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a lot of them were things like old natural history or philosophy textbooks from the 160s or 170s… fifty, sixty years out of date and looking like they’d felt every day of it.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.

The more time I spent in the hallways and classrooms of the university, in my dorm room or the lounges and bathrooms of Harlowe Hall, the less each additional moment mattered. The less impact it had.

Some of my worst memories were of that first weekend, too. Plopped down in the midst of all that mind-searing newness was me, fresh off the coach from a small town in Blackwater Province and with nine years of some really pretty terrible social conditioning to overcome. I’d been so eager to prove myself to others and so unwilling to have my worth proven to myself. I’d been awkward in every sense of the word, socially backwards and clumsy. I’d been easy prey for others.

That last part at least was a lot less true by the start of my second year.

I’d shown up at MU for the first time determined that everything would be different for me there. It had been, of course. But lacking any sort of prior experience or frame of reference or plan, “different” hadn’t necessarily equaled “better”.

At the risk of history repeating itself, I was determined at the start of my second year that things really would be different. At that point, though, this was more of an observation than an overly-optimistic determination.

Things already were different. I knew where things were on campus and how they worked. I had a better handle on who I was and what I was capable of. I had friends and lovers. Since I’d spent the summer session at MU, I had spent more time on campus than the incoming freshmen and most of the returning sophomores… half of the undergraduate student body. It’s such a little thing to count as a confidence booster, but when your confidence needs boosting you’re willing to settle for little things.

Also, some of the little things are huge.

Having just one person you know with you can be a little thing. I mean, I’d never been the sort of person to feel lonely or need other people around me constantly, after all. I guess I’d missed my friends while they were away for the summer, but I’m not sure that I had missed them in the same way that they’d missed me. There were nights where I woke up horny and there were times when I positively ached for Amaranth, but all in all… well, I’d never found myself bored and wanting company. When I was bored I’d gone over to the library, or wasted time on the ethernet. I’d had what you might call a lonely childhood, but a side effect of that was that I’d never acquired the habit of other people.

Still, having someone to hang out with and talk to and just be with made a huge difference when dealing with something huge and new.

My girlfriend Amaranth wasn’t due to arrive for another day. She and her fellow cereal nymph had agreed to take separate coaches from their home in Paradise Valley, and Barley had taken the first one. My boyfriend Ian was traveling from farther away and wouldn’t arrive until nightfall. Steff, my other girlfriend, had flown in the day before. She’d spent the night getting settled in with Viktor in their new dorm room on the third floor of Harlowe Hall, the designated non-human dorm, but she was spending the afternoon with me. Ogres are a nocturnal people, and even though Viktor’s half human, spending the day out in the bright sunlight wasn’t his idea of a good time.

The first time I’d met Steff had been when she’d been “personning”… to use her word… the table for the Prism Pride Coalition. We didn’t get to know each other until after we met again in history class the following Monday. Now that first meeting had come full circle, as I was helping her cover the table while her friends from the PPC were off getting food and chasing down the faculty advisor for something or other.

The first year, she’d been dressed androgynously for the task, as the group’s leadership had decided that a physically male half-elf wearing women’s clothing might give the wrong impression. I personally thought that it might give the impression that the PPC was accepting of people with any gender identity or expression, but I wasn’t even a member of the group.

This year either there was no issue, or Steff hadn’t cared what anyone thought. She was wearing a beautiful elven-style gown… it wasn’t authentic, of course. No elf would make a dress to fit the generous curves Steff’s narrow frame had gained through alchemical intervention in the time between last year’s festival and this one.

By this time, she’d looked like that for most of the time that I’d known her… but it was still her “new” look to me. First impressions can be a powerful thing. I’d taken Steff as a woman from the first time I’d seen her wearing a skirt. Her tendency to wear either loose blouses or modest false breasts had been enough to convince my eyes I was seeing a girl. The lack of hips hadn’t fazed me, as the pale-skinned elves of the surface were never known for their sexual dimorphism.

Learning… eventually… that she had a penis hadn’t changed the impression of her as a girl one bit. It had taken a bit of explanation for me to grasp how that worked… or maybe to realize that how was less important in such cases than who. Steff was who she was, and a girl was part of who she was.

Credit went to my one-time roommate, current suitemate, and informally adopted sister Two for helping me work that out.

Likewise, I now accepted curvy Steff as being Steff… she still had the same pale and angular face with only a little more roundness to it. She still had the same wispy whitish-blonde hair. I knew the body she wore was her real body, the only one she had. Most of the time when I closed my eyes and thought of her, it was what I saw… let’s face it, picturing big breasts didn’t exactly strain my brain.

Steff was still Steff. She still excited me, frustrated me, cheered me up, and occasionally frightened me. But I’d seen her before, I’d grown fond of and familiar with her before… I’d seen the change, and so it would always register to me as being a change.

It was possible I might get used to it, though, as other things in my life changed. There was probably a finite number of things that could seem new, different, and strange at one time.

For one thing, the festival was larger than it had been the year before, in that there were more booths. More merchants from the nearby town of Enwich and the surrounding environment were participating, as MU was in the process of expanding. More housing and classrooms had been added to the campus. There were more concessions available for retail and fast food businesses and more would be added in the next two years.

It was larger but it seemed smaller, because it was more spread out. The crowd was thinner. In fact, there were pretty much two crowds as the tables and booths were clustered in two main areas, one in the five-sided field and plaza in front of the old student union and the other in front of the new student life center and the bardic arts building.

Whoever had handled the logistics of the thing had made some deft decisions in assigning spaces to avoid traditional rivalries. Last year, I’d witnessed an illusion fight between the queer pride PPC and a religious group… religious meaning Khersian, of course. In the plains of central Magisteria it almost always did, at least among humans. That was one of the internalized attitudes I’d brought with me that had only eroded slowly and over time.

The conflict between the gay and Khersian groups was avoided this year by distance. We were stationed on the pent, in sight of where the fountain with the three dragon fountains had stood last year, spewing illusionary fire and actual water. That familiar landmark was also now gone. It had been removed over the summer quietly and without fanfare, having been inextricably associated with the violent death of an MU student inside of what was supposed to be the protective aegis of the network of enchanted paths.

The death of Leda the swan princess had been officially attributed to a freak monster attack. I was one of the few people who knew that the “monster” had been another student. I was also one of only two people who knew exactly what had happened to her murderer.

In the place of the fountain where Leda had died stood a stunning illusionary sculpture of MU’s tri-dragon mascot as it would look rendered in icy-white crystal. The ground around it was covered with a shimmering illusion of water. It would have looked cool, but for what struck me as a rather ghoulish touch: at the dragons’ feet was the figure of a swan that slowly shifted into a tall, thin girl of regal bearing. Part of the funds for the illusion display had been donated by Leda’s family, but I imagined that its existence in the first place was part of the off-the-books settlement they’d reached with the Imperium.

Even knowing what had happened there, I missed the real fountain. It was familiar… it fit in with the surrounding architecture better… and it couldn’t begin to be as much of a haunting reminder of Leda and her fate as a life-like but ghostly image of Leda herself that we’d have to walk past every day was.

The fountain had also incidentally been the site of my first spanking, at the oh-so-knowledgeable hands of Amaranth. I hadn’t been a fan of the public aspect of that, but the experience had been a revelation. I never had completely got over the idea of sex as something shameful, but I had learned to enjoy the shame… and I wasn’t ashamed of that.

For all the changes, there were some familiar aspects to the festival. Illusionists still used it as a prime chance to show off. The show-stopping centerpiece was the official tri-dragon mascot… a flight of three dragons that looped about overhead, occasionally forming into one dragon with three heads for a while and then splitting again. I’d missed the merge-and-split routine last year, but I hadn’t exactly lingered long. I’d also arrived later in the day, when there was less supervision and the people casting the illusion and maintaining it had cared less and the dragons started changing colors and sporting wacky headgear. At this point, they were still proudly wearing the school colors of purple and green.

One of the crew running them was my former floormate, Celia the nagakin. During a break in the dragonflight, she wandered over to us.

“What’s up, snatch-hatchers?” she said by way of greeting.

That, too, was a mixture of the familiar and the new. Celia’s kind had a mixture of mammalian and reptilian traits, though she’d always firmly identified as a reptile and had disdained mammalian folk as “pink skins”… never mind that we weren’t all pink, or that she was, too. If you excused her almost non-existent nose and ears, overlooked her snake eyes, and didn’t see her open her mouth, she could have passed for a hairless flat-chested human girl.

Apparently she’d spent her months off learning new and more accurate ways to insult us… it took me a few seconds to parse what she’d said, but once I did I had to admit it was actually a pretty good one.

