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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you actually enjoy that?”

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

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

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

“So you are into it?” she said.

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

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

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

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

“No,” I said. “It was all his idea.”

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

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

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

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

“Oh,” she said. “Um… oh.”

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

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

“Why not?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you making fun of me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You gave me this shirt,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ian gave Amaranth a meaningful look, and she smiled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s our pseudowench,” Steff added.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I could definitely like this.

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

Submission.

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

Was it possible that I was overlooking an easier way?

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

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

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

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

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

I worked the way that I worked.

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

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

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

“Actually, no,” I said.

“Whatever you took for it agrees with you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Like what?” I asked.

“Up,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s that?”

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

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was not disappointed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She giggled.

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

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

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

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

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

“No, ma’am,” I said.

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

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

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

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

“Good luck, ma’am,” I said.

“Goodnight, baby,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

Luckily I had been right, though.

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

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

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

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the idea.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I like her,” I said. “She’s fun.”

“I mean… never mind.”

“No, what?”

“I mean, do you like her?” Ian asked.

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

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

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

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

“What do you think about her?”

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

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

“I meant as a person,” I said.

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

“That seems pretty perceptive,” I said.

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

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

“Do you?”

“You think Steff’s right?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, my life is pretty complicated already.”

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You have a problem with that?”

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

“No,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Like what?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I like your top,” Two said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thanks, Two,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is ‘Mouse’ a… um…”

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

“I like Mouse,” Two said.

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

“It’s true,” Two said.

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

“That’s submission,” Amaranth said.

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

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

“Is Shiel her dom?” Nicki asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So… you noticed?” she said.

“Nicki did,” I said.

She laughed.

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

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

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

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

She sighed and took the paper from me.

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

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

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

“What?”

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

“Okay,” I said.

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

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

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

“If that happens, I’ll ask,” I said.

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

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

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

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

“I’ll have it back to you tomorrow.”

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

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

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

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

“I will,” I said.

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

“Um… I’m pretty sure Ian’s sleeping with me tonight,” I said.

“It’s cool,” she said. “I’m thinking more of the weekend, anyway… Viktor’s started grumbling about how classes get in the way of his ‘real work’, so I think he’s going to be want to be alone and I’m going to want some company.”

“Company you can have,” I said. “Depending on how things are going in my life, I may or may not wake up in the middle of the night screaming…”

“Oh, I can help with that,” Steff said.

“How?” I asked. “And please don’t say something about making sure I don’t wake up.”

“I was going to say I can help keep you awake..

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”

“And screaming, of course.”

“Of course.”

Sunday night, we had a comfortably crowded bed. Ian had needed a couple nights of me to himself to feel completely at home in the room, and now that he was over that I hoped to spend a lot of nights beneath him and Amaranth. I knew she wouldn’t spend every night with us, but Ian didn’t exactly have a better deal waiting for him back in his own room.

Even if he wanted more space to himself, he wasn’t exactly going to find it in the standard bunk compared to his side of the queen-sized four poster bed Amaranth had smuggled in for us, at least in Amaranth’s absence. We were narrow people.

Technically, the room belonged to Amaranth and me, but I had a hard time seeing that way. In some ways, it felt like Amaranth’s room. She’d gone through the trouble and expense of decorating it as an actual bedroom, after all. In other ways, it felt like ours… all of ours. The fact that Ian wasn’t technically part of our suite was only because the university didn’t allow that kind of mixing across gender lines. We’d picked Gilcrease Tower specifically for its co-ed floors, so Ian would be close enough that he could live with us for all practical purposes.

My dreams Sunday night were pretty indistinct, which was a good indication that they were just dreams. All the same, I thought I felt something poking around just outside the edge of my awareness. Though since they weren’t particularly lucid dreams, I couldn’t say if I really felt that or if I dreamed that I did… or if, upon waking, I imagined that I had and then remembered it that way.

Ordinary dreams were such tenuous, malleable things. That was part of what made it so easy for an invading mind to seize control of them, especially since the invader’s mind was almost always more awake by definition… but this also made them susceptible to more mundane powers of suggestion. It would be so easy to fool myself if I got all wrapped up in the possibility of what could be happening.

I had techniques for evicting a presence from my head, though they were only as good as my willingness to use them and in the heat of the moment… more particularly, in the dream-heat of the dream-moment… it seemed like I was too easily distracted to be trusted as the only line of defense. What I needed was some kind of alarm, something that would let me know for certain if my mind was touched while I slept.

Possibly something that could wake me up at the first sign of trouble… as long as I could remove it easily if I started to get sleep-deprived… but even just something that let me know for certain when I woke up normally would help.

Otherwise it seemed like I might go crazy wondering if the things I thought I felt were real, and I would never know if I was doing it to myself or if I was being dancing-lighted by either or both of my nocturnal visitors.

There was one person who I thought could possibly help me there, and I was due to be checking in with her anyway… we’d kept things loose after my last scheduled appointment of the spring semester, with the idea of re-establishing a schedule after things settled down again in the fall. I couldn’t say for sure that things were necessarily “settled”, but the lull between when the semester began and when it started to pick up speed seemed like as good a time as any.

I waited quietly in between Amaranth and Ian until they woke up.

“You sleep okay, baby?” Amaranth said.

“Yeah, mostly,” I said.

“No surprise visitors?”

“I thought the potions took care of that,” Ian murmured, obviously less sleepy than he sounded. Amaranth gave him a something between a light shove and a very slow slap on the shoulder.

“Not that I can tell,” I said. “But I’m not sure.”

Amaranth frowned.

“That could be a problem,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m working on a solution.”

“Oh?”

I stopped, because I heard Dee inside the bathroom… or rather, because I heard the water running and nothing else. Like a lot of the students who’d come out of Harlowe Hall, Dee and I shared a mental healer. Theodora Lundegard had gained a reputation for the hard-to-handle cases, which included the difficult ones, the unusual ones, and the hard-to-care-about ones.

“Yeah,” I said. “Excuse me for a second.”

I knocked on the door.

“I apologize, but this chamber is in use but shall be vacated shortly,” Dee said from within.

“I don’t need the bathroom,” I said. “I just wanted to ask you if Teddi knows about the, uh, owl-turtle.”

There was a pause, and then the door opened and Dee came through. She was wearing a floor length dark blue night gown… though I noticed the hem only touched the floor when it was across the threshold from the bathroom to our carpeted one. Telekinesis had its little advantages.

Ian pulled the blankets up over himself. I realized that I was also naked, but it was a little late for modesty. Dee and I had both seen each other naked before, and she didn’t equate it with intimacy.

That didn’t stop me from blushing a bit, but making a big deal out of would have made the whole thing more embarrassing.

“Yes,” she said. “I am uncertain if she believes in its existence as an entity, though she assures me that she believes that I believe in it. It is a peculiarly unreassuring assurance.”

“Well, I might be giving her independent testimony,” I said. “I want to talk to her about ways to be sure if it… or anyone else… is coming and going.”

“It was definitely present in my dreams last night,” she said. “Though perhaps it would be a mistake to assume it can only exist in one place at a time. It has told me in the past that it believes it could replicate itself across multiple minds but chooses not to do so, for fear of losing its ‘specialness’ and creating rivals for itself… but perhaps some intermediate step exists before the full-fledged duplication.”

“No pun intended,” Ian said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Fledged,” Ian said. “It’s a bird. Ish. Thing.”

“Ah,” Dee said. “I must confess, I do not know what that word means outside of the idiom.”

“…something to do with feathers,” Ian mumbled.

“Fledgling is what a bird is after it’s a hatchling,” I said.

“It’s when a bird is developed enough to fly but still learning,” Amaranth said. “Though I guess full-fledged would be when it gets past that?”

“As… illuminating… as this digression may be,” Dee said, “I believe it is a distraction from the issue at hand. The owl-turtle thing has not been forthcoming on the subject of its interest in you, beyond admitting that it did cross into your mind.”

“What did it say when you asked?” Amaranth asked.

“Its exact words were that it was a private matter and I should direct my inquiries to Mackenzie if I wished to know further,” Dee said. She turned to me. “I believe it was fully aware that we had already discussed the matter and that I was looking for information that you do not possess, though I have enough experience with its games to know that if pressed on that point, it would claim that you and I collectively know all that we need to between us if only we would realize it. It is a most frustrating entity.”

“Have you ever considered giving the damn thing back to Two?” Ian asked. “I mean, if it uses your telepathy to get around, it would basically be stuck there, right?”

“That wouldn’t be fair to Two,” I said.

