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.”

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.”

“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.”

It took extra effort on her part to steer the shape she bodied against its nature, but the advantages of an owl over diurnal raptors were considerable. A falcon’s eyesight was better over immense distances, but an owl’s was more acute. An owl’s hearing could rival an elfblood’s, could pinpoint the direction of a sound across any axis.

If she had been looking for signs of lost adventurers over a large area she might have gone with a hawk-form, but she was looking for something smaller in the limited environs of the eastern campus and its immediate surroundings.

The other reason she favored owls when sheer utility did not dictate another avian form was that, contrary to their use in iconography, owls weren’t really the big thinkers of the bird world. Compressing her human mind into an owl was more difficult than doing so with a falcon, to say nothing of a raven or crow.

Oh, they weren’t dunces. No predatory birds were. But a falcon could hunt its prey with cunning as well as stealth and speed. Owls simply used ruthless efficiency. They located their prey. They pinpointed its exact distance and direction. They swooped. Once an owl was locked on, what happened next was pure instinct. For an owl on the swoop, the world consisted of nothing but a line rapidly shrinking to a point.

It was easier to be an owl than a falcon or hawk if one simply let go and let nature take its course, but it was harder to be an owl and hold onto oneself. That suited Eloise just fine. She didn’t like forms that were too easy to inhabit.

For some druids, the goal was for the whole process of shapeshifting to feel completely natural… to be at as much ease in the skin of a wolf or a fish as they were in their own. This was usually an act of devotion, seen as a form of communion. It was also risky. If one felt too natural as a wolf, one might forget what it had been like to walk on two legs… and in fact, there had been druids who had sought to reach this state, considering it a form of grace extended from the pristine natural world to the various “fallen” races.

Eloise did not consider humanity to be fallen from nature or even apart from it, and her idea of a heaven did not involve sleeping in a tree or eating mice. So she kept her mind as intact as she could when she wore a wild shape, even though it required constant concentration. The feeling of unadulterated joy she got when she climbed high above the treeline and watched the horizon retreating farther and farther away could not be erased by a little bit of mental effort.

She had heard older druids try to describe the sublime joy they felt when they truly became, but the thing that had always stuck with her was how little they actually had to say about it. The stock line was that it was hard to explain in words, but Eloise suspected they didn’t even retain clear memories of the time they spent shaped. By giving themselves over to their animal forms so completely, they became like the untrained weres who essentially had one mind when they walked on two feet and another when they didn’t.

No thanks, Eloise-as-the-owl thought to herself. I’ll keep my mind and my feathers, thank you.

She spotted a flash of movement along the edge of one of the sidewalks. She adjusted the angle of her wings to fly parallel at a distance and turned her head to fix an immense eye on it. There was a mouse, a white mouse, that was scrambling in the grass along the edge of the sidewalk… her owl-eyes didn’t see colors the same way as her human ones did, but she could tell that it had a uniform light coat unlike the mice of the fields and forests. She also couldn’t imagine a wild mouse trying to get up onto the sidewalk like that, or failing so badly at it as this one was.

If it wanted to get across the path, it would climb up easily and run straight across towards whatever its goal was. This mouse was following the course of the sidewalk and occasionally trying to pull itself up using just its forelegs. It didn’t seem like it wanted to cross the walk so much as be on it. Its hindlegs weren’t hurt, but it didn’t seem to occur to it that climbing was a full-body exercise… or that its forelimbs differed from arms.

Positive identification, she thought.

She’d had a couple different ideas about what would come after that. It might have been possible for her to land nearby and then resume her human form, but there were students hurrying up and down the path the mouse-body was trying to scramble onto. If it succeeded, it might be crushed before Eloise could get to it.

That would be bad.

She banked away from the sight of the tiny scurrying figure in order to gain both altitude and distance, then put herself on a slow approach, her wings billowing out to get as much purchase on the air as possible in order to get her glide as close to a slow fall as possible. She almost paused in mid-air, and in that moment she checked the distance to the tiny white body using both eyes. She judged the wind. She adjusted her wings and went into the swoop.

The part of her mind that couldn’t help but be owl was locked. The body she wore would respond automatically. Her talons were like a springloaded trap and she’d already thrown the trigger.

This is going to suck, Eloise thought to herself.

Less than a second before impact, she forced a piercing shriek out of her throat… hard going, because it wasn’t even halfway close to the right time. An owl on the swoop is silent. She wanted to startle the student, though, she wanted his mind to panic and his body to freeze because she needed him to be perfectly still for this to work. She wrenched her mind up out of the owl and sideways, thinking green eyes and four legs, padded paws, sinuous spine.

The untransformed students who had caught a glimpse of the diving owl and frozen in place rather than scattering away from its path caught a confused glimpse of brown skin in a maelstrom of feathers before a tabby cat materialized out of it, snatched a tiny white mouse up in its jaws, somersaulted across the sidewalk, and landed in the grass on the other side of it, a very stunned but unharmed mouse in its mouth.

Yep. That sucked, Eloise thought. She picked herself back up and began to trot along the sidewalk towards the high sorcery building.

Holy shit, you can talk? the mouse-student thought back.

Not with this mouth and not with you in it, Eloise thought, focusing more strongly on the mouse. I can beast-speak, and you’ve got enough of a beast-brain at the moment to hear me, at least when we’re in such close contact. If you spent a couple of days polymorphed I could have a conversation with you from across the room, but you wouldn’t be able to tell me much more than what’s big and scary and what smells like food, or where all the lady mice are at.

I wasn’t trying to steal the sword. I just wanted to see how hard it would be to remove it from its stand. I figured that either I would fail completely and not trigger anything or succeed so well that I didn’t set off any of the safeguards.

I’m not here to arrest you, I’m just here to rescue your ass and get you to someone who can reverse the transformation. I’m guessing there’s an inquest in your future, though. You had an accomplicefriend?

A what?

That thing where you start to say one thing and then change it to another doesn’t really work so well here. Two students were hit when the ward went off, and it’s your bad luck that you managed to dispel the tracer spells before that happened. So which one are you?

I’m Seth.

What happened to Lacey Beaumont, then? You get separated?

Sort of. A cat got her. That wasn’t you, was it?

Nope. Tough luck for Lacey, Eloise thought.

Hey! Seth thought.

Sorry, kid… there isn’t a filter on this.

Will you be able to find her body? Her dad has a load of insurance on her.

Rich kids, Eloise thought. Always think their money makes them invincible.

Close enough! She’s died twice already.

Three times, you mean.

Fuck you! Are you going to help bring her back or not?

You got a real way with words. It’s probably way too late. When’d she buy it?

Almost right away. Right after we got out of the Em, just outside the tree line.

So this morning. You know, if you would have stayed put you would have been fine. Busted, but fine.

We didn’t know how long it would last… I thought it might wear off if we got far enough away. How long does it last?

Seth, if this had been a lesser polymorph she would have sprung back to her own body as soon as she died, Eloise told him. And apart from being dead and probably having a broken spine and some punctured organs, she’d be fine. Resurrection-ready, even. But your professor wasn’t messing around. A perfect polymorph means the mouse body is your real body until another spell of the same magnitude changes you back. And that means there is no policy or spell or prayer in the world that can do a thing for her in the shape she’d be in by now, if we could even hope to find her.

Shit.

Eventually.

That’s my girlfriend you’re thinking about!

No, it’s cat shit. I feel bad for her, but there are limits to how bad I can feel, she said. You two were committing what would be a serious crime…

We weren’t going to take the damned thing!

I know, Eloise thought. And I believe you, because you ain’t got the skills to lie to me through this. You did it as a lark, thinking it would be taken as a lark, because you’re white and human and have money and you’ve always gotten away with everything before.

I’ve never done anything bad, really.

Of course not. But you’ve probably done shit that would have got someone else turned into a quiver or thrown in prison for a few years. Your joyride is other people’s grand theft conveyance. You’ve probably sassed back to a guard. If I did that, it’d be interfering with an officer of the law or making terroristic threats or something. Your hijinks are other people’s crimes, Seth, and now your girlfriend is dead because of one and you know what the first thing that anybody’s going to say to you if they haul you before a tribune for it?

What?

“Oh, hasn’t he suffered enough? He has such a bright future, why throw it away because of one mistake?”

Bitch, you think I don’t feel bad?

You think this is about your feelings?

I could sue you.

What for, the negligent infliction of the fucking truth? I could swallow you now and say I never found you, but I know the difference between what’s right and what I can get away with.

It’s just that she didn’t want to be there. She told me I shouldn’t mess around with the sword, but she came along with me I guess to try to keep me out of trouble. It’s my fault.

Yeah, well, if you believe in justice, remember that when you’re in front of the trib.

They also allowed the bed to be lowered for easier entry by the diminutive swamp folk, and then raised for better ground clearance… all the while keeping the platform perfectly even. Honey had been surprised at how comfortable a way to travel it was, compared to the human-operated coaches and even the modestly appointed carriages her family used.

