This meant that every time I came out of my spellbinding lab, I could easily spend an hour or two working on what I’d learned before and after lunch if I needed to, or wanted to. Okay, there would be some days I’d need to give up some of that copious free time for my assignments for my other classes, or to practice stuff for Callahan’s class… but the five-credit impact on my GPA of the fighting class and Amaranth’s first task notwithstanding, spellbinding was really going to be the centerpiece of my schedule.

Instead of heading back to Gilcrease immediately, I found an empty lab room that had suitably rune-reinforced targets for destructive evocations in order to get a jump start for Wednesday. I expected it to be empty on the first day of classes, but there were about a half dozen kids in there messing around. It was kind of surprising to me that my brain instantly coded them as “kids”. It had to do with the way they all were startled when I walked in and assumed various shades of we-weren’t-doing-anything. The fading sparks and smell of smoke in the room argued otherwise, but then, that was what the room was for.

Ah, freshmen… or sophomores who still hadn’t quite shed the freshman mindset. The college experience often lacked clear signposts for what was within limits. The lab had a paper sign taped up outside that clearly stated when it was open and free for student use, but it lacked an adult authority standing there and saying, “Yes, this means you. You can come in and use this room. You don’t have to check with anyone. You don’t need to be told by your teacher to come here. You don’t have to show a pass.”

I wasn’t going to look down my nose at or laugh at anyone who was still all furtive and cautious about using the resources that were set aside for them. I’d pretty much been the same way all the way up through the end of my freshman year. If I hadn’t been kicking around a much less densely populated campus with none of my friends there all summer, I probably would have still been in the same boat.

I ignored them and got down to my work, and eventually they went back to their kind of sloppy magical missile-slinging.

When broken down to its components, the spell we’d done in class was nothing but a series of elemental invocations, and I was good at that. My infernal heritage gave me an affinity for pulling fire out from where it lurked inside other elemental matter. That had given me an insight on dealing with the other elements, and things like light or sound that behaved in a pseudoelemental fashion.

It only took a little thought and a few tries for me to make a tiny little thunderclap without using a spell formula. It was just a matter of working out the discrete steps that went into it and writing it out in my workbook.

Step one was to invoke air. That was both easy and hard. Air was all around me. Compared to something like the earth in a brick wall or the unexpressed fire in a candle wick, it was reasonably pure, as elemental manifestations in the physical world went. But air was also nebulous and hard to get a “hold” on. The real trick in invoking air was to pick out a particular bit of it and isolate it.

Step two was to impel it into motion… basically, call forth the elemental air from the extant material air in a particular direction. To push air away from one’s body, an invoker had to be able to “pull” it from an external point. That was a little trickier. Trickier still was making it snap. I didn’t want a breeze or even a gust, I wanted a clap… air bursting through air. It was like the difference between a wave and a slap. I could do it, but it took a few tries and then the spell didn’t travel very far. Well, the stock version hadn’t had much range to it, either.

Things like this were why formal spells were useful, even if they lacked versatility. I could invoke elements in any way I could imagine all day long, but if I wanted to do something complicated it really helped to have a formula to follow. When I found the trick to making the air snap, I jotted down a rough draft of it in the symbolic language of spells and then followed that. It was pretty satisfying to make the air crack like a whip.

I had a feeling it would be a useful trick in its own right, if I found myself in a tight spot… painful and distracting, but not terribly dangerous. I wasn’t planning on finding myself in situations where I would need to be able to deliver a painful smack from across a small room, but after my experiences of the previous year I decided it would be good to be a little more prepared.

I took one of my empty wands and managed to layer five charges of what I was thinking of as the whip-crack spell into it. I used up two of the charges testing it… one to make sure it had worked, and then another one after adding an accuracy enhancement that was sustained by the stored charges. That last flourish would mean that I’d have to periodically recharge the wand even if I never used it, but I really wasn’t much of a natural battlemage. There was little point in having a self-defense spell that I couldn’t hit with.

A little bit after I started producing the crack, I became conscious of the sensation of eyes on me. I don’t know what triggered it… possibly it was the awareness that the room had gone quiet even though I hadn’t heard anyone leaving. I didn’t look over… my newfound semi-confidence did not extend to enjoying being the center of strangers’ attention, and looking over would probably invite conversation.

I realized that while they were zapping and blasting sparks and flames at the rune-lined bullseyes, I was just shooting puffs of air. Before I managed to produce the snap, it must have looked like I was doing approximately nothing. My brain wanted to wonder what they thought I was up to, but I didn’t let it. It didn’t matter what they thought, I told myself. I didn’t even know if they thought anything bad. It wasn’t like they were audibly snickering or anything.

I started focusing all my attention on the center of the bullseye when I wasn’t looking at my notebook, even though my spell was stopping well short of it. Having something to focus on let me narrow my world to just me and my task. It was how I’d dealt with the torment of classmates in high school. I wasn’t exactly being tormented at that moment, of course, but I really had hoped to find a room that was either empty or containing other people who were equally focused on their own tasks.

Even with the audible snap, I was still doing only half of the spell… the stock one had ended with a spark or flash. I could make a flash of light or fire easily enough, and I could string that together with the little mini thunderclap, but that hadn’t been what we were doing. The snap was supposed to end in a spark… sort of the reverse of a lightning bolt splitting the air to unleash thunder. That was the really tricky part.

It took me the better part of half an hour of trying to realize that I wasn’t going to unlock the secret all by myself right then and there, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that I’d identified where the real problem was. I had another day to work on it before the class met again, and even if I made no further progress I would go in armed with this insight into the problem. The less time it took me to unravel the basic spell, the more time I would have to work on making it my own.

And of course, if I knew where I needed help I wouldn’t lose much time if I had to ask Acantha for assistance. I found that I liked her. It was pretty obvious she wasn’t used to leading a class… it wasn’t so much that her massive verbal outflow style of speaking would have been any better one-on-one, but I imagined it came from inexperience with addressing her instructions to a large group. She had done much better when dealing with individual students.

I especially liked her grading system, and the fact that she’d articulated how it would work for the day… an average grade for efficiently duplicating the spell, higher grades for improving on it. I wondered what would count as an improvement. Things like longer range, a louder snap, and a bigger or brighter spark were obvious improvements. Obviously they would count towards a higher grade, but I had a suspicion that going for less obvious choices might count for more.

But what would qualify? Would something cosmetic, like adding color or other visual highlights, be considered an “improvement”? I didn’t know much about fashion, but the way Acantha dressed and the fact that she colored her hair made me think she was probably pretty conscious of things like personal style. Would putting something like a personal stamp on the spell count as an improvement?

To play it safe I figured I should probably try for at least two technical improvements in order to secure my grade and then throw in a flourish to try to earn teacher-impressing-points.

If I wanted any chance of reaching that goal during the hour of allotted class time, that would mean trying to crack the secret of the spell before Wednesday’s class. That wasn’t a big deal. I’d had a somewhat rocky transition from the point where I was able to get most of my classwork done in class to spending as much or more of my own time on it, but at least this was for something related to my major.

Making cheap offensive spells and charging up wands with them was the least of what I wanted to be able to do as an enchanter. These were such easy and basic techniques and they had been around for so long that the catacombs and caves of the world were basically littered with discarded wands, staves, and rods with a handful of charges for some random spell in them.

But it was real enchantment, and I’d be doing it.

Acantha had talked about parallel sequences… that meant that by the end of the semester, I’d be able to load my blank staff up with one instance each of a bunch of spells and dump a ton of energy into it as charges I could expend without burning off any of the spells. I realized as I thought about it that even if I couldn’t get a permanent size-changing spell on it, I would be able to put shrinking and expanding spells in it and just recharge it from time to time.

I realized I couldn’t do parallel charges yet, but there didn’t seem to be any reason I couldn’t load up a few instances of size changing in each direction. I’d only be able to trigger them off in sequence, but that was no problem… I knew what order I’d want to use the spells in: shrink, grow, shrink, grow. I decided to let my energy levels regenerate a little over lunch and then I’d go try it out. It might actually impress Callah… Coach Callahan… if when I showed up at her class at the end of the day, I could demonstrate that I was actually carrying my weapon with me at all times.

This wasn’t the sort of modern stuff I wanted to do with my life, but it was an important first step and… well, I had to admit that part of me found the wizardly trappings pretty cool. I would never put on a robe and hat like Ian’s dad or the more traditionalist professors.

When we all met for lunch in the old dining hall… somehow nothing more than the plan to check out the Arch’s dining facilities for dinner had transformed this one into “the old dining hall” in my mind… everyone was excited about their morning classes. I was, too, but where Amaranth’s excitement made her talkative, I just kept thinking about the possibilities… the possible applications for what I’d learned, the possibilities for what I would learn.

Ian was quiet, but it was obvious he felt relieved. Not necessarily happy… it seemed he wouldn’t know the results of his audition until some time later, but at this point it was over. He’d made it through it. The world hadn’t ended. He hadn’t been laughed out of the room. His lute hadn’t caught fire or turned into a fish, and neither had his audience or himself. I don’t know that he’d actually worried about those things, but whatever worst-case scenario he’d envisioned had not come to pass.

Dee was also quiet, but she seemed to be content. Something about her seemed softer than it had the year before. Maybe I was better at reading her facial expressions, or maybe she’d grown more expressive. She was definitely covering up less, at least when she was indoors. Her cowl was hanging down her back and she was wearing her cloak up off her shoulders. The voluminous priestess robes underneath didn’t exactly show off skin, but the fact that she was showing off the robes made her seem a lot more open to the world.

Steff was sketching in her notebook. Seeing this made me happy, because she was an incredible artist… but her full-blooded elven teachers had made her really self-conscious about her artistic endeavors, so I didn’t want to call attention to it.

Also there was a good chance that whatever she was drawing wasn’t something anyone else would want to see while we were eating. She was an incredible artist, but her tastes tended to run dark… and red.

