getting you,” I said.

“I’ve had a funnel-glyph out in the ether for you for a while,” he said. “I happened to be at my desk when it went off, or you’d be talking to my echo-trap now.”

“It’s like five in the morning,” I said.

“I know, and if we make this fast enough I can still get home in time to get a full hour of sleep before I have to get up again,” he said. “Are you aware that you’re naked?”

“I borrowed my girlfriend’s shirt,” I said.

It was a little late to duck and cover, but I tilted the mirror up more towards my face. Since I couldn’t see my own reflection there was no way of knowing how much difference this made, but I focused on my breathing and ignored my nudity.

“You’re witty for five in the morning,” he said. “I don’t do witty before six.”

“Won’t you be asleep then?”

“That’s the best time to deal with witty teenagers,” he said.

“Fine. Do you know if my grandmother was aware of my father’s involvement in my birth?”

I was pretty sure the man hadn’t meant to feed me on purpose, but it would be good to confirm that it was true.

“Well, she grew up on a farm and she had children herself, so however old-fashioned she may seem I think she’s probably familiar with the part a man plays in…”

“I mean him, specifically,” I said. “Does she know who my father is?”

“I really couldn’t say,” he said. “And yes, I mean I don’t know. Judging by what I know of her, my best guess is that she doesn’t. If she knew at the time, she probably would have intervened. Do you have any happy childhood memories of her?”

“I guess,” I said. “Holidays and stuff.”

“Then I think it’s safe for you to assume she didn’t know back then,” he said. “My best guess based on what I know about her… and I want to emphasize that this is not based on any direct, first-hand knowledge of her… is that if she found out about it later she would have done something with that information, or tried to do so in a way that we would have noticed.”

It sounded like he was going on the same kind of reasoning I’d used. I’d hoped for something more concrete.

“Mackenzie? I do have something I need to finish here.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I thought you’d know something more than that.”

“I do have a file on your grandmother that I read last year, but it was out of date and incomplete,” he said. “It was a pre-recruitment evaluation that my office inherited.”

“It was never updated?”

“We never recruited her.”

“She was an imperial agent,” I said.

“She was a paladin in the service of the empire,” he said. “There’s a bit of a difference there. The White Dragons are an imperial order, and they coordinate their international missions with Law, but they’re not actually under our aegis. Separation of powers, and all that.”

“Like that actually means anything to you guys.”

“No matter how many spheres our interests might touch on, we actually do have certain prescribed limits to our power,” he said. “To say nothing of practical limits. Even if I somehow had a file on every single person in the world, I couldn’t have every one of them in arm’s reach at all times. If you looked me up to just ask me what your grandmother knows… that’s not the reason I had you flagged.”

“That was actually just the preamble,” I said. “What I really want from you won’t make much difference if she already knows and isn’t doing anything. I want you to send your file… the one on him… to her, and identify him as my father.”

“Is that all? You could tell her that he’s your father.”

He could be right… I probably could give her enough information to at least lead her to the right demon. But with no name and so little to distinguish him, it was far from a sure thing… and the lack of an easy identification meant it would be impossible for me to just drop her a postcard. It would have to be a lengthy conversation, at the very least.

And even if she would do it herself for her own reasons, I couldn’t believe my grandmother wouldn’t make me pay for it. She would not pass up the chance to bring me back under her control.

In fact, if she saw an opportunity to do that, she might consider it a higher priority than killing a demon or avenging her daughter’s death. She’d spent almost a decade trying to keep me safe and safely in check.

“This can’t come from me,” I said.

“I like the sound of that,” he said. “But what explanation am I supposed to give her for dropping this information into her lap out of the blue?”

“What sort of explanations do you usually give?” I asked.

“She’ll be looking for a motive.”

“Yeah, but you’ve got an obvious one,” I said. “A demon’s been operating in your beat. He evades your usual methods. She’ll probably figure that you want to get rid of him. And as far as I know, that’s true.”

“A successful demon removed from the plane is a win for everybody,” he said. “But the kind of brawl that it’s likely to take to dislodge him, especially when it’s a fight between a paladin of Brimstone Blaise’s caliber and when she has nothing to lose and he has everything to lose? I know people your age throw around the words ‘epic level’ a lot, but that phrase exists for a reason and an epic level battle is not the kind of thing we want to see. Not in the middle of inhabited provinces. It’s not orderly. It’s not good.”

“But would it come to that?” I said. “He doesn’t fight his battles head-on. You said he likes to keep his head down. If he knows she’s hunting him, he might even go to ground completely… and that will probably take him away from settled areas, if he’s in one now.”

“So this isn’t about killing him?” he said. He sounded disappointed. “I was halfway interested when I thought you were trying to use me to put a hit out on your own father using your own grandmother.”

“Well, it will at least give him something to think about,” I said. “If it does nothing but keep the two of them busy for a while, I’ll call it a double win.”

“And what will you call it if she dies?”

“Her choice,” I said. “I don’t think anybody made her be a paladin.”

“I take it back,” he said. “I’m more than halfway interested. You are one cold daughter of a bastard. But what do I get for doing this?”

“Well, since it’ll cost you nothing I think a fair trade would be… nothing.”

“It’ll cost me time.”

“Minutes.”

“Minutes are how I measure my sleep, kid,” he said. “Which means you already owe me just for listening.”

“You led me into a dragon’s den,” I said.

“And you came out the other side unharmed.”

“I came out the front door, actually.”

“I was speaking metaphorically.”

“Yeah, well, that’s where we’re having a bit of a disconnect, because I was speaking literally,” I said. “It wasn’t a tunnel I passed through or a rite of passage, it was the actual lair of an actual dragon and what happened there was the single worst, most harrowing experience of my life.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I can’t,” I said. “And I wouldn’t talk about it with you. Look… you had a flag out because you were hoping to hear from me. You probably didn’t expect me to turn up out of the blue looking for a job.”

“No, I thought you’d turn up wanting something from me,” he said. “Which gives me the opportunity to ask what you’ll do for me. You see how this works?”

“What I’m asking is not that big a favor,” I said. “It lines up with your interests and it probably won’t require anything you couldn’t do on your lunch break.”

“You’re assuming my lunch break isn’t booked solid as it is,” he said. “And no, you’re not asking for anything big from my point of view. But you said this can’t come from you, and I can’t imagine any situation where you’d be calling on me if you could see another way of accomplishing the same goal some other way. You need me to do this, and that makes it a big favor.”

“Fine,” I said. “You do this and we’re even.”

“That doesn’t get me anything.”

“Yes it does,” I said. “It gets you even. You want me to owe you a favor, right?”

“And you’re saying I won’t.”

“You’ll be one step closer,” I said. “Look, you could watch me secretly and swoop in and save my life the next time I’m in real trouble and I still wouldn’t feel like I owe you a damned thing. You’d just be making up for what you did before. And that should be what it takes to make up for that… something seriously life-or-death. And now that I’ve said that out loud I could never trust any situation where that happened.”

“Believe it or not, you aren’t important enough for me to engineer a rescue for,” he said. “You are one of several potentially interesting candidates I have an eye on.”

“You put a trace on me,” I said.

“That only took a minute,” he said.

“Whatever lengths you would or wouldn’t go through to get me to forgive you is beside the point,” I said. “The point is that you can either do this one relatively simple thing and the next time I need a favor from you I’ll agree that it is a favor, or else it doesn’t matter what you do, I’ll never want to deal with you.”

“How do I know there’s going to be a next time?” he asked. “You could just shake me off and never give me a second thought.”

“That’s my plan,” I said. “But you already know how good my plans are, because I told you last time I wouldn’t be contacting you.”

“Hold on,” he said, and before I could respond the mirror went back to swirling mist. I barely had time to be irritated before he came back. “Okay, I’ll do it. But I want you to know, I’m doing this more because I’m amused by your attempts to negotiate than because you’re any good at it.”

“Whatever you have to tell yourself to get the file in the mail,” I said.

“If you want to have a look at it yourself, I’d be happy to arrange a meeting.”

“Maybe next time,” I said. I flipped the mirror shut. It was beyond brusque, but he was the one counting his minutes.

I stretched out my legs before trying to get up. I looked over at the bed, where Ian was sitting up watching me at rapt attention.

“What?” I asked.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said. “But I’m trying to figure out if something else could have crawled into your head while you were sleeping and grabbed the reins.”

I laughed, not so much because it was funny but because all the tension I’d been holding onto for the past several minutes just sort of broke at once and left me first laughing and then shaking. I felt like I used to feel every time I’d had half as much attention focused on me… that is, like I was going to throw up.

“It’s me,” I said. “I promise.”

“I know,” Ian said. “I watched you almost bash your head into the corner of the dresser. No entity could be as graceless in that body as you are without a lot of practice.”

Thank you for your support! Paypal: WePay: Or maybe… …buy one of my short stories on Amazon. Thank you, and enjoy the read.

Knowing that he was putting on a brave face for her, she had no choice but to put on a braver face for him. However bad the news was, she’d take it in stride and make the best of it.

There was the niggling thought at the back of her head that if Danny really wanted to fool her he wouldn’t do it halfway, but then surely he wouldn’t be so devious as to fool her into thinking he’d tried to fool her just to actually fool her into a more optimistic frame of mind?

Of course he wouldn’t, she told herself right after she sorted out what exactly it was he wouldn’t do. Anyway, what would it say about her, if he’d go that far to avoid setting her off? Sure, Dell had a temper. She’d been Bob Corvir’s girl for longer than she’d been Lord Robert’s daughter, hadn’t she? But that didn’t mean she was unreasonable, or in any way out-of-control.

In the off chance that Dan Harris thought otherwise, of course, she’d be happy to prove him wrong by greeting his bad news with grace and good cheer. But since she was quite sure he didn’t think that and was really quite sincerely putting forth an effort to be cheerful for her sake, she’d do so anyway.

“What’s the news, my love?” she asked him as she took his hat. “How goes the battle?”

“A near-total victory,” Dan said. “Complete capitulation.”

“Oh?” she said. She held back the natural response of So you mean they’ll be leaving Aidan alone? or even Things will be going back to the way they were? because she already knew that neither of those things would be the case. Raising them as possibilities and forcing her husband to deny them would undercut the totality of his victory.

“The enemy has agreed to a phased withdrawal from the field of battle,” he said.

She couldn’t help narrowing her eyes at the phrase.

“Meaning?”