The physical accommodations could have been more pleasant. There was nothing but a light canopy to keep the sun off, nothing to keep out the wind or the bugs, and the seats were non-existent… Oru had explained that the vehicle was a “cargo crawler” that was also incidentally used to ferry people, but she’d also warned Honey of the implications of this and suggested she bring a cushion to sit on.

It wasn’t the only way to reach the goblin village, but the only one that didn’t involve barges.

The thing about goblins that made traveling with them surprisingly pleasant was that they didn’t sweat. They had a faint musty odor that could be unpleasant in its unfamiliarity, but it was the same after a vigorous bout of exercise or a long trip in the hot sun. Honey found the odor of well-groomed gnomes and even humans to be generally inoffensive under the best of circumstances, but things quickly deteriorated in less ideal circumstances and it didn’t even matter who your grandfather was. The best breeding could do nothing for body odor.

There were three goblin passengers and one human in the crawler with her, as well as the craft’s operator, who called himself the steward. He was a hobgoblin, grey skinned and around the height of a short human, though with a smaller torso and more length in his limbs and width across his shoulders and hips.

“There’s a sight you won’t want to miss,” the steward said as they came around the bend of a hill. He pointed to the top of another, larger hill where there was a series of scaffolding with rope or chains hanging out from a beam. “Means we’re going in the right direction. Not that there was any doubt, mind. Sometimes the routes change on us, but it’s been a dry year.”

Hanging had been outlawed in Logfallen for long before the Imperial Republic had forbidden executions by any client states, but part of the scaffold had been preserved through much of her childhood and “Hangman’s Hill” was still used as a landmark. The apparatuses on the hilltop here had to be similarly disused, but they looked… from a distance… to be well-maintained.

“Are they… do they still get used?”

“Every spring. I know what you’re thinking,” the steward said. “But that’s there’s just the brood hill.”

“Brood hill?” Honey repeated.

He nodded. There were some chuckles from the goblins sitting behind her.

“The water table’s so high here that we can only dig the pits up on the hill,” he said. “When a mother-to-be’s about to pop, she goes up and hoists herself into a sling and positions it over a well. It’s all very modern.”

“I’ll say,” one of the passengers said. He was an older goblin, though it was only possible to tell this because of his size. He was a good half a foot taller than the other non-hobgoblins on the craft. Goblins had the ability to keep growing throughout their life, though they used most of it up in their youth. “In my day, there weren’t any slings, and women were expected to dig their own pit and line it with stones themselves.”

“Obviously there were some problems with that system,” the steward said.

“I see,” Honey said.

“Some women still do it the old way,” he said. “One or two each year, most years. Well, I mean, they use the public pits, because they’re there. They believe it gives their children the best start on life. The noise is unbelievable. But you know, some of the biggest goblins climb out of those pits, so maybe there’s something to it?”

Honey found herself longing for the naivety of a minute before, when she’d thought she was looking at execution devices.

“That’s not to say that no criminal’s ever met his end on the hill,” he went on. “It was never exactly what you call a legal form of execution, but a good way of making sure someone leaves without a trace. It’s a lot easier to haul a body out of a bog than it is to find anything left in a spawn-hole after the little suckers have finished with it. I could take you to go see them sometime if you wanted… this late in the season they should all be empty.”

“No, thank you all the same,” Honey said. She smoothed her dress out so that it would better cover her feet. The canopy had no sides, and if she came home with tan feet her mother would tan parts of her that saw even less sun. “It must not be much farther to the village?”

“About twelve miles,” the hobgoblin said. “Wouldn’t do to have women giving birth any closer than that.”

“They travel twelve miles while they’re giving birth?”

“For us, birth is more of… well, an event than a process. There isn’t really a ‘during’, just a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. Sometimes a mother will get a little too proud or too competitive and try to hold them in too long, but other than that it never has a chance to sneak up on a body. When they decide it’s time, they ride a crawler out here with food and water for a few days and a book, or a sharp knife if they’re in a hurry.”

“What happens if a goblin decides… not to have a child?” Honey asked, wrinkling her nose.

“Well, it would take an adamantine womb to have just one child,” he said. “But the brood can be ended, with permission.”

“From the husband?”

“From the fire chief and the militia,” he said. “Goblin pregnancies all end the same way, and you don’t want to try to take on the brood up close because they’ll fight back. The traditional method involves a torch and a lot of oil, or a fireball wand.”

“You mean they kill their babies with fire?”

“Well, in the first place we don’t call them ‘babies’ until they grow legs, generally,” he said. “And it’s a lot less one-sided a fight than it sounds like. If you ever saw a goblin brood, you’d understand… briefly.”

“I can’t believe the Imperium doesn’t have anything to say about this?”

“Oh, those meddlers have a lot to say about everything,” the steward said. “They sometimes send an ‘observer’ around in the spring, to make sure that no one’s getting shoved into a pit who doesn’t want to be there… though mainly I think they’re counting how many broods there are and how many babies climb out of the pits.”

“Back in my day, they made some attempts to ‘improve’ the process,” the old-timer said.

“That ended pretty badly, from what I’ve heard,” the steward said. “Though we’ve got the slings now, and the province sends a few crates of healing potions in the early spring. I think it’s all to make the whole thing more, what’s it called… palatable… to humans, but it’s for the best. Hardly anyone dies in childbirth anymore, and if they do it’s usually the mother.”

“Time was a woman wouldn’t be caught dead surviving her brood,” the elder goblin said. “It isn’t respectable.”

“Don’t mind him,” the steward said. “He’s just surly because he’s been married to the same woman for thirty-six years. Can’t stand her but wouldn’t dream of divorcing her, because no one before his time needed to. The new ways are better, though.”

“You don’t need to convince me,” Honey said.

In a bit more than an hour, the crawler reached the village. The buildings were made of a combination of peat blocks, mud, stone, and wood, but they were made in an imitation of the human above-ground style. The newer ones incorporated more modern materials, particularly in their front facades.

There wasn’t exactly a crowd to meet the crawler, but some people… children, mostly… had stopped what they were doing and come out to greet it. Honey found herself regarding the jagged iron-like teeth that the enormous smiles of the children didn’t really do much to conceal. She understood that very young goblins retained some of the instincts from their brood days, but she didn’t know what counted as “very young”, or how quickly goblins grew.

“Okay, Miss,” the steward said to her as the crawler settled itself down near the ground. “Donu’s house is right up the main lane. In case your friend’s not out to meet you, it’s a big white house and the only one with pink shutters. I have to see to my cargo, but I’ll have your bags sent along within the hour.”

“Thank you,” Honey said.

Oru was waiting outside the house with the pink shutters. The thing was built against the side of a hill, which Honey found to be a nice touch. It looked like someone had extended a burrow outwards with blocks of sod and then slapped the front of a human house on it.

Honey recognized her by the fact that she had three bundles-like pigtails jutting out of her head, where her sister only had two… other than that, they might have been twins. By the conventional definition of the term, they were. Their block-patterned sundresses weren’t identical, but were made in the same style.

The girls stood just behind their mother and on either side of her, remaining motionless and impassive until Honey stepped across the boundary of their yard, at which point Oru came running forward to embrace her.

“Honey!” she said. “I’d like to introduce to you my mother, Aru, and my sister Eru. You’ll have to wait until supper to meet my brother and father… they’re out fishing.”

“Hello, Oney,” Aru said. “So glad to meet you. How was your trip? I’m told you insisted on the long way.”

“It was quite pleasant,” Honey said. “And it might have been longer, but it was also drier.”

“Well, you’ll be happy to know we have just re-waterproofed our walls,” Aru said.

“I’m sure they’ll be just fine,” Honey said.

“Mother, may I go see Gako now?” Eru said.

“Of course,” her mother said, and Oru’s sister was off like an arrow.

“She’s, um, courting, apparently,” Oru said.

“She’s lobbying,” her mother said. “You have to understand, Oney, that goblin women are fiercely competitive. In my grandmother’s day, they could all count on having a turn with the one of the best men, but in more recent generations the thing has been to land a good marriage early on and make it last… I got my husband and I’ve held onto him, and my girls are both trying to follow my example. Eru moreso.”

“Oh, mother… I haven’t given up on marriage,” Oru said. “I just think a college degree or at least a useful trade skill will make me more valuable.”

“Just as long as there’s anyone left to value you by the time you’ve finished learning it… there is a perfectly good guild school just down the river, and you know I’ve checked and they say your credits would transfer. The practical ones, I mean.”

“Mother, goblins didn’t stop brooding the day you rolled down the hill,” Oru said. “There will always be more boys to marry.”

“This is how my daughter speaks to me,” Aru said to Honey, who thought she was saying it at least a little good-naturedly. She turned back to her daughter. “I didn’t roll anywhere, beloved eater of my flesh. I walked on my…”

“…own two legs and was opening the store the next day,” Oru finished, as her mother grabbed her hair-spikes and tweaked them. “Ow!”

“How about you, Oney?” Aru said. “I understand your family is well-connected… you probably don’t even have to worry about finding a husband.”

“Oh, that isn’t something I’ve given much thought to,” Honey said. “I’m a bit young for gentleman callers, to be honest…”

“Oh? I thought Oru told me you were of age.”