Strangely, after Amaranth, the most sociable one at the table was Two. She seemed to pick up her friend Hazel’s outgoing attitude for a period of time after they hung out. She also made friends easily, or else people easily befriended her… she kept saying hello to what I assumed were classmates and former classmates who went past. She also greeted at least one former floormate of ours.

“Hello, Belinda!” she said as the half-ogre stopped at the edge of the seating area, an almost empty tray held in her massive hands.

“Hey!” she said, suddenly smiling a big tusky smile and striding towards us. “Do you all mind if I join you?” She sat down without waiting for an answer, but from the way she was talking a mile a minute it seemed like it was more absentminded nerves than presumption. “I saw you this morning but I was already sitting with the Skirmish guys and I’m on my own right now, and I saw you all and I thought, you know, it’s kind of how last year started, all of us Harlowe peeps eating together… not that you’re in Harlowe, anymore. That was a crazy year, wasn’t it? We really kind of got off to the wrong foot, I mean on the wrong foot. Or to a bad start.”

“Hello, Belinda,” Amaranth said. “Sure, feel free. We’re all friends here.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Oh, and it’s Bel. I’m going by Bel now. I mean, I think I am. It’s something I’m trying.”

“Okay, Bel,” Amaranth said. She squeezed my hand under the table.

“Hey,” I said, hoping I was smiling. I felt like I was smiling, but the half-ogre made me nervous. She’d done a complete one-eighty around the time of Leda’s death, but first impressions can be a powerful thing, especially when they’re pressed in with seven feet of craggy muscle.

She was one of the people I’d shared a table with a few times in the first few days of the previous fall semester and then never again. She’d landed a position as captain of a squad in the school’s Skirmish team on the strength of being a half-ogre, with emphasis on “strength”. I guess she’d seen the presence of a supernaturally strong half-demon as an unacceptable challenge to her position… the fact that I had no interest in recreational or real fighting hadn’t mollified her at all. It had only made my existence in proximity to her all the more insulting somehow.

To say it charitably: she hadn’t exactly dealt with her insecurity well… but who could say they handled everything with perfect grace in their first year at college? I sure couldn’t. She’d managed to get over herself.

She was also long over any need to prove herself the biggest and baddest one on the block. She’d toyed with dropping out of Skirmish, but it seemed she had come to realize that despite being only the second or third strongest person in the Harlowe girls’ freshman floor, she was a better fighter than Puddy or I were… and while there was a limit to what she could do about her strength while staying within Skirmish rules, nothing stopped her from becoming the best fighter she could be.

“How are things on the hex?” Amaranth asked her, referring to the six-sided field where the Skirmish matches were fought.

“Pretty good,” Belinda… Bel… said. “I think we’re going to have a great year, especially with Rocky as co-captain of the squad. We’ve been working on strategies over the summer. We’ve also been working with the other squad captains more. You know last year they mostly tried to use us as a sort of secret weapon, but that only really works once. This year we’re really working more as an actual part of the army.”

“I thought you really pulled things together nicely at the end of the season, last year,” Amaranth said. “Granted I wasn’t watching the whole battle from the healer’s tent, but I picked up on the highlights.”

“We’ll do better this year. We’ve lost our air support and our skeleton herder, but they weren’t exactly team players to begin with, you know?”

Steff had given no sign that she was paying attention, but I heard her let out a derisive snort. If Bel heard it, she didn’t react.

Ian joined in the conversation as it continued along the same lines, and I zoned out more. Even if I was taking five hours of melee class, mock combat still wasn’t my thing.

After lunch I hurried back to Gilcrease and up to my room so I could see what I could do with my staff. I still couldn’t reliably shrink it down to a handy pocket size for very long, which was my eventual goal… but halving it was no problem, and going a little further wasn’t that hard. I settled on a length of about two feet, which was short enough that I could have it hanging off a belt loop like my paddle, and also long enough that I could possibly use it as a weapon if I had to.

I’d played around with changing its size enough that it only took me fifteen minutes to write up a workable shrinking spell. It was no different than enhancing the attribute of an item… in this case, the attributes were its dimensions and I was “enhancing” them negatively. I couldn’t have effected such a drastic alteration for long with anything else, but my staff was made to be enchanted. It was, in fact, enchanted to be enchanted.

The spell to restore it to full size was even easier, because it just had to undo the shrinking spell… and that was where I hit the first hitch in my plan. I’d been thinking of it like a toggle, because I’d always be switching back and forth. But the shrinking spell was a temporary alteration. It could last a good long time given the staff’s base enchantment, but it would wear off eventually and every time it did wear off on its own I’d be stuck wasting a charge of the reversal spell before I could shrink it again.

It was possible I could have contrived a shrink spell that would sustain itself like the seal, but that would be getting really complex. It would be weirdly recursive… the charged spell would be sustaining itself before it was cast, and when it discharged it would have to become self-sustaining, too. I couldn’t begin to wrap my mind around that.

So in the end I decided to do it halfway: I stacked five copies of the shrinking spell as charges in the staff. When I needed it big, it was no big deal to just peel them off. In fact, I realized that when I got to the point where I was ready to do the spells in parallel it would make more sense to have a shrinking spell and a general purpose enhancement-dispeller… then I could use the same stored spell to cancel the shrinking one or to strip away an opponent’s buffing effect.

All the work I’d done during my break felt kind of clumsy and had probably taken me much longer than it should have, compared to what I hoped to be capable of after a little bit more training. I imagined I’d find myself redoing all of it more than once as I learned better ways of doing things.

The funny thing was, I didn’t mind that one bit. Considering that my remaining two classes for the day were both things that had nothing to do with my major and that I was being required to take, it felt good to be able to put my lessons to a hands-on use already.

Soon: Mackenzie’s in a delving class? One taught by a semi-familiar face?? Declarative sentences end with question marks??? Come back Wednesday and find out why!

It was a weird kind of normalcy, granted, given that instead of waking up underneath Amaranth in a tiny little bed, I woke up underneath her in the middle of a great big one. The new furnishings really did have the effect of making it seem like I was waking up in an entirely new place, not the room I’d spent the last week in.

I didn’t mind that little mental reset one bit. The summer housing dorm I’d stayed in for the preceding three months had never felt anything like a home. The room in Gilcrease had felt like that: just somewhere I was staying. Somewhere with a place for me to sleep and room for me to store my stuff. Amaranth’s arrival might have been enough to turn it from “some place” into “home”, but turning it into a cozy and comfortable home with little resemblance to the crowded and strictly utilitarian place it had been was even better.

It also gave me the sense that it was more her room than mine, which I also didn’t mind… it had been years since anywhere had really felt like it was mine. While I’d made a lot of strides in dealing with it, feeling out of place was still one of my bigger sources of anxiety. How could I feel out of place in Amaranth’s room? It was where she kept her belongings. She even had a place for me.

When we unpacked her books, it occurred to me that she had a practical reason for delegating the shelving to me… it wasn’t just a matter of giving me a task for the sake of doing so. She seemed almost inherently incapable of picking up a book and just putting it on the shelf. Each one that she took out of the trunk, she ended up at least flipping through, if not sitting down to read. I like books, and I can’t pretend that none of them caught my eye, but a lot of them were things like old natural history or philosophy textbooks from the 160s or 170s… fifty, sixty years out of date and looking like they’d felt every day of it. Amaranth cooed over each and every one of them like they were children, which meant I got a dozen or two books up on the shelves for every one she took out.

“You have your class with Coach Callahan this semester, don’t you, baby?” she asked me, while paging idly through a large book about wildflowers. “The additional one you promised you’d take when she gave you a pass/fail grade last year?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. My replies were more likely to come out “yes, ma’am” than anything more conversational when I was actively working on not sounding snappish. She knew this already. We’d gone over my whole schedule before. “It’s my last class of the day, every day.”

“A five credit-hour class,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I’m taking 17 hours this semester, but don’t worry… I’m still ahead of where I need to be, credit wise, and I’m not going to slack off just because I got extra classes in over the summer.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about you slacking off in that regard,” Amaranth said. “I’m just thinking about what a bad grade in a five hour class would do to you. What grade do you think you would have earned in your last melee class, if you hadn’t been given a pass?”

“Probably a C,” I said. “That’s what Callahan thought I would end up with when she made the offer.”

“Coach Callahan,” Amaranth said. “I want you to start practicing proper respect for her.”

“I don’t think that’s going to affect my grade,” I said, then added, “ma’am.”

“No, but it will affect your attitude, which might affect your performance, which would affect your grade,” Amaranth said. “Say it.”

“Coach Callahan,” I said. “Coach Callahan told me she thought I could end up with a C.”

“If you get a C this time, it will be a third of your grade,” Amaranth said.

“Not quite a third,” I said. “Ma’am.”

“More than a quarter of it,” she said, and I couldn’t argue with that. “So we’ll have to make sure that doesn’t happen. Therefore, one of your tasks will be to get an A from her.”

“Yes, ma’… wait, you mean to get my collar, I have to get an A from Ca… Coach Callahan?”

“Whose collar?”

I lowered my eyes.

“Your collar,” I said.

“Do you not think you can get an A?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Honestly, her grading system is kind of… well… arbitrary.”

“Do you think it’s unfair?”

“I couldn’t say,” I said. “She says she assigns the grade she thinks students deserve. Anyway, even if I do get an A, that means it’ll be winter break at the earliest that I get to wear your collar.”

“I didn’t say they would be short tasks,” she said. “You’ve been mine for almost a year. If you don’t think you can wait one semester to make it ‘official’…”

“I can wait!” I said. “But… what if I don’t get the A?”

“Let’s just focus on getting the A, shall we?” she said with a broad smile, and that was all the discussion she would allow on the subject.