I didn’t have to admit it out loud, though. I was working on controlling my temper. I’d never exactly been a raging berserker or anything… the thought of violence still had a tendency to turn my stomach… but I did have a problem with what Amaranth called volume control. For most of my life, I’d either clammed up completely under stress or vomited out my naked reactions without any restraint… all or nothing. Under Amaranth’s guidance… and with a little help from Teddi Lundegard, one of the school’s certified mental healers, I’d made some strides in things like letting things roll off my back or acknowledging them without losing control.

Given that I was nominally representing an organization that I didn’t even belong to, this seemed like a “roll off my back” kind of moment.

“Hello, Celia,” I said. I tried to smile at her. I couldn’t say how successful I was. “You volunteered for dragon duty this year?”

“Volunteered? Nah, I had to,” she said. “I’m on scholastic probation because of my grades last semester. My advisor got some of them adjusted but I have to be on the drill team. It’s not all bad, though… I’m getting lots of practice on scales.”

“You know, I used to think illusion was a soft option,” Steff said with a great big smile on her face. Steff’s snark rarely sounded anything other than absolutely, delightfully chipper… only if she were really upset by something would it sound nasty. And she was being snarky. I knew her enough to know that. I could even guess the shape of the next thing that would come out of her mouth before she said it. “Then I realized it’s actually an intangible one.”

“Ha fucking ha,” Celia said. Illusion was one of the easier schools of magic, in terms of power drain… but in fairness to illusionists, there was a lot of skill involved. Not that Celia had necessarily mastered them. “Do you know what the difference between illusion and necromancy is?”

“If you’re confused about that, that might explain the probation,” Steff said.

“Illusionists never get in trouble for fucking their homework,” Celia said.

“Don’t be silly… all sex is illusory, ultimately,” Steff said. “Any time we fuck someone, we’re fucking an illusion.”

“That’s pretty cynical for someone who believes in love,” I said, a little stung. I knew Steff had her cynical side. I knew she could use people for pleasure… I knew that she used me for pleasure. But she also cared, and she loved. She liked to act like these things were unrelated… she liked my company and she loved me, and she also enjoyed fucking me… but I didn’t see how they could be.

“We fall in love with illusions, too,” Steff said. “Don’t look at me like that, hon. It doesn’t mean the love isn’t real… or that the sex isn’t. But how the fuck are we supposed to know what another person’s really like when we can barely even know ourselves?”

“Says you,” Celia said. “I know who I am. That’s why I stayed with Harlowe instead of trying to shed my skin and walk with the humans.”

With that, she turned and walked back to where the rest of the drill team was. Steff had been the one who’d pissed her off, but she’d thrown her last barb at me.

“I know you had your reasons for switching dorms, and I almost switched, too… but I do kind of wish you hadn’t,” Steff said. “It seems so empty over there. I mean, the lower floors have always been less full than the upper floors, because of people dropping out or finding other accommodations, but it seems emptier than it was. The fourth floor, too.”

“People are still arriving,” I reminded her.

“Yeah, but the crowd’s… less crowded,” she said. “And everyone’s talking about… well, they’re talking about you.”

“Nice to know some things don’t change.”

“I mean as the ringleader of the whole Harlowe Exodus,” she said.

“Is that what they’re calling it?” I asked. “I just wanted a different living situation for my sophomore year.”

“Yeah, but you’ve got three other Harlowe girls with you… you’ve personally decimated the sophomore floor of the girls’ side,” Steff said. “And other people followed your lead.”

“I don’t have a lead,” I said. “If anything, they’re probably following Shiel… she’s the one who actually made a bunch of noise about moving out. Considering that I moved dorms in part to get away from nosey people, I’d really rather that nobody noticed. Besides, we aren’t ‘Harlowe girls’. We lived in Harlowe last year. This year in Gilcrease. If the tower doesn’t work out the way we want it to, or we don’t all want to live with each other next year, we’ll end up being somewhere else.”

“You see?” Steff said.

“No,” I said. “What am I supposed to see?”

“You’re pretending your move wasn’t political, but then you say you’re not Harlowe girls.”

“I’m not being political,” I said. “I didn’t break some rule or smash down some barrier to go live in Gilcrease… you said yourself that a few people find other accommodations each year.”

“Right, but that’s just people drifting away or finding human friends to room with. It’s not purposeful movement, like when four Harlowe residents all move out at once,” Steff said. “And three of you are known political agitators.”

“Amaranth wouldn’t like to be called any kind of an agitator,” I said. “She’s a political soother.” I couldn’t really argue that Dee was politically minded, as she’d become more involved in campus protests and awareness campaigns as she came to learn more about the surface world. “And I’ve never agitated politically on purpose.”

“You’re just a natural born rebel, Mack,” Steff said. “Have you seen much of Dee?”

“She got in on Wednesday,” I said. “Well, Tuesday, but she was staying with her entourage until they checked out the dorm situation. I haven’t seen much of her since then. She’s been spending most of her time meditating in her room. The only time I’ve seen her is when she needed to use the sink while I was taking a bath.”

“She just walked in while you were bathing?” Steff said. I could tell from her voice… and from the fact that it was Steff saying it… that she was less scandalized by the idea than she was turned on by envisioning a version of events that was pornier than anything likely to have actually happened.

“She asked first,” I said. “I didn’t mind. Really, I’m the last person who should be monopolizing the bathroom since I don’t need to use the, you know, facilities.”

“Neither does Amy,” Steff said, using the pet name she used for Amaranth to get around the fact that her name was uncomfortably close to that of Steff’s elven father. “I guess Two and Dee really lucked out there, if they have to share one toilet with two other girls.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Though it’s still one bathroom for the four of us. We’re going to have to figure out how to work that stuff out in the mornings, once everyone’s here.”

“Well, on the plus side Amy’s intrinsically clean and never has to do anything more with her hair than give it a little shake and watch it fall into place,” Steff said.

“I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re right,” I said. I had fond memories of showering with Amaranth, and I knew she enjoyed steamy hot showers, but there would be no reason she’d need to be in line for the tub every morning before class.

“And Dee and Two are both early risers, so they’ll probably be done and gone before you get in there,” Steff said. “Hey… I feel dumb for not thinking to ask what her summer plans were before, but Two didn’t go back to that shitty golem group home, did she?”

“No,” I said. “She went to Logfallen with her friend Hazel.”

“Oh, good for her,” Steff said. “And for her friend Hazel. I’m surprised she’s allowed to bring ‘big people’ back to the shire, though.”

“It’s probably a little scandalous, but I have the impression Hazel’s already pretty scandalous there,” I said.

A couple people drifted over from the next table, and I faded into the background to let her deal with them. She was a lot better at talking to strangers than I was, and she was actually a member of the Prism Pride Coalition where I was just sort of hanging out behind their table. While she talked to them and the next group of people who followed, I opened up my notebook and resumed work on my plans.

A year ago, the idea of enchanting weapons would have filled me with distaste. There were so many better things… cooler things, more useful things, less violent things… that could be done with modern enchantment techniques than making magic weapons. That was one reason why Applied Enchantment was a whole separate major from Armoury.

But the necessity of dealing with weapons had helped me to see that the things that drew me to enchantment didn’t disappear when the subject was a weapon rather than some other sort of tool or device. Especially after I lost my knife and started fighting with staves instead… a staff was a traditional wizard’s tool, after all. It had most of the properties of a wand, and a few others besides.

I couldn’t begin to afford the sort of wizard’s staff that would be worth paying for, of course, even without throwing in the need for it to be useful as a melee weapon.

“Journaling again?” Steff asked me when there was a break.

“I told you I gave that up,” I said.

That was just another example of how easy it was for people to get the wrong impression based on a few interactions. I’d tried keeping a journal during part of my freshman year, and even though nothing had really come of it, anybody who’d seen me writing in it and asked what I was doing now gave me a knowing look any time I pulled out a notebook. Given that we were at university and I liked to write and sketch out random spell and enchantment ideas, this was often.

“So what are you doing, then?” she asked.

“Just streamlining some of my ideas for my staff,” I said.

“You haven’t taken care of your weapon already? Class starts next week, and Jilly’s not going to go easy on you this year.”

“I have a staff,” I said. “But the one I bought is a blank.”

“A what?”

“It’s a weapon that’s enchanted to be enchantable,” I said. “It has its own susceptibility to enchantment enhanced, and it also has spells in place to sustain and power temporary enchantments put on it… makes it good for practicing complex enchantment work, but it also means I can lay enchantments on it before the start of class and they’ll last all the way through the end of it.”

“Oh, cool!” Steff said. “Also: nerd.”