“I am, technically, an adult,” Honey said. “But my people don’t tend to get really serious about that sort of thing until their forties or even fifties, these days.”

“Ah, well, the Burrower claws ever closer, doesn’t it?” Aru said.

“She means times change,” Oru said. “Though it also means something about hurrying up and not taking too long with something.”

“I meant the former, I promise you,” Aru said. “Oru, why don’t you show our guest where she’ll be staying, and then you can show her around the village. Make sure you show her the store!”

“Yes, mother, I’ll make sure it doesn’t get lost among all the other interesting sights.”

“Oru-Donu’Kfughn, what did you say to me?”

“I said, ‘Yes, mother!’”

---

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Author’s Note:

I get a lot of questions about goblin reproduction… well, some of it is questions, and some of it is incoherent screaming. Either way, hopefully this answers some of it! To refresh yourself on the topic (and things like goblin naming conventions), check out the following stories:

Small Talk
More Small Talk
(Not Just) Small Talk
Professional Small Talk

Aside from the floating lanterns, the box had also contained a set of hooked metal rods for hanging them over head. The little magic lights would remain stationary in the air in whatever position they were released in while activated, though a warning on the side of the box announced that they were not rated for unnatural winds.

There were more than two placement poles, but the pair were putting up the lanterns themselves rather than risk someone else tearing one or getting it stuck in a difficult-to-retrieve position. It was one of those jobs that the officers ended up doing themselves because it was the only way to make sure it was done properly, like putting posters up in what were thought of as the sketchier dormitories.

In years past, no one had seemed to care about that sort of thing, but after multiple fusses verging on uproars in the previous years, the campus life office had come down hard. Any advertising the SAC did in the residence halls had to cover all residence halls in proportion to their size.

It was a hassle, but rules like that made it easier to ascend the ranks… or rather, being willing to put up with them did.

“Oops… I think we’d better raise these lanterns a bit,” one of them said.

“I don’t think we can get them any higher,” the other said. “Anyway, isn’t that plenty high?”

“What if Belinda shows up? Or the other half-ogre? Or the bull guy?”

“He graduated last year, if you ever paid attention to skirmish. I think they’re high enough… I mean, it’s not like even an ogre could actually hit its heads on these, is it?”

“No, but it’s a dance… people are going to be putting their hands in the air and jumping and stuff.”

“Good point. I’ll go see if I can find a broomhandle or something so we can push them up.”

“Get a stepladder! We’re going to need to get them back down.”

Several yards away, Tasha found herself glad for a temporary break in the chatter between the two activity directors. She frowned at the two slightly greenish oblong crystals she’d set on the table in front of her, the points of the spires facing each other… mostly. Every time she tried to link them together, they repelled each other slightly instead of snapping together into a harmonic configuration like they were supposed to.

“Why won’t these things resonate?” she said.

“Check the labels,” Evan said, and she flipped them over and scowled.

“Wait, what?” she said. She glanced at the row box she’d pulled the paired crystals… or the crystals she had thought were a pair from. The only empty spaces were side by side. “They aren’t the same album… but they were in the same slot. This one’s blank.”

“They were in the same slot, yes, but that doesn’t mean they were both in the right slot.”

“Does that happen a lot?” she asked.

“No, but it does happen… because someone put them in the wrong slot,” he said. “Because the last guy messed them up. Or because you were careless and in a hurry, like you were now.”

He held out another crystal to her, and she handed him the faulty one as she took it.

“Or because you mixed them up on purpose to catch me out,” she said.

“I mixed them up to see if you’d catch it,” he said. “If you’re not checking them when you pull them out, you won’t check them when you put them back… and you always have time to check. So you always check. Okay? Now show me how you align them.”

With matching crystals, she got them lined up and softly thrumming in under a second.

“See?” he said. “A few seconds to check and you can get it set up in no time. Now, a dance like this you want to start with something high-energy and recognizable, something that lets everyone know where the party is. The opening set is what sets the tone for the rest of the dance. But here’s the thing: you don’t want to use all your best songs too early. You want to have something to peel the wallflowers off the wall after they’ve had a chance to get comfortable, and something for them to move to when you do.”

Tasha nodded. She already knew that she wouldn’t be the one choosing the playlist for the night… technically she was shadowing Evan while he CJed. But she was thinking about songs she would play in different circumstances, just in case he put her on the spot… and she had a feeling he would.

“Remember,” Evan continued. “Crystal magic is finicky, but it’s the only way… or at least the best way… to make music for a crowd like this. A simple music box is fine for instrumental pieces. Illusionary sounds work great in a small space, but they fall off too quickly. To create actual music on demand you need a resonant echo, which means crystals.”

Tasha nodded. She knew all this… mostly… but Evan was supposed to be mentoring her, and he liked to go over things again and again.

“That’s not to say we don’t use illusions,” he said. “That’s the trick to getting the perfect sound: you fake it. We have an illusionary soundtrack backing up the actual resonant one. One of the secrets of really great crystal-flipping is watching the crowd and adjusting the balance on the fly… when people are just hanging out and chilling, you ramp up the illusion a little bit so that everyone can hear the tunes wherever they are but it’s not drowning anyone out. On the other hand if people are being rude fuckers and they’re drowning out the tunes… or you want to boost the energy and get more people out on the floor… you fade back the illusion and boost the volume on the real sound.”

“Mick said the rule of thumb is more illusion on slow songs, more resonance on fast songs,” Tasha said.

“Yeah, that’s the rule of thumb, but if you’re going to reduce everything to a formula we might as well replace you with an air golem,” Evan said. “This is an art, okay? You can make or break a party. Follow the guidelines when you’re starting out, but keep your eye on the crowd and look for ways to give them a better experience. Now, you want to use more illusion on the slow songs because that way everybody’s hearing it the same and it’s like they’re in a world by themselves with their partners. Real sound hits them where they can feel it and reminds them that they’re part of a crowd. Also, fast songs tend to be loud songs, and again, large-scale illusions tend to fuzz out easily. Something downtempo gives you more wiggle room there. Though the illusion always enhances the real sound, never replaces it.

“Now, we’ve got walls of sound set up around the dance floor… technically they’re walls of silence only they’re like fifty percent sound-permeable. They mean we can pump more volume into the pent without getting complaints, but it also means we don’t have to… the music’s not getting out and it’s not competing with as much. We’re outside the perimeter… it makes a nasty loop between our crystals and the resonators otherwise… so what we hear isn’t going to be what the dancers hear. That’s why we wear the seashells. You can take one off when someone’s talking to you, but you need a shell on one ear at all times or you don’t really know what you’re doing.”

While Tasha was learning the ropes, Eloise Desjardins crouched on the ground near one joint in the five-sided sidewalk around the dance floor. When she touched the grass with her fingers and concentrated, she could feel the artificial lines of power formed by the spells running through the path, and the invisible sound-reflecting curtain formed between the crystal-studded pylons that had been set up just inside its elbows.

These things were more glaring and obvious than the undercurrent she was searching for, which was the natural flow of magic under the earth, but when she found it and took hold of it, it was clear that it was stronger.

She nodded to the geomancer in coveralls who was standing nearby.

“Got it,” she said. “They did a pretty rough job when they bumped up the seals on the sidewalks… I mean rough as in forceful and inconsiderate, not shoddy… but the flow is already smoothing out and diverting around it. I don’t think we’re going to have any more fields buckling or exploding this year.”

“Thanks for the second opinion,” the geomancer said. “I have the damnedest time sorting out the natural lines so close to the sidewalks. I don’t know how you do it.”

“It’s called learning to trace leylines in the city,” Eloise said. “The first time I went out into the bayou and got away from all the artificial power structures, I was amazed at how clear and bright everything was… I was used to thinking of natural lines as something murky and buried deep. Especially in my part of town.”

“Well, I’ve got other junctures to check tonight, but this was the most important one and the only one I wasn’t sure of,” the geomancer said. “Thanks again for your help.”

“No problem!” Eloise said, and then she wandered over to the refreshment table.

“Hey, are you serving already?” she asked the young woman who was setting cups out next to a set of three punchbowls: one orange, one blue, and one red. The bowls were frost-rimed and had a jagged-edged crystalline look. Their contents matched their colors.

“Sure, let me dip you some out,” the woman said. “What flavor do you want?”

“Is the red strawberry?”

“It’s fruit punch.”

“What flavor is blue?”

“Raspberry,” she said.

“I’ll take that, then,” Eloise said, and gratefully accepted a cup. “Thank you… those bowls are really cool!”

“Thanks! And that’s literally true… they’re actually made out of ice, so it’ll keep the punch chilled all night. My own personal invention.”

“Did you make them out of frozen punch?”

“Yeah,” she said. “The same stuff that’s in the bowl, in fact… that’s actually part of the spell. It uses the composition of the ice as a template. Pour anything in that’s not part of the template, and the whole thing freezes solid. Perfect anti-spiking spell. After the hijinks at Veil last year, campus life requires some kind of protection for the drinks… not that anybody ever proved that the drinks were spiked there.”

“Still, that’s pretty slick.”