“Well, it’s not fair to whoever it lands on,” Ian said. “But Two made the thing. If it belongs anywhere, I think it would be her brain. Or mind. Or dreams, or whatever.”

“I weighed that as an option,” Dee said. “But I am uncertain that I could effect a safe and effective transfer on purpose… and I did take the owl-turtle thing into myself when I unwisely attempted to aid her with her dream problems. That I succeeded in that goal in any fashion is an accomplishment I would not undo.”

“Well, as martyr complexes go, that one seems pretty benign, at least,” Amaranth said.

“I also think of the future,” Dee said. “If the owl-turtle thing were returned to Two, it would simply exist in her mind indefinitely. She would be bound to it for the rest of her dreaming existence. Within my mind, there is the chance for progress… be it an evolution into something useful, or a lessening or removal of the burden. And I must confess that the longer I reflect upon it, the less certain I am that removing it would be wholly beneficial.”

“You can’t actually like it,” I said.

“Baby, no one’s completely unlikable,” Amaranth said.

“To the contrary, I believe that may be one of its inherent traits,” Dee said. “If only because its creator felt no fondness for it and her mind shaped it. But as little as I care for it, I believe it can be useful… and it is a new thing.”

“So?” Ian said. “Aren’t there new things all the time?”

“Forgive my imprecise command of an imprecise language,” Dee said. “But, no. It is not a new thing in the sense that a new pair of socks is new, or even in the way that a new type of socks would be. It is a new thing in the way that the first pair of socks ever was.”

“Interesting analogy,” Ian said.

“It is early and I have been engaged in laundry,” Dee said. “My point is that I am coming to the conclusion that to rid the world of the owl-turtle thing would be a… well, it would fall somewhere between a sin and a missed opportunity.”

“Um… have your conversations with it helped you reach this conclusion?” I asked.

“It is a staunch advocate for its own continued existence, but it has never raised this point in its own defense,” Dee said. “The idea originated within my own mind.”

“Um… point of order,” Ian said. “Wouldn’t any idea it had also originate within your mind?”

“Yes, but this one came from me.”

“How can you know for sure?” Ian asked.

“I have been trained from an early age to recognize external insinuations,” Dee said.

“Except this wouldn’t be external,” Ian said.

“When we were dealing with my pitchfork, you told me that when an idea is planted inside someone’s mind, their mind will figure out how to slot it in naturally and then just sort of roll with it,” I said.

“I did say something of that nature,” Dee said, shifting a little uncomfortably… which meant she was really uncomfortable, or else it would have been completely unnoticeable. “But… I do not believe that is the case here.”

“You don’t know, though,” Ian said.

“I believe it to be true, but I will by no means discount the possibility that I could be wrong.”

“Anyway,” I said, “I’m going to talk to Teddi about any kind of external countermeasures I can use.”

“Don’t you think she would have mentioned them when you were dealing with your father?” Amaranth asked.

“Maybe, but I didn’t ask,” I said. “And I was looking for things I could learn because I didn’t have any money to spare. But if my head’s going to be turned into a carriage hub, I think it’d be worth it… actually, I think even just keeping the man out would be worth a few coins. I just didn’t think of stepping things up any until something else changed.” I shrugged. “It’s an idea, anyway.”

“It’s more than that,” Ian said.

“Oh?” I said.

“It’s a plan.”

“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” I said.

“I’m not saying it rises to the level of an intricate multi-layered scheme,” Ian said. “But that’s probably one of its better features, honestly. Less that can go wrong. I mean, Teddi will either be able to help you or she won’t. There isn’t much room for hijinks there.”

“I have to say I can see no fault in your intended course of action,” Dee said.

“Do you have to say it, or must you confess it?” Ian asked. Dee glared at him. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m naked under here, and insecurity makes me feel testy.”

“No pun intended, I am certain,” Dee said. She bowed to him, and withdrew from the room.

“That was rude,” Amaranth said to Ian.

“It’s banter,” Ian said. “I don’t mean anything by it.”

“It’s like what he does with Steff,” I said.

“Right,” Ian said. “Except I don’t mean anything by it.”

Ian was kind of quiet and stood back a bit through a lot of the night. I worried that he felt left out by the amount of time I spent talking to Nicki, but every time I looked at him he looked like he was enjoying himself, and he seemed perfectly fine when he was talking to me, especially when we were out under the lights together.

Still, I worried about it enough to ask him if he had a problem with her when I was sure we were well away from Nicki.

“I like her okay, so far,” he said. “And it’s good to see you making friends you can talk to like that.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like you talk to her,” he said.

“So why don’t you talk to her?” I said.

“If you want me to make forced and awkward conversation with her because it’ll make you feel better, I will,” he said. “But if you want me to do it because you think it’ll be fun for me or her, you’re probably wrong.”

“Why would it be forced and awkward?”

“Because I’ve never been great at talking to girls,” he said.

“That’s stupid,” I said. “All the people you hang out with are girls.”

“First, not all the people,” he said. “Most of my friends are guys. Close friends? I don’t know. But I don’t wink out of existence when I’m not with you. And I don’t spend that much time talking to a lot of the group. And the reason I can talk to you…”

“Don’t say I don’t count as a girl,” I said.

“You don’t count as ‘girls’,” he said. “You’re a specific girl. I’ve spent time getting to know you and figuring out how to talk to you. Mostly by trial and error.”

“So get to know Nicki,” I said.

“I will,” he said. “But even if I don’t end up best friends forever with her, that doesn’t mean you can’t hang out with her.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t mean to pressure you.”

“You were just looking out for me,” he said. “I’m a quiet guy sometimes. It doesn’t mean I’m not a good time. You of all people should know that.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“Say that a few more times and I’ll be having a great time.”

Steff did show up, as I’d been pretty sure that she would… her transparent attempts at being coy and blase about it had been, of course, transparent. She’d taken the time to get dressed up-ish, wearing a lacy spider web-patterned shawl over a loose peasant top and black jeans that hugged the hips she’d sprouted early in the previous year.

She didn’t dislike breasts on others and I think she enjoyed having them, but her internalized elven mores meant that she was often less comfortable with clothes that showed off the bulges on her chest than she was with clothes that made it hard to hide the one between her legs.

Neither touch made her look any less feminine to me… or any less hot, for that matter.

“So this is the new sidekick,” she said, giving Nicki an up and down look.

“This is my friend, Nicki,” I said, correcting rather than arguing with her… just on the off-chance that Nicki actually aspired to sidekickdom and would have found it slightly soul-crushing to hear me blurt out a quick rejection of the idea.

“Hi,” Nicki said. “We’ve actually met, a little.”

“She looks a little sturdier than the last one,” Steff said, “but I still don’t think she’d last three rounds with the Dark Lord.”

“Wait… what Dark Lord?” Nicki asked.

“This is Steff’s sad little attempt at a running joke,” I said.

“Yeah, I’m just kidding,” Steff said. “Like he’d kill someone important to Mack that quickly after what she did to him last year.”

“Seriously, there isn’t a Dark Lord,” I said. “There isn’t even so much as a beige duke. My life is not the simplest place to stand, but it has yet to be complicated by any evil overlords.”

“And isn’t that a mercy?” Steff said.

“Mostly uncomplicated by evil overlords,” I said before she decided to spill any more in front of Nicki. I was sort of equally concerned of her being scared off and of her continuing to get the wrong idea about my life of adventure and excitement… i.e., that it existed. “Though I can’t really say the same thing about overlords-in-training.”

“There are classes for evil overlords?” Nicki asked.

“Not as such, no,” Steff said. “I mean, I thought about minoring in poli arts, but that’s only because it sounded like something else. Um, Mack, I think you might want to rescue your girlfriend from the fight she’s about to start?”

“What?” I said, looking around. Amaranth was a bit more prone to wide open socialization than any of the rest of us, and so I hadn’t thought much of it when she’d split off to go talk to someone else. I could easily see a fight breaking out over her attention, but I didn’t see anyone squaring off over her… instead, I saw her engaged in a conversation with a somewhat bemused Eloise Desjardins while looking increasingly flustered. “I, uh… I should probably go see what that’s about.” I looked at Nicki. “I’ll be back, seriously, don’t…”

“Go!” she said, with an easy laugh.

Amaranth wasn’t quite at the foot-stomping mad stage, but she looked closed… her cheeks were red and her eyes could have been flushed with tears. Her losing her cool was unlikely to lead to violence, but it could easily lead to her saying or doing something she’d regret… and I’d regret if she alienated or pissed off Eloise. Not only was she pretty cool, but her presence was the only part of my local hazards class that I actually liked.