I sort of understood why she wouldn’t discuss alternatives. If she told me that failure would mean she’d give me some other task, that would be the same thing as saying that if I didn’t mind waiting longer I didn’t have to try to ace Coach Callahan’s class. But it felt very much like she was telling me I had to do something impossible and I wouldn’t get to wear her collar after the inevitable failure.

Still, even when she was proposing that I should scramble up the dome of the sky and peel the moon off of it for her to use as an umbrella, I loved being in her presence again. Amaranth was warmth incarnate, and I basked in her. It was like the sun had put on flesh and was now sitting on a battered sofa that looked like it was missing at least three inches of height in the form of legs.

Other than getting Amaranth’s things in order, it was an utterly routine day. We ate all of our meals in the cafeteria, we went and hung out in the library in the afternoon. It was what had become a typical Sunday in my life.

Steff and Ian went to the library with us, but they didn’t stay very long. None of us had any homework or studying to do, obviously, and the others wanted to go check out the newer additions to the campus facilities. Amaranth seemed content to just enjoy being with me in a familiar place for the moment, and of course none of the additions were new to me anymore.

I took an odd kind of comfort in the knowledge that by staying over the summer I had spent more time living on campus than about half of the undergraduate student body, assuming an even distribution of students over the four years. In our little group, Steff had been at MU longer than I had but she’d missed out on the changes over the summer.

“It’s kind of a shame we won’t be here when the library gets remodeled,” Amaranth said, in between flitting between books. “It’s part of the five year plan, but there are no funds allocated for it yet, which means it probably won’t be done in the next two years.”

“I’m kind of glad,” I said. “I like the library the way it is.”

The multistory school library was one of the biggest and the nicest library I’d ever been in. The municipal library in downtown Enwich was bigger and more impressive looking on the outside, but its inside was kind of dingy and institutional-looking. The MU library was very modern in its design. Its floor plan was very open and well-lit, with skylights on the top floor and a lot of glass in the front that illuminated all three stories. I couldn’t imagine a building on campus in less need of renovation.

“Well, I look at it this way,” Amaranth said. “If they expand it, it’ll have room for more books. Anyway, it’s hard to say what will happen in the next four years… Bethany Davies is laying out all these big changes, but she’s not staying to see them through.”

“You seem really up on this stuff,” I said.

“I got the Gazetteer, the alumni newsletter, and the Enwich Times in Paradise Valley so I could keep up on it,” Amaranth said. “Last year none of us really came here with our eyes all the way open… I didn’t want to make that mistake again. Anyway, it’s obvious Chancellor Davies is concerned about the legacy she’s leaving now that she’s retiring. I just hope she’s thinking about more than buildings and landscaping projects.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, it’s not like we’re not giving her plenty of opportunity to get her name attached to something positive.”

My case against the school for the little matter of one of their employees warding me inside a room with a divine seal and another one accidentally dumping me into the ancient magical labyrinth used for delving exercises was still pending, though a settlement offer was on the table that would let them off the hook without much financial hardship or metaphorical egg on their collective and equally metaphorical faces.

They’d have to admit wrongdoing, of course, but since what we were really looking for was improvements in the handling of racial matters there was plenty of room for a moderately skilled P.R. department to spin the whole thing into something good for the school.

“I keep wanting to ask if Lee knows you’re back,” Amaranth said. Lee Jenkins, of course, was my lawyer, who was handling my arbitration case against the school and who had helped me out in some of the bigger trouble spots of my freshman year. “But of course you didn’t leave.”

“Yeah, we’ve been in touch,” I said. “He’s inviting us to the wedding reception, by the way. It’s in the first weekend in Polyantha, so if you want to go you’ll probably want to make arrangements to stay past the end of the year next semester.”

“I would have thought it would have happened already,” Amaranth said. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised they’re opting for a longer engagement, with his career and all.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “His wedding’s been pushed back by his in-laws-to-be again… something about an insufficient bridal gift. They want time to put together a better offering.”

“I can’t imagine he cares about that,” Amaranth said.

“I’ve got the idea that it would be insulting for him to tell them that,” I said.

Lee didn’t talk about himself very much, but when he did he was really talking about his fiancee, K’thindi. She had a half-orc mother who’d raised her orcish, and they were a close-knit family. The stereotypical view of orcs wouldn’t lead one to imagine they could approve of someone with a white collar job, but most cultures tend to view someone who makes a good living in high regard. If anything, orcs had a higher regard for lawyers… trial lawyers, especially… than humans typically did.

Orcs didn’t practice trial by combat. They viewed trials as combat. Two people standing up in front of an audience of their peers and a respected authority, making contrary claims and trying to show the other up as a liar or trip them up on a point of traditional protocol? That was the kind of thing orcs could understand. It was more or less how they’d settled disputes of honor for ages, during times when a lot of humans were still dueling.

“Anyway… in my mind, it felt like during the summer you went somewhere else,” Amaranth said. “I know I was writing to you here, but it was like you left MU and went to some other school and then came back. I’m sure that doesn’t make any sense…”

“It kind of does,” I said. “The campus feels different during the summer. It’s the same buildings, a lot of the same people, and the same place… but somehow it adds up to something different. I can’t explain it.”

“I think you just did,” she said. “As much as I can, anyway… it seems like we both understand what we’re talking about, and that’s what matters.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, smiling so wide that my cheeks blushed out of apparent belief that I couldn’t possibly be so happy without having something to feel self-conscious about.

It was nice in some ways to be put in my place, to fall into the familiar rhythm of yes, ma’am/no, ma’am with my Owner in her room… but it was also nice in other ways to just have a quiet conversation with my girlfriend in one of our favorite places to go together.

The next day we went back to the union for breakfast… myself, Amaranth, Ian, Steff, and Two. Despite how familiar the buffet-style cafeteria was, this felt a good deal less routine, because it was the first day of class. I’d been through this three times before but each time it was different. I was less than an hour away from starting a new class with a new instructor.

“Lot of new faces,” Amaranth said as we sat down at a pair of tables in the middle of the room.

“Yeah,” Ian agreed.

“Thirty-three that I can see from here,” Two said. “No, thirty-two. I’ve seen the girl with the green earrings before.”

I took their word for it… Two’s, particularly. I wasn’t really good at faces, and I’d never been much of a people-watcher. I tended to keep my head down. When I did look around the room… which I did reflexively since the others were talking about it… my eyes gravitated towards the faces I recognized. They were mostly non-human.

There was Belinda, the half-ogre, who was sitting with some of her human teammates from the Skirmish team. She saw me looking and waved. I returned it, a little awkwardly. We weren’t exactly friends, but she’d been friendly enough towards me after the beginning of the previous year.

Celia was sitting with a couple of lizardfolk… one who I thought was Hissy, our floormate from last year… and the gorgon who’d been in the room beneath me in Harlowe.

Twyla, a quiet girl who looked completely human except for a pair of pointy little horns jutting out of her forehead, was sitting by herself at a two-person table, her head down low over a notebook. I didn’t know much about Twyla. She’d hung out with the Leighton twins, who seemed to have managed to make it from junior high to higher education without maturing at all… but that was probably more due to bad luck in the roommate lottery than any personal preference.

“I wonder how many people are coming over for meals as opposed to the Archimedes?” Ian said.

“We call it the Arch,” I told him.

“That’s how you can spot the cool kids here at the Mag Univ,” Steff said. “They’re up on the newest campus slang, or ‘camp slan’, as they call it.”

“I’ll bet a lot of the new freshmen in Harlowe are going there instead of here,” Amaranth said. “It’s so much closer to those dorms. I mean, I don’t think I see any obviously non-human students I don’t recognize here.”

“They must be going there,” Steff said. “The school quietly dropped their Food For Freaks program… no more catered meals to keep us from upsetting the normals.”

“Huh,” I said. “Kind of works out nicely for them that the new student center with the whole racial harmony message is so much more convenient to Harlowe.”

“Yeah,” Ian said. “A human who’s got a big problem sharing eating space with other races wouldn’t go to the dining hall that’s all in-your-face with the tolerance. So they come here by default, while most of the people they’d object to go to the new place.”

“Well, to be fair,” Amaranth said, “the new dining facility is designed to cater to more diverse dietary needs. Considering how many people had problems finding adequate nutrition in the cafeteria options before, putting it close to Harlowe seems like a goodwill gesture, really. It’s not a perfect solution, of course, but you have to remember the whole campus is getting overhauled. Presumably when the student union gets its own re-do, this place will offer similar options.”

“I’m not saying it’s all bad,” Ian said. “I mean, I don’t think there was some conspiracy by the school to trick Harlowe people into going one place and not the other. But… well…”

“It’s complicated,” I said. “There’s good and there’s bad in what they’re doing.”

“I agree,” Amaranth said. “I just don’t want the good to be overlooked.”

“I’ll tell you one good thing about dining at the ‘Argh’,” Steff said. “They do take-away boxes. You swipe your card like normal, but instead of all-you-can-eat, it’s all-you-can-cram. Not that I don’t enjoy a little mealtime social fun, but I’m looking forward to that for those nights I just want to be alone, or alone with Viktor… popping out and bringing back something resembling real food is going to be a lot better than trying to make a meal out of the stuff they carry at the little hallway store in the Nexus.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “I wonder if this place is going to start doing that? The Arch would be a bit out of our way for food, but that would be nice.”

“Oh, Little Ms. Here All Summer didn’t know about the take-away boxes?” Steff said. “I guess the chosen one hasn’t penetrated all of Magisterius University’s secrets, after all.”

“Who’s the chosen what now?” Ian said.

“It’s really not worth asking,” I said. “And no, I didn’t realize they let you do takeout. If I had…”

I was cut off by a whooshing sound, a flash of light, and then the clattering of a chair and several screams. We all turned and looked. Twyla had jumped up from her table, several things on which seemed to be burning… it looked like the whole tabletop had burst into flames but most of it was already dying out.