“Much slicker than my first draft,” she said. “Originally I had it set to dispel itself if it detected a violation. Made one hell of a mess… and I didn’t think about who was going to be standing right next to it when it went off. The next dance the SAC did there were so many spikings that I think word must have gone around and people were doing it on purpose. I mean, trying to trigger the spell. Obviously people don’t usually spike drinks by accident.”

“Yeah,” Eloise said. “That’s really neat.”

“Are you sticking around for the dance?”

“Might as well for a little bit,” she said. “You never know who’s going to show up.”

My dear friend Two,

I appreciate the diligence with which you have undertaken to write to me. Receiving your letters with such regularity has enabled me to keep a firmer fix on the passage of weeks than the routine of events at Ceilos would normally allow.

Though to write with all due honesty, the truth is that I have not been allowed to participate in anything resembling a normal schedule. My shifts are given over to whatever labor is both necessary and appropriate for the position I currently occupy. I do not mind the labor. I am accustomed to work, even that which might be counted as drudgery. But I am accustomed to doing it in accordance with some greater purpose, and with greater regularity. My governors here tell me that they wish to impose order on my life in order to prevent further mischief, yet order is exactly what I crave and exactly what I lack.

Incidentally, I find the use of such words as “greater” and “lesser” obviates the difficulties inherent in moving between differing vertically-oriented relational schemes.

Please convey my regards to your friend Hazel and her parent.

Your friend,
Delia Daella ^xd’Wyr, ~Dee

Postscript:

I would greatly appreciate it if you could tell me more about the amphibian/avian hybrid figure who used to appear to you within your dreams. Please do not ask me why.

“How was that?” Two asked when she had finished reading. She sat in a hand-carved wooden chair at an old oak writing desk in the bedroom she was sharing for the time being with her friend Hazel.

“I take it back,” Hazel said from atop the pile of quilts piled on what was for her an outrageously oversized bed. “It’s better when you don’t do the voice. That was just… unsettling.”

“I think I did a pretty good job.”

“Too good. That’s what was unsettling,” Hazel said. “Anyway, it’s nice to be remembered. I’ll tell my father she asked after him… and that she’s stopped calling him ‘the former consort of my deceased mother’.”

“Hazel, she never called him that,” Two said.

“Not in so few words, no,” Hazel said.

Two carefully refolded the letter along its creases before slipping it back inside its envelope and filing it away. She would answer the letter promptly, of course, but she had no need to refer to it again. She could not perfectly recall every page of text she’d ever seen as some of her classmates at Magisterius University had assumed, but she did have the ability to hold an image in her mind perfectly while she was still using it.

She took a sheet of paper and began composing her reply.

Dear Dee, I am afraid you are mistaken. A turtle is technically a reptile and not an amphibian…

“So, how’d she spend a year walking around in the sunlight and never manage to hear the word ‘father’?” Hazel asked after a while.

“She knows what a father is,” Two said. “But she has loss of privacy and I do not think all the clerics who read her letters do. She avoids talking about things that will confuse them because that just delays the mail.”

“But evidently ‘vertically integrated organizational themes’ doesn’t give them any problems, does it?” Hazel said. She sat up and slid off the pile of quilts towards the edge of the bed, where she didn’t catch herself so much as briefly interrupt her fall to ensure a safer landing. “What do you want to do today, love?”

“I am a guest in your home, so I should be deferring to you,” Two said.

“Eleven to one that the etiquette guide you pulled that out of says that as hostess I’m supposed to find out activities that you like and suggest them,” Hazel said. “Don’t know who goes around giving golems advice like that… seems to me like a perfect recipe for a fatal staring contest. Anyway, I’m as much a guest here as you are, aren’t I?”

“Are you?” Two replied. “I know you chose to stay here with me instead of in your father’s apartment in town, so I’m confused about the etiquette.”

“Lot of that going around,” Hazel said. “Which is why I’d rather stay here in the lodge.”

The lodge had originally been an imperial staging inn, but once modern enchantments obviated the need for horse-drawn mail coaches it had been privatized. The way modern coaches revolutionized overland travel had proven to be a bonanza for hostelers who operated at important junctions along the major imperial roads. The road that passed through Logfallen Shire was not such a hotspot, and the inn had quickly folded.

Whether or not the Imperium was aware of the treaty that had allowed the gnomes of Logfallen to claim the building as their own was an open question, but it was unlikely they would have cared as they had already been paid for the property when the stage network was shutdown. The little folk of the shire kept the property well-maintained and made it available to outsized guests, or more often as overflow housing when another shire came to call and space was at too much of a premium for comfort.

That is to say, the residents themselves would move into the lodge for the duration of the visit while offering their guests beds in their own holes. Asking a guest to sleep above ground would have been terribly gauche.

Hazel had no trouble sleeping above ground. The only time in her life that she’d lived in a burrow had been when her mother’s family had donated one to them, during the last stages of her illness. Before that point, the Robert Willikins family had been boaters, and proud. Well, Robert had been proud. Hazel had spent enough time around the children of more respectable families to start wondering if boating really was anything to be proud about, which had served to make her all the more proud at times, and terribly insecure at others.

She twitched, brushing aside an unpleasant memory of that feeling… and found the fierce pride lurking behind it.

“Well, if you’ve no preference,” she said to Two, “let’s go swimming.”

“Is there anywhere to swim?”

“Well, we should avoid the river proper, because I’m rusty and it’s sure to have changed on me,” Hazel said. “But there’s a nice sheltered pool just south of the bridge, and then there’s a pond out by the north crossing.”

“Swimming in rural ponds isn’t safe,” Two said. “There can be all sorts of hazards under the surface.”

“What do you mean, rural?” Hazel said. “Just because it’s not a big square pool full of conjured water doesn’t mean it’s full of merrows and ghouls… though we will might to be on the lookout for freshwater crabs. They take a lot of killing, and they’re not very good eating by the second week.”

“Hazel, I don’t think the folks here approve of swimming,” Two said.

“We wouldn’t be doing it for their approval,” Hazel said. “Is that so wrong?”

“No,” Two said. “But would we be doing it for their disapproval?”

“Might as well do something to earn it,” Hazel said. “Something more than existing. Or not being Hon… Heather. Or stopping her from having a goblin friend. You know, I have a goblin friend. Sort of, anyway. Sort of a goblin and sort of a friend, I mean.”

“I don’t think Shiel would like being called sort of a goblin,” Two said.

“A kobold is a sort of goblin.”

“I am not certain that she’d agree.”

“You’re a good friend, Two, but you’re rubbish at arguments,” Hazel said. “Not like Shiel. And does anybody care that I have a sort-of goblin sort-of friend? No. They just want to know why I didn’t stop her… I’m supposed to keep her from making friends now? They just told me to keep her out of trouble. Well, I can’t imagine anywhere she’d get into less trouble than a goblin village. There’s nothing to drink, and no suitors to suit her. Anyway, it’s not like she went straight from uni to the bogs or ran away in the middle of the night. She came back here and announced her plans. Her mum helped her pack her bags, and as soon as she was bundled onto the coach, she turns to me and she says, ‘I hope you’re happy.’”

“I was there,” Two said. “And what she actually said was, ‘I hope you are well-pleased with yourself, Hazel Willikins.’”

“That’s what I said.”

“It’s semantically similar but not identical to what you said.”

“And I’m not happy,” Hazel said. “I’m not. I’ve never been happy in this town, save when I had a boat to leave it on. You know, I almost wish we’d been sent to keep an eye on Heather in goblin-ville, as dull as that’d be. Oru’s family has to be better than hers.”

“You have family here.”

“Just my father, and he’s… I’d like to get him out of here, but I’m not sure how much of him’s left that’s ‘him’ and not ‘here’,” Hazel said.

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Yeah, well, if you’d have lived my life, it would,” Hazel said, and Two had no argument for that. “What day is it, today?”

“It’s Tuesday.”

“Tuesday the what-th?”

“The sixth,” Two said. “Andreas is visiting in two weeks and three days.”

“Don’t see why he couldn’t come earlier, or stay longer,” Hazel said.

“He has business to take care of.”

“What kind of business can’t wait a couple of weeks?”

“Most kinds,” Two said.

Hazel sighed.

“I’m not really mad at him, you know,” she said. “Or even missing him in particular, though I do miss him. What I really miss is different people… people with different thoughts, different ideas, different experiences. Even the ones I didn’t get on with. Especially the ones I didn’t get on with.”

“You miss Shiel,” Two said, nodding.

“I don’t mean just her,” Hazel said. “Everyone here gets on with each other, and that seems nice enough until the day comes when you don’t get on with just one of them… especially if they are a Callaway and you’re from off the river. And there’s less and less river folk all the time. Hardly anyone’s been through so far. When they sent me off to university, I thought… well, I thought I’d come back all worldly. Cosmopolitan. I’d have learned things and seen far-off places. I thought the Callaways would look at me like I was an adult, or even a person… or, you know, their kin. Not on the same level as they are, but in the same neighborhood.”

“You do want their approval,” Two said.

“I’m not greedy,” Hazel said. “I’d be happy with an ounce or two of it.”