I knew that the two of them’d had at least one debate before, though I hadn’t been present for it… Amaranth generally tried to err on the side of respecting other people’s beliefs, but it’s possible she had a blind spot regarding secularists… especially ones who were specifically not following the ways of her goddess. She might have been the first one to agree that Mother Khaele didn’t particularly want or need worship, per se, but she identified the goddess as her literal mother to the extent that a perceived lack of respect offended her.

Once I got close enough to hear what Eloise was saying, though, it seemed that religious conviction in and of itself wasn’t the source of the dispute.

“No, I’m not saying it’s an absolute certainty that there are no druids anywhere who have ever had sex with a humanoid while ‘shaped, I’m just saying it’s not likely,” Eloise said.

“I don’t know how you can say that, though,” Amaranth said. “I mean, it’s not like you’ve spoken with every druid who exists.”

“It seemed like you were willing to take me as spokeswoman for druidry when you asked me if I agreed with you,” she said. “Anyway, I’m not talking about what other druids think, I’m talking about how we think. You have to understand that even when we keep our minds, we are the shape we wear. Fundamentally. That’s not just a basic tenet of druidry, it’s a big part of how it works. If I’m being a hawk, I’m thinking I’m a hawk or else I’m falling.”

“And?”

“And hawks aren’t interested in people,” she said. “Romantically. Sexually. On any level you can think of.”

“Maybe that’s typical, but is that the same thing as fundamental? I just don’t see the fundamental incompatibility between an animal’s nature and the physical act of love with another being,” Amaranth said. “We may be different orders of creation, but we were created after the same models.”

“I ever meet a hawk that wants to engage in the physical act of love with people and I’ll lead the hunting party myself,” Eloise said. “That would be a serious menace… a seriously fucked-up menace.”

“Look, can you let go of the hawk example? I wasn’t thinking about a hawk specifically,” Amaranth said.

“Okay, you look,” Eloise said. “If you’re not actually trying to talk me into putting the ‘wild’ into ‘wild shape’ with you, then I really don’t care what your beliefs or preferences or predilections are. But… and this is the key part… I really don’t care. That doesn’t just mean I’m not going to say anything about them. It means I don’t need to hear anything about them.”

“Has anybody ever tell you that you have a very closed mind?” Amaranth asked.

“Nothing’s fallen out of it yet.”

“Um… is everything okay?” I said.

“Just a minor disagreement on a philosophical point,” Eloise said. “But you know, since I’m not affiliated with a circle and I’m not religious I really don’t think you should be bringing any more questions like this to me.”

“Alright,” Amaranth said. “I just thought that since you’re not affiliated, you might have a different opinion…”

“And it turns out I do. How about that?” Eloise said.

Amaranth didn’t seem to have an answer for that. She opened her mouth and closed it a couple of times. I felt bad for seeing her so completely frustrated, but… she was very in the wrong here.

“Is that Steff?” she said finally. “I’m going to go say hi to Steff.”

“Sorry about that,” I said to Eloise.

“What for?” she said. “You’re not her keeper… anyway, I wanted to tell you that Swain’s finalizing the schedule for her field excursions. It’s actually supposed to be done already but she’s had to juggle things around a bit to make things work… it seems neither one of us has a lot of luck getting attention and respect from the bureaucracy.”

“I’ll be looking for it… I know you’re leading your own excursions, but are you going to accompany hers?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m definitely going to be on for the overnight trip,” Eloise said. “And the plan is for me to be there on the shorter trips, too… but that’s going to come down to some external factors.”

“Well, I’ll keep my fingers crossed,” I said. “I’m not exactly comfortable in the woods, so I’m hoping to go out with as big a group as possible…”

“Yeah, it seems like a safe bet that she’ll have the largest group,” Eloise said. “Maybe not as big as you think, though… some people will go for the other accredited guides just because they aren’t teachers, is my guess. And if you’re worried about safety, you stick close to the professor. Don’t let her hear you repeating this, but she had a pretty good run as a wilderness adventurer before she took up teaching. The wee folk respect her, and so does the forest.”

“Somehow I’d take more comfort in your presence than hers,” I said.

“You’d have a hard time keeping up with me when I’m airborne, and when I’m not… well, I’m more about seeing the sights up close and getting my hands dirty,” she said. “I’m not careless, I just weight my priorities a little bit differently. I pick the reasonably safe place that gives me the best view. She picks the safest place she can see okay from.”

“Do you spend a lot of time as a bird?” I asked. I didn’t think druids were very limited when it came to the forms they could assume, but it seemed any time Eloise’s animal time came up she was flying.

“In total? No, but compared to other animals, yes. I’m a city girl originally, but I always wanted to fly,” she said. “It was either that or the air navy… I thought about both, but I decided I’d rather be able to spread my own wings and see the whole world spread out beneath me than be stuck on a boat looking over the railing, when I had time to look at all. That and the philosophy of druidism appealed to me more, though the hierarchical aspects put me off the religion. A hawk doesn’t answer to anyone, or have anyone under them… both are important to me.”

“So I guess you’re not looking to go into teaching full time,” I said.

“I don’t think teacher/student has to be a hierarchical relationship,” she said. “Students have to respect teachers for anything to get done, but it’s just as bad when teachers don’t respect students. I taught myself more than I ever learned from half the teachers I’ve had. I don’t know, you might have had something similar to deal with growing up.”

“I suppose,” I said. “I’ve had pretty good luck in college so far, though the exceptions have been… exceptional. So far even the classes I haven’t been crazy about have had good people leading them.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said. “Is it that obvious that I really don’t want to be there?”

“There’s a lot of resentment over the new rules,” she said. “I guessed it from what you said about the excursions. I wouldn’t have picked your face out of the crowd as being someone who was ticked off… you look like someone who has a tendency to look more sullen than you actually are, if only because you don’t go around looking people in the eye and smiling at them.”

“It’s been more interesting than I expected, really,” I said. “I don’t think I’d drop it now if I had the choice of opting out of the requirement somehow… though I would skip the excursions if I could.”

“You can,” she said. “You’ll fail, the class of course, but that’s the nice thing about failure: it’s always an option.”

“Well, it’s an option I can’t afford,” I said.

“Oh, you’ll do alright,” she said. “Professor Swain is a pretty soft touch when it comes to grading, as long as you’re legitimately trying. Anyway, they couldn’t make these classes too hard when they’re making the whole university take them, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m not really worried about passing the class. I’m just…. not looking forward to the process of getting there.”

“Well, there’s that other option we talked about,” she said. “Relax, though. Maybe it’s been a rough beginning, but we did kind of throw the thing together. Things will smooth out further down the line.”

“Actually, it hasn’t been that bad a beginning,” I said. “I mean, last year I’d already changed one class by this point and I was on the verge of dropping another. All things considered, this year has been going pretty smoothly, classes I’m not crazy about included.”

“Glad to hear it,” she said. “Hey, I’m going to take off. Not that I don’t like fraternizing with undergrad, but this isn’t really my crowd. See you next week.”

“Yeah,” I said.

She walked off, and I headed back to my group, thinking that the year really had been off to a much better start than the one before. Sure, there had been some rough patches. I’d let myself get way too caught up in the whole thing revolving around Twyla… but we’d got that sorted out pretty quickly. I was doing at least okay in my classes so far, and my relationships were going pretty strong… we had our miscommunications and our miscues, but we cleared them up like grown-ups most of the time now.

Nothing was perfect, nothing was terrible, and so the year rolled on.

“Um, I can take off?” Nicki said. “If you two have to talk.”

“Please don’t… if you could just give us like a moment?” I said to her. Imagining the litany of uncertainty that could be running around in circles through Nicki’s head, I decided to be explicit. “I’m really enjoying talking to you.”

“Okay,” she said.

“This won’t take long,” Twyla said.

“I’ll just… um… get more punch, then,” Nicki said. “Oh, would anyone else like some?”

“No, thank you,” Twyla said.

“I’m good,” I said.

Twyla played with the beaten copper bracer on her wrist, rubbing the skin underneath while Nicki retreated towards the refreshment table.

“I guess I should start by saying I’m sorry for assuming the worst,” she said.

“It’s okay,” I said. “So… uh, I guess you figured it out yourself?”

She froze, then jerked her hand away from the bracelet like it was hot.

“Wait… you knew?” she said. She sounded more incredulous than angry, but if that was because she couldn’t believe she’d calmed down and forgiven me and now it seemed like I had been setting her up all along then the anger would be fast on its heels.