“The inspectors will return next month, and if all looks well, they’ll skip the next month and if things are fine then we’ll be back to the quarterly cycle after that,” he said.

It was nothing like what Dell wanted to hear, but she knew that Danny would have fought hard for the concessions he’d been given and she didn’t believe that any man could have talked the imperious bureaucrats down any further.

“Well, that’s alright, then,” she said, and she gave him a kiss, though he still had the aura of one who was holding his breath despite regular exhalation and inhalation.

“Is that all?” she asked.

“There is… something else,” he said. “Where’s Aidan?”

“Asleep,” Dell said. “He said he’d stay up to meet you, but you know how sleep overtakes him.”

“Gets that from his father’s side,” Dan said.

“What’s the matter, then?”

“There was a man on the sky coach,” Dan said. “Talking about a school of sorts that he represents.”

“Oh?” Dell perked up at this. Maybe Dan didn’t think she considered schooling him outside of Lefton to be an option, but she was beginning to see the virtues of it. “Did it sound like a good one?”

“He, er, wasn’t talking in general-like,” Dan said.

“He knew about Aidan?”

“All about him!” Dan said. “Or near enough. And no, I don’t think he’s connected to the ministry. They wouldn’t have needed to plant somebody on the coach to talk to me when I was headed to their offices. And they could have made the pitch as part of their negotiating. No, this bloke was well-connected, but not officially. I think he or whoever he works for is more of a collector.”

“You make it sound like a menagerie for exotic creatures.”

“Maybe more like a stable for racehorses,” Dan said. “You know, more useful and valuable than just rare and colorful. He wanted to impress upon me how many alumni of his academy are uniquely placed to help us with our bureaucratic troubles. Though I’m not clear on whether he ran it or just represented it. I doubt very much that he’s the top dog, but my hunch is that he’s higher up the ladder than he’d want to let on in a first meeting.”

“What’s his name?”

“Stanley,” Dan said. “Don’t know if that’s first or family. I didn’t much feel like chatting.”

“The whole thing sounds like bad news,” she said. “Whatever my feelings towards the Mother City, we can’t afford to be mixed up with a subversive group.”

“It’s less subversive than diversive, I think,” Dan said. “They don’t want to interfere with the normal functioning of the government, they just aren’t averse to channeling it in directions they find favorable. Mind, this is just my impression from a single sales pitch, but the arrangement he spoke of sounded too cozy to be revolutionary.”

“Well, I don’t trust it for anything, anyway,” Dell said.

“Nor do I,” Dan said.

“Though… it isn’t too soon to turn our thinking towards the boy’s education, you know.”

“Has something happened?”

“…nothing worth speaking of.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“It’s to do with Mrs. Cribbins next door,” Dell said.

“She’s certainly not worth speaking of,” Dan said. “But go on.”

“Her Michael saw you on your way to the coach stop.”

“Through eyes bleary enough to make it an accomplishment.”

“She’s just such an awful gossip…”

“You do her no credit, love… she’s dead brilliant at it, and you well know it.”

“…and it just got me thinking again that when Aidan starts school, he’s going to be there with her children and everyone else’s,” she said. “There are good people in Lefton, but there are also…”

“Cribbenses,” Dan said. “And Martindales, too.”

“I’ve nothing against the village,” she said. “Or the school. But I’d rather Aidan be schooled somewhere where he isn’t…”

“My son,” Dan said.

“The son of a demonblood,” Dell said. “Or of anyone in particular. It’s nothing against you, Danny, neither. I want our Aidan to be able to sit down in a classroom as just one out of a dozen boys and either stand out or not on his own.”

“You know he’ll stand out. He won’t be able to help it,” Dan said. “But we do have options. All sorts of options. That’s the main thing. Expense is not an object, if it comes to it. We’ve the money to have him schooled down in Augustinium. He has money enough of his own to go to any school anywhere in the isles. Our choices aren’t so narrow as sending him to Lefton Common or shipping him off to this Middlestone place.”

“I’d rather not ship him anywhere, though!” Dell said.

“Wouldn’t have to be far,” Dan said. “There are good schools in Augustinium, just down the main road. I took some time to check them out. Couldn’t get anyone to show me around of a Saturday evening, but I wouldn’t want to do that by myself anyway. He could be home every weekend.”

“He’s too young to ride the coach by himself,” Dell said.

“He’ll be older, next fall,” Dan said.

“Still too young.”

“He wouldn’t have to travel by himself,” Dan said. “You could ride down Friday morning and bring him back with you in the evening, and either or both of us could take him back on Sunday.”

“That would make the weekend all the shorter.”

“Then we could go down on Friday evening, spend two whole days together as a family,” Dan said. “And ride back Sunday evening.”

“Taking out a suite every weekend would get expensive,” Dell said.

“So we’ll get a flat in town,” Dan said. “And have an agency let it out to business travelers during the week. Augustinium’s the regional capital. We might even come out ahead, in the long run.”

“How long have you been thinking about this?”

“Just since this afternoon,” Dan said. “To tell you the truth, I was out of the ministry not long after lunch time and I had some time to kick around the old town and plenty to think on. I knew there’d be problems with Aidan going to the L.C. but I didn’t want it to seem like this Middlestone place was the only alternative. So I thought my way through some of the possibilities, what the likeliest difficulties we’d encounter would be, and how we could meet them. I really think we could have our pick of schools, though.”

“Oh, sure,” she said.

“Love, I’m not saying you should make up your mind now. I’m simply saying that we do have options… and we have time to explore them. Next time something carries us down Augustinium way, we’ll make a day of it and visit some of their schools in person… just to see, like. Anything catches your eye… and Aidan’s… and we can explore a little further. Alright?”

“Alright,” she said. “You know I’m going to worry about him no matter where he goes.”

“Of course you are,” Dan said. “He’s our son. And he’ll be cross if he’s not awake enough to greet me tonight, so why don’t you go start the process of rousing him while I have a quick shower, a late tea and maybe a gin and tonic, and watch the news.”

“Oh, it will never take that long,” Dell said. “Your food’s in the warmer, though. Feel free to take it in front of the telly.”

“Oh? I know I must have done something right today to get living room eating privileges.”

“Aye, you came home after I’ve wiped down the table and before I’ve done the carpets, you daft devil of a man,” Dell said, giving him a swat on the rear as he headed for the kitchen.

The subject of Aidan’s schooling did not come up at all for the rest of that week. It was midway through the next when Dan Harris received word that his wife was in the mirror for him. It was with more than a touch of concern that he tied a string around the crystal rod he’d been inspecting to mark his place in the array and hurried to the office that served mainly as a place to store his lunch pail safely out of reach.

“What’s wrong?” Dell asked before he could.

“Nothing,” he said. “You don’t reflect me at work, normally.”

“I didn’t mean to worry you,” she said. “I just needed to check… you said the name of the place that had men snooping around us was Middlestone?”

“Was and is, unless they’ve changed it.”

“I thought so,” she said. “But I didn’t get the feeling they were the sort to send out brochures.”

She held up a glossy-looking booklet showing a tower of gray and white stone blocks backed by blue sky, with a logo up top that read “MIDDLESTONE INSTITUTE” in big bold letters with “& Academy of Personal Achievement” in smaller ones underneath.

“I don’t believe they are,” Dan said. “But they are at least flexible, if nothing else. I asked them to send out literature and they did.”

“I don’t like it,” Dell said. “Makes me wonder how badly they want him, and why. And what else they’ll do.”

“A man who will put out paper that glossy will stoop to just about anything,” Dan said. “I suggest you don’t let the little monster see anything of theirs until we’ve had a chance to look through it and see what exactly they’re going to promise him… I mean, if they had those made up just for his benefit, it might be a little slanted towards his particular interests.”

“I don’t want to think about how they’d know what his interests are,” Dell said. “But you’re right. The package arrived in a shiny black wrapper with a bow design done on it and was addressed to ‘Master Aidan Harris & Family’… he saw his name and thought it was a present, so I told him it was for Aidan, Senior, and we couldn’t open it until you were home.”

“He’s still going to expect a grand unveiling.”

“I know,” she said. “I slit the wrapper carefully enough and I can seal it back up so he’ll never know. But this thing… it’s not just written for him, it’s written to him. The captions in the pictures are all talking to him. He can’t read without sounding things out yet but when he sees his name he’ll stop and do it. It’s all terribly flattering, is the problem. How is any school in town going to compete with that?”

“Literally,” Dan said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, they’ll literally compete with it,” Dan said. “We’ll make them. When I unwrap that booklet you have there, we’ll put on our least impressed faces and just be like, ‘Oh, well, I guess it’s started then.’ and ‘Look at how hard this rubbishy school is trying to impress you, Aidan. Wait until the others get their licks in.’”

“Then what? We fake up brochures from the other schools?”

“No, I’m fairly certain they’ll just post them to anyone who asks nicely.”

“But no one’s going to… to court him like Middlestone.”

“Listen, you want to see courtship? You’re talking about the son of a knight and a the grandson of a peer,” Dan said. “How often do you think they see one of those down in Augustinium? We’ll write to the schools in town that Sir Aidan Harris, Senior, and the Lady Ardellia Corvir Harris, daughter of Lord Robert…”

“…am I a lady?”

“You’ll never hear me say differently,” Dan said. “Anyway, I’m fairly certain you are one… that’s what you call the wife of a knight.”

“I’m certain that’s a dame.”

“It was, but then they started knighting women,” Dan said. “And now that’s what you call a dame. So now the wife of a knight is a lady.”

“But ‘lady’ is what they call women who’d be lords,” Dell said. “I’m pretty sure a lord outranks a knight!”

“And speaking as a knight, I’m pretty sure his wife outranks him, too,” Dan said. “But if you want to insist otherwise, I can’t argue with that. Listen, you’re definitely a something. We’ll look into it. There’s a manual somewhere. I think it’s holding up the back leg of the sofa?”

“Oh, right,” Dell said. “This would be the sofa that was fine until you sawed the back leg to fit the book underneath.”

“Dell, my dear, you know that my art is my life, and vice-versa,” Dan said. “I don’t ask you to explain what you’re getting into in the spare bedroom all hours of the day.”

“Tax preparation!”

“I know, love. That’s why I don’t ask you to explain it. Do you have any idea how bloody dull it is?”

“But you’re not even anything like a proper knight, Danny,” Dell said. “We aren’t the least bit posh. You don’t even own a suit.”