Two very calmly pointed a finger at the table and the rest of the flames went out with a puff. A wave of her hand dispersed the acrid smoke. A couple of people who’d been in the verge of running towards the burning table stopped mid-stride. Other people who’d been running for the exits kind of stumbled to a stop as awareness that the emergency… such as it had been… was over caught up to them.

“Gesundheit!” Steff yelled to mixed chuckles as Twyla grabbed her bag and made a very hasty exit.

“A spell must have run away from her,” Amaranth said. “That’s why you’re not supposed to mess around with fire magic outside of labs. I wonder if someone should go after her and make sure she’s alright?”

“She wasn’t burned,” Steff said. “That look on her face was embarrassment. I don’t think there’s anything you could say or do that would make her less embarrassed, Amy. If you want to be kind to her, I’d say the best thing to do would be to never mention it. That girl’s got a serious case of Really-I’m-Normalitis.”

“I suppose not saying anything is safer than saying the wrong thing,” Amaranth said. “But it feels like there should be some right thing I could say, that would let her know it was okay.”

The cafeteria manager was surveying the damage and shaking his head by this point. He wheeled a trashcan over and began disposing of the damaged tray and silverware and table accessories, and the burnt paper goods.

“Anyway,” Amaranth said, “getting back to the previous subject… if you had known about the takeout boxes, baby, you would have turned into a hermit the day they opened their doors. That’s something I am not going to permit you to do now.”

“Okay, yes, I probably would have taken food back to my room a lot of time,” I said. “But when I was here by myself, it’s not like I was sitting and talking with people at meals anyway.”

“No, but you were getting out for them and sitting somewhere where there were other people around,” Amaranth said. “That’s something. If it’s not a step forward, at least it’s not a step back. Now that we know we can do takeout, we’ll use it sometimes, but only when we’re going to be being sociable back in one of the dorms or for a picnic or something, or when there is an ironclad academic reason you need to be eating alone somewhere.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“In fairness to Mackenzie,” Ian said, “we’re acting like the new dining hall is the first time there’s been an alternative to eating in the cafeteria. But she could have got food from one of the burger stands and taken it back to her dorm, and she didn’t do that. So it’s not like the Arch thing would have given her a new and exciting opportunity to withdraw from the world if only she had known about it.”

“Oh,” Amaranth said, her cheeks coloring slightly. “I completely forgot about that. I’m sorry, baby.”

“I actually forgot about it, too,” I said. “We went to the food court so rarely that it didn’t even cross my mind as an option. Otherwise, I probably would have been eating chicken sandwiches and burgers by myself in my room all summer, and that probably wouldn’t have been a good thing.”

“Thank you for saying so. In any event,” Amaranth said, “how about we go check out the Arch for dinner tonight? I’m kind of curious to see it.”

We all agreed, and after that the conversation turned to more academic subjects.

As apprehensive as I was about all the unknowns involved in starting my first class of the year, I was really looking forward to it. ENC 217: Spellbinding For Enchantment was going to be a major step along the way to my major. Thus far in my education as an enchanter, I’d learned how to manipulate the inherent properties of an object. I could make a sword sharper, a coat warmer, or a door stronger… for a little while. I’d learned how to prolong the effects of such enhancements, though I couldn’t yet make them permanent. I could even make a person faster or stronger or more perceptive, though that didn’t last nearly as long.

I’d also picked up as a necessary skill in all of my lab classes the basic art of spellbinding, of taking magical techniques that worked for me and shaping them into a formula that could be repeated at need. It was very much an art, and there were a lot of trade-offs involved in taking powerful and useful magic and reducing it to something that could be more or less relied upon.

But that was what my major, Applied Enchantment, really consisted of. Humanity and other races of the world had been using cooling magic for millennia. When you took that magic and stuck it inside a box in such a way that it was always there, you had a refrigerator, and something like a refrigerator could change the world.

ENC 217 would focus on how to craft spells with an eye towards attaching them to objects. I still wouldn’t close out the semester any closer to being able to make a permanent magical item, but my spells would be a lot tighter and I’d be able to store them as charges in an object. I was really looking forward to that, especially considering how often during the winter months I’d had to repeat the insulation spells I put on my coat.

In fact, that was why I’d decided to take it during the fall semester. By the time the sunny, summer-ish weather left us I’d be able to deal with the cold in proper wizardly fashion.

Ian was a bit less sanguine about his first day of class.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said quietly to himself near the end of breakfast. “I am so not ready for this.”

“Relax, sweetie,” Amaranth said. “It’s the first day. I’m fairly certain you don’t have to be ready for it.”

“What’s there to be ready for?” Steff asked. “I’m sure your syllabus-receiving skills are still in top form even after a summer without so much as an agenda.”

“Okay, maybe you all don’t have to do anything for a grade today, but I have to play an audition in front of my professor and the music department head,” Ian said.

“Isn’t that the sort of thing they should have you do before they let you into the class?” I asked. “If they’re going to be picky about it, I mean.”

“They did,” he said. “This is… I got a notice over the summer that I’ve been ‘selected’ to give an additional audition.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” Amaranth said. “I mean, I can’t imagine how it would be bad.”

“It’s bad in that I already made it through the process once without blowing it and now I have to do it again,” Ian said.

“It sounds to me like you’re under consideration for some honor or advanced class,” Amaranth said. “So the worst thing that would happen is you’d be in the class you signed up for and nothing would be different, right?”

“Except my professor, who had thought I was worthy of consideration, would now know he was wrong,” Ian said. “Seems like that would be worse than never having caught his attention in the first place.”

“Well, if that’s how you feel, you could just tell him that you’re comfortable where you are and decline,” Amaranth said.

“And give up without trying?” Ian said. He sounded borderline offended by the suggestion. “You’re kidding.”

That seemed to make up his mind, like he’d decided to go in and give it his best shot out of sheer stubbornness. Amaranth had always been the sort of person who would encourage people to excel, but she’d become a little more nuanced in her approach.

“What do you have today, Two?” Amaranth asked.

“My friend Hazel and I are taking Small Business Management together,” Two said. “And then I have a pastry class, and then I have The Art of Presentation.”

“Does this small business thing have anything to do with your friend Hazel’s three or four plans for making money?” I asked. I was long past my initial suspicion of Hazel taking advantage of the easily-disadvantaged Two, but that didn’t mean I was thrilled at the thought of her rearranging her curriculum around Hazel’s pipe dreams.

“No,” Two said. “My friend Hazel says it’s planning for the future.”

“I think it’s a very good idea,” Amaranth said. “I mean, college only lasts a few years… if you don’t want to live at Hearts of Clay for the rest of your life, you do need to be planning ahead.”

“My friend Hazel says she is pretty sure she can get the money to open an inn,” Two said. There wasn’t a hint of doubt in her voice, but I knew from experience that this didn’t mean she believed Hazel’s claims. She had no problem blithely repeating the things the burrow gnome said, because she was confident at least that Hazel had said them.

I knew there were a lot of things that could change between sophomore year and graduation. Two and Hazel could have a falling out, as hard as that was to imagine. They could drift apart, especially given Hazel’s growing friendship with Shiel and the fact that they weren’t even in the same building anymore when they had used to be just a few doors away from each other. I knew, too, that they didn’t have anything like a firm plan for post-college life, but I envied that they had as much figured out as they did.

In theory it was easy to make money with an enchantment degree, but I didn’t have anything firmer than that theory. I knew I wanted to stay with Amaranth, but I had no idea how that would work. Making a living as an enchanter would probably require me to live in a city, and she was bound to a plot of land in a farming commune. Her divine nature wasn’t much of a hindrance to me at school, but back home she acted as something like a priestess. Then there was the fact that her home was the field of amaranth that was her “other body”… how could we live together there?

“What happened to your excited smile, baby?” Amaranth asked, breaking into my thoughts.

“Just thinking about the future,” I said.

“I thought that’s what you were excited about.”

“I mean the long-term future,” I said.

“Isn’t there a lot to be excited about there, too?”

“There’s a lot to be uncertain of.”

“That’s another way of saying there are a lot of possibilities,” Amaranth said. “I can’t think of anything more exciting than that.”

“Ah, you all are so cute,” Steff said. “It’s just a bunch of sophomore jitters, which are like first-year jitters but a year more advanced.”

“And I suppose you have junior jitters,” I said.

“No such thing,” Steff said. “Or at least there won’t be until next year, when I’m a senior and you’re all juniors, with your junior jitters. Oh, it will be freaking adorable. I can’t wait.”

Friday: Mackenzie’s first class.

Ian was right, though… Amaranth would be very happy to see what was happening in the lounge. I supposed I was pleased, too… I hadn’t given much thought to Belinda since she hadn’t really been around all that much, though in retrospect I probably should have. For all I’d known about what was going on with her, she could have been just biding her time and waiting for another chance to get at me.

I remembered our confrontation in the empty class room… it had caught me by surprise that she could feel looked down on and excluded by me. It really sounded like she’d had the same kind of revelation, as a delayed result. Put in those terms, it seemed even more like Amaranth would really want to know what was going on. By declining to fight her, by finding another way… even a slightly violence-and-intimidation-based way of dealing with Belinda, I had indirectly contributed to her growth as a person.

Not that I could take credit or anything… it would have taken a lot of thought and reflection for Belinda to come around so completely. But with how much I had changed since coming to MU, who was to say that she couldn’t have done the same?

Of course, there was still a core of me underneath it all that was still the same… I was still stubborn and a little quick to jump to conclusions sometimes. I still had the same interests I’d always had, though maybe with a few new ones on top of them.

And Belinda was doubtlessly still the same person underneath, too… she’d always been concerned with being the best. She was just defining it a little differently… and maybe, having realized that there could always be someone better than her, she was more concerned with bettering herself than besting others.

I could imagine that Belinda had been treated as if she were stupid for most of her life. That was the stereotype of ogres. Their culture was primitive and unrefined in comparison to human society and people equated that with stupidity, but there was no evidence that ogres were any less intelligent than humans, any more than humans had been in earlier ages when they were less interested in complex enchantments and the more complicated way of life it enabled.