“Do you approve of them?”

“Does it matter if I approve of them?” Hazel said. “I’m nobody here. They’re well-off, they’re respectable, and they’re going to be living it up under the high hill no matter what I think of them.”

“Isn’t the reverse also true?”

“Yeah, I’m not going to be living in the high hill no matter what they think of me.”

Two frowned slightly, her forehead wrinkling and her face twitching as she thought through what she was trying to say.

“I do not mean the exact reverse,” she said. “I mean that you will still be Hazel and you will still be all worldly and cosmopolitan and have a university education and friends no matter what they think of you.”

“Right,” Hazel said. “And that’s fine enough for me, out there in the wide world. But then every time I come back here, I’m right back in their little world and what I think doesn’t matter.”

“And out there, what they think doesn’t matter.”

“Right, but I’m just going to end up back here.”

“Why?” Two asked.

“Because… well…”

Two sat patiently while Hazel grappled with the realization.

“You know, I’ve decided what I want to do,” Hazel announced at length.

“What?” Two said.

“Open up some more rooms and get some of the other windows open, air this place out.”

“You said we shouldn’t use more rooms than we need for the two of us, since that just makes more work for the caretakers when we leave,” Two said.

“We will clean up after ourselves,” Hazel said. “We’ll leave everything better than we found it, and we won’t care that the Callaways of the world will want everything cleaned again anyway without so much as a glance, because obviously we wrecked the place… and if they don’t think that now, they will most definitely think it after the party we throw.”

“What party?”

“The one where we invite everyone in the shire, and everyone in the next shire, and put the word out up and down the river that everyone’s welcome,” Hazel said.

“That could be a lot of people to feed.”

“We won’t empty the stores,” Hazel said. “The kind of party I’m thinking of has more food the more people show… and honestly I’m not sure how many people will. There are less and less folk on the river, and even though everyone loves a party, the disapproval of the Callaways counts for a lot. Folks they wouldn’t give the time of day to will line up to lend the Callaways their pocketwatches.”

“I don’t know what that means. Hazel, do we have permission to do this?”

“Sign out front says ‘welcome travellers’. We’re just putting those words into action,” Hazel said. “You start opening shutters, I’ll go down to the banks and put up some riversign. If I remember it. Let the shire scowl… we might be throwing a party for the two of us, but by Owain, they’re going to know we threw one!”

A seasonal meditation from your author:

Winter snow arrives, my hoodie/shawl combo fails. I need a new coat.

The mystery thins a bit when one considers the first law of unflattering similes, which is that they are always about other people. It’s not that Leftoners are particularly lazy, it’s that the person making the comparison isn’t. Still, this leaves the question of why Lefton in particular.

The answer has to do with something that the villagers themselves have been saying for generations, which is that the sun in Lefton is still in bed at an hour when any decent solar disk would be up and hard at work already. Yes, the original saying was lazy as the Lefton sun.

In defense of the sun, though, it does have a rather immense hill to climb over on its way to Lefton, one capped by the airworks. It is for this reason that the oldest portion of the town is shrouded in shadow for a time each morning even while the sky is blue and the surrounding countryside is bathed in light.

Mount Mondell Hill is not a mountain, at least not according to the imperial statutes regarding such things. Its peak fell just short of the required elevation of one thousand feet. Attempts by the locals to enhance it through geomantic means resulted in the entire council of Lefton being brought up on charges of interfering with an imperial cartographer, as well as a temporary doubling of the garrison and imposition of a curfew over the whole town. There has never been any such crime as interfering with an imperial cartographer on the books of the Mother Isles, but while the Unnameable Emperor expected a high degree of precision from those charged with mapping his domains, he has often been a bit more relaxed with regards to those who enforce his laws.

In a final bid to have their most prominent local landmark recognized as a mountain, the newly appointed council issued a resolution naming it after the emperor, concluding that no imperial functionary would dare be the one to shoot down this tribute. They were correct, but they underestimated the sheer mulishness of the imperial bureaucracy… they soon received new signage which had the full name written in this fashion:

Thus “Mount Hill” was born, which within a generation had been shortened and transmuted through common usage to “Mondell”. The next generation of locals, as proud as their parents had ever been, insisted on “Mount Mondell”. The next generation of imperial cartographers had been just as insistent. Once “Mount Mondell Hill” became the official appellation, the empire seized control of it outright and forbade any further meddling with its height or name. This ultimately worked out to Lefton’s advantage when they went looking for a suitably lofty site on which to build the massive airdocks needed for a new shipworks.

Even if the sun took its time in cresting the roof of the ‘works, the people of Lefton were not so sluggish. There were still only so many hours in a day, and the sun did not tarry on its westward journey to compensate for its late arrival in their streets. Dell Harris in particular had already been awake for hours by the time it peeked out over the artificially heightened horizon… though she’d been careful not to let her husband know he hadn’t succeeded in slipping out of bed without waking her, she had always been a lighter sleeper than he was. There was just no way to live on an airship if you couldn’t sleep through all the motion and commotion that entails.

That, and it was hard to miss how much colder the bed suddenly became in his absence.

She’d waited quietly in bed until she was sure he was well down the lane and then slipped out of it herself. With Dan away for the day, she would be looking after Aidan herself, which meant she needed to get a good start on things if she wanted to get any work done.

It wasn’t necessary for Dell to work from a purely financial standpoint. Dan made a good enough living at what he did, and he’d come into life on the ground with a bit of savings. This was all before they took into account the rather sizable endowment that Aidan’s birth father had left him, and the gifts that he periodically sent from wherever it was he had eventually settled.

The compensation that eventually reached the Harris household in lieu of the actual gifts after their inevitable seizure the postal authorities was doubtlessly a tiny fraction of their worth, but given a large enough whole, a tiny fraction could be impressive.

But Dan and Dell were determined not to touch what they thought of as “Aidan’s money” until he was of an age to spend it wisely, and they hoped to instill in him some form of middle class virtue before that point. Dell herself had been brought up to believe in the virtues of hard work and service to one’s fellow citizens, and working made her feel useful. Fortunately, her upbringing had also left her with a valuable skill set that she could easily employ from a small office in the unused bedroom.

Dell Harris was an accountant… or rather, A.C. Harris was. Dell was okay when it came to doing the quarterlies for her neighbors, or for helping out the workers at the hangar who trusted Danny’s old lady over anyone from the city, but when she’d expanded her business to include people who had never met her she’d found a girlish sounding name to be a bit of an encumbrance.

It was Danny who had suggested she use the initials of her full first name and her maiden name, though she’d rejected his suggestion to rename their son “Associates” and emblazon her weavesite with the claim to “over seven generations of experience in taxation and bookkeeping.” It was technically true, but those had been generations of tax collectors, not preparers. While having had an inside look at the imperial revenue apparatus at the local level did give her an edge in knowing how to help her clients deal with the same apparatus, she did not want to play up that hereditary connection.

The sky was visibly brightening by the time she’d finished a few hours of work. She put her ledgers away and went to prepare to wake her son. This could be an involved undertaking, as Aidan was a far deeper sleeper than even his adoptive father. If he didn’t wake himself up, it could be the better part of an hour just to get him to open his eyes.

On this particular day, he did wake himself up… he was already out of bed and standing on his toes, looking out the window of his bedroom.

“Da’s gone,” he said before his mother could bid him a good morning.

“He left for the city this morning.”

“He hates the city,” Aidan said.

“He dislikes anywhere he has to go,” Dell said. “Because he has to go there. Or thinks he does. It’s the journey that bothers him, more so than the destination.”

“Why does he have to go?”

“Just some business that needs straightening out,” she said. “Don’t you worry about it.”

“That means it’s about me,” Aidan said.

“It means it’s not a thing to be worried about,” Dell said. “It’s a simple difference of opinion, love… the inspectors would like to come and visit you more often. We’d prefer if they visited less often. That’s all.”

“I don’t mind the inspectors,” Aidan said. “But Da does, and I like it when he’s at home.”

“Your da and I both feel our lives could do with less inspection, but he feels it more than I do,” Dell said. “Being human, I have less to worry about… though what we do worry about, we worry about as a family.”

“Isn’t Da an inspector?”

“Of a different sort,” Dell said. “He inspects things to protect people, which is the other way around from how the government does it, most times. Come away from the window and I’ll make breakfast.”

The prospect of bacon… and there was always bacon at the Harris breakfast table… was enough to make the child put aside the disruption of his orderly Saturday that the temporarily fatherless house represented. After breakfast and a repeated encore presentation of his favorite Mecknights episode, he went out into the backyard to stomp around in the dewy grass making whooshing noises as he jabbed his toy Sky Knight at the air like he thought he could break one with the other while his mother read on the patio.

“Good morning, Dell,” their neighbor called over the low wooden fence.

“Good morning, Leticia,” Dell replied as she got up from her chair and ambled over towards the boundary.

“Michael said he saw your one headed for the coach stop early this morning.”

“Did Michael have a pleasant walk home, then?” Dell asked, smiling.

“Must have been something important come up to send him on the first coach out of town.”