“I have parts of one,” Dan said. “In fact, come to think of it, I have parts of several suits, including a collection of amusing ties, most of which are bound up in even more amusing knots. Anyway, we’ll want something tailored, not something off the rack. We want something that looks like it’s never been on a rack and wouldn’t be caught dead with one.”

“Sounds like most of the things you own,” she said. “All these years living on solid ground and you still haven’t learned the use of a wardrobe.”

“You mean the big box-like thing you keep next to my pile of clothes?” Dan said. “That’s a kind of a very large duffel bag, isn’t it? I just haven’t found the drawstrings.”

“And you’re going to present yourself as a gentleman of leisure.”

“And hero of the empire, remember that,” Dan said. “I’ve a famous name if I bothered to use it. Anyway, my hands are soft enough for a gentleman of leisure… I’ve never yet managed to raise a blister on them, much less a single callus. Nobody who shakes these hands would ever accuse me of working for a living.”

“But you do work for a living.”

“Madam, you offend me,” he said. “I’m an inspector of airsips. What’s that? Not even a proper job. You just look around every once in a while and nod, and that’s on the days you even bother to show up. It’s a pure sinecure if I’ve ever heard one, and as a knighted hero of the empire and gentleman of leisure, I can assure you I have heard plenty.”

“But, isn’t this the opposite of what we wanted?” Dell said. “When you started talking about schools, the idea was to find a place where he could just be another boy, not… anyone’s son.”

“Well, we have to make do with the cards we’re given,” Dan said. “We can let it be known that Sir and Whatever Aidan Harris, Senior, wish for their son to be given no special consideration and treated like any other student. I’m pretty sure I can figure out the wink that means no, seriously when we say that. The fact that we live in such a small unassuming house in a small unassuming town will help there.”

“And what do we tell them about Aidan’s nature?”

“That… not to worry… he isn’t my actual descendant, strictly speaking,” Dan said. “More than that we don’t need to say. And Aidan won’t have to know there’s anything unusual about children being chased by schools. I mean, that’s really the idea behind recruiting other schools to recruit him: make him think it isn’t unusual.”

“And we accomplish this by splashing our titles… whatever they may be… around, accompanied with generous cash gifts, I suppose?”

“Of course not,” he said. “We’ll make perfunctory cash gifts,” Dan said. “The kind that say, ‘We have not settled on you, we just have so much money that we think nothing of giving this away up front.’ If we’re generous right up front, then there’s less incentive for anyone to chase after us.”

“You know I hate the thought of invading Aidan’s legacy like that,” she said.

“As do I,” Dan said. “But it’s for his benefit. His education was one of the specific cases we decided it would be acceptable to spend a little.”

“I was thinking more his higher education, when he’s old enough to decide for himself.”

“As was I,” Dan said. “What a stroke of luck that neither of us said so, or we’d be in a real bind… anyway, we’ll take his preferences into account. We won’t send him anywhere he doesn’t want to be.”

“What if he doesn’t want to go anywhere?”

“Then he won’t go to Middlestone, either,” Dan said. “And if Lefton Common School doesn’t work out… well, if we can afford to board him, we can afford to tutor him at home for a few years”

Dan winced as soon as he’d said that, not because of how Dell reacted but because she didn’t… she remained still as a stone statue, staring out of the mirror at him.

“Why didn’t you say that before?” she finally shouted.

“I thought it went without saying,” he said.

“Well, it did until you said it,” she said.

“It couldn’t be a permanent solution,” Dan said. “Lythander wanted him to be brought up right, and that means a certain amount of being out and about in the world.”

“But it gives us a few more years before we have to put him outside our reach,” Dell said. “And his father wanted him kept safe, you can’t forget that.”

“We still need to look at schools,” Dan said. “In the first place, we still need something to distract him from Middlestone, and in the second place, we should be considering all the alternatives. And as much as the idea of tutoring might assuage your inner mother bird’s fear of fledging, there are still some concerns there.”

“Well, obviously I wouldn’t let just anyone teach my son,” Dell said.

“Right, and if not just anyone turns out to be not anyone from Lefton, that means we’re not just letting someone teach our son, it means we’re letting someone live in our house,” Dan said. “Which means you’re losing your office.”

“Or we turn the cellar into a flat.”

“That wouldn’t just be a flat, dear, it would also be a shallow and a narrow,” Dan said. “They say good things about gnomish teachers, but I think I’d prefer someone the boy could look up to.”

“Then I’ll turn it into my office,” Dell said.

“We’ll have to talk about this more later,” Dan said. “I think that the prospect of sending your son away has rendered you temporarily more keen on the prospect of taking a stranger into your house than you would truly otherwise be.”

“How can you say that, Dan? This is the clear choice,” Dell said. “It’s the only one that makes sense. Name one downside to it.”

“They’d be living in the same house as Aidan.”

“Well, there are good points and bad points all around,” Dell said. “Clearly we should talk more about this later, once I’ve had a chance to consider them.”

“Then I’ll see you when I get home, love.”

Out-and-out humiliation could get me hot and bothered given the right context, but it would also leave me just as bothered as I was hot. But what we did was not humiliating. Giving in to Ian, giving myself over to him, being put to his use like that… it was more a form of sublimation, no pun intended, and it left me feeling both very relaxed and very strong in myself. Amaranth’s gentle, loving, but firm spanking had had a similar effect, or else I probably would have been too frazzled about the casual nudity to pull it off.

We didn’t go to bed any time soon after I finished Ian off, but instead just went back to our homework. Only now I was sitting cross-legged on the floor near him, and he still had his dick out until the next time he needed to get up… but only in an incidental sort of way.

The whole thing left him with a kind of unassuming cockiness, pun somewhat intended, that just made me want to be used even more by him.

I’d spent enough time sitting on the floor at the feet of either Amaranth or Ian to be comfortable doing it, though doing homework was a new experience. I thought I would probably need to get some kind of writing surface if I were to do it more often. The interesting thing was that even without a desk to write on, the clarity and calm it left me with made a huge difference in my ability to write out a spell formula flawlessly.

If Ian really did want to assert more dominance in our relationship, I could definitely see the upsides from where I was sitting. It was something to talk about in the morning, I decided, once I’d re-emerged from my submersion. I didn’t feel like talking much at all as it was, and there didn’t seem to be any need to.

My dream that night began with me naked and on the floor, though sitting rather than kneeling or crawling. It had the horrible hyper-real clarity that told me it wasn’t just a dream.

The contours of the room had shifted a bit. In the waking world, the only way to fit a queen-sized bed into the undersized dorm room was to have it with one end stuck in the nook where the original bunk beds had been. In the dream, the whole room was bigger and the bed had its head towards the outer wall and its foot towards the door.

The man was sitting on the foot of the bed, his hat in his hand. I didn’t know how much control he had over the initial setting of the dream, but he certainly would have had a hard time figuring out a better way to make me feel looked down upon. The altered dimensions of the room even made me feel smaller, like I was a child instead of being a mostly-adult college student in what was technically her own room.

“So that’s how you spend your time,” he said, shaking his head .”On your knees, slobbering all over a piece of human meat… it’s like watching a vampire kiss a boo-boo to make it all better. Disturbing”

“Well, I’m sorry for having sex in a way that makes it creepy for you to spy on it,” I said.

I used the shot of indignation that went through me as I said it to asset myself a bit, and I found myself sitting on the desk chair. I’d go to the floor for any of my lovers because I chose to be beneath them, but I wouldn’t lower myself for him.

I kept myself naked, though. I was naked, in real life, and since I was alone in bed with my boyfriend I didn’t see a problem with that. If he was going to sit there in judgment of the way I lived my life, pretending I was living it a different way wasn’t exactly a strong opening move.

“Listen, child, your mind’s not a television box and it’s not a book,” he said. “I can’t change the channel and I can’t flip around in it. You got something fresh and firm in your head…excuse my choice of words… when you fall asleep, it’s going to be right there when I show up.”

Buoyed by the sense of clarity that still lingered from my earlier submission, I took the time to dissect what he was saying before responding. He was acting like he’d had the misfortune of stumbling into his knowledge of my bedroom hijinks… but even if that were true, he’d had no business in the place where he was stumbling.

“Think of it as a trap for the unwary burglar, then,” I said. “I’m sure you’d rather I’d been biting and tearing… but I’m just not made that way, and even if I was, he wouldn’t be very filling any more.”

“Hey, just because I’d like to see more respect for yourself doesn’t mean I’d want you to do anything that makes it more dangerous for you to live in this world,” he said. “You are far too precious to me. That’s one reason I took your pitchfork away until you’re a bit… wiser. It was apt to get you into far too much trouble.”

The mention of my pitchfork stirred something in me that almost distracted me from the ongoing judgment, but I decided to address that and ignore the dangled bait.

“I’m learning how to respect the person I am,” I said. “I have to know myself in order to respect myself, and I’m not going to accept the judgment of someone who doesn’t know the first thing about me when it comes to what is and isn’t respectful… and anyway, you could have told me what the pitchfork could do to me and how to handle it safely!”

Okay, so ignoring the dangling bait hadn’t completely worked out. But I hadn’t let his judgment pass unchallenged, and I’d kept mostly calm.

“Still could,” he said. “Will, one day… when I can trust that you’ll listen to me and won’t just go doing the opposite of what I say out of sheer damned spite. The point isn’t that you should be out there killing humans or that you shouldn’t be enjoying yourself, it’s about how you do it.”

I didn’t want his approval, but I didn’t deserve his disapproval.

More than that, he didn’t deserve to approve or disapprove of me.

“Yeah?” I said. “If you think you could do a better job, I’ll dream a dick and you can show me.”

“So that’s how you talk to your daddy?”

“I wouldn’t know, I’ve never met him,” I said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think he even exists. I also don’t think you really give half a disapproving cluck who I have sex with, or how I do it… it’s just a convenient lever, a way of making me feel inferior.”

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent,” he said.

“Right, which is why you need to go to that kind of effort to convince me to,” I said.

“Hey, listen,” he said. “We’re getting off to a bad start… again… but I’m not here to push my own agenda. I wouldn’t be bothering you at all, to tell you the truth, but there’s something going on you need to know about. Something new.”

“What?”

“Well, I don’t want to alarm you any, but you should know you’ve got something creeping around your backstair,” he said.

I bit back my first response and forced myself to breathe, in the process realizing that I hadn’t been. At all. One of the lesser pitfalls of a dream. Elves… full elves… could stop their breath in real life, though they lost some of what made them like mortals in the process.