I realized I’d exhausted the short distance between the lounge and my own door and had been standing outside my own room like I was selling ranger cookies or something. I almost lifted my hand to knock, then felt silly. The door wasn’t even locked, as it turned out.

Amaranth was sitting with her back against the wall, right under the window. For a moment I couldn’t believe she wasn’t freezing, but then I remembered that she walked around outdoors wearing nothing but her smile. It was really no surprise that she wasn’t cold… her smile was certainly warm enough for me.

“Well, hey there,” Amaranth said, looking up from my mirror. “Oh, baby… what’s wrong?” she asked in her most supportive voice, the one that was both kind and carrying hints of pain that she felt in sympathy.

It caught me off guard and left me feeling a pang of sympathetic pain towards her… that posed an interesting ontological question. If she felt pain in sympathy for me and I felt it for her, then from where had the pain first come from? We were two mirrors reflecting misplaced concern for each other, and misplaced or not the feeling was very real.

“Baby?” Amaranth said, her tone now even more worried. The warm enveloping smile she wore most of the time was sliding off her face, and I realized that I felt colder for it.

“I… sorry,” I said. “I got distracted… sorting through feelings, I guess. Nothing’s wrong… nothing new, I mean. But Ian thought you might like to see what’s going on in the kitchen.”

“Why, what’s going on?” she asked.

I spent a few seconds trying to figure out a brief way to convey Belinda’s apparent epiphany in a way that would really capture what had happened, and then realized that words were inadequate to the task… or I was.

“You kind of have to see it,” I said.

“Okay, baby,” she said.

“What made you think that something was wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I couldn’t really read the look on your face. You looked… not exactly sad, but thoughtful, maybe.”

“Yeah, I was feeling thoughtful,” I said. “I haven’t really had a lot of time to myself lately, I guess… I think a little more time to stop and think about things might be a good thing, for everyone.”

“Oh, I agree,” she said. “But what did you want me to see?”

“You’ll have to…”

“See it, I know,” she said with a laugh.

She glanced down at the mirror in her hands and waved something away out of it and snapped it shut. Seeing her pushing herself up off the floor, I hurried forward to offer her a hand.

“Thank you, baby,” she said. “Just be careful, I’m a little bit bigger… oh!” she said as I pulled her up to her feet. She giggled. “It’s easy for me to forget how strong you are, sometimes. You’re so small and…”

“Weak?” I suggested.

“Uncertain,” she said.

“Except when I’m resolutely uncertain about something I’m completely wrong about.”

She put her other hand over the hand that she still held and gently squeezed.

“Baby, you have some amazing convictions that are anything but wrong,” she said. “You can be brave, Mack… you can be fierce. I’ve seen it.”

“I wouldn’t think you’d approve of fierceness,” I said. I started to pull away, but she tightened her grip. That was all it took. I stayed where I was, as I was… my hand wrapped up in hers, my heart wrapped up in hers.

It was a nice place to be.

“I don’t want you to be fierce in your judgments,” she said. “But you can be fiercely loyal, fiercely protective… few things are entirely bad, entirely without their uses, Mack. Unmoderated fierceness, unrestrained fierceness… well, it can be attractive, I suppose. Just like unrestrained passion can be, and probably for the same reason.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s terribly freeing,” she said. She let go of my hand and grabbed me by the hips, her fingers splayed out wide behind me, gently pressing in on the sides of my ass. “You don’t have to think… it feels good.”

“Not… not everything that feels good is bad,” I said.

She laughed.

“Oh, perish that thought!” she said, her hair bouncing gloriously as she shook her head from side to side. “Banish it to the farthest corner of the furthest plane! If anything is truly bad, it’s definitely not feeling good… or making other people feel good. You make me feel so good, Mack.”

“It’s mutual, believe me. I haven’t forgotten how incredible last night was… the club, the stage and everything… I’ve had other things on my mind, Amaranth, but I haven’t forgotten,” I said. “You were like a goddess up there.”

“Up where?” she asked, and at first I thought she was just being silly. Then I remembered that I had been on the stage with her… I hadn’t exactly forgotten that, but the significance of it had paled somewhat in my head compared to Amaranth’s performance.

“Above me,” I said, hoping it would be enough for Amaranth to understand what I meant.

“Oh,” she said, and she blushed a little. She took my hands… both of them this time… and looked down into my eyes. “I hope you know that even when you’re beneath me, Mack, you’re never beneath me… and when I said that you make me feel good I didn’t just mean that you give me pleasure. You make me feel like I am good… like I’m a good person.”

“What, was that ever in doubt?” I asked her. “You’re… you’re probably the closest thing to inherently good of anyone I know.”

“Divine,” she said. “But that doesn’t make me inherently good any more than you’re inherently evil… and don’t you dare argue about that, baby. If ever there is a time for you to go around casting aspersions on your moral character, right now is not it. Anyway, I’ve had my doubts… I mean, I’m kind, and I try to be decent, but good? Before I came here, I didn’t really have as much serious one-on-one interactions with anybody except… Barley… and I’m not sure that I really did right by her. If nothing else, I definitely didn’t do any good for her.”

“You’ve definitely done good for me,” I said. “You’ve been good for Two, and I think Steff, too. Dee would probably tell you that she appreciates your friendship.”

“I wonder what friendship means to Dee,” Amaranth said. “I don’t think she’s ever had, you know, peers before… I think she’s kind of lived in a bubble. I have to wonder what it’s going to be like for her to go back down there… will she be lonely? Will she try to mingle with more people, like she does up here?”

“Oh!” I said, my memory spurred on. “I was going to show you what’s going on in the lounge.”

“Oh, yes,” Amaranth said. She laughed again… I loved her laugh, and I loved how easily she laughed. “Come on, baby, let’s go.”

She took my hand one more time and we headed towards the door. I had a thought that… as thoughts so frequently did… stopped me in my tracks. If Belinda could change and grow and be a bigger person, maybe I should try to do the same thing.

“What is it, baby?”

“Just thinking again,” I said. “Ian’s probably going to want to know what you found out about my grandmother… and you know, I really don’t care if you talk about it.”

“I’m glad you said that, baby,” she said. “I don’t like to think that you’re so afraid of her that you can’t stand to even hear her name.”

“I wasn’t… okay, yeah, I am afraid of her,” I said. “But I also just plain don’t like her much. Maybe those two facts aren’t completely unrelated, but it was more the dislike than the fear that was making me so irritated with it all… and that’s just kind of juvenile.”

“It’s very juvenile,” Amaranth said. “But you’re only eighteen, after all. You’ve been a juvenile for most of your life.”

“Yeah, well, so have you,” I said. “You might have sprung fully-formed from your field, but if you’re any wiser today than you were back then, then you can’t really deny that you had some growing to do.”

“No, I suppose not,” she said. “But what put that into your head?”

“What you said about Barley,” I said. “It’s not your job to be good for her. You loved her…”

“I still do,” Amaranth said.

“Well, yeah,” I said. “But she can make her own decisions.”

“I guess I never realized some of the things she was deciding,” Amaranth said. “Like, that she was only coming here because she wanted to get away from me.”

“Oh, I doubt that was the only reason,” I said. “Amaranth, I wanted to get away form my grandmother but that wasn’t my only impetus for coming here. Barley’s got interests that don’t have anything to do with you or me… she could have decided to focus on them instead of dwelling on you. She could have gone out and made friends outside Harlowe. I mean, it seems like she’s doing those things now anyway. She could have done them from the start.”

“Or I could have been more sensitive, like the sister I thought I was,” Amaranth said. “Instead of just following her around, nipping at her heels like an overeager puppy, I could have…”

“What, bowed out?” I said. “Maybe you didn’t have a well-thought out plan like she did, but you can’t tell me that you only came here to follow her, any more than you can say that she only came here to get away from you. Even if you didn’t think about going to school until after she did, the idea had to have appealed to you.”

“Well, yes,” she said, playing with a bit of her hair. “I thought it would be nice to learn new things. I’d read so much about the world but seen so little of it. Barley… well, until she started telling me about her plans, I never really thought that much about the difference.” She giggled. It was nice to see that she could laugh, even while thinking about Barley. Barley had hurt me, but Amaranth felt a pain all her own when it came to the other nymph. “And also I thought that there were bound to be loads more books here, if nothing else… and I was right.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Amaranth?”

“Yes, Mack?”

“I love you so much,” I said, and I rocked forward a bit, standing on my toes to reach up and kiss her. She bent into it.

“Hey, guys is everything… oh,” Ian said, sliding into view in the open doorway. We both jumped. Amaranth bit my lip. “Oh, shit, I’m sorry,” Ian said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I was just getting worried.”

“That’s quite okay, Ian,” Amaranth said. “We were just about to come join you. Are you okay, baby?”

“Yeah,” I said. I probed my lip. It was tender, but intact. Invulnerability for the win. “It’s not like you broke the skin, obviously.”

“I wonder why not,” Ian said. “Doesn’t divine stuff hurt you?”

“Yeah, but Amaranth’s body is flesh,” I said. “Her spirit’s divine, but I’m not touching it.”

“Okay, but can’t you bite yourself with your own teeth?” Ian said. “I’d think her teeth would be the same as a blessed weapon.”

“Well, I don’t think her teeth are exactly weapons, is one difference,” I said. “And again, they’re really just teeth, not blessed teeth. In fact, even if it would be hard to find a human who looks exactly like her, there are probably few intrinsic differences between her body and a human’s.”

“In fairness, baby, it’d be hard to find a human who looks exactly like Ian,” Amaranth said. “Everybody is unique, after all.”

“Yeah,” Ian said. “But you’re unique in ways that most people aren’t, especially teenage guys.” He gave a little laugh. “You know, it’s weird to call myself a ‘teenager’. When you’re in high school, that’s like a synonym for ‘high schooler’. You think of college kids as being mostly grown-up.”