“Well, there are only the two coaches,” Dell said. “So it would either be the first or the last… I wouldn’t read too much into it.”

“Oh, of course not,” Leticia said. “I wouldn’t dream of reading anything into anything, but mind… people do like to do that.”

“Then we should count ourselves blessed that only you, Michael, and myself know about it,” Dell said.

“People will talk, though.”

“Well… again, if only you, Michael, and myself know, then when you say ‘people’ i have to assume you’re working with a rather limited definition of the term,” Dell said.

“I hope you’re not implying I would gossip,” Leticia said.

“To your face? What was I thinking,” Dell said. “Leticia, Dan has simply popped down to the city to take care of some business. He left in the early morning because that’s the only way to be back in the evening.”

“It can’t be easy for you.”

“Every day is a fresh challenge.”

“It’s good of you to put up with him,” Leticia said. “I know he’s a bit of a hero, and the lads all say he’s decent enough…”

“Tell the lads they can back well off, he’s already married,” Dell said. “Was there something that you wanted, Leticia.”

“I just thought… while he’s away, if there was anything you wanted to talk about… he’s always around, isn’t he? He hovers around you and little Aidan.”

“Not your like Michael.”

“It can’t be easy,” Leticia said again. “If you ever want to talk…”

Dell held up her book.

“I’m actually in the middle of something kind of important,” she said. “So if you don’t actually have anything…”

“I understand,” Leticia said. “You feel like you can’t say anything in front of Aidan.”

“I am about fifteen seconds away from saying a thing in front of him that I’ll be weeks explaining,” Dell said.

“Some would say…”

“Some haven’t been asked,” Dell said. She spun around. “Aidan! Let’s go inside. You’ve won an extra hour of television today.”

“I did?” Aidan said.

“Yes. There was a sweepstakes drawing this morning. You won it. You can watch anything you want.”

“Mecknights?”

“You’ve already watched that.”

“You said I can watch anything I want.”

“Why do you want to watch it again?”

“I watched it pretty good, but I think I could watch it better,” he said.

A bit over an hour later, Dell had Aidan bundled into a jacket and took him down to the public square, which had a playground. She would have taken him there in the first place, but it wouldn’t have done to announce their destination in front of her nosey next door neighbor. Not that she could stop Leticia from finding out they’d been to the park, as if that were some piece of pertinent information… but finding out after the fact prevented her from suggesting a group outing, which saved Dell an act of rudeness she’d surely pay for in some fashion. Nothing at all prevented Leticia from showing up at the playground with her two boys, of course, but that wouldn’t be subtle… not according to the peculiar standards of subtlety as practiced by Leticia Cribbins.

Dell didn’t have much problem with the Cribbins boys. She didn’t mind Aidan playing with them, as long as she was in earshot so she could keep track of all the things the Cribbins boys said and did that she would have to explain to Aidan that he wasn’t allowed to, and why. They were the only children near to Aidan’s age who lived in their row and she wouldn’t have denied him the chance to meet them and learn a few essential truths about dealing with boys who were slightly older and less well-supervised before he started school.

School was a subject that invariably gave Dell a little quiver of dread. The school in Lefton was decent enough, and Dell knew a number of the teachers… but there was no getting away from the local gossip in a local school, and children rarely exercised even Leticia’s subtlety. Dan was generally liked in Lefton, but even people who liked him in general could have specific quibbles about his nature.

It was no secret that Aidan, Jr., was not his child in the conventional sense, but it was even less of a secret that the government had taken an interest in his upbringing. Whether this was because of something about the junior or the senior was a matter of frequent if hushed speculation

Aidan arguably could have started year one already, but a certain ambiguity about his actual birth date had allowed Dan and her to keep him out at least another year and they hoped to be able to delay his formal schooling for one more beyond that. He was small for his age but precocious, and that seemed like a combination that was liable to bring about trouble even before getting into the question of his parentage.

They’d talked about sending Aidan off to an independent school instead, but Dan and Dell both had other qualms about that… the ideal solution would be to see to Aidan’s education themselves, but when they’d raised that possibility, the men from the ministry had made it clear that they would expect to be intimately involved in that education.

Absent another alternative, the local school seemed to Dell like the best solution… but still Dell had her doubts.

Although some dragons were drawn to the diplomatic service, greater-than-common ones were rarely employed outside of Draconic Relations as sending one to meet with a foreign ambassador or head of state was tantamount to greeting such a personage with an army.

Sanders was the second dragon to head up that office. The previous incumbent had held the post for seventy years, which exceeded the term of office of most of her predecessors by almost seventy years. Many dragons did not take kindly to the expectation that they treat with a mortal as equal, even if that mortal was theoretically a representative of a vast and powerful political entity that could make a credible account for itself in a war against a dragon. Employing dragons as diplomats towards other dragons had its own problems, but having mortal envoys who answered to a suitably powerful dragon made for a tidy compromise.

Mr. Sanders had revitalized the Office of Draconic Relations by moving to recruit more dwarves. He felt that dwarves had a better understanding of dragons than most people from the mortal order of creation. They shared similar viewpoints on the importance of privacy and personal security, for one thing, and had compatible ideas about strength and respect.

A human faced with a display of power from a dragon might think that the obvious choices were to answer in kind or to tremble and back down, either of which might be seen as a provocation to an actual attack. The dwarven sensibility was simple acknowledgment… to nod and accept it as what it was. It was this shared sympathy that had led Mr. Sanders to adopt a dwarven body as his favorite form, where most of his kind preferred humans or elves.

Mr. Sanders’s chief deputy of the moment was a human, as was the majority of his staff. He didn’t necessarily see this as a problem, as he had no intention of creating a homogeneous agency from near-top to bottom. He did want to see a more typically dwarven mindset permeating throughout the corps, but dwarves were not seen as nature’s diplomats, and it took time… human generations… to reform an institution of any size worthy of the name.

In any case, if his right-hand mortal did not have much understanding of dragons, he did have a keener understanding of humans than Mr. Sanders himself did, and that was useful. Sanders could have managed the relations between Magisteria’s other dragons and himself just fine without any government post or support, but navigating the perils of co-existence between the same dragons and the various provinces of an empire dominated by a particular breed of humans called for a broader perspective.

“There’s a bit of a situation brewing in Blackwater,” his chief aide, Luke Mathis, informed him.

“I’ve received no reports,” Sanders said. He liked to have everything in writing, although he rarely issued written edicts himself.

“It’s… well, perhaps situation was a strong word,” Mathis said. “It’s more something that could become a situation.”

“Brevity and clarity, Mathis,” Sanders said, making a hurry up gesture with his hand.

“The new provincial governor, Ruthers, has made some remarks about MB,” Mathis said. “About the time coming for her to show proper respect. There’s no indication that she’s heard about it yet…”

“She isn’t exactly the political type.”

“Exactly, sir,” Mathis said. “So when she does find out about it, her response may not be nuanced.”

Sanders closed his eyes and sat very still behind his desk for the space of a few minutes, leaning back in the gold chair that was the only touch of ostentation in another wise austerely functional office. Mathis had quickly learned to stand as still as he could and say nothing when his superior was thinking. Dragons placed a high value on patience as a virtue in others.

“Let’s send a friendly memo to the consular office,” Sanders said at length, his eyelids fluttering a few times before coming to rest in the open position. “He may need to be redistributed before he provokes an actual confrontation. While the dragon in question is not rated as a significant threat, the strategic value of her presence in the region at this time cannot be overstated.”

“Certainly, sr,” Mathis said. “Um, if I may ask…”

“No, we don’t have the power to reassign a governor,” Mr. Sanders said. “But we have the power to suggest. The lowliest citizen of the Imperial Republic has that power to petition the consuls, after all. Should we be any different?”

“Will it have any effect?”

“Well, it might make the governor nervous,” Sanders said. “And that might be enough. If it isn’t, we’ll take the next step, which will have to be damage mitigation so that ‘MB’ vents her corrosive spleen in a fashion that doesn’t damage imperial interests or undermine faith in imperial leadership.”

“Yes, sir,” Mathis said. “There is one other matter… I was signing off on the mandatory annual inspections, and I noticed that we don’t have anyone assigned to FTR.”

“Brevity and clarity,” Sanders said.

“That’s… that’s it, sir,” Mathis said. “I thought it was an oversight.”

“No.”

“I was under the impression that the mandatory annual inspections were mandatory, even for unrecognized dragons.”

“We don’t send inspectors to Fysaskerath,” he said, “because he has made it perfectly clear that we will not get them back.”

“It is not imperial policy to ignore threats from foreign powers.”

“How long have you been under me, Mathis?”

“Seven months.”

“And before that you were overseas.”

“In Thassalia, sir.”

“Your predecessor here retired after only three years, at the age of fifty something. She was awarded the Imperial Purple Arms,” Sanders said. “The man she replaced was sent to a watchtower on the northern frontier, where I believe he is still stationed. This is, I believe, known as a make-or-break sort of position. People have made their careers in it. People have been broken by it. Are you perhaps a gambler?”

“No,” Mathis said.