“Anyway, Coach Callahan has never gone easy on anybody,” I said. “The fact that she could be harder doesn’t make her easy.”

“No, you’re right, that’s not what makes her easy.”

“And now we’re in territory I really don’t want to hear about,” I said.

“Don’t worry, we’re not fucking,” Steff said. “At the moment, I mean. Though I guess you’d probably notice if that were the case.”

“There really should be a rule about that,” I said.

“There is… but it only applies if I’m in one of her classes,” Steff said. “I’m already ahead of the game in weapon proficiency credits, so I can go all the way to graduation without putting myself off-limits.”

“I meant a rule against you having sex with her,” I said. “Or her having sex with anyone.”

“I don’t think you’d like that,” Steff said. “Jillybean gets violent when she’s not getting laid. Or when she is. At the same time she’s getting laid, I mean. But also before and after. Let me try this again: she remains violent regardless of whether or not…”

“Basement,” I said. This was my safeword. Was it meant to be used to end a conversation I didn’t want to hear? Probably not specifically. But as a shorthand way of letting Steff know how serious I was about not wanting to hear about her sex with “Jillybean” Callahan, it got the job done.

“Oh, here comes Markel again,” Steff said. “Finally.”

“His name is Marcel,” I corrected her. I couldn’t see him, but I didn’t doubt her word. Steff’s senses weren’t as sharp as a full elf’s, but they were far more acute than mine. “You should be nicer to the freshmen.”

“Was anyone nice to you?”

“Some people were,” I said. “Present company sort of intermittently included.”

Steff stood up, pushed her long, straight hair back off of her shoulders, and then leaned towards me. Her lips formed a tight, wicked little smile.

“You wouldn’t like me if I were nice all the time,” she said without moving them, her voice tickling in both my ears like a faint wind. Elven voice magic was one of Steff’s favorite tricks. It had lost most of its power to startle me, but now that it was familiar, it felt intimate.

“I might,” I said. “I’d like you differently but I’d still like you.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Steff said, taking my hands and pulling me up out of the folding chair. She put her face very close to mine and stared into my eyes, deeply and without blinking. “I know you, Mack. Amaranth is your safety. Ian, even when he’s doing his Lord High Dongmaster routine and making you crawl, is your security. I’m your thrill, Mack. You like me a little nasty. You like me dangerous. You like my edge.”

I blushed. That much was also still the same. No matter how much better I got at controlling my reactions, I still blushed at the drop of a fashionable but clumsy hydra’s hat.

“I thought you said we never really know other people,” I said, even though a big part of why I was blushing was that she was right… I wasn’t sure that there wasn’t room in my heart for a nice, safe Steff, but I did like her to be wicked. Steff took my breath away, and it just wouldn’t be the same if I didn’t have the lurking worry that she might not give it back.

“Well, if you’re an illusion, then I must be better at doing color changes than Celia,” she said, reaching up to touch the rosy part of my cheek with the back of her fingers.

“You’re still needling her even when she’s not here to hear it,” I said, ducking my head slightly.

“You know what they say… character is what you do when no one’s around,” Steff said.

“Hey, girls,” Marcel said. “Oh, don’t stop on my account,” he added as I jumped away from Steff. He was a human boy, small and wiry and with spiky purple hair. He wore a long-sleeved shirt of loose mail under a black t-shirt with the sleeves torn off, and black studded leather pants. A small mace made of gleaming black metal hung from one of the belt loops. “Sorry I took so long… I swung by my room on my way back and my roommate was just getting in.”

“Hey, Markel… any problems with the roomie?” Steff asked.

“No, he already knew I was queer from our a-mails,” he said. “But I helped him move his stuff in. I hope that’s okay. Professor Thorne said it wouldn’t be busy until three or so, and we should have more help then.”

“I’m probably going to take off before then,” I said. “I’m not really a fan of crowds.”

“Okay. Have you decided to join up?” Marcel asked.

“I’m not much of a joiner,” I said, which was what I’d said the first time he asked. Marcel was a joiner. He’d signed up for the coalition right away and then volunteered to help staff the table. He couldn’t understand why I wasn’t interested in the same, as a bisexual girl who was out and clearly had no problem with the organization.

“No, Mack is more of a leader,” Steff said.

“Oh, that’s cool,” Marcel said. “What groups are you involved in?”

“None,” I said. “I’m seriously not a group person.”

“She led the Harlowe Exodus, delivering the oppressed non-humans to the promised dorm,” Steff said.

“The what?” Marcel said.

“Don’t listen to her,” I said. “I just moved dorms from Harlowe this year. A lot of people did. Well, not a lot, but more than me. For some reason, some people think everyone else who had the same idea was inspired by me. It wasn’t even my idea in the first place.”

“You were in Harlowe?” Marcel said. “Oh, that’s cool… I mean, I shouldn’t have assumed… well, you look human.”

“You don’t know who I am?” I asked.

“Should I?”

“Well, there’s no reason you’d need to… but I did get to be kind of semi-infamous last year,” I said.

“This is my first year here.”

“I made the news a little,” I said.

“Really? What for?”

“Well, you know this whole province used to be under the thumb of a powerful necromantic warlock,” Steff said.

“Yeah, but he died thousands of years ago,” Marcel said.

“Hundreds,” I corrected. The Merovian habitation of the plains hadn’t even begun thousands of years ago. “Steff, what are you…?”

“Right,” Steff said. “But… necromancer. No necromancer worth his zombie-killing salt would let a little thing like death stop him for long. He’s never managed to come all the way back, but he’s never gone away, exactly. Even today he’s so feared that locals fear to speak his name.”

“His name is Praxis,” I said. “And seriously, Marcel, she’s…”

“Except for Mack, of course,” Steff added. “She’s the only one brave enough to say it openly.”

“Was Praxis, I mean,” I amended, but Marcel was already looking at me. “He’s dead. Dead-dead. And this has nothing to do with…”

“She’s too modest,” Steff said. “The permanent, final death of the Necromancer-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named has everything to do with her, the chosen one who saved the school… and the whole world… from his tyranny.”

“And this made the news?” Marcel asked, looking at me with the look of someone who’s pretty sure he’s being bullshitted but doesn’t want to look stupid if he’s wrong.

“No,” I said. “Because it didn’t happen. There was just a series of events… well, I kind of got attached to them, because I’m, well… a half-demon.”

“Heh,” Marcel said. “That’s a good one. You’re almost making Steff’s story believable.”

“It’s true,” I said.

“A demon at university?”

“Half-demon,” I said. “My father was… is… a demon. My mother was human. It happens. Not very often, but it happens.”

“Demons are destroyed on sight.”

“Half-demons aren’t,” I said. “Because we’re half-human. We have souls. We have rights.”

“And they just let you enroll?”

“We have rights,” I said again. My modulation of my voice started to slip, but I pushed it back down to a normal level as best as I could… with sort of mixed results. “Come on, I’d think someone in the Prism Pride Coalition would be a little more open-minded than that.”

“Being queer isn’t the same thing as being a demon,” he said.

“I didn’t say it was!”

“Are you serious?” he said.

“I’m serious that I’m a half-demon and that I have the same rights as anyone else who’s here,” I said.

“Is she serious?” he asked Steff.

“Yes,” Steff said. “Mackenzie Blaise is the half-demon princess who defeated the necromancer underlord of Prax and saved Magisterius University in accordance with the prophecies.”

Marcel snorted and rolled his eyes.

“I knew you were full of shit,” he said. “Half-demon student.”

I shut my notebook.

“Excuse me… I think I’m going to go work on my staff,” I said.

If I needed a concrete reason to not join the PPC, I had it… eventually Marcel would learn the truth, and the sort of person whose reaction to learning that I’m a half-demon is to insist that such a creature couldn’t possibly be admitted to a major university is not the sort of person I wanted to be around.

I’d spent too much of my first year learning and then re-learning the lesson that I didn’t have to give my time or my life over to people who had no use for me… or, for that matter, people who had nothing but uses for me.

Still, Marcel’s reaction was helpful in one regard: it served as a sharp reminder that not everything that was familiar was comforting.

Soon: In Friday’s chapter… hail, hail, the gang’s all here. Then next Monday the academic term properly begins. Watch my Livejournal this week for more details about my plans for book one of this volume!

Yes, there was nothing like ten solid minutes of nothing happening to convince oneself that the potion one had taken might as well have been interesting colored water for all of the pregnancies it would actually terminate.

“And that’s it,” Roger said finally. “Remember, don’t take anything else and try to stay away from any buffs or debuffs for the next two weeks. There wouldn’t be any interactions with most of them, but we don’t want any nasty surprises.”

“Okay,” I said.