“No,” I said quickly. “I really didn’t. I mean, I know now, but that’s because I wanted to find out why Professor Bohd would react that way… after I found out how she reacted, I mean. I seriously didn’t have any idea that was going to happen, Twyla. I honestly thought she’d be the best person to help you.”

“I believe you,” she said. “I just… the only thing I had ever heard of her was that she was kind of a, you know, a strict teacher, and you had this kind of, of, knowing air when you said I should go talk to her, like you were very pleased with yourself. I kind of associate that with someone trying to put one over on me.”

“Well, you weren’t exactly coming out and saying what you wanted from me,” I said. “So I was happy that I thought I’d worked it out and figured out a way to help you.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. ” I don’t like to be suspicious, but… well, when I was in high school, my mother was a teacher. Nobody ever shoved me into a locker or anything obvious like that, but… well, they found other ways of getting at me.”

“Like what?”

“Just as an example, on my first day as a freshman, they told me that the left-handed lockers were on the other side of the school.”

“Didn’t you have an assigned locker number?”

“Yes, but I was told that they re-use numbers,” she said. “The one I was looking at was R-1123, not L-1123… look, it sounded more plausible to me then because I was young and in a hurry and petrified of making a mess of things on my first day. The guy who told me it was older and sounded authoritative. When I made it to the other side and saw that the numbers were still going up and the locks were on the same side as the ones I’d been at, of course, I realized how ridiculous it was… but by then I was already late for my first class. That kind of thing happened… well, not all the time. But enough times to make an impression.”

“You thought I was sending you on a golden snitch hunt?” I said.

“No, I didn’t think that,” she said. “But I was… wary of the possibility. I was too trusting as a child, so sometimes I overcompensate.”

“You went anyway, though.”

“I didn’t have any real reason not to trust you,” she said. “And I couldn’t see any obvious trap… I mean, it’s not like you told me to go to such-and-such a spot and wait. You gave me a name and I found her office. But when Professor Bohd started screaming at me, I… I didn’t really stop to listen. I just figured she didn’t like being interrupted by students, and you knew it.”

“You didn’t even think it could have anything to do with your horns?”

“I… try not to think about them, when I’m evaluating how another person treats me,” she said. “Sometimes it’s glaring, but… well, I think I honestly got more guff for being a teacher’s kid than I did for having horns. As far as I could tell. Anyway, the point is that I was half expecting the worst from you… not because you’re you, but because that’s what I’m used to… and that stopped me from looking any further.”

“What changed your mind?”

“I thought about it more when I cooled down and realized that you don’t seem like the type,” she said. “I mean, the time you caught me envisioning in the ballroom…”

“‘Caught’ makes it sound like you were doing something bad.”

She looked away slightly.

“Well, yes,” she said. “That’s my mindset. I’m used to anything I say or do being used against me by a tribunal of my peers. In my mind, that’s just how it goes. But you didn’t say anything, and then you scribed off a copy of my avatar. It’s just… a lot of little things like that, made me step back and rethink it. By then I didn’t remember much of anything about anything Professor Bohd had said, but I remembered that she said some things that kind of sounded like Alephayic mixed in with it, so I started from there.”

“Maravayan seems more likely,” I said.

“Well, yeah, in hindsight it’s obvious. I didn’t think she was speaking Alephayic… I just said that’s what it sounded kind of like. I know some words in Alephayic, and I know it shares some similarities with Maravayan,” she said. “I still don’t know what she said, but I’d imagine it was a Maravayan word or phrase relating to ifrits, and not a nice one. But even knowing that much was enough to get me looking in the right direction, and as soon as I figured it out… well, once I knew the type of fire, I started looking for ways to hold in or control it.”

“The bracelets?” I said.

“Yeah… I couldn’t figure out where to look for something like this so I just asked an armoury student to help me make something simple. I don’t know how much they’re actually doing,” she said. “Or if they’re doing anything, besides keeping my elemental levels in check. It might just be in my head, or the knowledge that I don’t have to worry about flare-ups… but I feel more centered.”

“Have you looked into side effects?” I asked. “I mean, if they help, they help… but it might not be healthy to have your energy all bottled up. No pun intended.”

“Well, from what I can tell… and I haven’t exactly found any ifrits to interview about this personally, so it’s all second or more like third-hand… but it seems that ifrits do wear copper and bronze bracelets to help keep their own power focused,” she said. “I don’t know how often they take them off, or if they have to do anything to ‘vent’ the excess, or if there are any special enchantments on them… I’m going to have to find out, obviously, but I think l’m going to be okay using them casually. I’m not planning on walking around with them on all the time… honestly, just long enough to get used to them enough to sleep in them, because that’s what really scared me.”

“I can definitely sympathize with that,” I said.

“Do you think copper would work for you?”

“I’ve honestly never thought of it,” I said. “If copper has any general anti-elemental properties, they aren’t well-known to western alchemists… I’m more inclined to think it’s something particular about ifrits and copper than fire and copper. I guess I could check sometime. I have made it this far without them… though I have honestly never thought about what kinds of countermeasures I could use. I mean, divine and cold magic hurts and weakens me, so they’re out the window.”

“Yeah, from what I read, copper works as a ‘vessel’ for ifrit magic,” Twyla said. “It contains without weakening. Even if it doesn’t work the same on other fire creatures, I’d be surprised if there aren’t things that do. Have you never looked into them?”

“My grandmother was only interested in teaching me to control myself, and by the time I was on my own it didn’t seem like that big an issue.”

“I guess if she couldn’t think of anything, there might not be anything,” Twyla said.

“I wouldn’t say that,” I said.”I don’t think she even considered it… I think she thought that if I couldn’t do it all on my own, I was too dangerous to keep around.”

“That’s… severe,” Twyla said.

I shrugged.

“There is something to be said for making sure I can handle myself without any outside aid before getting dependent on that aid,” I said. “Though I really don’t think that’s what she was going for… there was never a phase two in her plan, just get me housebroken and keep me home.”

“I’m sure she loves you.”

“I… I don’t think so,” I said. It stung to say it out loud. “I think if you asked her, she’d say she does… or at least, she’d be offended at the implication that she doesn’t. But her idea of love is an obligation. She sees an obligation to my human blood, to my family blood. She calls it love. Maybe there’s some sentimentality helping enforce that obligation, but… I can’t call it love.”

“Wow,” Twyla said. “I’m sorry. This got kind of… um, it’s taken a turn. Do you want a hug?”

“Um, no, thank you,” I said. “Hey, on a brighter note… at least you know more about your parents now, right?”

“Not really,” she said. “I mean, I know one more fact about them, or part of a fact about one of them… but that’s it. And the same brick wall I’ve always run into is still there. Someone’s drawn a veil over my past, a powerful veil… I think the main thing I’ve learned is how powerful. I’m not actually giving up, but I am getting on with my life. I’m going to focus on the practical things I need to learn about myself before I turn my attention to my roots again.”

“That makes sense,” I said.

“I mean, I can think of two reasons for the veil,” she said. “One would be to protect me from something, and the other would be to protect whoever’s on the other side… I mean, from intrusion or being bothered or whatever. So, stumbling into it just doesn’t seem like a good idea, especially right now when I’m young and hardly know what I’m capable of….”

“That does make a lot of sense,” I said. “What are you capable of?”

“I hardly know,” she said. “I mean, I’ve never felt any pull towards shapeshifting or… until recently… noticed any elemental inclinations. I feel pretty solid, generally, but I don’t have any basis of comparison with how anybody else feels, so I don’t know. So… how did you find out?”

“Well, I went to talk to Professor Bohd. She was… well, she seemed embarrassed when she calmed down. I think that might have been part of why she wasn’t enthusiastic about helping you directly, even then… but she made sure I could find the information.”

“Ah. That makes sense,” she said.

Inside, I wrestled with how much more to say… whether I should be trying to preserve the peace I had for the moment, or laying everything out on the table. I decide it was better to just tell her the truth..

“The thing is… I didn’t figure it out on my own,” I said. “We kind of all know. Not Nicki, but my close friends. I mean, it’s not like posted on a bulletin board somewhere, but I talk about things with my friends. If you’re looking for more information, Amaranth could probably help you find it. She’s the one who really cracked it.”

“I will keep that in mind,” she said. “Well, I should probably let you get back to your…?”

“Friend,” I said. “Nicki. She is my friend, just… new. She’s in…”

“Class with us,” Twyla said. “I haven’t met her yet. I mean, apart from just now. But she seems nice?”

“Yeah, she’s kind of cool, actually.”

“Well, I’ll see you both on Tuesday, I guess.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Thanks for the help,” she said. “Even if it didn’t go how you expected.”