“Good. Then I will tell you that there are three things that you need to be aware of if you intend to keep your present position,” he said. “The first is the difference between ‘it is not imperial policy to’ do a thing and ‘it is imperial policy not to’ do it. The second is the difference between a threat and… no, I’m not about to say ‘promise’. A demonstration. When I say that he has made it perfectly clear, I don’t mean through words.”

“So we ignore the loss of our agents?”

“No, Mathis, we learn from it,” Sanders said. “This is the third thing you need to learn. There are some things that doubtlessly could be viewed as insults to the Imperium, but which it is more prudent to regard as otherwise. A being of the magnitude of Fysaskerath the Red is not insulting anyone through the death of a few humans or elves. Have you ever heard it said that mortals are like insects to dragons?”

“Yes, sir,” Mathis said.

“Well, it isn’t true,” Sanders said. “Insects are like insects to dragons. Mortals are like mortals. We do know the difference. But it can be said that there is something of a tiered relationship, with insects, and then mortals, and then dragons. Your current ordering of creation has animals being made at an inferior stage or order to dwarves and humans and so on. You treat them accordingly. The same system of organization places us above you. You cannot be insulted that we accept your logic regarding your own organizational schema. You should be proud.”

“It’s not my pride you should be worried about.”

“How very lucky for me,” Sanders said. “Have you ever wondered about why Fysaskerath the Red styles himself ‘the Red’? It seems like a question with an obvious answer, but the obvious answer is obviously wrong. If either of the other greater red dragons active in the world today thought that he was claiming himself to be the sole or definitive red dragon complete with definite article, they would tear this world apart to redress the insult. That they both know this is not what he means gives them a convenient cover for not engaging him, to their considerable advantage.”

“It’s about the wound, isn’t it?”

“The wound that won’t heal,” Sanders said. “The wound inflicted as the last act of a dying god, the wound cursed by same nameless god to never close. It should have killed him, you know. By all accounts, it is a fatal wound and it will doubtless be the thing that kills him. A hole right over… and very likely partially through… his heart. You know the old wives’ tale about dragons having a vulnerable spot in their chests? It comes from Fysaskerath. That’s how old he is, and how old his death-wound is. Understand, it is not just that Fysaskerath killed a god. It is that he has survived a dying god’s curse, from the dawning days of the world on.”

“He has been beaten, sir.”

“Fought to a draw,” Sanders said. “Three times since you people started keeping track. Once by Ambrosius, once by that Merovian archmage with a penchant for pyromancy…”

“Girault,” Mathis supplied.

“Yes,” Sanders said. “He wanted some of the blood from the wound… the heart’s blood. He wanted the words it contained. Have you ever heard that if you taste a dragon’s blood, you get the gift of tongues?”

“It’s not true.”

“Oh, it is, more or less,” Sanders said. “But it would kill you before you had a chance to say much. An ordinary man would have been burned to cinders by a red dragon’s blood. Girault was, too… but not fatally. Three have fought him to a draw, and none of them were able to destroy him, even with the open wound exposing his beating heart. If three opponents to get the better of him seems like a high number, consider the number of opponents he destroyed along the way. It is rumored that his most recent opponent had to sacrifice her squire in order to issue a binding challenge to a blood duel.”

“The version I heard was it was her mount.”

“Either way, both went into the mountains under her charge and neither came back,” Sanders said. “Here is the final analysis, Mathis: Fysaskerath the Red is older than the mountain he lives on. He is personally the reason that greater red dragons are the rarest kind of dragon in the world, and though none of them will admit it he is the reason why divine manifestations in Magisteria are rarer than any other continent.”

“There are a lot of stories about him being outsmarted, sir.”

“That’s what people do when they know they can’t beat someone.”

“Outsmart him?”

“Tell stories where they do,” Sanders said. “The policies of the Imperium do not apply, not because anybody has penned a specific exception but because they were not written with a being of his caliber in mind.”

“Sir… I mean no disrespect…”

“Clarity and brevity, Mathis!”

“I’m not sure you have the authority to decide that,” Mathis said.

“Let me put your mind at rest,” Sanders said. “I most certainly do not. No one does. The political atmosphere of the Imperium would not allow anyone to do so, save the imperator himself… and he could not hope to declare a neighboring dragon greater than his empire and hope to keep it. This is why it is necessary that I am willing to make these decisions without any conferral or confirmation, Mathis, and why it is important that you do not question them. There can be no ‘running up the flagpole’ on this. No one saluting would be the least of the problems.”

“To be brief and clear, I’m not fully comfortable with this.”

“You shouldn’t be,” Sanders said. “This isn’t a comfortable thing we do, Mathis. It isn’t a comfortable world we inhabit. Dragons… we are not creatures of this world, not truly, so we can never be truly comfortable here, and you should not be comfortable about sharing it with us. And we in the sense of this august office, Mathis, we have the unenviable job of making dragons and mortals coexist. We take as much of that discomfort onto ourselves so that everyone else can just sort of live. Fysaskerath the Red lives on with a bleeding hole in his chest. The Imperial Republic lives on. The question is, Mathis… can you live with this?”

“Yes, sir,” Mathis said.

“Clear and brief, Mathis, that’s what we like.”

Dwarves have not made a habit of exploring wetlands, but they would not have been surprised to discover networks of caverns beneath them. While it’s well known that dwarves aren’t fond of water, it would be a mistake to assume they don’t respect it. Among the dwarven nicknames for water are “The Great Hollower” and “The Lathe of Heaven”. They understand that what water touches, it carves.

The underground waterways that honeycombed the land in the region nicknamed the Dragonfens provided pathways for many of the region’s reptile and fish inhabitants, but even the largest of them would not have provided a den for a single adult dragon of any magnitude, much less two great ones.

The pair who had settled there had instead torn up the ground over a particularly large cave network to make a huge pit and then covered it over with a dome of earth, stone, and wood. Over the years, weather and vegetation had worked their own will upon the outside of the dome, transforming it into something completely indistinguishable from any other hillock in the area except by its sheer size.

The locals called it something that translated roughly to “Two Dragon Hill”, which later human settlers to the area had briefly assumed was a reference to its size.

A great green dragon is not a different race than a common green dragon, nor are they separate species as related but dissimilar animals might be. They do not quite belong to differing orders of creation, either. A common dragon is simply the greatly diminished descendant of a greater dragon.

The most commonly accepted theory among mortal dracologists is that the original dragons arrived within the sphere of the world as fully-formed immigrants from some other sphere or plane, and they were several magnitudes greater than the greatest living dragons of this age. Some accounts suggest there was a breeding pair of each color, or a larger colony. Some say that a single dragon or pair of dragons somehow gave rise to every color now extant, or that there was a single pair for the lustrous noble dragons and one for the iridescent ignoble ones.

However many of them there may have been, the first dragons were too great for the world to contain, even in its most primal state. Each successive generation born within it was somewhat lesser than its progenitors. The diminishing effect is small and incremental, although a certain point is crossed where a threshold is crossed and the newly hatched dragon’s form can only contain a fraction of the majesty that should be its legacy. Some lines of dragonhood quickly bred their way down to smaller and more bestial forms, while others took advantage of their long lives to preserve as much of their original essence as possible. Thus, for every color of dragons on both sides of the divide, there are dragons ranked from least to greatest.

The amount of time it takes to breed from the mid-point of a recognized level to the threshold of the next is such that it has only happened a handful of times since recorded history… only enough to identify it as a phenomenon. It seems impossible to imagine that this slow and steady devolution could be responsible for the orders of dragons as we know them, but recorded history is only a small fraction of the time that dragons have been around. “In the beginning,” the story says, “there were dragons.”

Many a smart-alecky school child has asked how this can be when the Age of Titans preceded the Age of Dragons, but this is due to a mistaken assumption about the meaning of the term “titan”. While that term is often used for the greatest and oldest of giants, it properly refers to any creature that inhabited the not-yet-diminished world of that first age: the giants, the dragons, and the things far less easily described.

Accounts differ as to how these various beings all came to be and which did so first and where the gods factored into all of this, of course, but they were all present early enough to make a credible claim to have been in the beginning.

Another mistake, of course, is thinking of “the beginning” as a singular point in time. There is nothing like a credible estimate of how long the Age of Titans lasted. From the creation of the sun until the departure of the giants, somewhere between three and fifteen thousand years passed. There is no recorded measurement of the presolar epoch, but it’s believed to have been longer than that. The word “million” is sometimes suggested, if a little tentatively.

The Age of Dragons lasted as long as the food held out, which is estimated to be between two hundred and five hundred thousand years. In that time, the dragons’ uncontested mastery of the world allowed the least dragons to breed with an explosive abandon the world had never before seen, creating varieties so far divorced from the original model of dragonhood as to resemble different creatures entirely. There were wingless dragons swinging from the writhing limbs of the tentacle forests, flocks of bipedal dragons winging their ways across the sky, finned dragons swimming the seas, and limbless dragons slithering across the land.