The whole thing had taken maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes, including the wait before I’d seen Roger. I figured the others had probably headed for lunch already, but they wouldn’t be anywhere near finished, and I still had to eat… okay, technically I didn’t have to eat. But I still enjoyed and was in the habit of eating, and was expected to by my owner, so I went straight to the dining hall.

After I got inside, I decided to check in at the table where the others were before getting my food. My jitters from earlier weren’t ready to leave just yet, so they were finding new things to pester me about, like what would happen if everybody else finished eating just as I was sitting down and so they had to sit there awkwardly while I ate or else they’d all just get up and go, leaving me sitting there alone…

Nothing, I told them. Nothing is what would happen. Certainly nothing worth dwelling on or complaining about.

The jitters were unimpressed with my reasoning, but I held firm.

Ian was there, as I’d expected, along with Amaranth and Steff and Two. Amaranth looked up as I approached, but her smile froze on her face and her perpetually sun-kissed skin paled just a little.

“What’s… what’s wrong?” I asked as the once-downcast jitters rejoiced.

“Do you feel okay, baby?” she asked me.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. I now wondered if I was showing unexpected side-effects from the potion. Maybe a ten minute waiting period hadn’t been quite enough. Maybe the anti-fertility potion had never been tested on those with infernal or extraplanar blood. “Why? Do I look… is something…”

“There’s something… off… about you,” she said. “It’s hard to explain.”

“You look okay to me,” Ian said. “Did you go to the healing center?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said.

“Why were you in the healing center?” Amaranth asked. “Mackenzie, baby, is something wrong?”

“No, really,” I said, trying to put as much assurance into my voice as I could. Whatever had Amaranth spooked, the news that I’d gone for healing certainly wasn’t helping put her mind at ease. “During the night of the fish-beast, Ian and I had sex without a ring… so they gave me a potion to cure disease and another one to inhibit fertility, you know, just so I don’t end up pregnant… well, it’ll wear off in two weeks… could you be seeing that somehow?” I asked Amaranth.

“Oh yes,” she said. “I guess that does explain it.”

“You don’t think there’s something else, do you?” I asked. “Because I also took a cure disease potion right before it, so… I should be pretty healthy. But I don’t want to take any chances.”

“Yes, I’m sure you’re fine,” Amaranth said. “I’ve never seen anything like it… it just looks funny, is all. I suppose I’ll get used to it.”

“What exactly are you seeing?” I asked. I didn’t want her to be worried, but I also wanted to be sure there wasn’t anything for her to be worried about.

“Well, ‘seeing’ isn’t really the best word… okay, maybe it is the best word but it’s a case where the best word isn’t actually very good,” she said. “I guess I could just say ‘sensing’, since I am processing the information coming to me through a sense, but that always makes me picture something like Dee getting all psionic, where this is more like a physical sense, like sight or smell, but…”

“What are you sensing?” I asked.

“Just… well, it would be like seeing a shadow,” she said. “A dark spot. Or a blank one. Like something that should be there is being blocked out, or erased. Like I said, I’ve never experienced something like it before, but I suppose it is how I would ‘sense’ things if your natural fertility was being suppressed.”

“Wouldn’t someone who happens to be infertile hit you the same way?” Steff asked.

“No,” Amaranth said. “I mean, I can tell when people are more or less fertile in the course of things, but this stands out… it’s like the difference between knowing all your life that people have different faces, and then seeing someone wearing a mask for the first time. It was a little startling.”

“Well, I’m going to go get a tray,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

I headed for the desserts first. I felt like I deserved a bit of a treat for what I’d done… well, it was more like I felt like I should feel that way, that Amaranth or others might think I deserved something. I didn’t feel like I wasn’t entitled to something, and I supposed that was a start.

What I really would have liked was something with a good deal of meat to it, but lunch time was the worst meal for that. Breakfast always had some combination of bacon, sausage, or ham available by itself.

Dinner sometimes had a meaty entree, mixed in with the rice and noodle dishes that had shreds of chicken or tuna or beef hidden like tiny prizes among the larger bits of starch that weren’t so much seasoned as stained interesting shades of brown and yellow.

For noontime meat entrees, we were pretty much stuck with the alleged chicken-and-rice dishes, and occasionally things like cold cut sandwiches. Most students seemed to just fill up a plate at the salad bar or grab some of the snackier items.

But as I passed the salad bar on the way to the cake and stuff, I noticed something: there were great big strips of chopped up ham and pieces of grilled chicken sitting on it. So I ended up with two pieces of strawberry cake and something that stretched the definition of “salad” to the breaking point and beyond for lunch, but even if I couldn’t convince myself that I deserved anything special, I also couldn’t convince myself that I didn’t want a pyramid of chicken and ham stacked over a thin layer of lettuce.

I expected a bit of reproach for my meal choice from Amaranth, but she just raised an eyebrow at it. When Two didn’t have anything to say about my use of the salad bar, I figured that I was in the clear… but then, her ice cream sundae had more little candies on it than was probably strictly regulation, so maybe she just didn’t feel like casting stones.

“There’s an interesting question that just popped into my head,” Amaranth said. “If you did get pregnant by a human father, would you need to eat human sustenance while you were carrying the child?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “My understanding is that human appetite plus demon appetite divided by two equals a slightly moderated demon appetite, because demonic hunger is stronger or bigger or more dominant than human… at least, that’s how I made sense of it when my grandmother explained it, to the extent that she explained. I suppose at some point it’s got to average out to the point that a human with infernal blood would have to eat human food. I just don’t know what that point is… and I’m not too interested in finding out.”

“Well, you never know how you’ll feel in the future,” Amaranth said. “You might change your mind. And after all, if you were to find out that three-quarters human or non-demon would be enough to allow a more conventional diet, wouldn’t that do away with one of your main objections to being pregnant?”

“Psst… I think Amy wants you to have her babies,” Steff said.

“Well, obviously not,” Amaranth said, rolling her eyes, “I just want Mack to be aware of what her options really are.”

“I’ve had enough of options for now, I think,” I said. “I don’t want to think about choices, or possibilities, or potential. I just want to coast for a while.”

“Then I’ve got good news for you,” Steff said. “It’s all downhill from here!”

Amaranth wasn’t the only one who noticed something different about me… when I headed back to the dorm after lunch, I saw Celia in the stairwell and she flicked out her tongue and told me that I “tasted funny”.

This wasn’t the first time she’d said something like that to me, so rather than assuming she was talking about my potion use I just said, “I thought you’d be used to my scent by now.”

“Different than what passes for normal, for you,” she said. “Like when you’re having a weird mammal thing, only… different.”

“Oh, well, I’m sort of on something at the moment,” I said. “For health reasons,” I added, since Celia was the biggest user of recreational alchemy in the dorm.

“No shit?” she said, her big, lidless eyes brightening. “You got anything you want to trade?”

“No, it was just a single dose thing,” I said. “And I wouldn’t want to trade… this is a legitimate health need.”

“Hey, I’ve got not needs, too,” Celia said. “Emotional needs, spiritual needs… there’s more to health than blood and guts.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not judging… I’m just saying I’m not holding or carrying or whatever you’d call it, and I’m not looking for anything,” I said.

“Alright. Cool,” Celia said. “Baby steps. Got to learn to slither before you learn to walk, I get that. Oh, Feejee asked me if I’d seen you.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Don’t know. Why don’t you ask her yourself? I don’t even know why she asked me in the first place,” Celia said. “She’s a lot ‘closer’ to you than I am. If I had eyebrows I’d be raising them when I said ‘closer’.”

“Was she in your room?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Celia said. “Where do you think I just came from?”

“Okay… thanks,” I said.

“Don’t overwhelm me with gratitude or anything,” Celia said, and she went on her way.

Feejee and Celia’s room was at the near end of the hall, the closest one to the bathroom not counting Kiersta’s. I’d have to walk right past it to get to my own room. I decided that was okay, though… if Feejee were looking for me, it would be better for her to find me in the hallway of our shared dorm than out and about somewhere. There were bound to be at least a few other people on the floor, and I had my own room to retreat to.

It wasn’t like she could corner me, I realized… if I had to, I could always break down the nearest door and jump through a window. I didn’t tend to think of things like that because I’d been brought up to think of using my strength like that as something like a horrible sin. My brain really didn’t even pick it out as an option in most cases.

But I wasn’t too worried. It wasn’t like I didn’t believe Feejee was capable of harming me, but she was also at the same time determined to be friendly, and she also held to her own people’s values when it came to things like hunting on the land. That was more than could be said for Iona. I also knew that I could cow Feejee with a show of my own predatory mojo, if I could muster it.