She headed off back towards her friends. Nicki, who’d been waiting over by the punchbowl, hurried back.

“You know, it’s things like this that make me think you lead such an interesting life,” she said.

“Like what?” I asked.

“I don’t even know!” she said. “That’s what’s so interesting… though at the same time, I kind of see what you meant about anticlimax. I mean, you were acting like there was going to be some big confrontation that you had to get over with.”

“That’s what I expected,” I said. “Would you believe I was ready to spend the whole weekend stewing over what to do about her?”

“So what’s your weekend look like now?”

“I’m not sure exactly, but things are definitely looking up,” I said. As I said that, I happened to glance over and see Amaranth coming towards us, as if to prove the point. Her latest admirer was trailing not very far behind her.

“Hey, baby!” she said. “So… it looked like Twyla cooled down. Did she apologize?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And I did, too, for inadvertently getting her screamed at.”

“That’s very good,” Amaranth said. “Um… were those copper wristies I saw her wearing?”

“Yeah,” I said. “So, she’s got it worked out for herself… but I did tell her you’d be happy to help her with additional research.”

“Thank you, baby,” Amaranth said brightly.

“I don’t know if she’ll take you up on that or not,” I said.

“So… um…” Nicki said, her eyes making nervous circuits between Amaranth and me.

“Oh, I’m sorry… I’m Amaranth,” Amaranth said, unnecessarily. “And you’re Nicki, right?”

“Yeah,” Nicki said. “If you want to talk to Mack alone, I can totally scoot… I’m a very good, um, scooter.”

“Oh, don’t be silly… this is a party. Who’d come here to be alone? Oh, and Mack, Nicki, this is Nina,” Amaranth said, putting her arm around the girl who’d been dancing against her. “Her father’s a professor of evocation.”

“Hey,” Nina said, taking in Nicki and me with a slow, sloppy wave, before turning back to Amaranth. “I’m actually gonna run now, but I wanted to tell you that I will definitely be seeing you later.”

“Okay, Nina!” Amaranth said. She gave her a hug, and then watched as she went bouncing away. “You know, I think we’re going to be seeing a lot more of her.”

A seasonal meditation from your author:

Like leaves under snow, my old winter coat isn’t really that useful.

Nicki was shy when it came to talking about herself, but through some gentle coaxing I did learn a bit about her family. Specifically, I learned that as far as she knew she wasn’t at all related to the La Belle family, which was a bit of a surprise and a relief.

I learned that she was the middle child of three, which seemed like a big family to me… that also surprised me, because I would have guessed her to be an only child like me.

“Nope,” she said when I told her as much. “I think sometimes that I might have grown up to be a stronger person if I’d been an only child… not that I don’t love my brother and sister. When we were younger it was like having built-in best friends, but then my brother reached a point where he felt like he was too old to play little kiddy games with his sisters, and my sister… well, I had the idea that her being younger than me meant that she should be capable of and interested in everything I did, only like, subordinate to me. Um, that probably makes me sound really immature and self-involved.”

“It makes it sound like you’re talking about a child,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s what I mean… oh, right!” she said. She laughed. “I guess I never felt like I was particularly immature when I was a kid, so when I look back on the things I thought and did, sometimes I just… it seems like I was so stupid. And even if I sit here and tell myself that I was only like seven or whatever, it just feels… grown-ups always acted like seven-year-olds wouldn’t know better, but I felt like I did at the time, and now I look back and realize I didn’t but I still feel like I should have. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t really dwell on my childhood that much, but I definitely do know what it’s like to dwell on mistakes, or perceived mistakes… Amaranth has done a lot to help me come to terms with that, and with learning how to forgive myself.”

“For what?”

“For whatever,” I said. “Even in cases where you didn’t actually do anything wrong but you still beat yourself up over it, you have to learn how to forgive yourself for it before you can let go and realize that the forgiveness wasn’t even necessary. Amaranth likes to read just about anything, but lately… well, as of late last spring, anyway… she was following research in the Journal of Empaths about self-forgiveness vs. self-esteem.”

“Are those things really opposites?” Nicki asked.

“No,” I said. “But they’re different approaches. Trying to instill self-esteem in someone… including yourself… is a different process than teaching them how to forgive-themselves. If you’re hung up on self-esteem, then anything that makes you feel like you have a flaw… well, your idea of your value as a person is being defined by value. So you either have to deny the flaw or let your self-image dim a little. Self-forgiveness is more like, ‘So, yes, I made a mistake, and that’s okay.’”

“Still seems like they could go together,” Nicki said. “I mean, if you have enough self-esteem you should be able to handle some criticism.”

“Right, but how many people do you know who actually do that?” I asked. “And think about how easy it would be to take that statement and use it to flog yourself with? I mean, if you believe that feeling good about yourself means you should be able to shrug off insults or not take criticism personally, then what does it say about you when somebody says something that does hurt you? And honestly, that is going to happen.”

“I guess I sort of have been there,” Nicki said. “I mean, I’ve spent some time kind of beating myself up for not being able to handle peer critiques more, in my design classes.”

“Are those a regular part of design classes?” I asked. That didn’t sound like a lot of fun.

“Yeah, they’re pretty common, but I don’t think Professor Stone is planning on doing them,” she said. “They weren’t on the syllabus.”

“That’s good to know,” I said.

“I would have expected you were used to criticism,” she said. “I mean, you must have people saying worse things… shit, that’s coming out wrong.”

“It probably sounds worse to you than it does to me,” I said. “Because, yeah, I did get used to people saying shit about me once it was known that I was a half-demon. But just because I accepted it as normal didn’t stop it from hurting. Though at the time I kind of felt like I reached a point where it wasn’t doing any harm because there was no more harm for it to do.”

“That’s… kind of depressing.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Oh, no, it’s okay… I don’t mean that you’re depressing me,” Nicki said. “I mean, I feel bad for you… oh, hey, I think I see your… girlfriend?”

The hesitation and questioning tone made me cringe with the expectation that she’d be talking about Steff, but when I looked over to where she was pointing, I saw it was Amaranth, arriving with an entourage of several guys and at least one girl in her wake. The exact size and composition was hard to tell, because the party was reaching full swing and more and more people were arriving… with the exception of the kind of short girl who was trying to walk with her arm around Amaranth’s shoulder, it was hard to say who was showing up with her and who was just showing up at the same time from the same general direction.

“Yeah, Amaranth is my girlfriend,” I said.

“I knew you were together,” she said. “I just wasn’t sure what the best term was, with the poly and the, uh, kink and whatever else.”

“Girlfriend works,” I said, realizing that the same kind of confusion over nomenclature could have applied to Steff’s relationship with me even without any confusion over Steff’s gender, or pointed rejection of it.

Amaranth saw us looking and waved across the way at us, though she didn’t hurry over.

“Do you want to go talk to her?” she asked, with a hitch in her voice that reminded me that I would need to explicitly tell her that yes, she’d be welcome to come with me if I did.

“Not right away,” I said. I didn’t really like dealing with groups of people that I didn’t know, which was probably one of the reasons Amaranth hadn’t come running, my not-quite-date with Nicki being the other one. “I want to at least say hi, but I’d rather wait until she’s a bit less entangled.”

“That might be a while… she looks pretty well entangled with that girl,” Nicki said, which was a pretty good description of the way the one girl was,

“Do you think any of those people have had sex with her?”

“I think they probably all did,” I said. “Or sex with people in her presence… that’s probably why they all arrived together.”

“Does that bother you? At all?”

“Nope,” I said. “Not even a little tiny bit.”

“That chick is playing with her tits,” Nicki said.

“Um, yeah,” I said. “That’s not really something I want to watch, but it’s because a breast is being fondled in public, not because of whose breast it is.”

“I don’t think I could be as cool about it as you are.”

“I don’t think it’s being cool,” I said. “Seriously, it’s not like it would bother me but I’m making an effort and choice not to be bothered. It’s not like I got involved with her and then found out that she was a nymph, or how she spent her time… how open she is about sex shocked me at first, and I guess it still does, sometimes… not ‘shock’ in the sense of surprise, but more like jarring my ingrained sensibilities, I suppose. But that’s got nothing to do with any feeling that I have some kind of exclusive claim on her and more to do with having been brought up to believe that sex is something that pretty much no one should be having ever, and that all the sex that isn’t had should happen behind closed doors.”

“You still feel that way?”