What did I lose when I didn’t have a breath? Any sense of tempo, or temper, probably. Though I still felt more in control than usual, I’d been getting angrier and angrier.

Focus, I thought, and it sounded in my head like Dee’s voice during our meditation sessions. Breathe.

I made myself breathe and thought before I answered. The way he said it, it sounded like he didn’t know that I knew about the owl-turtle thing… that seemed impossible, but the owl-turtle thing itself was an anomaly to begin with, and Dee had said that it was able to hide its nature and true presence from even skilled telepaths. Whatever path he’d taken to my sleeping mind, I didn’t think the man measured up to the standards of Dee’s people in that department.

If he didn’t know, I decided, I wasn’t going to tell him.

“What, child?” he said. “What were you going to say?”

“Nothing… just another retort wasted on you,” I said, realizing that leaving it at “nothing” was telling him that it was something I didn’t want him to know. “But it seemed too obvious, and honestly, you’re not worth the effort.”

“I’m serious, though, and no, I’m not talking about me,” he said. “There has been something lurking around the edge of your mind the past couple of nights. Listen, I know you don’t think much of me but I’ve always been up front with you about my presence. I’ve got no reason to come by except to see you, so you’ll always know when I’m around.”

“As far as safe but meaningless claims go, ‘I’m never around when you can’t see me’ rates pretty high,” I said. “How exactly is it that you came to know what’s going on in my mind, if you weren’t around?”

“A father knows,” he said.

“So how did you?”

“Thought you weren’t wasting time with obvious retorts,” he said.

“It’s a work in progress,” I said. “If you haven’t been spying, how do you know what has or hasn’t been in my head?”

“When I go in and out, I leave protections over my path. Alarms, you might say,” he said. “It’s you I’m thinking of… I wouldn’t be so irresponsible as to leave a way into your mind that any Tom, Dybbuk, and Harry could crawl in through, you know. I hope you can at least appreciate that.”

“Thank you for taking the time to put a string with some tin cans on it across the hole you leave in my head,” I said.

“Yeah, well, something tripped over that ‘string’, only it was heading in the wrong direction… it wasn’t on the outside heading in, but the inside going out.”

“Oh,” I said. So, it seemed that the owl-turtle thing had at least made an initial foray in the direction of the man’s mind without my permission. It seemed obvious that the sense of lurking presence I’d felt the past couple of nights was either a result of it trying to skirt around the edges of my consciousness, or a side-effect of it trying to get past the man’s defenses. So it seemed that either it had decided there was something there worth pursuing with or without my cooperation, or it was trying to test the feasibility of its ideas in the hopes of better persuading me to go along with them.

The man’s eyes narrowed, just a bit. I realized my noncommittal response had rattled him somewhat. That was surprising, but it was nice to see.

I kept breathing. Slow, steady.

“What?” he asked. “What do you know?”

“Nothing,” I said, this time counting on the fact that it was the world’s most transparent denial. It was more or less the truth, but if I said it loud enough he’d never believe it. “I mean, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you noticed.”

“What were you doing?” he asked.

“Nothing!” I said, even more forcefully. “I mean, you’d know if I did, right? You’re the expert here. I’m just sort of… feeling my way around.”

I didn’t have to force the smile that came onto my face as I said the last part. Feeling my way around. If he thought I was stumbling around in the direction of his headspace, that would probably reinforce it.

“Don’t play around,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he meant not to play around with him in the here and now, or not to play around at poking back at his mind, or if he was just covering all the bases in general. “Seriously, girl, you do not want to mess with me.”

“You’re right about that,” I said. I got up and stretched. Now that he was getting uncomfortable, I was feeling far less so. “I don’t want to have anything to do with you.”

“You’re not fooling anyone,” he said. “I know there’s something else that’s been bird-dogging me. Not you. More than you.”

The phrase “bird-dogging” made me smile because of its accidental almost-appropriateness. I didn’t hide my amusement from him… I’d let him wonder what was so funny.

“I thought I made it clear that who I let into my room and what I do with them is my business,” I said. I wished it were true, but I could say it with enough conviction anyway because given the choice I would take the owl-turtle thing in over him.

I had the increasingly surreal sense that to an outside observer… someone who had no clue what was going on in my head… I’d look a lot more clever than I actually was, like a character in a TV show or comic book who always keeps her cool and always has a plan.

I didn’t have a plan, exactly. I was just liked seeing him rattled.

Is this how he feels? I wonder. Not knowing half of what he wants me to think he knows, not telling me half of what he does know. I didn’t necessarily agree that turnabout was fair play, but playing fair had to be done on both sides.

“You’re messing with things you don’t understand,” he said.

“I’m messing with things you don’t understand… and that worries you,” I said. I added the last bit when I realized how I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I I had almost sounded. With the addition, it almost sounded insightful.

“I’m worried for you,” he said. “Can’t you understand that?”

“Yeah, well… if I didn’t have anyone climbing into my head in the first place, I wouldn’t have to turn to anyone else to help keep them out,” I said. “So if you don’t want me making any alliances with forces that are beyond your reckoning, stop giving me a reason to.”

I felt every inch the brat that Amaranth had said I wasn’t, and that thought gave me a weird thrill of impish glee. Asserting myself like this was doing nothing to knock me out of my comfortable headspace.

I still felt submissive, that just made it all the more significant that I wasn’t submitting to him.

“Girl, you have no idea what kind of forces I can reckon with after a thousand years of crawling about the skin of this world,” he said. I could see fire behind his eyes… I could practically see it burning beneath his skin. For the first time, the thin veneer was fading away.

“No, but I know at least one thing you can’t reckon with,” I teased.

“You’ve got too much of your mama in you,” he said.

“Nine years’ worth of her… not nearly enough,” I said. That was probably his fault, but I sat on the blast of anger that thought provoked. “Can I blame you for that? I think I will.”

The offhand way I said it to him was apparently the conversational equivalent of a head blow in Callahan’s class. He leaped to his feet like he’d just sat on something with teeth, a sneer on his face.

“Yeah, don’t you be so proud,” he said. “You know where you get that from, don’t you? You Blaise women are so prideful, so stubborn when you get pressed to the point. Your granny would light the whole world on fire if she thought that wickedness could be burned out of it.”

“I bet she’d do just about anything to stop you,” I said.

“Of course she would, even on principle alone,” he said. “Wouldn’t even have to be personal. That’s what I’m saying. No sense of proportion at all, just like your mother. Just like you.”

“Like you’ve never given her a reason to make it personal.”

“Not so far as she knows.”

“You mean she doesn’t know who you are?” I asked.

“As much as anyone does, I suspect she does,” he said. “We’ve had our go-rounds, but I think I learned more from them than she did. Mostly I learned she’s not worth trying to tackle directly.”

“No, not when you could take advantage of her daughter and rub her face in it,” I said.

“Oh, like I’d be so indiscreet,” he said. He sounded offended… not wounded in the way he did when he was pretending to flinch at my disdain, but actually insulted. “Being with your mother was a great big risk, and I’ll admit to some private pleasure, but what happened between your us wasn’t about petty revenge. I wouldn’t risk what we accomplished together just for the sake of spite… though the same can’t be said for your mama.”

I wanted to tell him to shut up… but more than that, I wanted him to keep talking. I’d never made him mad like this before, and his chrome-plated tongue seemed a lot looser when he got wound up.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Do you want to know the real reason why she’s gone?”

“If you’re going to say it’s because of me, you can save your breath,” I said. “I know it wasn’t my fault.”

“It wasn’t,” he said. “And if you’re going to guess it’s because of me… well, that’s what she’d say, too, if she could tell you. But the truth is, I didn’t lay a finger on her. She did it all herself, and she did it out of spite… to spite me. She was so dead-set on shutting me out, she was willing to take herself out of the picture to make it happen.”

“Even if that is true, I don’t think you’re proving what you think you’re proving.”

“She left you alone, Mackenzie,” he said. “She left you alone with that woman. Think on that a spell, why don’t you. However much I irk you for whatever reason, try to imagine having a daughter you love, and taking your dislike of me out on her the way she took it out on you. Could you do it?”

“No,” I admitted. “I really don’t think I could.”

“Didn’t think so,” he said.

“That’s why I don’t think she did,” I said.

“I’m telling you, I didn’t kill her,” he said.

“I can believe that much,” I said. “I’m not saying I do. But if I go with the idea that you’re slanting things rather than lying outright, then maybe she did give her life to spite your plans… and I’d have to be pretty stupid to not think your plans don’t revolve around me.”

“Then you’re as arrogant as your grandma.”

“Fine,” I said. “They revolve around you using me. From this point on I’m working on the assumption that she gave her life to put me outside your grasp, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to honor that.”

“Girl, you’re making a mistake you don’t want to make,” he said. “You’re doing the exact same thing she did.”

“And wouldn’t she be proud to know it?” I said. I walked over to the door and opened it. “I think you know what this is and how to use it. I’m going to give you exactly one chance to walk out of here under your own power, and then I’m going to wake up. I’d rather not do that because I have class tomorrow, but missing a little sleep is the least of what I’m prepared to do to keep you out.”

“Girl, every time I see you, you say you’re going to…”

“Goodnight,” I said, and I pried my eyes open.

Support Tales of MU! Paypal: WePay: Or maybe… …buy one of my short stories on Amazon. Thank you, and enjoy the read.

“Are you staying in tonight?” I asked her as we rode the lift to our floor.

“No, baby,” she said. “I have to circulate… I was thinking about going to one of the male dorms, since I’ve been taking on a lot of women lately. But there’s something I want to give you first.”

“What’s that?”

“A surprise,” she said. “Though nothing too out of the ordinary. I’m glad you got Nicki to come to dinner. I think we’ll probably be seeing more of her, now that she and Hazel are talking. It gives her a reason to hang out here… another reason, I mean. Not that you aren’t reason enough, but you know some people will always need an excuse.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

The bell chimed, the doors slid open, and she led me by the hand to our room, where she sat down on the bed.

“Pants,” she said, and I got my pants off as far my shoes before I realized the problem and started to kick my shoes off. “Oh, for my mother’s sake, baby, you’re going to mess up the carpeting. Bend over and take them off properly.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and I stooped down to undo my shoes.

“Actually… turn around first, and I said bend, not squat… keep your knees straight. Undo both of them, then take one off and then the other, then step out of your jeans. Stay bent.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, my cheeks flushing as I complied. The actions in question were harder to perform than they’d been for her to describe, especially when I was so focused on keeping my knees locked and so mindful of the way my cotton-clad rear was sticking out in the air.