The man in my dreams had called mermaids “sea devils”… that raised some interesting questions. Was that just an old name for them in their monstrous forms, or was there something more significant to the name? In another one of my dreams, he’d suggested that the current state of the demon race was as a result of meddling by Khersis… if demons had once been another race of human predators inhabiting the natural world, might they not have been similar to land-dwelling mermaids?

Of course, demons couldn’t shift their shapes… at least, no more than humans or most other races could. An immortal life span and a hefty power reserve meant that a given demon was likely to be better at altering its shape than a given human.

All of this was an interesting mental digression, but if I was going to go upstairs and face Feejee I would need to do that. Well… I wasn’t so much specifically planning on facing her as I was planning on walking past her room and letting her say whatever she wanted to say to me outside in the hallway. I wasn’t going to go out of my way to confront her and I wasn’t going to go off alone with her.

I figured there was no point in trying to be all stealthy, both because I wasn’t exactly known for my ability to move with elf-like grace and silence and because Feejee would latch onto my smell as I went past her door, but even though it was slightly ajar there was no sound or movement from within it. It was only when I was almost to my own door that I heard hers opening and, stupidly, I stopped and turned to see her headed for the stairs. She must have glimpsed me out of the corner of her eye, because she spun around. Her face was not quite unreadable.

There was a trace of genuine happiness around her eyes, and a touch of worry, but on the whole she looked a bit like she was under the effect of a numbing spell that was just starting to wear off.

“Oh… hey,” she said, heading towards me. She blinked a couple of times as she got closer. “Are you wearing perfume?”

“No,” I said. “Do you smell something?”

She came right up to me and leaned forward, sniffing all around me.

“No,” she said. “I just… I didn’t recognize your scent. It’s usually pretty distinct.”

“Well, I didn’t do anything different, in the olfactory arena,” I said, which was technically true.

It was pretty obvious what the cause of the change that was tripping her and Celia up, but if it made it harder for her to recognize my scent then I wasn’t about to volunteer any information about the source or its duration.

“I’ve been looking for you,” she said.

“Yeah, Celia told me,” I said.

“I was wondering if you’ve seen Iona.”

Well, that was a question and a half.

“Not today,” I said. “Why?”

“I haven’t seen her for a while,” Feejee said. “She went out for a walk the other night, and didn’t come back.”

“What night was that?”

“Wednesday,” Feejee said.

That was the night of the fish-beast… the same night that Iona had cornered me in the bathroom in Smith Hall, after history. I hadn’t exactly gone looking for her, but I hadn’t seen Iona since then, either.

“Iona’s pretty good at taking care of herself, I’m sure,” I said. I didn’t really want to wish her well, but it didn’t exactly seem politic to say as much.

I was trying hard to keep my voice steady while not actually saying any of the things that were running through my head. Had someone already made an official unofficial move on her? Had she encountered something nastier than herself out there in the dark? Had the fish-beast done something?

“Still, I worry about her,” Feejee said. “She goes wandering around the campus at night. It’s not safe.”

“For anybody,” I said. That was a lot more pointed than I’d meant to get, so I decided it was time to end the conversation. “Feejee, I’m sorry you can’t find Iona, but I really haven’t seen her, and I’m not about to go looking for her.”

“Okay,” she said. “Sorry. It’s just… we kind of had plans for this weekend. Involving you. You know?”

Yeah, I did know.

How much safer the world would be for humanity if all of their predators were as guileless as Feejee? Though I couldn’t help but think that would make the world that much more dangerous for everyone else… and now I was sounding like my father. The man in my dreams.

“Well, if I do see her, I’ll try to send her your way,” I said.

“Okay, thanks,” Feejee said. She sniffed the air again, made a little frown, and then turned to leave.

It seemed like I wasn’t going to be able to avoid being stuck with decisions, as I now had a new one to make: get the hell out of campus for the weekend, or spend it surrounded by my friends… including Dee and Pala, preferably.

Soon: Well, that would be telling.

Discuss this story on the Livejournal community.

Enjoying the story? Please consider showing your support in a tangible way. Even a one time contribution would be appreciated. I’ll see all of you back here on Monday!

It seemed like much of Harlowe shared our plans. On our way down the boys’ side we passed a few guys who were carrying garment bags and things that were obviously costume props. One of the other canids whose name I didn’t know had evidently decided to highlight his appearance by dressing up like a stereotypical werewolf. In the girls’ stairwell, we passed Trina… dressed like a faerie princess, complete with wings and sparkles in the air all around her… and a girl I’d never seen before, who seemed to have painted her entire body with gold and green paint. There was only the faintest outline of pasties over where her nipples would be. You could only just barely make them out if you looked really closely. I wasn’t sure what she was going for with the costume, exactly, except for “sexy mostly naked girl covered in body paint”.

I had to admit, it worked.

“Oh my kosh, Gladys, did you see her checking you out?” Trina said once they were a flight down. So that was Gladys. I wondered what her racial background was… she’d looked human enough, except for maybe being bald. Though it was possible that might have been a skull cap… I hadn’t been paying that much attention.

“Man, did you see her eyes?” Ian asked.

“Um, what about them?” I asked. I hadn’t really noticed anything out of the ordinary about them.

“They weren’t there,” he said. “She had like an illusion effect or something… it was like you could see straight through to the wall behind her, like she had a chameleon spell just in that spot. Or those spots.”

“That’s weird… why would she do that?” I asked.

“Maybe because she couldn’t paint them?” Amaranth suggested. “I mean, maybe she wanted her costume to feel complete?”

“I don’t know why she wouldn’t just use glamour for the whole thing,” I said. “That paint had to be a hassle for whoever helped her put it on…”

“I don’t know about that,” Ian said.

“…and it’s probably going to make a mess everywhere she goes,” I said.

“Maybe she’s glamour-resistant?” Amaranth suggested.

“I don’t think anyone’s specifically resistant to glamours,” I said. “Except in the ‘able to see through them’ or ‘dispel them through contact’ senses. It’s nothing more than an alteration of appearance. I suppose if somebody were resistant to alterations, or to magic in general, that might make it harder to apply a glamour, but anyone or anything that has an appearance is equally susceptible to having that appearance manipulated.”

“Well, then it’s probably a tactile thing,” Amaranth said. “She was feeling very sexy, and very confident in her sexiness. I’d imagine that if she were just wearing a skimpy bikini and had her skin glammed, she might feel more exposed compared to the feeling of the paint against her skin. It could be her way of being both daring and coy, by covering herself and revealing herself.”

“It’s kind of a weird costume, though,” I said. “I mean, she’s not really going as anything, as far as I can tell. She’s just going as herself covered in paint.”

“I think it’s a bold choice, and I hope I have a chance to tell her so at the dance,” Amaranth said.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “That’s Trina’s friend she’s reflecting to every minute of every day with the latest up-to-date reports on every tiny little thing anyone does.”

“Yes, well, we can hardly judge her for that,” Amaranth said. “I mean, you’ve never heard her side of those conversations… maybe she just tolerates Trina’s gossipy ways because she wants to be a friend to her?”

“Okay, I don’t exactly have a lot to go on here, but from my one almost-run-in with her, I’m pretty sure it’s a mutual relationship,” I said.

“Well, I’m withholding judgment,” Amaranth said.

“That’s a shocker,” Ian said.

“Oh, hush,” Amaranth said.

There was a strong breeze and a high-pitched buzz when Amaranth opened the door at the top of the stairwell.

“Whoa,” she said, laughing and rocking back a little. She stuck her head into the hall, then laughed and stepped through. Ian and I followed.

The hallway was pretty busy. Mariel the sylph was zipping around like a hummingbird on haste. She stopped in front of us… well, hovered might have been a better word since she didn’t actually stop moving. An incomprehensible torrent fell out of her mouth in Amaranth’s direction, though her eyes kept darting over towards me. From the look she was giving me, I thought she was complaining, but Amaranth just said, “Yes, please, if you aren’t too busy.”

Mariel’s four delicate arms moved like a tornado, and a wash of rich woody color spread over Amaranth’s skin while her hair darkened and turned green.

“Thank you!” Amaranth said. She dropped a few coins, but Mariel had already zipped off… though she zipped back and caught them before they hit the floor.

Leda was out and about, dressed as a prima ballerina. She was talking in low tones with a tall, athletic human girl who looked a little familiar. She didn’t seem to be in costume, though from the way she kept staring at her hands like she was on something, I almost wondered if it wasn’t Celia in a really elaborate illusion. Celia would have been probably the second last person to dress up like a human, but she might have done it for irony purposes.

“Yo!” Celia called from by her room, dispelling that theory. “Can I get a little help?”