“If you asked me if I believed that, I’d say ‘no’,” I said. “Because I don’t. But do I feel that way? Yeah. Not with the intensity of a thousand exploding fireballs or anything, but I get a twinge of it every now and then. I think I’m lucky in that my mother didn’t really do anything to instill that in me… she didn’t go out of her way to teach me about the birds and the bees at an early age, or try to instill a bunch of stuff about free love in me, either… but she wasn’t religious and didn’t try to pound any religious ideas about sexual morality into me. So it’s part of my upbringing, but only part of my later upbringing… my grandmother was able to pound it in pretty deeply, but not as deeply as she might have if she’d had more access to me sooner.”

“You know what surprised me about your grandmother?” Nicki said. “That the White Dragons are a Universalist order.”

“Well, the Universal and the Mother Temples are the ones that have the most orders of paladins and monks,” I said. “And the Imperial Republic’s not very likely to sanction a metro order, or vice-versa… and my grandmother wouldn’t have joined it if they did.”

“That’s what I meant, though,” she said. “I never would have guessed she was a Universalist. I would have guessed her to be some kind of Khersian Essentialist. I mean, I think of places back east as being more Universal Temple territory than south central Magisteria.”

“Well, that’s pretty true,” I said. “But it’s not like temples buy exclusive franchises. I’m not sure why my grandmother settled around Blackwater of all places, but now that I’m thinking about it, I think maybe the fact that it wasn’t part of the Universalist stronghold might have influenced her. She has a lot of respect for the institution and its offices, but I think maybe she likes the idea of hierarchy more than she likes being part of one.”

“She always wants to be in charge?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Because officially she has a lot of old-fashioned ideas about women and our place… but I think maybe she needs to be in charge, and chafes when she isn’t, or when she thinks the people in charge are doing things wrong. So she just stays away from it all. If she paid attention to what the Pontifex was doing, she might have an opinion about it.”

“Doesn’t the fact that she thinks she could do better tell her that she’s wrong about women?”

“On some level, I’m sure,” I said. “But my grandmother already believes that people… women especially… are prone to ‘error’, so when that happens it’s probably pretty easy for her to tell herself that she’s wrong for thinking she’s wrong. I don’t know… it’s not like I spend a lot of time analyzing my grandmother’s thought processes. I really don’t like thinking about the way she thinks in general. It’s just not always possible to avoid it, after spending most of a decade living with her.”

“Do you still live with her?”

“No,” I said. “Right now, officially, I don’t live anywhere except the school.”

“Seriously? Where does your mail go?”

“To the school,” I said. “I think they still have my grandmother’s place as my official address, but I was here all summer so I got all my enrollment stuff for the new semester through the intracampus system.”

As we spoke, Amaranth appeared to be saying farewell to her escorts, exchanging embraces and kisses with several of them. The girl who’d been hanging off of her appeared to be especially reluctant to let go of her, which just made me feel even more embarrassed by proxy. Amaranth gave up and led her onto the grassy dance floor instead.

“I think that girl’s got it hard,” Nicki said.

“You know, if you want to know who likes girls, hanging out with Amaranth might be a good way to find out,” I said.

“Seriously?”

“Well, yeah,” I said, a second before I realized that her disbelief wasn’t at the idea of Amaranth as a walking spell of detect lesbian tendencies but at the idea of her hanging out with Amaranth. “I mean, she’s really easy to get along with… I’m sure she’ll like you.”

Of course, while it wasn’t what I’d meant, Amaranth actually could literally detect lesbian tendencies, and other facets of a person’s romantic and sexual being. Outing people for the convenience of a friend would be inappropriate, but now that I was thinking about it, Amaranth had to know other people who were in the same position as Nicki, and playing middleman or matchmaker for a couple of them was exactly the sort of good deed she’d enjoy doing.

“Hey,” I said. “Maybe Amaranth could set you up?”

“I don’t know… I mean, beggars and choosers and all that, but that chick seems a little aggressive for me,” Nicki said. “Oh, sorry… I don’t know if that’s one of your friends or not.”

“I didn’t necessarily mean her in particular,” I said. “And no, I don’t know who that is, either.”

Amaranth’s dancing partner was short, as I’d mentioned… a bit shorter than me, judging by how she looked next to Amaranth. She was a bit more built than I was, still mostly on the skinny side. Her hair was brown, and maybe a little reddish… though that could have been the fact that they were standing under an orange paper lantern.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen her before, but I don’t really pay a lot of attention… and Amaranth tries to meet as many people from around the school as she can,” I said.

“Oh,” Nicki said. “It just seemed like…”

“Like what?”

“I can’t imagine being that close to someone I didn’t already know,” she said.

“I can’t, either,” I said. “But a lot of other people don’t have that problem. Anyway, maybe they do know each other. Amaranth has a much bigger social circle than I do.”

“Oh, hey!” a voice said from behind us. “I thought it was you.”

I processed whose voice it was as I was turning around to face her: Twyla.

We’d never really come to an official conclusion about what we were going to do about going to the dance, which meant that Ian’s idea of not worrying about who was officially going with whom sort of unofficially won by default. Amaranth and I talked about it briefly and decided that we would each go over on our own, to give her some time to spend circulating around one of the dorms since she’d spent the night getting intimate acquainted with a book instead of performing her nymphly duties. She’d still be there to step in if I needed support or if things got weird or uncomfortable with Nicki.

On a certain level, this made the whole thing a lot easier. Not sweating over who I was going with somehow meant that I was sweating a lot less over things like what I was going to wear and worrying less about who else would be there or what they might think or say… of course, noticing how little I was worrying made me start to worry, but I was able to cut that line of thought off fairly quickly.

I did have to give some thought to what I would wear, but I decided to just go with one of my nicer dark blue pairs of jeans and a black fitted tee with a bit of an actual neckline… not exactly the stuff I would have pulled on after rolling out of bed if I still got dressed by rolling out of bed and pulling on what I found underneath it, but not exactly the sort of big production I’d gone with for my first dances.

I had a few skirts, mostly gifts from Amaranth and Steff, and even one that had been a Khersentide gift from Two, but I didn’t feel fully comfortable in them. The shorter ones left me feeling exposed and the longer ones just felt ridiculous. I could navigate either of those feelings in the context of submission, but I wasn’t going out in sub mode.

I did let Two put my hair up in barrettes, after I asked her how I looked and she asked me what I was doing with my hair in a way that suggested that ”nothing” was not an available option. I had a feeling that Amaranth would approve of the effort, and Two certainly enjoyed it.

It was a little weird to think of a golem who’d spent the majority of her life living in what basically sounded like a display case playing dress-up doll with me, but that was how I felt any time Two took an interest in my appearance.

“Thank you,” I said when she was finished and had pronounced the effect to be suitably cute.

“You’re welcome, Mack,” she said. “You can pay me back for the barrettes later.”

“Um, I wasn’t planning on keeping them,” I said.

“I do not expect you to, either,” she said, and I understood her meaning.

“You will get them back, Two,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “I will be very pleasantly surprised when that does happen.”

She was being very matter-of-fact about it, not snotty at all or anything, but it was definitely irritating the way she just assumed I would lose or ruin anything I borrowed from her. Okay, yes, that had happened before, but it was one thing to extrapolate a future pattern from past events and it was another thing to… the point is there was a good chance that I could get through the night without losing a barrette.

With half the day gone and the dance ahead, I was basically setting Sunday aside for homework… I’d had a tendency to do that during the slower parts of my freshman year anyway, because I could usually take it to the library and so still keep that part of my social routine.

There was one part of my design assignment that couldn’t wait, though… asking for Steff’s help in bringing my vision, such as it was, to life. If she wasn’t willing or able to help me, I’d have to get cracking on my own sketches all the earlier to make sure that I was able to adequately convey my intentions with them. I wasn’t exactly a terrible artist, but I had managed to improve my grade in a junior high art class by keeping my mouth shut while the teacher explained what she thought I’d been painting.

Steff had said she might drop in at the dance, which made me think that she probably would… but I thought it would probably be a mistake to assume that I’d see her there, so I wandered over in the direction of Harlowe to see if I could find her.

It was weird how this could feel both completely normal and extremely strange at the same time. Harlowe had been my home for the better part of a year… not even my home-away-from-home, but my only home. I hadn’t had anywhere to go back to over the holidays or at the end of the year. It had been where I’d met most of my current friends, and I’d felt like I belonged there more than anywhere else on campus… but I’d never really felt like a member of the crowd there.

As a participant in and occasionally alleged ringleader of the so-called Harlowe Exodus, I felt doubly out of place when I thought about going back to it.