Gilcrease Tower had better environmentals than Harlowe Hall, and even this early in the year the rooms were pleasantly cool… or cool in a way that was pleasant for people who didn’t have ties to the elemental plane of fire. It wasn’t a horrible ordeal for me, but rather bracing… it kept me fully aware of every inch of exposed skin.

I left my socks on because Amaranth hadn’t said anything about them, and I stayed where I was, bent at the waist and facing away from her.

“We’re going to have to do something about your socks,” she said. “The rest of your wardrobe has been slightly more refined, but most of your socks are so… functional. I know you’re inclined to think that anyone who pays too much attention to clothes is shallow, but you can acknowledge that things have a surface even when you’re looking beneath that surface. You know, I think Nicki could be a good influence on you. She’s fashion-conscious, but not… well… fashion-beholden.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. More so than just obeying her directions, holding such an uncomfortable position was sharpening my submission.

I heard the bed shift as Amaranth got up off of it, though her bare feet made no noticeable sound on the plush carpet. I thought I could feel her standing behind me. Her warmth was not so great that I should have been able to feel heat radiating off her body across the open space, but I was a trained elementalist with an affinity for fire, and so when I opened my senses up a bit I could in fact follow her as she moved back and forth a couple of times, admiring for whatever reason the shape of my ass.

“You’ve always seen spankings as a punishment,” she said. “Which is inconvenient, since they’re also one of your favorite things in the world… they have been from the beginning. You had your first conscious orgasms from spanking, after all. If you were at all naughty by inclination, you would have evolved into a perfect brat by now, but no amount of physical pleasure is worth the shame of being bad for you. That’s why I’m going to try my best to teach you to enjoy it as a reward.”

She carefully pulled my panties in back just enough for the top half of my ass to be hanging out of them, and then she stroked the back of her hand across the now-exposed skin.

“I know you like just about any kind of attention down in this neighborhood,” she said. “So we’re going to start with that. Just some good, affectionate, loving attention.”

She hooked a finger under my waistband and then started to pull me back towards the bed.

“Straighten up, missy!” she said with a giggle, and I did. “Backwards, march!”

She led me back towards the bed and then pulled me onto it, arranging us in the middle of the bed. She closed the curtains around it, leaving us not exactly swathed in darkness but at least enclosed. It made a difference in both the air temperature and my less material comfort levels. Small spaces were comforting. A small space with my loving owner holding me tightly against her body was even more so.

“Okay, you’re going to lay yourself out… face down, head towards the foot of the bed,” she said, and she helped me position myself the way that she wanted, then she laid her own body down on top of mine. I was only mostly naked from the waist down, so while I could feel her chest against my shoulders the primary point of contact between us was the exposed curve of my butt.

She slid her way down my body, hugging me from behind. Her hands caught on my panties and she pulled them the rest of the way off. Then, kneeling between my legs, she began to massage my backside, firmly kneading it with a hand on each cheek.

“I want you to understand this and everything that follows as a reward,” she said. “You did so good today, baby… Ian was impressed with how confident you were. He likes it when you’re confident, you know. It makes your submission to him more meaningful.”

“I didn’t feel particularly confident,” I said. “I wasn’t really nervous, because I wasn’t the newbie at the table, but I didn’t feel especially confident.”

“You’re not new to any of us, but you weren’t worried about impressing Nicki… and you barely made faces when they were talking about their game,” Amaranth said.

“I was trying not to make faces at all.”

“Someone who didn’t know you as well as I do probably wouldn’t have picked up on it,” she said. “I was watching for a reaction, in case you needed a reminder to behave… but you didn’t. Now, you mustn’t count on getting rewarded just for common civility, but this is for the whole package, you might say.”

She slowed the rubbing, and then stopped it. The bed shifted as she bent down and deposited a pair of gentle kisses, one on the outside dimple of each side of my rear. She straightened again, and then there was a pause and I held my breath, guessing the general shape of what was coming.

I was not disappointed.

Amaranth was a relatively large girl, not overly muscular in a bulging way but with the muscle of an athlete or a farmhand underneath her soft curves. She could put a lot of force behind the swing of her hand, and she did. She followed that first hard smack against my bare and unprotected ass with a gentler slap using just the tips of her fingers, then she bent to kiss me and did the whole thing over again.

Masochist or not, pain hurts. I don’t want to give the impression that the repeated impact of her hand against my backside was anything but painful. But it was a pain I could relish, and what sprang up in its wake was undeniably pleasurable. The massage had felt nice, but the spanking felt good… so very, very good.

The tears that welled up in my eyes weren’t purely from the pain, though. Amaranth was right. This was too close to a punishment for me. I thought it probably always would be, regardless of her expert ministrations. The tender kisses did something to quiet the voice inside my head that wanted to tell me that I was bad and I deserved it… as did Amaranth’s voice urgently cooing that I was good and I deserved it.

Amaranth knew how to work me to build up to a climax without anything more than repeated strokes across my backside… okay, with the occasional shot going meaningfully astray… but she wasn’t doing any of that tonight.

“I don’t really have a dramatic stopping point in mind tonight,” she said. “So I’m just going to wind things down. Ian talked to me while you were talking to Steff. He’s been taking charge more when the two of you are together, hasn’t he, baby?”

“Yes… ma’am,” I said, as she gave me a still firm but somewhat gentler stroke.

“Like I said, he liked seeing you a little more poised than usual,” she said. “It makes him want to take a, uh, firmer grip on you. Specifically, he asked me not to get you off for the next few nights. I told him it wouldn’t be a problem, because I probably would be spending my nights out anyway, but once I started thinking about it more, I thought it would be more fun to work you up a bit every day… I mean, there’s not giving someone an orgasm, and then there’s withholding an orgasm. I pass by lots of people every day without getting them off… at least not directly and right at the moment… but you’re special, baby, so I should be doing something special for you. To you.”

She giggled.

“It’s going to be a challenge, given how tightly your bow is strung,” she said. “But I look forward to meeting it. I can’t tell you exactly what Ian has in mind, baby, but I’d get ready for some intense frustration.”

She couldn’t tell me, but I thought she probably knew, or had a good idea… when it came to sex, a nymph was the next best thing to a mind reader. It was possible that Ian’s desires didn’t correlate perfectly to his plans, but they would be in the same neighborhood.

Amaranth bent over and planted delicate little kisses all over my bruised-feeling backside. There wouldn’t be a mark on it, because my invulnerable flesh would not do more than momentarily dimple a bit after a non-magical, non-sanctified impact, but invulnerability to harm was not the same thing as invulnerability to hurt. I felt everything the same as anyone else would.

I figured we were probably done, but after helping me upright and giving me a long, lingering kiss on the lips, Amaranth started to take the rest of my clothes off me.

“You don’t have any reason to go out tonight, do you?” she asked.

“No, ma’am,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “Then tonight is a naked night. I don’t know when Ian’s planning on coming over, but I want you to be naked when he does. If someone knocks on the door, you can put on a robe. Same thing if Two needs to talk to you. Don’t cover up for Dee, though, since your nudity doesn’t mean anything to her.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I blushed at the thought of going about my business buck naked, while people came and went through the hall just outside my door all evening long.

The thing about dorm life was that sounds in the hall carried everywhere. I could hear doors opening and closing all the time. People hanging out and talking anywhere in the vicinity of my door sounded like people hanging out and talking right in front of it. I’d learned to block out such things as the ordinary sounds of dorm life, but the thought of sitting naked and exposed… not just incidentally or momentarily naked in the course of changing or getting dressed or doing anything that made nudity appropriate, but just… being naked…

“There,” Amaranth said, smiling radiantly at my growing embarrassment. “Now you’ll be ready for Ian. Don’t hide in bed, either… still do whatever homework or other things you were going to do. Just… like that. Now give me one more kiss goodbye, and wish me luck.”

“Good luck, ma’am,” I said.

“Goodnight, baby,” she said.

I stayed in bed until I heard the door close and lock, and then it was only the force of orders that got me out of it. I did my best to forget that I was naked, but the cool air made that impossible. My piercings in particular made me acutely aware of my nipples… sometimes the fact that I’d literally risked my ass along with the rest of me to get enchanted ones but hadn’t thought to have some kind of temperature-moderating spell layered onto them struck me. I did have homework to do, though, so I focused on that.

I wasn’t expecting Ian to come over until near bedtime, but I’d barely started revising spells for my grimoire for Acantha’s class when I heard a knock on the door. Any question that it wasn’t Ian was all but dispelled by the way it happened: one slightly quiet and uncertain knock followed almost immediately by a firmer one.

Ian had his own insecurities. One of the reasons we worked well together was that we had complementary ways of dealing with them.

I went up to answer the door and immediately realized there was no space for me to stand behind it while pulling it open. So instead I unlocked it and then stood on the other side, saying, “It’s open.”

It was only a second later that I realized I hadn’t checked the peephole, and my confidence in my ability to recognize Ian by his knock plummeted into the pit of my stomach. I felt the splash when it hit bottom.

Luckily I had been right, though.

“Hey, what’s… oh,” he said, when he saw me. He closed the door and held up his backpack. “I, uh, actually wanted to bring my homework over, if it’s not going to distract you… but maybe you have other things on your mind?”

“I was actually doing my own homework,” I said. “But… Amaranth…”

“Loaned you her favorite outfit?” he said. He kissed my forehead. “I approve. So… if I sit here and do homework and talk to you, you’ll just… you’ll stay…”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the idea.”

“Okay,” he said. He put his book bag down on the little two-seater couch that Amaranth had replaced one of our desks with. “Is this… something you’re going to be doing often?”

“If you want me to,” I said. “Amaranth said it’s a ‘naked night’, so I don’t think it’s going to turn into a new rule or anything.”

“I do really like the thought of you meeting me at the door naked all the time, but it’s kind of… a dorm’s not a great set-up for something like that,” he said. “You know?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. I had to admire Amaranth’s ability to set it up so he’d get what he’d want without having to orchestrate it for himself. She did sometimes misjudge the gap between sexual desire and reality, but she was generally pretty good at it.

I realized that Ian was focusing his attention rather intently on the book he’d pulled out of his bag.

“You… you know you’re allowed to look at me, right?” I said. “I mean, this is basically… I’m basically here for your benefit.”