Mariel flitted over and buzzed angrily at her.

“Hey, slow it down,” Celia said. “I don’t speak bumblebee.”

“…have time to slow down I have people waiting on other floors and I thought you said you didn’t need my help and anyway I know you don’t have money to pay and I’m not doing this for my health and…”

“Please help her out,” Feejee said from within the room. “I’ll pay for her.”

Mariel sighed, then went to work on Celia. Her pink skin tinted itself orange and slightly metallic. The texture changed, looking leathery and scaly.

“Can you do wings and a tail?” Celia asked. Mariel exploded into another hypervelocity outburst, and then flitted away towards the other end of the hall.

“That would take an illusion,” I said.

“Yeah, I thought so,” Celia said. “That’s why I told her I didn’t want her weaksauce glamour in the first place. Oh, well… I guess I can use this as a base and whip up the full effect at key moments.”

“Hello, Mack!” Feejee said, sauntering into view of the doorway.

She was wearing a chef’s hat, a long white apron with a barbecue fork, a basting squirty thing, a brush, and a squeeze bottle of some kind in the pockets. That was all she was wearing. She’d gone the opposite route of Celia, melting her scales into mammalian-looking flesh.

“Wow,” Ian said.

“Oh, do you like it?” Feejee asked, leaning against the doorframe and striking a pose. “I’ve been watching a lot of cooking shows lately. Something about the look just appealed to me.”

“Well, I think you look just great, Feejee,” Amaranth said.

“What do you think, Mack?” Feejee asked.
“I… uh… I have to get my own costume on,” I said.

“I look forward to seeing it,” Feejee said, and she turned and headed back into her room.

“I don’t know who she thinks she’s fooling,” Celia said. “That girl is so queer for you.”

“Seems that way,” Ian said.

“Yeah, um, let’s get changed,” I said, and I started heading down the hall… though I stopped outside my room when I saw Honey’s outfit.

She had let Mariel tinge her skin a mottled goblin green. Her curly hair was pulled up into three short spikey pigtails. Her dress was kind of an approximation of something that Oru might have worn, though the top came up much higher and the skirt went down much lower than was the goblin style. She was wearing Oru’s lock necklace around her neck.

“Um… have you seen Shiel?” I asked her. What I really meant was, had Shiel seen her.

“Oh, Shiel can go soak her fat head,” Honey said. “We’re just having good clean fun. It’s Hazel who should be ashamed of herself. Her costume doesn’t hide anything. You can see the shape of her legs, all the way up.”

“Go soak your own head!” Hazel yelled from down the hall… from the door to my room, in fact. Her hair had been glammed blonde, and she had vaguely runic-looking letters stenciled on her forehead that said “TFH”. “There is nothing wrong with my costume.”

As far as I could see, she was right. Far from being more revealing than Honey’s, hers actually covered more than her cousins. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a fuzzy sweater. They maybe clung to her small form a bit more snugly than her everyday clothes, but that was the look she was evidently going for… everything Two wore was pretty perfectly fitted to her.

It was a little shocking to see Two’s friend in anything other than an earthy shapeless house dress. I’d seen Hazel in the showers before, so I knew that she’d been hiding a mature woman’s body under those dresses, but this was a whole new context to process it in.

“Hazel, you forgot the band,” Two called.

“I didn’t forget it, love, I just had to straighten my cousin out a little,” Hazel said.

“If you think I’m going to let you walk out of the hall dressed like that…” Honey said, her bare feet slapping the tile of the hallway as she stomped her way past us towards her cousin.

“Let? I don’t at all hate to tell you this, Miss Honey Callaway, but you are not my mother,” Hazel said.

“No, but it’s her I’m thinking of,” Honey said. “What do you think she would say, if she knew her only daughter was strutting about in trousers, like the commonest trash that ever floated down the river?”

I braced myself for an explosion, but Hazel just drew herself up to her full height… she seemed to be an inch or two taller than Honey, though I’d never noticed before… and said, “I don’t know, Honey. Maybe she’d say, ‘That’s my daughter’.”

“I can’t believe that even at her…”

“At her what?” Hazel said.

“Most rebellious,” Honey said. “I can’t believe that even at her most rebellious, she would have countenanced her daughter gallivanting around in trousers, with her feet shoved into shoes.”

“They’re sandals,” Hazel said, and I realized that was the source of Hazel’s elevation… I hadn’t registered the unusualness of a shireling with footwear because the clunky wedges she was wearing went with the rest of her outfit. “And they’re just part of the costume. Golems don’t go around bare. They’ve got regular feet of clay.”

“They’re shoes, Hazel, whatever you want to call them,” Honey said. “May Owain the Merciful have mercy on your soul, because Owain the Just probably won’t.”

“I don’t see what’s…” I started to say, but Amaranth reached out and shushed me with her finger.

“Come on, baby, don’t put yourself in the middle of this,” Amaranth said.

“Yeah, I have to side with her,” Ian said quietly, drawing me towards my door. “This is cultural and it’s family… you really don’t want to get involved.”

We ducked into the bedroom while Honey and Hazel continued to quarrel loudly in the middle of the hall.

“Hi, Mack,” Two said. She was wearing a human-sized copy of one of Hazel’s dresses. Her runes had been masked over, and her hair was curled and chestnut color. “Hi, Amaranth. Hi, Ian.”

“Hi, Two,” I said, along with the others. “Wow, you guys really went all out.”

“Yes,” Two said. She scowled. “My clothing is not indecent. It’s just regular clothing. And it’s pretty.”

“Oh, honey, Honey’s just from a different culture,” Amaranth said. “She has different values.”

“Well, her values are wrong,” Two said. “There is nothing wrong with girls wearing trousers and there is nothing wrong with the shape of my legs, so there is nothing wrong with letting people see them.”

“She’s not talking about you, sweetie, she’s talking about her cousin,” Amaranth said.

“She’s talking about the way I dress,” Two said. “She just won’t say it to me because she knows it’s none of her business.”

“Well… it isn’t,” Amaranth said. “So don’t worry about it. It’s her culture and her values, not yours, and so whatever she thinks, it doesn’t really hurt you, does it?”

“No,” Two said. “She’s still wrong, though.”

“Well, let her be wrong,” Amaranth said.

“Okay,” Two said.

“Are you done getting ready?” I asked. “Because Ian needs to get changed.”

“Yes, I’m done,” Two said. “I think you are the last one on the floor to get ready.”

“Well, we’ll take care of that if you’ll just excuse us for a few minutes,” I said.

“Okay,” Two said. “I have to go to the bathroom, anyway.”

“Thanks, Two,” Ian said.

“You’re welcome,” she said, and she left the three of us alone.

“Man, if I could attract girls the way you seem to…” Ian said, leaving the sentence hanging unfinished in the air.

“What?” I said.

“I’d attract a lot of girls?” he said, pulling off his jeans.

“It’s not all great,” I said. “Believe me, some attention is not worth the trouble it causes.”

“You’re talking to the human guy who’s dating a half-demon,” Ian said. “When you’re sexually involved with someone who might occasionally look at you like you’re a tasty snack cake, then you can talk about trouble.”

I would have liked to change the subject, but what could I say to that? Some dramatic irony we’ve been having lately, huh? So instead I just let it hang awkwardly, while I kicked off my shoes and pulled off my shirt. We got changed in silence, Amaranth helping me get the bikini top on.

“I am going to freeze to death,” I said, looking at myself in the mirror. It was amazing how my boobs seemed to have stayed just as tiny as ever while my tummy was starting to hang out and my ass had blown up like a pair of balloons. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“You can put an insulation spell on the cape,” Amaranth said, holding it up. “The fur… even if it’s fake… will be good for that, right? And of course, you can wear your coat on the way there… I’ll take it when we get inside.”

“Looking good,” Ian said. He took a step back behind me. “You know, I’m not even sure you need the cape.”

“Oh, I am wearing the cape,” I said, grabbing it from Amaranth. “I can feel myself hanging out in back.”

“While I agree she looks better without it, Sooni might feel put out if she doesn’t wear the cape after she took the time to fix it up,” Amaranth said. “The poor girl tries so hard to be a good friend, and I think she actually came pretty close here. It would send the wrong message to reject that.”

“Thank you,” I said, though I suddenly felt a lot less sure about the cape. I’d forgotten Sooni’s part in it.

“You’re welcome, baby.”

I finished decking myself out with the accessories. The boots, which were fuzzy inside, were a big surprise… not only did they fit my feet snugly, but they were pretty damn toasty inside.

“Oh, wow,” I said. “I am so keeping these boots.”