I knew that going into Harlowe and up to Steff’s room during daylight hours wouldn’t be violating any rules… you couldn’t get around a campus having as much anxiety as I tend to have about doing things wrong or being in the wrong place and not become acquainted with the rules regarding things like visitation and what buildings are open when and stuff like that. But the room she shared with Viktor was on the boys’ side, and it was the room she shared with Viktor and both of those were reasons for me to feel a touch of trepidation about the whole thing.

I’d learned long ago that the best way to get along with Steff’s primary partner was from a distance. They had a mirror in their room, but I knew I could get Steff’s attention from the hallway without disturbing Viktor if he were trying to sleep or compose. From what I knew about him, it seemed like he did very little else.

It turned out that luck was with me, because Steff wasn’t in her room… she was wandering the pathways around campus, as she often did when she needed to think. And, as she often did, she noticed that I was out and about and took the opportunity to sneak up on me. This time, she goosed me right as I reached the door from the nexus into Harlowe Hall.

“How long were you following me?” I asked her after I’d settled back into my skin.

“Just since you came around the corner of the complex,” she said. “Look at you, half dressed up. Is this for your new stalker?”

“It’s for the dance,” I said. “And just because I have a new stalker doesn’t mean I love you any less.”

“Well, at least she’s having a positive effect on your banter,” she said. “But it seems the stalker has become the stalkee… you were looking for me?”

“Yeah, actually, I was,” I said.

“Let me guess: you wanted to tell me the latest about Twyla?”

“I’m actually a little tired of talking about her,” I said. “I mean, it’s interesting, but I’ve got to get on with my school stuff. If you’re really dying to hear Amaranth’s theory about the alchemical properties of copper and its alloys…”

“Boring,” Steff said. “If you can’t drink it, it’s not real alchemy, and I’m not supposed to be doing that anyway.”

“Okay, then I’ve got this assignment for my design class that I need to get some drawings done for. I’ve spoken to the teacher about it, and it wouldn’t be cheating if I supplement my sketches with your art.”

“Why would you want to do that?” she asked.

“Because it would be a lot better than just turning in my sketches,” I said. “Steff, you can draw the pants off me.”

“Yes, and I have sketchbooks full of drawings that prove it,” she said. “But ‘art’ isn’t exactly the best word for what I do. It’s very flattering, but I think your feelings about me are clouding your vision… and that’s flattering, too, but I know your grades are like a big deal to you and I don’t want to be the reason they suffer now… not after all the times I held back to avoid distracting you.”

“It doesn’t have to be great art or anything,” I said, even though Steff’s quick sketches were pretty great. “I’ll just be supplementing my sketches with your slightly better sketches.”

“How much difference can that actually make?”

“More than you might think,” I said. “Whatever you think of your actual talent, you know you’re better than me.”

“That’s true, I guess,” she said. “What are we talking about, anyway?”

“The project is to redesign a modern utilitarian product in a way that’s more… elegant, I guess. I want to take a TV and make it look like a fish tank.”

“And you can’t draw some rectangles?”

“Well, it’s the decorations inside the fish tank… illusionary, obviously… that are the subject of the design,” I said.“And I have something kind of specific in mind. I want a castle and a treasure chest that sort of match the old TV from the fifth floor girls’ side of Harlowe.”

“You mean the one you broke?”

“The one Sooni broke, yes,” I said. “My teacher was evidently a fan of it.”

“Does he know you broke it?”

“I don’t know who he thinks broke it,” I said.

“Sounds like it would be smarter to avoid anything that would make him think of it,” she said.

“It’s a little late for that,” I said. “Anyway, I’m not great at this kind of thing in general, so I’m trying to work the angle that I have. I know he likes this kind of thing. I don’t really have much else to go on here.”

I might have said that I really needed her help or that I would seriously owe her, but it was a little early in the year to be handing an emotional marker like that over to Steff. I loved her, and I was pretty sure that she loved me… but if I gave her something like that, she would totally use it.

I wasn’t one hundred percent opposed to that, but I wasn’t in the mood for it at the moment.

“I don’t know, Mack… I like to doodle, but that’s just thinking out loud with my hands,” she said. “I’m really not great at the detail work.”

“That’s okay… I don’t need finished drawings, just rough concept sketches to get the general idea across,” I said.

“Then why do you need me at all?”

“My sketches are going to be a lot sketchier than yours,” I said. “Yours would at least be able to convey the resemblance. Besides, I have a feeling that your specific style might be better for this particular project.”

It was really a matter of quality over style, but I figured that Steff would be less likely to argue if I said I was looking for her style than if I told pushed the quality issue.

“I don’t know,” Steff said. “You know, I’ve got homework of my own… when you get up into the three hundred level classes the profs aren’t shy about bringing the rocks down during the first week.”

“If you don’t have time, I understand, but what I’m looking for is really basic,” I said. “If it takes you more than half an hour, you’re probably going into too much detail.”

“When do you need it?”

“Tuesday,” I said. “But… they have to be based on my sketches, and I’m not going to have them until tomorrow.”

“Well… I can probably find half an hour to sketch a castle between Sunday night and Tuesday morning,” Steff said. “But no promises about quality.”

“The treasure chest is the more important part,” I said. “And I’m not asking for any promises. Whatever you can manage will be better than what I can do on my own.”

“That much is definitely true,” Steff said. “Okay… I’ll do it. If only so you can get some official feedback from someone who actually knows something about art.”

“What if he comes back and tells me that he loves your drawings?”

“Then he’s a walking argument against tenure,” Steff said. “Do you want to bring the sketches over to my room tomorrow?”

“Um… I was thinking I’d just see you at dinner tomorrow night, so…”

Steff laughed.

“Relax,” she said. “I’m just messing with you… I’ve seen you walk into a lawyer’s den with less dread than you had on your face coming over here.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said. “It’s nothing personal, I just…”

“I don’t mind,” she said. “Viktor and I are going to be co-overlords some day, so it’s really kind of good if people quiver a little at the thought of facing him in his lair.”

“I don’t think the other ogres are going to be quite as easily intimidated as I am,” I said.

“I don’t think burrow gnomes are as easily intimidated as you are,” Steff said. “Anyway, I have to go get ready for the dance, and since I doubt you want to tag along…”

“So you’re definitely going?” I asked.

“No, but I’m definitely going to be ready in case I do.”

“He came back,” Ian said, while I was still searching for my own response.

It was all he had to say.

“Oh, baby,” Amaranth said. She pushed the book away and threw her arms around me. “I hope you showed him the door.”

“Eventually,” I said. “He had some things to say before that.”

I repeated the story again. Amaranth listened patiently as I gave her the background leading up to the important bit.

“Baby,” Amaranth began carefully after I’d said it, “have you…”

“Never thought of this before? No, I really honestly hadn’t,” I said. “And I’m sorry for interrupting, but I’ve had three different people ask me that so far today, counting you.”

“Who else have you told?” Amaranth asked.

“Just Dee,” I said. “I figured she was likely to overhear eventually, and she generally gives good advice. She had some… interesting… ideas, but the big conclusion was that we need to understand his motives.”

I was skipping over some things, but I also I hadn’t told Ian all of what Dee had said. Her idea about the man’s designs for me were not something I really wanted to discuss any further at the moment… talking about them with Dee had been one thing, if only because her differing views on family stopped her from seeing the full extent of the awfulness. Talking about it with someone from my own culture… that just made it too real to face, especially when it was nothing more than Dee’s theory.

“Did she have any ideas about how to do that?” Amaranth asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Her suggestion was to contact people who would have known my mother, way back when… the most likely person I could think of is my Aunt Jo. She was the closest sibling in age to my mother, and the only one she really kept in touch with.”

“Were you ever close to her?”

“Not especially,” I said. “The times that we met, there were always other adult relatives around and since I never saw them very often they all just sort of blurred together. I’ll have to think if I can even remember her last name. Her full first name is Joanne, and I’m pretty sure it’s one word. I don’t know what kind of reception I can expect from her… Dee has the idea that she might be happy to hear from me, but I don’t know.”

“I really imagine she would be ecstatic!” Amaranth said. “I mean, wouldn’t you be happy to re-connect with someone who was so close to your mother?”

“When you put it that way, I feel like I should be,” I said. “But honestly, I can’t help thinking of her as someone connected to my grandmother.”

“Even though I’m sure she loves her mother, I can’t imagine that Joanne isn’t aware that she has her faults,” Amaranth said. “You shouldn’t think of her as being on Martha’s side or against you.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I’m not even talking about allegiances or anything like that… it’s just the way my memories of her are grouped in my mind. I’m not saying I’m going to be treating everything she says with suspicion or being all defensive with her or anything, just… it’s not easy for me to think of her as my family. She’s my mom’s family, which means she’s my grandmother’s family.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” Amaranth said. “Or at least, I can understand how it makes sense to you.”