“Which is a sure sign that few high schoolers live in college dorms,” I said. “I don’t know if it’s weirder to think of myself as a kid or to think of myself as an adult.”

“I’d say it’s weirder to think of you as an adult,” Ian said. “But that’s only because I know you.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said, and I gave him a kiss.

“Whoa,” he said. “What was that for?”

I looked at him.

“What do you mean, what was that for?” I asked.

“You don’t usually just… do that,” he said. “Anything like that. I don’t mind, I don’t hold it against you… I just figured you were self-conscious or something.”

“Oh,” I said, and now that he’d said it, I was self-conscious.I looked down at the floor and stuffed my hands in my pockets.

“You don’t have to be like that,” he said. “I liked it.”

“I wasn’t even thinking about it,” I said. “I’d just been kissing…”

“…Amaranth,” Ian said. “Yeah, I saw.”

“It just seemed like the thing to do,” I said.

“For heaven’s sake, it’s not something you have to explain or excuse,” Amaranth said. “You’re getting more comfortable, with him or with physical affection or both, or something else. Whatever it is, it’s hardly a change for the worse.”

“Though I am going to miss it if you stop blushing like that,” Ian said.

“Like what?” I asked, though I could feel my cheeks flushing with crimson heat at the mention of blushing.

“Like that!” Amaranth and Ian both said at the same time, laughing. Two very different hands reached for mine, and we headed out into the hall together. Hazel, Rocky, Belinda, and Two were all visible in the kitchen. Two was sweeping up… apparently her dislike of mess had overruled her desire to see the one who’d made it clean it up. Rocky and Hazel were at the table. Belinda was at the counter, her back to us.

“Rocky and Belinda decided to help out,” I said to Amaranth. “Belinda’s apparently had some time to think and has kind of undergone a change of heart. She talked Rocky around, too.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” Amaranth said. “I knew Hazel was right about the community coming together, but that’s really a better start than I could have imagined.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “It’s amazing.”

“I’m proud of you, getting along with the skirmishers,” Amaranth said.

“What do you mean?” I said. “I’m not doing anything. They’re the ones who were aggressive towards me…”

“Well, I’m proud of them, too,” Amaranth said. “But I’m proud of you for being willing to let it go… and anyway, you can’t pretend like you didn’t prejudge them at all.”

I sucked in a breath to exhale an argument, but then I just let it out.

“No, you’re right,” I said.

“Hazel has Belinda chopping up vegetables while she talks to Rocky about seasoning proportions, or something,” Ian said. “Honestly, I think she’s just trying to keep Rocky engaged… not a bad idea, probably.”

“No,” I said.

“So what’s the thing you wanted me to see, anyway?” Amaranth asked.

“You’re joking, right?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“Rocky and Belinda,” I said. I stopped and dropped my voice, so that we wouldn’t walk into the lounge talking about them. “Don’t you think that’s amazing?”

“I think it’s wonderful, Mack, but hardly wondrous, in the strictest terms,” Amaranth said. “It happens… people come together, even if they’re different. Look at Dee and Steff… Steff’s never going to be like Dee, and I’m sure Dee has no aspirations to become like Steff, but they’ve been becoming better friends all the time. In fact, I think Steff is probably the closest thing Dee has to a best friend up here.”

“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” I said. “Sometimes I get the feeling that Dee barely tolerates Steff… like she only puts up with her because of the obligations of the label of friendship.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s the case at all,” Amaranth said. “Dee can be a little stiff… especially when dealing with someone as, well, loose as Steff, to use the term as an antonym for ‘stiff’ in the metaphorical sense, and not as a pejorative based in sexual shaming… but there’s real warmth there. She certainly wasn’t obligated to try something so desperate and stupid as giving Steff that potion.”

“No,” Ian agreed. “That kind of stupid takes love.”

“You think you’re joking, but I absolutely agree,” Amaranth said.

“Yeah, I kind of agree with me, too, actually,” Ian said. “I mean, I tolerate Steff, so I know what that looks like.”

“We should go join in,” Amaranth said, and we did… Hazel welcomed Amaranth and Ian back and put them to work on her grand soup plan. I stayed on the edges of the group. Part of it was me trying to keep out of the way and part of it was that I didn’t have a lot to say, even as Amaranth’s presence added to Hazel’s turned the lounge into a veritable maelstrom of pleasant conversation .

The fact was Belinda still made me uncomfortable. She was still big and she still had a look on her face that looked like she suspected someone was taking advantage of her and she couldn’t see who or how and so she might just take a swing at the first target that presented itself… or maybe that was just her face. She seemed genuinely interested in helping Hazel’s drive towards solidarity, and I wasn’t going to be the one who rocked that boat over hurt feelings or my dislike of jocks, no matter how justified… or maybe “understandable” was the better word… it might have been.

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Spectators filled all six sections of stands which surrounded the battlefield a mile outside of town. For this game, the visitors had selected the heavily wooded side five for their home base, leaving the home team defending side two.

The visitors’ team was actually a coalition from two smaller school districts, one of which overlapped an elven forest. While all their fighters were ostensibly human, they had an unusually high concentration of skilled archers and lightly armored, highly mobile infantry.

They’d managed to hold their wooded turf with a small number of defenders using traps and hit-and-run tactics, freeing the rest of the coalition to concentrate on offense.

It seemed like a good strategy on the face of it, but two hours into the skirmish match it was becoming apparent that the coalition’s generals would have done better to reverse the starting positions, forcing their opponents to try to defend the wooded section against a force of highly-skilled elfbloods.

Instead, the home team had erected their standard on the largest hill on side two and massed their defenders around it. The two-school coalition had lost so many men in their assaults on the hill that they would lose handily by default once the five hour mark was passed.

As the tipping point had already been reached, they couldn’t wait the other side out… if they couldn’t win outright, they would have to inflict more casualties. They’d begun to get creative in their attacks.

Five different groups of archers launched volleys of arrows in waves, concentrating their aim near the top of the hill. Each flight of arrows was obviously smaller than a massed volley would have been, but by loosing their projectiles in turns they were able to keep a more or less constant stream going.

A wavery blue energy shell appeared in the sky seconds after this assault began. It was curved like a section of a dome, and it intercepted most of the arrows. They were ready this time, but the defenders’ wizards hadn’t always been so quick, and the side of the hill was dotted with shafts, and a handful of bodies lying motionless.

A figure stood near the top of the hill, dominating the scene in much the same way that the hill itself did the surrounding terrain.

She, too, was dotted with the red-fletched arrows of the opposing team. The arrows’ tips hadn’t quite penetrated through her tough hide, and while she could no doubt have just brushed them off of her arm like the irritants that they were, she instead left them in place so that anybody who charged up the hill would see them sticking out of her arm like the quills of a porcupine.

At the same time that the rain of arrows began, a magical wind rammed into the line of defenders who guarded the hillside in a ring halfway up its slope. One group of lightly armored fighters in red charged through the hole this made. The wind-battered soldiers picked themselves up and quickly closed the gap, fighting back the rest of the attackers and preventing any more from joining the charge up the hill.

However, the attackers started to lose momentum almost as soon as they were past that first obstacle. They slowed, their formation losing cohesiveness, and more than one of them actually glanced behind at the path of retreat through the enemy line.

Just as they’d known would happen, the massive figure gave a fierce bellow and swooped down in a counter-charge, sending the lead warrior flying with a swipe of her gauntleted arm, bowling several over, and breaking up the tight formation. The other hilltop defenders rushed in after her, slaughtering the scattered and distracted soldiers. The attack was quickly repelled with no casualties among the hilltop group, though two soldiers were sent down to replace those who’d fallen on the line.

The hulking fighter hadn’t even taken the sword off her back.

On a floating disk hovering high in the air ten yards outside the hexagonal boundary of the skirmish field, a representative from Magisterius University watched with an air of practiced skepticism.

“Let’s be honest,” he said to the head coach. “She’s not that great a solo fighter. She broke their formation with momentum and because they’re afraid to engage, but in a straight one-on-one fight I think a good swordsman could take her out.”

“That’s why she’s a skirmisher, not a gladiator,” the coach said. “Look, we’re seven and two so far this season and she wasn’t even playing for one of those losses.”

“Well, she holds the line well enough on a small field like this,” the man said. “But we have one of the largest skirmish fields in the Imperium.”

“That means you’ve got a lot of spaces to fill,” the coach said. “You can’t tell me that you don’t have room for an ogre among them.”

“Half-ogre,” the scout said. “Raised by a human parent. ‘Belinda’ doesn’t sound very imposing, does it?”

“When she’s out on the field, the other team doesn’t know if she has a flower print comforter on her bed or if she has jam and toast with her tea,” the coach said. “And for somebody who’s never met a full one, she’s ogre enough.”

“Still, I can’t guarantee her a spot.”

“Are you telling me you’ve got other players on the hook that can hold a hundred and fifty yard radius all by their lonesomes?” the coach said. This was an exaggeration, of course, as the figure on the hill was hardly holding the entire field, but the scout was used to dealing with hyperbolic coaches. “Look, I know you’ve got a bigger operation than we do, but you give her a squad to lead and she’ll do the same thing for you that she’s done for us as team captain.”

“Being the captain of a small team isn’t anything like being squad leader on a big team,” the rep said. “Do you think she’d be able to handle that?”

“For a chance to play with the big boys?” the coach said. “We didn’t start her out as captain. She worked her way up. She knows how it goes. Anyway, why so many questions? You can see how she handles herself. You’ve met with her. We know you’re not going to have an answer for her immediately… but you know, of all the teams that have scouted us—and that’s a lot of teams this year—nobody’s seemed as, well, skeptical about our little Lindy as you are.”

“We’ve been burned before,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing I want to talk about, but let’s just say I’m going to be damned sure they’re really interested in college skirmish before I sign any more ogrebloods.”