“Feel free,” Ian said. “I rescued them from the garbage… I mean, I saved them from going into the garbage. I didn’t rescue them from out of the garbage.”

“I think I’d probably wear them anyway, as long as I’d already put them on before you told me that,” I said. “I think they’ll even kind of go with my coat, as long as the color change is permanent.”

“With that coat, I don’t think it would matter if they were hot pink,” Ian said.

“Can I put making fun of my coat on the black list?” I asked Amaranth.

“The important thing is that you like it,” Amaranth said.

“I think the important thing is that it keeps me warm,” I said. “That’s what a coat does. That’s what it’s for.”

“Who’s dressing up as a golem, again?” Ian asked.

“I’m just saying form’s not as important as function. If it keeps me toasty on a cold night, it’s the most beautiful thing in the world by default.”

“The most beautiful thing?” Amaranth repeated, arching an eyebrow at me.

“Uh… well…” I said, starting to shrink down inside myself. I recovered, though, and slipped an arm around her. “That criteria isn’t just for coats.”

Discuss this story.

“Celia was able to render a solution to the problem,” Dee said.

“Hey, uh… hey, Mack,” Celia said.

I looked at Celia skeptically. If I hadn’t known the potion was planted in my stuff, and that it was apparently put there by an infernal presence, she would have been my first suspect for wacky alchemical mishaps. It was still possible that she’d had something to do with it, even inadvertently.

It didn’t make her look any more innocent that she ducked down behind Dee in response to my scrutiny. Considering that I was locked inside a protective circle… and I was still sitting on my hands, for some reason… I thought she was overreacting a bit.

“Celia, please give her the potion, or hand it to me,” Dee said.

Celia handed a small vial to Dee, who levitated it towards me.

“What is this?” I asked, watching it bobbing in front of my face.

“Purge,” Celia said. “But not the nasty kind. It just forces other potions to expire quickly.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I have already verified its efficacy and safety,” Dee said. “Take it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I grabbed it, popped the stopper off, and drank it. It had a slightly hot, spicy taste. I didn’t feel a whole lot different. Of course, my right hand still smelled strongly of peppermint… but then, sticking it right up near my face hadn’t made me feel any more swoony or out of control.

“The potion has a prophylactic effect for its duration, which is… unfortunately… not very long, due to its nature,” Dee said. “I suggest you wash your hands in the kitchen within the next half hour. Our bathroom has been cleared of the offending substance by the maintenance staff, but it’s crowded and we only had doses of purge for those most affected.”

“Where’d it come from?”

“Me,” Celia squeaked, coming out from behind Dee a little. “I don’t keep a lot of it on hand. I mean, I give… a lot of money for my potions, I don’t want them crapping out on me early. But sometimes I hit on a bad mix, or I need to come down fast.”

“How much does this stuff cost?” I asked. I was already out the cost of all my bath stuff… my one big indulgence for myself, and it was gone.

“Don’t worry about it,” Celia said. “It’s a trade. Amaranth’s hiding the rest of my stash in her magic nymph pocket.”

“On that note, the campus guard is checking rooms for illicit substances,” Dee said. “You will want to dispose of that container, and remove any items you wish to keep private from your room. I suspect, under your circumstances, that they will simultaneously treat you with suspicion and respect… the latter in order to discourage any accusations of retribution for your case, but the former in case there is something they can use to undermine it.”

“I can’t think of anything,” I said.

“Here, I’ll take that,” Celia said, snatching the vial from me. She popped it in her mouth and swallowed, her throat bulging only slightly as it went down. “What?” she said, as we both stared at her. “I can get it back any time I want. So… anyway… purge working?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Seems to be. You shouldn’t worry, though… I mean, my demonic side could be dangerous to anybody, but not you in particular.”

“I figured you hated me, down under it all,” she said.

“Under all what?”

“You know, deep inside.”

“Why would I hate you?” I asked. Celia wasn’t my favorite person in the world. She wasn’t always the nicest person in the world, but she had a long ways to go to be worse than a lot of people I could think of, on our floor alone.

“Because… well, I tell you and your friends off,” she said. “I call you a mammal.”

“I am a mammal,” I said.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I have to rub it in,” she said. “Also… I lost you the election.”

“I told you I don’t care about that,” I said.

“Yeah, you said that, but I thought that was just because you’re a wuss,” Celia said. “I figured with, you know, your true self revealed, you’d be all anger and rage and angry rage…”

“Mackenzie is half demon,” Dee said. “Her true self is as much a wuss as it is a demon.”

“Just so I’m clear, did you take one of the purge doses, too?”

“Is that word insulting in and of itself? I apologize deeply,” Dee said, bowing. “I had inferred, based on the people who used it and the context in which it was used, that it referred to a finer quality which was being disparaged by tone. As for what I said before… well, under the circumstances I could not pretend that I did not mean it, though I promise you I did not mean to say it.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Saying you wouldn’t have sex with a half-demon really isn’t some crazy, off-the-wall thing… I mean, it was harshly worded, but the end result is the same as you just not being interested. You at least don’t let your distaste stop you from talking to me.”

“I know you cannot help your heritage,” Dee said. The urgency of the penitent was in her voice. I believed that in her culture, restraint and modesty were taught as virtues. Through no fault of her own, she’d been stripped of hers. “But it is there. It is part of who you are, not something for which you can or should be blamed, but irrespective of that blame, you are tainted in a very real, very spiritual way. I can no more ignore that than I could ignore the danger inside your mind.”

“Believe me, I understand,” I said. I was starting to feel embarrassed… and mostly not on my own behalf. “I’m not angry or disappointed. I have enough lovers, and I still get hung up on the idea that they’re actually willing to have me.”

“Of course, that is part of it as well,” Dee said. “I don’t believe I could climb to intimacy with anyone who has regular congress with a faint elf… much less a faint elf who habitually abuses the remains of fellow creatures. Your social life is like a series of horrible paintings which, when removed from the wall, only reveal an even worse one behind it.”

“Oh, man,” Celia said. She laughed. “That’s awesome.”

“Yeah, um… are you sure you took purge?” I asked. Dee had always struck me as blunt when she broke her reserve to speak, but this was going beyond the pale.

“I am so, so very sorry,” Dee said. “I have not had anyone to confide my more inappropriate feelings in for months now. My therapist has been helpful in that regard, but there are some limits to how candid I can allow myself to be with her. Some things have been bottled up. Now I feel… uncorked.”

“Yeah, well, maybe you should let the rest of the bottle out on your therapist,” I said.

There was a knock at the room next door, and a loud but muffled female voice said, “Room check!”

“Um, you gonna let the naked chick out of the holding circle before the guards do your room?” Celia asked Dee.

“That would probably be a good idea,” Dee said, and she broke one of the lines.

I got to my feet… or I tried to, but my legs had gone completely to sleep. Dee did not hesitate to step forward and steady me, physically helping me up. Celia just stared. Low.

“Man, your junk is messed up,” Celia said.

“It’s just how mammals work down there,” I insisted, though I blushed and covered myself with the hand that wasn’t around Dee.

“No… I’ve seen other girls in the shower,” Celia said. “They aren’t all floppy and shit. Your junk is not right.”

“There is no ‘right’ size or shape for the components of a woman’s intricacy,” Dee said. “There are merely endless complex variations on a simple theme.”

“Wait, you call your thing an ‘intricacy’?” I said.

“Sometimes… I gather that’s not an idiom that carries over into Pax?” Dee replied. “It’s hard to learn the terminology. So few Paciphones are willing to discuss the subject on a mature basis.”

“Don’t you call your spooky forgotten goddess a goddess of ‘intricacy’?” Celia asked.

“Forsaken goddess,” Dee said. “And, yes… that is part of her portfolio.”

“So, when you ‘worship the goddess of intricacy’, is that another way of saying…”

“No!” Dee said. “Not always.”

There was a knock on the door. Dee held up her hand and a towel flew to it. It was very coarse, and very small.

“I… I apologize, but I cannot lend you any of my clothing,” Dee said.

“Of course,” I said, holding the towel up in front of me with the top just above my nipples.

The knock repeated.

“Room check,” the woman said.

“It is unlocked,” Dee said, and as she said it, it was.

The door opened, and a pair of female guards came in, with Kiersta hanging out in the doorway. Her eyes were already pretty freaking wide, and they widened further when she saw the three of us. She gave us a pleading look, but I wasn’t sure what she was pleading for, exactly… did she want us to hide the evidence of the potion-and-blood orgy we’d obviously been having before they came knocking?

“What’s everyone doing in here in the dark?” one of them said, surprising me as I’d forgotten the lights were off. She turned them on and Celia hissed in pain, covering her eyes. “Oh,” the guard said, looking at Dee. “Right.”