It turned me beet red to say that, which is another way of saying that it really turned me on.

“I know,” he said. “But… I really do have homework to do, so I think I’m just going to enjoy the fact that you are naked and almost shivering for my benefit for a while. I mean, that’s the fantasy, really. Availability. Willingness. Convenience. At the end of the night we could still end up in bed even if you were fully dressed right now and I was sitting in my own room. This is just like foreplay. Anyway, it’s good to practice a little self-control.”

“Okay,” I said. And for a while, we sat in relative silence, him scratching words out in pen in a notebook and me writing lightly in pencil the lines of symbolic runes I would trace over in ink. A grimoire was meant to be permanent, but because it was permanent, it also needed to be perfect.

“So, what do you think about Nicki?” Ian asked after a while, which surprised me… it seemed like something I should be asking him.

“I like her,” I said. “She’s fun.”

“I mean… never mind.”

“No, what?”

“I mean, do you like her?” Ian asked.

“I don’t… not… like her,” I said. “I mean, she’s… cute.” I blushed. “I’m really not used to talking about girls… or guys.”

“Well, you spent most of your life not really seeing yourself as a sexual person,” he said. “You know you are now. I don’t think that means you have to start checking people out and talking about them, but I just thought… you know… if you wanted to but maybe didn’t have anyone you knew you could talk like that with… in theory, being able to talk about girls is supposed to be one of the perks of having a bisexual girlfriend, so I just wanted you to know I’m cool with that.”

“Honestly, I’m not looking to date anyone else, and I’m not interested in casual sex,” I said. “I mean, with people I’m not dating. I don’t think sex between us should always be formal.”

“Good thing we’ve apparently relaxed the dress code, then,” Ian said.

“What do you think about her?”

Ian stuck his pen in the spiral of the notebook and set it down on the arm of the loveseat.

“Well… I’m honestly not surprised that Steff wants to nail her,” he said. “And when I started that sentence I was going to say because her ass is her best feature, but now that I’ve said it I’m trying to think of someone or something I would be surprised about Steff wanting to nail, and I’m not really coming up with anything. A bucket of cole slaw, maybe?”

“I meant as a person,” I said.

“Well, she seems a little desperate,” Ian said. “For approval, I mean… and not in a way that makes her annoying. She’s not like clamoring to be the center of attention all the time. She’s almost wary of it, in case she screws up.”

“That seems pretty perceptive,” I said.

“Yeah, well… it’s not like she’s a simulacrum of you, but you’ve got elements of that,” Ian said.

“We’re definitely not simulacra,” I said. “She’s more sociable, even if she feels like she’s faking it. And I think Steff’s way off base in thinking she’s, um, hot for me.”

“Do you?”

“You think Steff’s right?”

“I think Steff’s wrong in thinking it’s going to happen,” Ian said. “But I’d say from the way she looks at you that you’re her type. But I think she’s more actually interested in making friends.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She seemed pretty interested in getting a girlfriend. I mean, she asked me how to meet girls. I’d think if she was interested in me, she’d cut out the middle… lesbian.”

“A lot of people who aren’t nymphs can look at someone and say, ‘Yeah, I’d fuck that’,” Ian said. “Or some more tacitly respectful version of that. And maybe if the opportunity came up they would, but ‘the opportunity’ doesn’t just mean you’re both in the same place and willing to have sex, because there’s so much baggage and expectations and stuff that goes along with sex… and honestly, not all of the baggage is bad.”

“So your non-professional opinion is that Nicki wants to have sex with me, but wouldn’t,” I said. “Because what she really wants is a girlfriend.”

“Yeah, exactly,” Ian said. “I mean, it’s not like she’s burning a hole in your clothes with her eyes, or groping at you all the time.”

This made me think about my deal with Steff, and I started to blush.

“From the looks of things, you wouldn’t exactly mind that?” Ian guessed.

“I’m actually thinking of something else,” I said. “Anyway, I think she’d be too shy to do that.”

“But dancing with you would have been the perfect cover,” Ian said. “I think the bottom line is that when she looks at you she doesn’t see someone she could have a relationship with.”

“Yeah, my life is pretty complicated already.”

“Well, that’s why you wouldn’t have a relationship with her,” Ian said. “From her point of view, I think it’s more a matter of reach and grasp.”

“You think… you think I’m out of her league?”

“Well, if you weren’t naked and mine I’d probably feel the need to lie and say totally,” Ian said. He shrugged. “I like you, but I have to defer to Amaranth’s Principle here. You have nifty shapes, but a random person could easily find one or the other of you hotter than the other because that’s how it works. The thing is, she thinks you’re out of her league, and that’s what matters.”

“I… you may be right,” I said, when I thought about the fact that she’d needed to work up courage to talk to me. “So, what do I do with this information?”

“You’re not looking for another girlfriend, right?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t really need to do anything,” Ian said.

“But… if she thinks I’m so much better than her, she could probably stand to have a higher opinion of herself.”

“She’s got some confidence issues, yeah,” Ian said. “But I don’t think it’s a matter of a precise amount of self-esteem. It could go up and down without affecting how she sees you in relation to her, or she could decide you and her are more on the same level without it affecting her opinion of herself.”

“Did you turn into a subtle artist when I wasn’t looking?”

“No,” he said. “I’m speaking from a long experience of thinking girls are out of my league,” he said. “Since you’re hanging out together, there’s about a fifty-fifty chance she’ll get over it eventually, but by that time you’ll be firmly cemented as good friends… though if she’s anything like me, she might still jerk off over you every once in a while.”

“I don’t think that all of your experiences apply,” I said, blushing again at the thought.

“Well, maybe in translation,” Ian said. He’d been looking at me throughout our conversation, and the effects were starting to show in his lap. “Though, um, on the subject of jerking off: if you’re at a good breaking point…”

“You want to do that again?” I asked, remembering how he’d made me watch while he pleasured himself, in lieu of allowing me to. It had been a surprisingly maddening punishment, and I’d loved it.

“No, actually, I want to come in your mouth tonight,” he said. “But somehow, it’s hotter when I think of it as jerking off with your head.”

“Do I… do I get anything in return?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said with a smirk that just about skewered me on the spot. “If you do it three nights in a row… I’ll fuck you. But if you get off before then, with me or without me, we start over… and you pay a forfeit to be named later.”

So that was what he had in mind. I counted nights in my head. That would just work out with my arrangement with Steff if he gave me my reward on the third night.. Assuming I could withstand whatever Amaranth wanted to do, the other chance I had of failing was if my dreams took a sexual turn, and that did not seem to be in the cards.

“Steff has me, from Friday night,” I told him.

“Do you want to tell me I can’t get it up twice in one night?” he said, still smirking.

“No,” I said. “And I have to go the next two days without an orgasm?”

“You have a problem with that?”

I had to think about it, but I didn’t have to think long. The prospect of placing myself more fully into Ian’s hands… and Amaranth’s… for a few days was more appealing than straightforward sex.

“No,” I said.

I laid my grimoire aside, Ian stood up long enough get his pants down, and I became a masturbatory aid.

All in all, there were far worse ways to pass the time.

“Why, what’s wrong with the chair?” he asked, looking at it suspiciously.

“Nothing,” she said. “This isn’t the first time I’ve asked you into my office.”

“No,” he said. “But you’ve never asked me to sit down.”

“Well, this time I want to have a conversation,” she said. “When I’m looking for, say, an explanation, I prefer to keep things brief.”

“Fair enough,” he said. He folded himself into the chair. “What did you want to talk about?”

“You,” she said. “Me. Boundaries.”

“I feel like we’ve had this conversation before,” he said.

“I’ve had it,” she said. “I’m not sure you’ve ever really been present for it.”

She opened a desk drawer and pulled out an old, tattered red envelope. She set it on the desk, face down.

“This is what you were looking for when you ‘accidentally’ tipped all the contents out of my handbag,” she said. “That was a really incredible accident, especially considering that you’re an elf. And it was zipped.”

“Surely in all the world there must be at least one clumsy elf,” Xylon said.

“I understand that among elves, a boundary is seen as a challenge,” she said. “That a person sets a boundary with the expectation that attempts will be made to circumvent it, and this is part of the day-to-day dance of negotiation. I also understand that being a natural telepath on top of having elven senses means you’re accustomed to knowing everything that’s going on around you, or thinking that you do.”

“Your understanding overwhelms me,” he said. “You know, I think you just might have some kind of psychic empathy power.”

“The thing I want you to understand is this: I know you don’t mean any harm,” she said. “I know you don’t pry into my life with any goal except to know one more thing today than you knew yesterday, and you don’t have any use in mind for that information than to brag about it. And I know there are worse things a person can do with that kind of information, that there are worse reasons to disregard the lines that someone draws around their life.”

“So you asked me here to tell me that it’s okay that I’m a gossipy little bugger?”

“No, Xylon,” Lorellon said. “I asked you here to tell you it’s not okay. Crossing lines is what you do best. As far as I can tell, it’s a big part of why you work here. For all the things that I can do that you can’t…”

“There aren’t that many things.”

“Don’t kid yourself. For all the things I can do that you can’t, there are things you will do that I won’t,” she said. “But I want you to listen when I say that I’m drawing a bright red line around my life and my business, and if you cross it, you will be burned.”

“Listen, Lorellon… as long as we’re cutting proverbial shit, we both know that we’re both too valuable to let go,” he said. “And we both know that you’ve complained about me before, and it didn’t go anywhere…”

“I’m not talking about another Personnel Resources complaint,” she said.

“What are you talking about, then?”

“Xylon, do you think you’re the only one who has eyes and ears?”

“I don’t follow you,” he said.

“Press me, and you’ll find out.”

“You don’t… you don’t really have anything on me, do you?” he said. “And anyway, there’s nothing for you to have! Anyway, you can’t blame me for being curious when you’re so damnably mysterious about everything.”

“Curiosity is beyond your control. Actions aren’t,” she said. “And you’re still not listening to me, Xylon. I didn’t ask you here to argue about what you did, or what it means. I’m telling you that you have crossed a line, and the next time you do it will be the last time.”

She picked up the envelope, carefully holding the blank side of it towards him, and just as carefully put it on the paper disintgrating plate in the corner of her desk. She waved her hand over it, and it disappeared in a green puff.

“I’ve carried that with me for a long time,” she said. “My reasons for doing so are my own, but I’m sure you can imagine that it was important to me… though I know you can’t feel it, no matter how hard you try. My privacy is the most important thing in the world to me, Xylon. There is nothing I won’t do to protect it.”