“You won’t be burned by her,” the coach said. “Skirmish is her life… literally. Maybe I’m not doing her any favors by telling you this, but you have to understand, she’s got no prospects, nothing to look forward to. Her grades are shit right across the board. We help her out, but she just manages to scrape by with the minimum passing grades. She doesn’t have any interests or aptitudes except for fighting. I’d be worried about the kid, but we both know she’s got a future with some school’s program. I guess it’ll probably come down to who wants her the most.”

Monday, Astera 7th 222

“This is your squad’s room, Belinda,” the earnest young woman with the clipboard said as she led the half-ogress into a long, narrow room that looked more like a hallway with beds and footlockers. “As freshmen, we had to let the school assign you dorm rooms but you’re more than welcome to stay here.”

“What was that other room?” Belinda asked.

“What other room?”

“The barracks one,” she said. “The big open one.”

“Oh, those are the regular quarters,” the coach’s assistant said. “Since you guys in the seventh squad are kind of a special project, you get your own all to yourself.”

“We don’t get to be in the main room with everybody else?”

“Only the best squads get their own quarters. Oh, and see that door at the end? That leads to your personal quarters. It’s also your office. The joke around here is that the officers’ quarters are just broom closets with the signs painted over, but in actual fact, they are slightly larger. Now, if you’d like to meet some of your squadmates…”

“They told me I could pick my squad,” Belinda said.

“Who did?”

“The recruiters.”

“Oh, well,” the assistant said, flipping through the pages on her clipboard as though they had any information aside from room assignments and schedules on them, “of course squad leaders are allowed to have some input, but the final choice belongs to the general coach.”

Belinda glowered. While what the assistant said was technically true, everything she’d ever heard had led her to believe that skirmish team officers had a more active hand in things and that the coaches only moved people around after seeing how they fit together.

“But if I’ve already got squadmates, how can I have input?” Belinda asked.

“Well, again, the seventh squad is a special project this year, and in order to maximize the effectiveness of your unique contributions…”

“Whatever,” Belinda said. “Let’s meet them.”

“Go ahead and send them in, John!” the assistant called.

One of the doors opened and an extremely varied group of beings began to file awkwardly in: a half-orc, a woman made of rock, a big burly bear of a man with a bushy brown beard, a minotaur, a weedy-looking human boy dressed in black and wearing heavy eyeliner, a harpy, a muscular triclops, a ratman, and three lizardfolk… two in a pair and one who stood off alone. Some of them were freshmen, like Belinda, and they looked around the room and at each other. Others simply glared at the new squad leader. These were returning students who’d played on other squads and who now found themselves reassigned under a freshman.

“Belinda, these are the men and women of the seventh squad,” the assistant said. “Squad, this is Belinda. She’ll be leading you in battle.”

Nobody said anything.

“Well, I’ll leave you all to get acquainted with each other. You all are free until three, when you need to form up on the practice field for team orientation,” the assistant said. “And, if nobody else has said it yet, I’d just like to welcome the new fighters to Magisterius University.”

With that, she left. About half of the seventh squad did, too. Among those who remained, no one approached Belinda immediately.

“This is bullshit,” the dark-clad boy said to nobody in particular. He went to the one of the twelve beds that was furthest from the officer’s room and dumped the contents of his duffel bag out into the locker at the foot of it. “This is my bed. Nobody take the bed next to it. I want a buffer between me and all you freaks.”

“Watch who you’re calling freaks, corpsefucker,” the stony woman said.

“Watch who you’re calling corpsefucker, freak,” the boy said. “I am a necromancer, and I wouldn’t even be wasting my talents on this stupid game if the narrow-minded nitwits who run the university had given me any other choice. Honestly, they acted like I’d siphoned an entire soul… meanwhile, an actual corpsefucker just got a semester of community service… in the vaults. Three years, and I never had to lock my materials up before.”

Belinda watched the exchange, absolutely bemused. She hadn’t had any idea what to expect, but she’d had a vague idea that her squad would consist of squishy little full humans who would be intimidated by the sight of her. Nobody in the room seemed especially intimidated.

The woman rolled her eyes at the necromancy student, then strolled over towards Belinda.

“Hi,” she said, holding out a hand. “I’m, uh… well, just call me Rocky. I was a squad leader in high school… they usually had me lead charges and take point on difficult missions. I wondered what kind of strategies do you prefer to employ?”

“Uh… I like to make people come to me,” Belinda said. “But I like going on the attack, too.”

“Flexibility,” Rocky said. “I like that. They said you were captain, your junior and senior year?”

“I was,” Belinda said.

“What was it like leading an entire team?”

“I didn’t really do much leading, actually,” Belinda said. “I just went where the general told me to.”

“But you were the captain.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh,” Rocky said. “Okay. Well, good to meet you. I’m going to go stow my stuff. Are you planning on assigning bunks?”

“Um…”

“I’ll just go stow it, then,” Rocky said. “And if you need any help with strategy, or planning, or anything, let me know. I was a good officer.”

Friday, Astera 11th 222 (Morning)

“I think our squad’s really starting to shape up,” Rocky said as they watched the rest of the squads practicing coordinated maneuvers. “With Hissy coordinating our movements, you on point, Scylla doing air support, and Jimmy’s skeletons to do surprise flanking, I think we can be a real force to be reckoned with.”

“Yeah,” Belinda grunted.

“I think once they see us in action, they’ll start fitting us into the overall strategy instead of using us as a bunch of ‘scary monsters’ to spook the other side,” Rocky said. “I mean, we can fight. Even Jimmy can. It’s stupid for them not to make use of us. We are good for something besides holding a spot they don’t want to have to defend.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, there are two weeks of practice between now and the first match,” Rocky said. “I’ve been working on getting the coaches to put us on the field wherever we would most likely be during the actual match… supposedly so that the rest our team gets used to us, but hopefully everybody will see how well we do our things.”

“Hopefully.”

“I mean, you’re used to standing there and looking scary, but some of us are real fighters,” Rocky said.

Saturday, Astera 19th 222

“I have great news!” Rocky announced, after walking into Belinda’s private room without knocking. “I’ve been talking to Coach John and after seeing us beat squads one through three during practice maneuvers, he says they’re going to revise the battle plans for the game against Blackwater. Instead of just cutting off one chokepoint, we’re going to be working with one and three. Depending on which side BPC picks, we might actually be the ones capturing their standard.”

“Really?” Belinda said. “That’s… awesome.”

“Isn’t it?” Rocky said. “I’ve worked up some contingency plans based on the side they think Blackwater’s general will pick, and the rest of the squad is excited about them.”

“The rest of the squad?”

“Oh, yeah, I showed them to everybody,” Rocky said. “Actually, I wanted to get Knossos and Scylla’s opinions before I did anything, but I’ve got everything just about finalized now. If we can pull off what I’ve got in mind, we’ll never be relegated to static defense again. It’ll be tricky, but with Hissy coordinating and you soaking up their attacks, I think we can manage it.”

Friday, Astera 25th 222 (Final Practice Before The First Game)

“Where’s Belinda?”

That’s almost exactly what getting suckerpunched by a fucking ogre isn’t like.

What is it like? More like one of those spring-loaded gauntlets you see in slapstick shows. Only, less funny.

Of course, technically, Belinda may have only been half-ogre, but she identified herself as an ogre… and after getting hammered upside the skull out of nowhere I was willing to grant her that point.

Not only are ogres far from slow, they’re also not slow-witted… not when it comes to fighting, and especially in their favorite style: dirty. Belinda must have been watching me for days, planning this so I’d be alone and she wouldn’t be interrupted.

She caught me in the hallway just after I left my logic class, with my head still full of shifting spell sequences and half-formed plans. She simply stepped out of the darkened doorway of one disused classroom and decked me, half-carrying, half-pushing me into the room across the hall in the process and shutting the door.

I didn’t process all of that at once, of course. I only put it together after I finished pondering the question of how my skull could be in one piece after I’d distinctly felt my head exploding in a massive fireball of pain.

It was Belinda’s voice which started to bring me out of the daze brought on by the combination of pain, jarring physical displacement, and the dark room I found myself in.

“I told you I was going to get you,” she said. Her breath, hot and oddly sweet, was right in my face. Her face was on a level with mine… not because she was stooping but because she had me pinned with one stubby-fingered hand against the wall. Her face–which kind of looked like a boulder had a child with one of those really ugly, pudgy-faced baby dolls–was uncomfortably close to mine. Though, of course, I couldn’t actually see it that well. Because the room was dark. “You should have listened. You should have been ready. Did you think I was bluffing?”

“I’ve… uh… had other stuff on my mind,” I said, a little apologetically. “Sorry.”

I actually meant that to be mollifying, somehow. Yeah. It wasn’t my best idea, but then, I’d just been suckerpunched by a fucking ogre.

“You watch your fucking mouth!” she said, grabbing my shoulders with both hands and shaking me with considerable violence… though considerably less violence than hitting me would have involved, for which I was grateful. “All through high school I had to put up with shit from people like you, and I’m sick of it. This is my time.”

She got shit from people like me? What school did she go to, and why wasn’t I allowed to go there?

“Don’t look at me like that!” she said, slamming me back against the wall. I guess my incredulity must have showed. “You know what I’m talking about… I know your type. You were one of the smart kids, too good to talk to anybody else… always talking shit about the jocks and laughing when you don’t think they can hear you… acting so damned superior when you have to tutor someone. Well, who’s laughing now, smart kid?”

“Um… is it you?” I asked, and was rewarded with another punch in the face. If it hadn’t been for the wall behind me, I would’ve hit the floor. Instead, I slammed against the wall. That was so much better. She let go of me and I fell heavily to the floor.

It sure wasn’t the knowledge that she could hit me as hard as she wanted as often as she wanted without killing me that made me brave, because honestly, that’s not much of an encouragement to keep mouthing off.

So why the hell didn’t I shut up?