“Makes perfect sense to me,” Ian said. “My dad’s family are all kind of lumped together in my head in one giant, vaguely dick-ish pile. Dealing with the ones who are mostly pretty okay usually means dealing with the ones who aren’t, so they all kind of sound warnings in my head when I think about them.”

“Anyway,” Amaranth said, “after all this, I guess you’re probably not very interested in anything else right now.”

“I’d love to know what you found out last night,” I said. “The fact that it’s hard for me to think of anything except the possibility that my father killed my mother doesn’t mean that I don’t want to think about other things.”

“Okay,” she said. She went over to the desk and produced the book, which she flipped open to an index card. “Is this your shirtless warrior?”

When I looked at the picture, I was sure it was. None of the details had particularly stood out to me at the time when I’d had no idea it would even be slightly important, but looking at it now I recognized the image of the sun in the upper right corner and the upraised arm of the warrior holding a brownish-colored sword.

“Yeah,” I said. “This is what Professor Bohd was reading when I walked into her office.”

“The story is called ‘Hasan, The Sun, and The Warrior All In Bronze’ in this translation,” Amaranth said. “The picture doesn’t show him wearing it, but the text describes the warrior as wearing a bronze breastplate and helmet that protects him from ifrit magic, and having a magical bronze sword… which probably marks it as one the earlier human stories in this book.”

“I don’t think that’s anything special about the bronze,” I said. “‘Bronze’ used to be almost synonymous with ‘magical’ when it came to arms and armor, because it was stronger than cold iron to begin with… and a lot better at holding magic. So bronze swords were often assumed to be enchanted by people who didn’t have them, and a lot of the time they were.”

“I know all that, baby, but I think there’s more to it than that,” Amaranth said. “Throughout these stories, ifrits are trapped in brass bottles and copper rings, walled in with bronze blocks, and here they’re being defeated by a warrior armed with bronze equipment. It really seems like there’s a recurring theme of copper and copper-based metals as a weakness.”

“Or it could just be a recurring theme because bronze and brass were really impressive at the time the stories were written,” I said. “Maravaya was centuries ahead of everybody else in terms of alchemy… that’s where we get the word ‘alchemy’ from.”

“Well, the root is elven,” Amaranth said. “But you’re right about where it entered Pax.”

“My point is that they were outfitting their soldiers with durable bronze blades and dressing their cities up with shiny brass ornaments when humans elsewhere and almost everyone else who lived above ground was making do with the iron and gold they managed to stumble across,” I said. “It was automatically impressive, and they knew it.”

“I’m pretty sure ifrits live in palaces made out of brass,” Ian said. “Or at least, the guys in my dad’s order think they do… there’s like one line in the Crimson Oath about ifrits in their brass palaces.”

“What’s it say?” I asked.

“‘…and by the ifrits in their brass palaces’,” Ian said. “It’s just one thing in a whole big laundry list of things they’re swearing by, along with the salamanders, phoenixes, fire giants, and the great red dragons. That’s why I didn’t mention it before.”

“Why would anybody swear by giants and dragons in the same oath?” I asked. “They’re enemies.”

“Well, it’s not like a pledge of allegiance or earnest statement of principle,” Ian said. “Really, it’s more just a really long way of saying ‘hey, we like fire’ than anything else.”

“Ian, do you suppose your father would know more about ifrits?” Amaranth said. “I’ve thought about asking around the elementalism department here, but it might be a sensitive subject because of Professor Bohd’s position within it.”

“It’s possible,” Ian said. “But that wouldn’t be a conversation I’d look forward to having.”

“I’m sure your father would be happy that you were taking an interest in pyromancy,” Amaranth said.

“Overjoyed,” Ian said. “That’s why I wouldn’t look forward to it. The other problem is that if he doesn’t know, he would never admit it to me, so I might come back with nothing but tall tales.”

“I’ve actually heard the thing about the palaces, too,” Amaranth said. “But that still makes sense… if you were an extremely powerful creature of elemental flame, would you want to live in a palace that could be melted or burned by a careless flare-up? Anyway, it makes sense to me… Professor Bohd would have been looking for protections and countermeasures.”

“I suppose,” I said. “I don’t think it’s all that relevant to us, though… we know we don’t need countermeasures against Twyla.”

“Not everything has to be relevant to be interesting,” Amaranth said. “And anyway, don’t you think it might be relevant to Twyla?”

“If she had a serious allergy to copper, I think she would have noticed by now,” Ian said.

“Yeah,” I said. “That would be even harder to avoid than the elven thing with iron, or the human sensitivity to lead. It would make handling money uncomfortable.”

“The story’s not written like copper is something that harms ifrits,” Amaranth said. “Just something that can repel and contain their power. If she’s having problems with her fire nature, that could give her a place to start.”

“If it’s true,” I said. “I’d hate to tell her that some copper bracelets or whatever will keep her safe and then have this all be a huge misinterpretation.”

“Well, obviously you’d have to tell her that certain stories suggest this might be the case, and then it would be fairly easy for her to test,” Amaranth said. “I mean, copper’s not hard to come by.”

“No, but you can’t exactly melt it over a candle flame,” Ian said. “Even a bonfire doesn’t get hot enough to melt copper coins… a certain amount of semi-supervised playing with fire was part of my childhood.”

“Well, we don’t have to come up with a test right this second for it to be a valid idea,” Amaranth said. “I was thinking more about seeing how copper protects things from the heat of her fire… anyway, as curious as I am about all this, Twyla has such a shy demeanor that I have to imagine she’d be more comfortable trying this stuff out on her own than in front of an audience.”

“Am I the best person to be explaining this to her?” I asked. “It’s your theory… I’m not saying I think you’re wrong, but I’m really not sure that you’re right.”

“Well, I’m not sure, either,” Amaranth said. “Maybe you could see how Twyla responds to your approach? If she’s receptive enough to hear you out, you could tell her that I helped you find out more about ifrits and suggest she talks to me? You wouldn’t have to go into a lot of detail about how much we’ve been talking about her.”

“Figuring out the best way to lie to her to get her to trust you seems like a weird way to try to patch up a friendship,” Ian said.

“Well, it’s not that I want to be less than honest with her,” Amaranth said. “I just… want the truth to be presented in a way that won’t be hurtful.”

“I think you just need to lay it on the line,” Ian said. “Don’t act all furtive about it and she probably won’t think anything about the fact that you were talking to your friends about it.”

“Or she might be seriously hurt by it,” I said.

“Sure,” Ian said. “But that’s her right. I mean, we have been talking about her business for a couple days now. She’s entitled to opinions about that.”

“When you say it like that… I’m starting to wonder if it really is best to wait until Tuesday to tell her,” I said. “Because it is her business, isn’t it? I mean, the alternative is that we could spend another three days speculating among ourselves while she doesn’t have a clue.”

“You do have a point,” Amaranth said. “But how would you approach her, if not in class?”

“I say get her a-mail from the student directory,” Ian said. “Send her a message saying that you’re sorry about Bohd, you didn’t know she’d have that reaction but now you think you understand it and can explain it if she wants to hear. That leaves it kind of up to her and to fate.”

“A lot of students don’t bother with their university a-mail if they don’t have a teacher who uses it to communicate with them,” Amaranth said.

“Well, yeah, that’s the fate part,” Ian said. “This is basically what I do when I’m dreading talking to someone, or when I want to talk to them but I can’t figure out a non-awkward way to do it.”

“That isn’t a bad idea,” Amaranth said. “And if you don’t get a response, you have an opening on Tuesday… you can ask her if she saw it.”

“But if she has and she’s just ignoring it, that’s going to be more awkward,” I said. “I guess that’s the risk I have to take… it’s kind of nice that it’s the biggest risk. I mean, I can’t picture Twyla taking a swing at me, or throwing a shoe at my head, much less actually trying to harm me. I’ll figure out what to write tonight, after the dance.”

“So, you do still want to go to that?” Amaranth asked.

“Absolutely,” I said. “If I hide in my room every time he rears his head inside mine… well, that wouldn’t make a lot of sense as a response, in the first place. I already let him wreck most of a night’s sleep, I’m not giving him the rest of my weekend.”

“Oh, poor baby,” Amaranth said. “You mean you didn’t sleep last night?”

“Not well,” I said. “Or well, but not enough.”

“So, you want to go back to bed, then?”

“Well,” I said. “Since you asked… yes.”