“You’ve certainly demonstrated your willingness to put office equipment to its routine use,” he said.

“Xylon, I want you to think long and hard about my particular area of expertise,” she said. “I know you spend at least fifteen minutes of every work day thinking sloppily unguarded thoughts about my past… or rather wondering about it. I know you’re an arrogant little son of a bitch, but I want you to ask yourself honestly if you think you’re the worst I’ve ever had to deal with. And before you think you’re my better or even my equal, I want you to think about how the envelope you knew I carried with me came to not be in my handbag the day you decided to make your move for it.”

“Well, fine,” Xylon said, getting to his feet. “See if I bring you your mail again.”

“If you stop touching my mail, I’ll consider it a small miracle,” she said. “And Xy, I do want you to remember that: you’re not the worst I’ve dealt with. That’s why if you never stick your nose into my business again, I’ll be able to keep on thinking of you as that slightly annoying work friend. If you do, though…”

She shrugged, and looked meaningfully at the vanisher.

“That only works on paper, though,” Xylon said. “Oh, you’re being metaphorical, aren’t you?”

“Do us both a favor and don’t find out.”

“You know, turning into a hardass and talking about what you dealt with before me isn’t going to make me any less curious…”

“Again, your curiosity is not my problem or responsibility,” she said. “It’s what you do with it. There’s a whole world out there full of things you can be curious about. It doesn’t have to be this one thing.”

“But see, I am curious now I’m curious about what you think you know about me, and what you’d be willing to do with it,” Xylon said. “I’m curious about which one of us is better…”

“If it were you, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Lorellon said.

A lifetime before…

“I told you not to come back,” Laurel Anne said when she found the man sitting in her kitchen once more.

None of the runes she’d spent precious extra coins to have inscribed on the windows and doors had gone off. In her heart, she’d had little faith in their ability to keep him out, but she hadn’t seen the exercise as entirely pointless.

If he had to circumvent security measures that were clearly aimed at him, her thinking had gone, he would not be able to play innocent. When she saw the placid smile on his face when he saw her, she knew she’d been fooling herself. Nothing would stop him from playing innocent.

It just made the pretense all the more galling.

“And I told you I would be back,” he said. “How could you begin to trust me if I didn’t keep my word?”

“Your words have never been more than a distraction from your actions,” she said. “I can trust you to do as you please only. That’s how I knew you would be back regardless. If you want to show me that you’re trustworthy, leave now. Because I’m telling you to, leave and never come back.”

“What’s the use of proving my trustworthiness if I never speak to you again?”

“What’s the use, indeed,” she said.

“Stab me for thinking it’s a valid question.”

“If you only respect boundaries as a means to an end, you don’t actually respect boundaries,” she said.

“But what’s civilization itself, if it’s not the end goal of behaving civilized?” he countered. “You respect people so you’ll be respected in return. You treat people fairly so they’ll be square with you.”

“You’re right,” Laurel Anne said. “I’m treating you horribly. You should have nothing to do with me.”

“What if I came back to tell you that you’re right?”

“I know I’m right,” she said. “You came back when I told you to stay away. Your actions are proof enough, I don’t need you to admit to what you’ve already shown me.”

“Not about that,” he said. “My… purpose. In coming to see you in the first place.”

“I knew you were lying about that.”

“Okay, so I didn’t come to you to see about your little Aidan. I would have maybe dropped his folks a line, but he’s been put where I couldn’t conveniently reach him, anyway. Do you know how hard it is for my kind to catch an airship these days?”

“Again, you’re trying to impress me with your honesty by admitting what I already know.”

“Oh, there’s information in there I know you didn’t have,” he said.

“Yeah, you’re dangling information about Aidan in front of me like bait,” she said. “And I’m not biting. Before you pretended you were only interested in him, now you’re trying to entice me with hints about him… the fact that you’re really interested in Mackenzie is nothing I don’t already know.”

“Nothing you haven’t worked out, you mean,” he said. “And sharp as you are, you can’t tell me it doesn’t mean anything to have it confirmed. Listen, I knew you’d be suspicious. I knew you’d be protective of our daughter, and that’s only right. So I thought I’d make you aware of the problem and leave it entirely up to you if you wanted to avail yourself of the obvious solution.”

“That being you.”

“There are things I can teach her that she’s going to need to know,” he said. “And ways she can learn them that would be a good ways worse.”

“What did I ever do to you, really?” he asked.

“You took my childhood from me,” she said.

“I took you from your childhood,” he countered. “A place where you were stifled, where you had no idea what gifts you had or how to use them. You were nothinog more than Martha Blaise’s daughter. Now you’re someone new, someone strong.”

“All thanks to you?”

“Thanks to you,” he said. “I just opened a door for you.”

“And gave me a shove.”

“A small one, maybe,” he said. “A few ones even, here and there. But tell me you’re not better for it. Tell me you’d be happier, living the life your mother wanted for you.”

“I might have found my own door out of that life, eventually,” Laurel Anne said.

“You might have,” he said. “And you might have met a man and you might have had a child, though she wouldn’t be this one. So really, what are you complaining to me about… the fact that you ended up saddled with her?”

“Don’t turn this around,” Laurel Anne said. “I can love Mackenzie and be happy she’s in my life without being happy about how she got here.”

“You know, it seems to me like you’re objecting to what happened on principle, even though in this specific case you don’t have a problem with the results,” he said. “I mean, if you had the chance to undo it all with a wish, what would you do?”

“Word it very carefully,” Laurel Anne said.

“You can hate on me all you want, but you can’t deny that I had a hand in the best things in your life,” he said.

“That doesn’t make what you did right, and doesn’t mean I’m going to let you near my daughter,” Laurel Anne said.

“Our daughter, though I meant what I said when I told you I wouldn’t dream of interfering with how you raise her.”

“Except that was your plan all along.”

“To help, not interfere. What do you think I have up my sleeve, lady? What are you afraid that I’ll do, harm my own flesh and blood?”

“Let me tell you the least of what I fear,” she said. “It’s that she grows up like you, that she grows up to be your daughter, a liar and a trickster and a user…”

The man held up his hands.

“Okay, okay, I get the picture,” he said. “Listen, I’ve been alive on this plane for a long time, and to do that I’ve had to learn to think on my feet. This world hates me. This world rejects me. If I engage in a subtle bit of misdirection or manipulation to stay a step or three ahead of the mob… well, that’s better than the alternative, isn’t it?”

“Now you want credit for being a liar,” she said.

“Well, if someone asks me if I’m a demon, I’d rather tell him no than twist his head off,” he said. “Doesn’t that tell you something about my character?”

“That you’d rather avoid trouble,” she said.

“That’s true enough,” he said. “And that’s why I’m not going to press the point with you about dear little Mackenzie. You want me to leave well enough alone, I’ll leave well enough alone.”

“If that were true, you wouldn’t have come back in the first place!” Laurel Anne said.

“Now you’re getting emotional,” he said. “Listen, you have every reason to be upset, but there’s just no point in continuing this conversation right now. I tell you what, I’ll give you a little while to cool down and think it over, and if, in a calmer moment you still feel…”

“Now you’re in charge of judging whether I’m in a fit state of mind to make a decision,” she said. “And you’re trying to make it sound like you’re doing me a favor by ignoring what I’m saying.”

“Seriously, this is just pointless as all get out,” he said, standing up. “Don’t worry about showing me the door, I know my own way out.”

“You said you’d leave it up to me if I wanted your help or not,” she said. “I’m telling you right now, in so many words, I don’t…”

“Laurel Anne, I respect you too much to listen to you in this state,” he said. “I want to hear your honest thoughts on this, in a moment of cool and sober reflection after you’ve had time to think about it.”

“If you come back again, it will be the last time,” she said.

“See, now you’re making threats you know you can’t carry off,” he said.

“I don’t know how to stop you yet,” she said. “But I’ll be ready.”

“If I’m such a bad guy, wouldn’t that just give me incentive to hurry back?”

“So if I see you soon, I guess that’ll clinch it.”

For an hour, I kept my head down, I stepped up when it was my turn, and I swung my illusionary staff through the heads and knees and arms of my classmates. I ignored the brief spatter of gore that disappeared as soon as the red box enchantment registered that I had taken the fight out of my opponent and vice-versa.

I was also thinking less about what I was doing. I wasn’t going full-on automaton, but I was thinking about situations rather than people. He’s got a longer reach. She’s faster. He’s guarding his legs. Once I started seeing each fight as a problem to be solved, the solution to each seemed more obvious and less distasteful. The previous day, I’d won more fights than I’d lost. On this day, I only lost one.

I wasn’t crazy about the thought of becoming so inured against violence, even mock violence… but being unaffected by it was better than reveling it, I supposed. The great fear I’d had about learning how to fight was that my barely restrained demonic side would take the opportunity to assert itself.

So far there didn’t seem to be much danger of that happening. Ignoring my feeding cycle was dangerous. Exposing myself to violent situations just reminded me how much I disliked violence. Even putting myself in a situation where I had to fight five days a week just strengthened my resolve to get through it.

“You’ve been showing some focus these past couple of days, Frybaby,” the coach said to me at the end of class A. “Maybe you aren’t bringing everything you’ve got, but you aren’t dropping what you brought. If you keep building on this you’ll be in decent shape, but if you try to just coast along like this you’ll be lucky to end up with a low B?”

“I did better today than I did yesterday,” I said.

“Yeah, but I’m talking about your trajectory,” she said. “What you’re doing’s only going to carry you so far. You won’t be better Friday than you are now, the way you’re going.”

“I only lost one fight,” I said. “Do I need to be perfect?”

“I don’t grade on win/loss ratio,” she said. “You’re getting better, but don’t get comfortable. Listen, you can go nuts the next two days… I won’t be watching for how many hits you take or counting how many times you go down, I’m going to be watching to see if you’re trying new things. Then on Friday, if you’re doing better than you are now, I’ll tell you how you can get some of the extra credit you need.”

“I thought the point was to take our opponents out the quickest and easiest way,” I said.

“Quickest and most effective way,” she said. “That’s not always the easiest, and it’s not always the most obvious. Easy and obvious has its advantages when it works, but it doesn’t always… and then you get the little corner cases where the most obvious thing is going to blow up in your face.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Ask anyone who fought the hundred and fifty pound girl who rammed a staff through their head today,” she said.