“No, I’m serious,” I said shakily, as I picked myself up. It was like something had turned on… or been turned off… inside me… and I no longer cared what she did to me. “Is it you? Are you… are you laughing? Is this actually funny to you?”

“You bet your ass it’s not!” Belinda raged.

“Then who is laughing?” I asked, and got a vicious backhand for my trouble.

“Nobody!” Belinda bellowed. “That’s who!”

“Then why are you doing it?” I asked, getting up again.

“Because you’ve got it coming,” Belinda said. “I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks!”

“You must be terribly disappointed,” I said. “Because you don’t look like you’re having a very good time.”

“Yeah?” she sneered. “I’ll have a good time with you after I’ve taught you some respect. Yeah. Everybody else gets a piece, why not me?”

“Oh, so, are you going to rape me, Belinda?” I goaded. She hadn’t hit me the last two times and I seemed to be gaining some kind of weird momentum. Maybe the repeated blows to the head had done some damage, somehow… the situation might not have been funny, but my condition was starting to verge on hysteria. “Why not? That seems to be the number one solution for all life’s petty complaints. High school sucked? Shitty childhood? Go ahead and have one, on me!”

“You think I won’t?” Belinda asked, her voice cracking weirdly. Why did people keep asking me this?

“I think you’ll do whatever the fuck you please!” I said. “Why not? You’re Belinda, the hot shit warrior jock! Or you were in high school. Biggest and baddest on the team, I bet, right?”

“Damn straight I was!” she said.

“Damn straight you were!” I echoed. “But now you’ve come to a major university. You’re not the only half-ogre here. You’re not the only monster player. Worse, there’s probably human fighters from bigger high schools, with better budgets and better training programs, showing you up.”

“You shut your filthy cock hole,” Belinda screeched.

“You were the big boss of a little dungeon,” I said. The whole thing was a scenario I probably would have had no clue about if it had never been used as background plot material on TV shows and in novels, but from what I understood, it was one of those rare clichés that only get to be a cliché because they happen in real life. It was like the tale Steff had spun about failing a class and losing my scholarship: it could happen. You never think it’ll be you, but nobody’s immune. “Now you’re just another freshman player filling out the roster and now you’re going to beat on me until you feel better about it, aren’t you?”

“Fuck… you!” Belinda screamed in response, bent down to bellow directly in my face. “You’re nothing! You got that? Nothing!”

“Then what the fuck are we even doing here?” I screamed, right back at her and twice as loud.

“I’ll fucking kill you!” Belinda screamed. “Do you understand that, you bug-eyed little freak? Do you fucking comprehend it?”

“I comprehend just fine,” I said. “I just don’t care. You hear me? I am past caring. Ever since I got here, people have been slapping me around… I woke up the first day and my roommate was ‘ha-ha, just pretend’-ing to murder me in my sleep! Fucking Mariel slaps me around! I am sick and fucking tired of everybody thinking they can solve their problems by beating on me! Or on anybody else! When the hell exactly did violence become the first resort?”

Belinda was beyond taken aback.

“You want to hit me? Hit me!” I yelled. “Beat me! Rape me! Kill me, if you want to! Who knows? You might get a fucking medal for it! And when you’re done, your sad… little… life will be just as sad and just as little, and the only thing that will be different is you’ll have nobody left to blame for it. So, come on… come on!”

My pulse was pounding in my ears and my breath was coming hot and ragged, like I’d just run a marathon… or maybe a sprint, if that actually gets you worked up more. I don’t know. I could see it working either way. What do I know about running?

“You’re fucked, Blaise,” Belinda said, shaking her head in disbelief. “You are seriously fucked in the head.”

“Probably!” I agreed. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I told you what I’m going to do… I’m going to pound you,” Belinda said.

“Yeah? You said you were going to kill me,” I reminded her.

“I will!” she said.

“Go ahead,” I said.

She didn’t.

“I’m not afraid of you,” she insisted.

“I know you’re not,” I said. “I wish you were, but you’re too stupid to be. The real problem is that you think it won’t mean anything if I don’t fight back… you’re right, actually, but it still won’t mean anything even if I do.”

“I’ll kick the shit right out of you either way,” Belinda said defiantly.

“But you want me to fight back,” I said.

“It’s more fun that way,” she sneered.

“We already established this isn’t about ‘fun’… but you want me to fight back? I’ll fight back,” I said. “But… we’re doing it my way. Civilized.”

“A civilized fight?” Belinda asked. “No such thing.”

“Sure there is,” I said. “We’ll take turns. You hit me as hard as you can, and then I’ll hit you, and so on. Got it?”

“You got a fucking death wish,” Belinda said.

“That would explain a lot,” I said. “Are you in?”

She answered with her fist. It was somehow lacking in comparison to the previous ones. I know she wasn’t holding back on purpose, but I think she’d already put a lot of what she had into those earlier blows. Also, she might have been more than a little unnerved already.

I was hoping so. She’d have to be, if what I had planned was going to work. If not, I’d have no real choice but to mess her up, badly.

Also, I’d have to let her hit me again.

“Alright, runt,” she said when I got back to my feet. “Your turn.” She grinned a smug, toothy grin. “I’ll even be nice and let you actually take it.”

“That’s good of you,” I said. I raised one skinny arm, balled up a tiny fist, drew back my elbow… and then lashed out blindly to my side, knocking a big chunk of cinder block out of the wall amid a shower of plaster and dust.

Incidentally, that hurt quite a bit more than her punch had. My scream of pain sounded pretty primal, though. I think it might have passed for rage.

“What the fuck?” Belinda asked, her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open. She was staring at the crater my wild blow had gouged out of the wall.

“I missed,” I said, giving a lopsided grin, and resisting the urge to cradle my injured-feeling hand. “Not much of a fighter. Well… next time. C’mon, your turn.”

“Fuck this,” she said.

“It’s your turn,” I said. “Hurry up, I really want to try again.”

“Fuck this,” she repeated. “You’re using magic.”

“No magic,” I said, shaking my head. “Just me.” I bent down and picked up the chunk of brick, then crumbled it in my hands. I didn’t really want to do it… I knew I was doubling the work of whoever would have to put it back together… but I didn’t know how else to get the point across to Belinda that I could really hurt her, without really hurting her.

“This is what I am, Belinda,” I said, letting the pieces fall from my fingers. “You can beat on me all you want, but you can’t beat me, because the moment I fight back, you’ll look like that,” I said, pointing at the hole in the wall.

“You’re fucked in the head,” she said again, in a choked voice.

“Probably,” I said, once more. “What are you going to do about it?”

There was a moment when she might have launched herself at me with total abandon. I saw it on her face. She might have decided to hell with it, I was still a scrawny nerd no matter what tricks I might pull. If she did… well, I’d have to lash out, and quickly. I’d been learning–slowly but well, as Amaranth would say–that I wasn’t a fighter. If I hesitated, she’d be all over me, and she’d win. She couldn’t hurt me, but she could incapacitate me… and then do whatever she wanted.

I took a step towards her, squaring off my shoulders and lifted my hands.

The moment passed.

“Fuck this,” she said one more time. “You didn’t win.”

Then she was gone, the same powerful stride she’d used to ambush me carrying her out the door like a ballista bolt.

I can’t imagine what our “conversation” had sounded like to those out the room, but I had to believe it had been audible. Even with the identity and racial heritage of the participants unknown, it wasn’t all that surprising that nobody was in too big a hurry to investigate.

I sat down on the floor, not even bothering to stagger over to a chair. Also, the room was still dark, and I’d done enough damage to it for one day.

I’d only meant to catch my breath, but as the rush of excitement and imminent danger passed, pain seemed to seep back into my body and the floor seemed more and more to be the place to be. It was mostly in my head and arm but also in my back, shoulders, and one ankle, which I’d landed on when Belinda dropped me.

I’d won. No matter what she said, I’d won. I’d avoided violence, and still won. I’d yelled and lost my temper… and I would have to, as Dee had put it, “make an act of contrition” for that… but Amaranth could be proud of me for not having hurt anybody. I could be proud of myself.

I was laughing, even though the situation had not got one tiny bit funnier, when the door opened and a light came on.

“Just what’s going on in here?” a man asked. He was dressed relatively casually, in jeans and a polo shirt, though he was more than a bit old for a student, with noticeably salt-and-pepper streaks in his temple. Also, I couldn’t see a student opening with that line.

Well, it was getting a bit late in the day. He could be a teacher who’d been done with classes for a while… or maybe some departments had casual Fridays. I didn’t know.

“A couple people were fighting in here,” I said, truthfully, getting to my feet. “One of them knocked a chunk out of the wall.”

“And you just stood there and watched?”

“No, sir,” I said. I didn’t know the man or what his position was, so I decided to play it safe and respectful. “I tried to stop it.”

“These students today… and will you look at that,” he said, going over to examine the hole I’d knocked in the wall. He shook his head and clucked. “What were they fighting with, bolts of force? Still… not even worth bothering maintenance with. Not on a Friday, anyway. Not worth the headache.”

He waggled his fingers over the broken pieces. Their uneven surfaces began to glisten and then became smooth and round as they turned to beads of liquid, which then flowed together into a single, thick puddle. The hole in the wall drew the viscous liquid to it like a lodestone, and then the wall was solid. He made a similar attempt to draw the plaster back together, which failed and backfired in a cloud of white dust and particulate shrapnel uncomfortably close to his face.

“Don’t you have some place to be?” he demanded of me suddenly.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Um… do you want me to send for…”

“I think I can handle a little patch job!” he said indignantly, and I took my cue to leave. Not wanting to garner any more attention, I made an effort to walk normally until I was out of his sight, though my ankle didn’t want to support my weight. I could bear it, though. I knew what a real broken ankle felt like.

This was just a cheap knock-off. I could handle it.

After Ariadne and Belinda, I could handle anything.

Just… not right that moment… preferably.

Ow.

Ow.