Once the surface of the world and its upper oceans had been cleansed of the crawling chaos, the draconic world turned on itself and tore itself apart. The vast majority of the draconic pseudoanimals perished of starvation, or else they died feeding their less diminished cousins, more of whom were able to survive through hibernation, magic, or exercise of sheer willpower. The successive ages have been too crowded with the creations of the gods and other beings for dragons to fill the world again. The more intelligent dragons mostly haven’t tried. Their lesser kin face too much competition, and were too often targeted for extermination by mortals.

It is generally agreed that all of dragonkind is on a decline, but dragons themselves are sharply divided about what, if anything, should be done about it. Some think that a systematic program of breeding is the best way to ensure their survival. Others feel that reproduction itself should be the goal. Still others believe that indefinitely prolonging the lives of themselves is sufficient. Few of them are very passionate or frantic about the larger issue… from their point of view the most precipitous drops were in the distant past and now things have leveled out quite a bit.

For the dragons of the Dragonfens, the question of reproductive strategy was almost but not quite entirely hypothetical. Alikendril and Malborian, as they referred to each other, were both male. They had occasionally throughout their years of cohabitation discussed the temporary adoption of mortal forms of dissimilar sexes in order to create a child who would be both theirs and of a fully but wholly altered draconic nature. It was rumored that this had been done before, to an interesting result.

The pair had discussed the possibility at some length in the past. They wouldn’t opt for a human-shaped offspring, obviously… not when the gods had created a race of appealingly scaled humanoids practically in their own image. Oviparous bodies would obviate the need for one or the other of them to remain in a fragile mortal form for the better part of a year. The only sticking point was the proximity of a powerful human empire that preferred they not breed at all, much less bring about some sort of reptilian messiah figure.

They hadn’t given up on the idea, though… merely tabled it until such time as the empire was no longer around to object, or they were both feeling particularly peevish.

The story of how this particular pair had come to settle down together depended on which one you asked and what sort of a mood he was in, the latter criterion also having something to do with whether or not you would receive an answer at all. Alikendril in particular was fond of sounding put-upon and forbearing when he spoke of their union, to his partner or anyone else.

“If you weren’t the last of my kind, I’d never have mated with you,” he said, rolling over onto his side. This incidentally displayed his underbelly towards Malborian. It was a gesture of trust, but a lazy and indolent sort of trust.

The whole of the cavern was between them. Each of them had his own hoard filling a depression on opposite sides, with little nooks and cubbies for holding items of particular interest or delicate ones that would not be easily conserved as part of a dragon’s bedding. The two would periodically engage in trading items back and forth, and it really was back and forth because neither one could stand to have an item that had once been his out of his possession for long.

Malborian stretched out his long, sinuous neck… partly because it felt good and partly because it gave him an excuse to turn his gaze away from his partner when he rolled his eyes. He knew that there were in fact several dozen great green dragons extant in the world, a small majority of whom were female. He could feel each and every one of them as a subtle pressure on his mind, and he knew that Alikendril could feel them, too… but his mate had declared each and every one of them to be dead to him for various reasons over the course of his life.

He also knew better than to say anything about this, unless he was in the mood to repair the dome afterwards. The space inside of Two Dragon Hill was large enough for two dragons to coexist peacefully and tussle affectionately. It was not large enough for them to brawl with one another in.

“I said…” Alikendril began to repeat.

“I heard you the first time,” Malborian said. He was willing to be actually forbearing for the sake of their relationship, but there were limits. “Which was three thousand, four hundred twenty-seven years and eleven days ago. I also heard you this time.”

“Oh, let’s not bicker in front of the children,” Alikendril said, waving an articulated forepaw over the deep depression between them.

“They can’t understand us.”

“They hear the tone, though.”

They had to keep changing their private language in order to keep it private, because the sloping pit in the center of their cavernous lair housed the egg creches and nurseries of multiple tribes of keen-membraned and clever-tongued lizardfolk. There were always a few guardians or nurses lurking about, even when there were no live hatchlings at the moment.

No mortal race could hope to figure out a dragon’s private tongue in a thousand years, but the fen-dwellers had their ways. If a big enough group got together and started talking at once the way they did, they could do a thousand years’ worth of figuring in a handful of days.

“Aren’t too many of them around, in any case,” Malborian said. “Most of them are off at their little swap meet at the moment.”

“Don’t remind me,” Alikendril said. “It isn’t the sharing that bothers me, exactly… they’re just so terribly efficient about it. No bickering, and barely any negotiating.”

Three times a year, most of the adults of all the tribes came together in great big circles and started reciting figures about their hatchings and deaths and emigrations, and the state of their food stores and the money they’d accumulated. The groups would dissolve and reform with different members a few times, and at the end of a week or so the tribes would scatter back to their own territories, only the boundaries of those territories would have shifted in places and there would be a few days of swapping various materials and other forms of aid.

“They are a marvel of efficiency,” Malborian said. “You know, if we were of a mind to make a little money…”

“As if a little money was any interest to us.”

“…we could broker their services to the mercantile races,” Malborian finished. “Dwarf and human merchants would pay good gold to have their trade routes planned.”

“Why should they pay good gold for that?” Alikendril asked. “Aside from the fact that they have yet to discover any other kind.”

“Efficiency,” Malborian said. “Have you never heard of the traveling merchant problem?”

“I’m not in the habit of listening to the problems of merchants, unless said aforementioned problem is me,” Alikendril said. “And then I don’t listen long.”

“It has to do with finding the shortest route between points.”

“The direct one, most of the time,” Alikendril said. “Allowing for ordinary levels of dimensional folding, naturally.”

“Naturally,” Malborian said. “But that’s the shortest route between two points. What if you have three points?”

“Then you go from the first one to the nearest one and then to the farther one.”

“But now imagine there are more points.”

“Frankly, my dear, I’m having a hard time imagining less point.”

“The point, dear Alikendril, is that humans get bored of these problems, too,” Malborian said. “Because they take too long to solve. But our dear godchildren…”

“Don’t compare us to gods, it’s insulting. And don’t call me ‘Alikendril’, Malborian. I abhor pet names and you know it.”

Alikendril did abhor pet names, except when he didn’t, which was usually. Malborian wasn’t about to call him by his given… or rather, taken… name, not when Alikendril was still using the shortened version of his name that he’d devised. There were limits.

“What should I call them, then?” Malborian said. “They call us ‘uncle’ and that’s all very good for them, but they’re no particular relation to us.”

“No relation at all,” Alikendril said. “And you know, I’m concerned that our ongoing association with them will do nothing but cement the fallacious notion that mortal reptiles have anything at all to do with us. People are so fixated on the scales. There’s as much in us that is like birds or mammals as there is anything like a reptile, and that’s only because the Celestial Dame was discerning enough to borrow liberally from our better qualities when she populated this world with her creatures.”

“Still, there is something of a flattering resemblance,” Malborian said.

“Flattering to them, perhaps,” Alikendril said. “The green of their scales is not anything like the shimmering splendor of ours.”

“Certainly nothing like yours,” Malborian said. “Little cousins? I don’t think such a promotion would go to their heads, do you?”

“You are a shameless flatterer,” Alikendril said.

“You’ve always liked flattery before.”

“I meant your flattery of them. You really think there is money to be made from our little cousins’ talents, though?”

“We’d have to sell it properly,” Malborian said. “To the dwarves, this would simply mean demonstrating value… any misgivings they would have would stem from the number of individual people they would have to involve in their dealings to make it work. With humans, it would have to be couched in terms that were flattering to them… or at least, terms that weren’t insulting.”

“What would they have to be insulted about?”

“The idea that another race could do something they can’t.”

“If that’s all it takes to insult a human, they must walk around in a state of perpetual offense.”

“Well, the ones who control trade routes and have a relatively large amount of money to spend have peculiar ideas about the world and their place in it,” Malborian said. “It wouldn’t do to have a bunch of backwoods reptiloids being capable of calculations that defy them. In fact, it might be best to present them as our assistants, or not mention their parts at all.”

“I’m still not certain I’m interested.”

“Not interested in money?”

“Not interested in understanding,” Alikendril said. “It feels too much like learning a new thing, Malborian… you know I swore off that nonsense ages ago. I don’t know why you can’t remember it. You like remembering things.”

“One of us has to. Of course, our celebrated neighbor to the north will have to be dealt with, if we were to enter into commercial relationships with outsiders.”

“That old bat?” Alikendril said. It was an epithet for black dragons that happened to work out conveniently well in translation. “She was born senile.”

“So we can get away with paying her a pittance. That’s how the humans deal with her, you know. They make her feel important and they practically get away with slaying.”

“Well, that will have to be on you, won’t it?” Alikendril said. “You’re the diplomat here. You had best explain it to our little cousins… and to our mortal victims, too. I can’t follow the whole thing.”

“Clients,” Malborian said. “When you are giving a service in exchange for the treasure, they are called…”

“You’re teaching me again!” Alikendril said in a warning tone. “I distinctly recall warning you about that.”

“Well, if you can’t be bothered to understand the scheme and you won’t be conducting the diplomatic, instructional, or commercial aspects of the enterprise, then what exactly is it you will be doing?”

“Supervising,” Alikendril said. “The fact that you even need to ask that is a sign of how lost you would be without my supervision.”