“I do not weigh a hundred and fifty pounds,” I said.

“Whatever,” she said. “The point is that you’re a great learning tool for everyone else because of your strength, but this just makes it easier for you to get complacent and also harder for you to impress me, which is what you need to do. Lucky for you I’m not going to let you fall into a rut. Next week I’ll have something to shake things up for you. This week you’re going to have to do some shaking of your own if you want to keep on course. You got it?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I winced as I said it and I knew she saw me do it.

I couldn’t help it, though. “Ma’am” was Amaranth. I couldn’t say it without connotations of submissiveness and even sexuality creeping in. But putting myself into Coach Callahan’s hands and ignoring my ingrained instincts sort of shifted me into that headspace… and anyway, a one-word answer felt surly, and for me to call her “Coach” seemed phony.

My worries about bringing Nicki up to speed about my life’s strange goings-on proved to be a little premature. There was nothing new to say on the ridiculous owl-turtle thing front, so no reason to bring it up immediately.

She had changed for dinner, her hair and clothes both. She’d put on a pair of dark hip-hugger jeans with a wide belt studded with metal squares, and a black midriff-baring fitted tee with a spiraling starburst of sequins rotating around on the front of it.

Her hair was now a kind of pinkish-purple color in a messy style that looked something between a pixie and a pageboy cut, though one of its major features was that it was pretty much immobile. I wondered if her tendency to lock her hair in place reflected some limitation in her abilities, or if she was going for it on purpose.

It seemed safer not to ask, though. If it was on purpose I might be implying that it looks like an accident, and if it was accidental I might be rubbing it in.

“I like your top,” Two said.

“Thanks,” Nicki said. “If I say the word ‘rose’ it… oh, there it goes.”

The spinning sequins formed a flower, held the pattern briefly, and then separated and went back to their usual dance.

“It knows other words, but I don’t remember what they are,” she said.

“What is the purpose of this enchantment?” Dee asked.

“I don’t know, entertainment?” Nicki said. “It looks cool, I guess.”

“I grant that entertainment is a legitimate need of the mind, but I would imagine there is a limit to how much meaningful distraction there is to be in a set of silver dots forming an image.”

“It’s kind of hypnotic,” Amaranth said.

“I can see two sides of it,” Hazel said. “On the one hand, I have to agree with Dee about there not being much point to it beyond the shiny. On the other hand… shiny. And it is kind of compelling.”

“I just thought it was neat,” Nicki said.

“I think it’s neat, too,” Amaranth said.

“I like it,” I said. “You didn’t change just for dinner, did you?”

She ducked her head and blushed. I started to wonder if her interest in me was about more than making new friends and maybe meeting girls… or rather, if she’d already met a new girl. Then I ducked my head and blushed.

“…I decided to change my hair after class, and then it didn’t really go with what I was wearing anymore,” she said.

“I would never have been able to tell,” I said.

“It’s true,” Two said, nodding solemnly.

“Thanks, Two,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

“We can’t all be fashion-conscious,” Amaranth said. “But Nicki clearly uses her clothing to express herself, and she likes to look her best… so dressing up a little when class is over and she wants to hang out with her friends is not so much making an extraordinary effort as it is making a gesture.”

“In my experience, the main reason for changing your pants is to get into another pair of them,” Steff said.

I felt really bad for Nicki. Amaranth was trying to be nice, but even she’d managed to talk about her in the third person like she wasn’t there. I tried to think of something to say to her instead of about her, but the most obvious things that popped into my head were compliments on her appearance… which she might have liked in general, but at the moment it seemed like a good way to prolong her torture.

“Nicki plays stone soldiers,” I said to Hazel, immediately before I realized that this was also talking about her in the third person. Though I was trying to start a conversation that woudl involve her.

“Oh?” Hazel said. “You should come up to Gilcrease sometime, we’ve a nice set-up… a whole room just for gaming. It’s a bit cozy with too many tall folks, but big enough to accommodate players if not a lot of spectators.”

“Really? I’ve been hearing rumors about a room somewhere that they took the furniture out of and turned into a battlefield,” Nicki said. “But I figured they were just… well… rumors.”

“No, it’s true enough,” Hazel said. “It’s my room, to be perfectly technical, but I share a suite with my friend Shiel and her friend, er, Mouse, and there’s room enough for the three of us in one half of it. It gets a little awkward when my man comes around, but we’re working things out.”

“Is ‘Mouse’ a… um…”

“She’s not an actual mouse,” Hazel said. “And that’s just her nickname. It’s the translation of her name, Nae. She’s a kobold, like Shiel… who is incidentally also a kobold, if that wasn’t clear. She’s tiny, and quiet. Very serious. Big fan of standing in the corner.”

“I like Mouse,” Two said.

“You would,” Hazel said. “Two gets on well with her. The pair of them can just sit there quietly forever and never say a word.”

“It’s true,” Two said.

“I find Mouse’s company restful and her demeanor agreeable,” Dee said. “I was surprised to learn she is not a divinity major, as she has a very spiritual bearing.”

“That’s submission,” Amaranth said.

“You mean she’s religious about it?” Ian asked.

“No, Dee had it right,” Amaranth said. “She’s spiritual about it. Full submission can be a sublime, almost ecstatic state… my Mack has brushed up against that level only a few times, but I think Mouse has been living there.”

“Is Shiel her dom?” Nicki asked.

“No, I think they just met a bit ago,” Amaranth said. “Mouse’s primary relationship is temporarily on hold for her education.”

“Oh, so I guess it’s a long-distance thing for now.”

“You might say that,” Amaranth said. She focused on her salad. She respected people’s privacy, but wasn’t terribly comfortable lying.

We both knew that Nae’s girlfriend was Caron, a human-raised dwarf who lived no further away than the town of Enwich. I wasn’t a fan of Caron, due to the small matter of her trying to trick me into a lifetime of servitude at the hands of a deranged slaver. I had a slightly higher opinion of her “Little Mouse”, whose disapproval had somewhat blunted Caron’s determination to snare me, and whose existence had ended Caron’s hold over me when Amaranth deduced her identity.

Dwarves and kobolds weren’t exactly like oil and water when it came to mixing. They were more like oil and fire. Elves and dwarves were the more stereotypical rivals, but they didn’t tend to live literally on top of each other and they didn’t compete for the same resources or business. The two races of miners and smiths had been going at it hammer and tongs for long that they were probably responsible for the phrase.

“I guess there probably aren’t any kobold whatsits around here,” Nicki said. “No mountains.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think Shiel’s from one of the eastern ranges. I’m not sure where Mouse is from.”

The conversation from that point on was pretty easy, though a little bit heavy on tiny imaginary warfare for my tastes. I tried my best to hide my lack of interest in stone soldiers, since Nicki still seemed to be taking the things I said to heart. Maybe it was arrogant of me to think that she’d changed her hair just because I’d said something about it, but… I really thought that probably was true. I knew she’d kept it orange because I’d mentioned it in class, and then she went and changed it after I asked her why she hadn’t.

There were probably only so many times I could tell her that she didn’t need to impress me or to just be herself before she’d start feeling bad about wanting to impress me. I wasn’t going to start censoring everything that popped into my head, but it wouldn’t kill me to avoid casually disparaging the things that she liked. Even Steff was being fairly restrained, after all. If all my friends were making the effort to be nice to my new friend, it didn’t seem like it was asking too much for me to do the same.

After dinner, I got Steff alone to ask her about fixing her picture. I didn’t have to do more than pull it out before she started snickering.

“So… you noticed?” she said.

“Nicki did,” I said.

She laughed.

“It figures… I could hide a fortune in platinum five inches from a decent pair of tits and you’d never find it,” she said. “Apparently doesn’t even matter if they’re yours… how do you ever make it past a mirror?”

“I don’t spend a lot of time looking in mirrors,” I said. “Steff, come on… will you change it up a little?”

“You said you were satisfied with it as-is,” she said. “You said I’d fulfilled my end of the bargain.

“Okay,” I said. “What do you want for it, Steff?”

She sighed and took the paper from me.

“Nothing more than you’re already giving me that would be worth it to you for a few quick edits,” she said. “Did your teacher give you an extension?”

“It’s been pushed back until Thursday,” I said.

“I just have two favors I’d like to ask in exchange,” she said.

“What?”

“Viktor’s starting to get all… intense,” she said. “I’m going to need to sleep over for a few nights, maybe.”

“Okay,” I said.

“And when I say ‘sleep over’, it kind of goes without saying that my penis is going to be inside you at some point. Or several points.”

“It kind of just went with saying,” I said.

“Yeah, well, it goes both ways,” Steff said. “And the other thing: when Nicki makes her move, find out if she’s down for threesomes.”

“If that happens, I’ll ask,” I said.

“And put in a good word for me,” she said. “Or a sort of ambiugously evil but still vaguely good natured one.”

“She made it sound like you weren’t too interested in her,” I said.

“I’m not,” she said. “She doesn’t really do anything for me… but you and her together, that’s more interesting.”

“Okay,” I said. “And just so we’re clear, what I want from you is to make the mermaid look less like me… and not like anyone else in particular. Just a generic female figure.”

“I’ll have it back to you tomorrow.”

“Cool, thanks,” I said. “Um… can I just ask…”

“Why I did it?” she said. Her eyes kind of flicked down, and a touch of color crept into her pale cheeks. “I could say something about liking to see you squirm, and that would be true, but… I was a little annoyed, and that was just me being… well… a little bratty.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wouldn’t have asked you if I didn’t think your skills were up to the task, but I guess this time I pushed you out of your comfort zone.”

“I don’t know, maybe it’s good for me, too,” Steff said. “Hey, if you get a good grade on it, let me know.”

“I will,” I said.

“Come here,” she said, and pulled me into a kiss. Her hands were on my ass for a moment, before she realized we were still semi-public, and then she pulled away.

“Um… I’m pretty sure Ian’s sleeping with me tonight,” I said.

“It’s cool,” she said. “I’m thinking more of the weekend, anyway… Viktor’s started grumbling about how classes get in the way of his ‘real work’, so I think he’s going to be want to be alone and I’m going to want some company.”

“Company you can have,” I said. “Depending on how things are going in my life, I may or may not wake up in the middle of the night screaming…”

“Oh, I can help with that,” Steff said.

“How?” I asked. “And please don’t say something about making sure I don’t wake up.”

“I was going to say I can help keep you awake..

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”

“And screaming, of course.”

“Of course.”