The other guard was holding a wand, which she angled at us first. It twitched in her hands.

“You ladies take some of that elixir of potion purgation?” she asked.

I looked at the others to see how they were reacting. I knew what the correct answer was, but I wasn’t sure what the right one would be.

“I was assured it was a completely legal remedy, with little potential for abuse,” Dee said.

“It is,” she said. “Relax. Don’t look so guilty.”

“Doin’ a little magic before classes?” the other guard said, looking at the circle. “There are labs for that downstairs. You weren’t summoning something in here, were you?”

“Yeah, we were summoning demons and we got one out of the shower,” Celia said.

“That’s not something to joke about,” the guard said.

“The performance of magic in dorm rooms is not prohibited unless it involves fire or other dangerous forces,” Dee said. “A circle of protection is by its very nature harmless to mortal beings.”

“We know the rules,” the guard said.

Her colleague with the wand was now pointing it all over the room. She ran it up and down the closet, going back and forth, then ran it under the length of Dee’s bed. She approached Dee’s altar last, after checking the windowsill and the vents.

“You have a lot of apothecarial supplies for a first year student,” she said to Dee.

“I am a priestess.”

“A freshman priestess?”

“This is supplementary education,” Dee said.

“Supplemental as in remedial?”

“Supplemental as in additional,” Dee said icily. “I am a priestess. Nothing among my personal effects is illegal for clerics. I checked with the embassy and with the university administration before I allocated any of my limited space for luggage.”

“Aren’t… aren’t you just supposed to be looking for the shi… stuff… that ended up in Mackenzie’s bubble bath?” Kiersta asked timidly. The guards ignored her, and she just went pale and took half a step sideways, hiding partly behind the doorframe.

“I believe I am going to ask you to resume this inspection in the presence of my lawyer and a representative from the embassy at Ceilos,” Dee said.

The guards looked at each other.

“What do you need a lawyer for?” the one without the wand said. “We’re done here.”

They stepped outside, pulling out a notebook and marking some stuff down as they ambled towards my room. Celia let out a breath, her throat making a weird whistling sound as she exhaled. Dee looked at me… I just looked back, not knowing what she expected.

“Don’t you think you should be present while they’re in your room?” she said quietly.

“Yeah, I’m not getting dressed in front of them, and I’m not going to stand there with a towel barely covering me, either,” I whispered back. “I’d rather just wait until they’re done. It’s not like they’re going to try something, not after being bitches to everyone and with my case pending in arbitration.”

“They do not seem to be the cautious or clever type,” Dee said. “Certainly the school would not be so stone-fisted as to plot against you in such a clumsy fashion or employ such obvious tools to that end, but that does not mean that two guards who feel that their standing is great relative to ours wouldn’t do so. Persons who expect no consequences for their actions will not fear them, or take them into account.”

She’d just finish speaking when they knocked. Before I could either make a reply to Dee or go to let them in myself, I heard bare feet hitting the tiles out in the hall and Amaranth singing out “I’m coming!”

“I think I’ll let her handle it,” I said. “She’s a better witness than I am, anyway.”

“Indeed,” Dee said. “You do leave…”

“Yeah, please don’t say anything else about me,” I said.

Discuss this story.

Two wakes up in the glass case, which means that she hadn’t woken up at all.

The case, like everything else in the full but tidy basement workshop, bears a label. Its label says “Golem Case”. The block letters were applied to the glass almost directly across from her eyes, and so she can see the backs of them without moving or looking around and so she knows without moving or looking around that she was in the proper place, that she was in her place and so she knows that much at least is right in the world.

This means she’s dreaming.

She hears the bolts on the door at the top of the stairs sliding open, one after another. She tenses up. She hears the door open and she sucks in her lips a bit.

This time I won’t do it, she thinks as she hears feet tread on the stairs. I won’t say it. I don’t have to. I don’t have to say anything I don’t want to ^{I WANT TO DO WHAT I’M TOLD} but I’m a free being ^{but if I were a free being I wouldn’t be back here} but if I’m back here and not a free being then Miss Ruth never told me to say it and so I don’t have to.

Then she hears the bolts on the door at the bottom of the stairs and that door opens, and the man steps inside.

“Good morning!” Two says, and he freezes. The perfect dream of her perfect life begins to crack and fray around the edges. She doesn’t know what he says in response to this. She doesn’t know what happens next.

She had never said “good morning!” to the man.

Sometimes when this happens she wakes up and she cries because she ruined the dream and she can’t get it back. Other times she keeps dreaming. The workshop falls to pieces and is blown away, leaving her on a vast, flat, featureless plain (labeled “A Vast Flat Featureless Plain”) in an infinitely expanding empty space (labeled “An Infinitely Expanding Empty Space”), alone except for some sort of ridiculous owl turtle thing sitting on a post, both labeled appropriately.

The ridiculous owl turtle thing has occupied the vast featureless plain ever since the day that Two, wanting something to replace the workshop dream that had been her refuge until Miss Ruth’s increasingly specific admonitions to be more personable had finally destroyed it, had asked her friend Hazel what sort of things people dreamed about. Her friend Hazel had told her that a lot of her dreams had impossible things that were not quite one thing and not quite another. The next time Two had fallen asleep, after she wrecked the workshop dream, there it was: not quite an owl and not a quite a turtle.

It perched upright on the top of the post on bird-like talons, but it had a reptilian underbelly and a turtle shell. The things that stuck out of the holes at its shoulders might have been flippers and might have been wings. Its head was turtlish, but with owl-like tufts over big yellow eyes and a beak that almost might have belonged to a snapping turtle as much as a bird.

“Oh,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. “Back again?”

“Yes,” Two says sullenly. “I am back again.”

“Did you try what I said?”

“No,” Two says. “I did not.”

“Well, there’s no use glaring at me like that if you aren’t going to take my advice.”

“Your advice isn’t any good,” Two says. “I cannot make something up about my own… my maker. Making things up about people is called lying and gossip, and it’s wrong.”

“It’s only gossip if you tell other people and it’s only lying if you act like it’s true,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing said.

“I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think I know those things,” Two says. “So I don’t know how you could possibly know them.”

“I am a ridiculous owl turtle thing,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing responds, “and I am clearly impossible.”

“I am going to ignore you,” Two says. She looks around the vast, flat, featureless plain. “I think I am going to sweep.”

“Going to sweep? But you’re alweady sweeping,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. “This is all a dweam.”

“That isn’t very funny,” Two says.

“It’s your nascent sense of humor, honey. I just work here.”

“I need a broom,” Two says, looking around the infinitely expanding space, but of course, there is no such thing as a broom there.

“And who told you to sweep?”

Two freezes, looking guilty. Her face in the dream takes on the spasmodic tic that it does when she’s stuck in a chain of thoughts. In her bed, under the blankets, her whole body kicks and twitches.

“I… I… I… this is my space and I am supposed to keep my space clean and tidy,” she says with a measure of triumph as she works the justification out.

“Looks pretty neat and tidy to me,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says.

“Miss Ruth says that practice makes perfect.”

“I don’t think she was talking about sweeping perfectly clean surfaces.”

“She did not specify,” Two says. She says again, “I need a broom.”

“Have you tried the other side of my post?” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. “It seems to me that you can see everything there is here from where you’re standing, except for the other side of my post. So if you can’t see a broom, that’s the only place it could be.”

“Oh, okay,” Two says, and she walks around the ridiculous owl turtle thing. There is no broom leaning up against the post. “No,” she says. “There is no broom here.”

“Well, of course,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. It’s facing her again. “That’s this side of the post. You want the other side.”

“But I went to the other side,” Two protests.

“I beg to differ,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. “You did not go to the other side. You came to this side. The other side is always the one at which you are not.”

“That poor chicken must be very tired, then,” Two says. “And dizzy.”

“Now who isn’t very funny?” the ridiculous owl turtle thing asks as Two reached around to the other side of the post and feels her hand closing around a wooden handle. She pulls out the improbably-placed broom. It’s labeled “Improbably-Placed Broom”.

“You,” Two says, and she begins to sweep the perfectly flat, perfectly clean surface of the vast, flat, featureless plain. “You aren’t funny. Still. Now be quiet. I have sweeping to do.”

“How will you know when you’re done?”

“When I’ve swept the whole place.”

“But it’s endless.”

“Yes,” Two says, and she smiles.

“You aren’t very good at dreaming, you know,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says.

“I don’t care,” Two said as she starts to sweep.

“Your name isn’t even Two,” it says. “You just made that up.”

“I think I hate you, ridiculous owl turtle thing,” Two says.

“You aren’t supposed to hate anybody.”

“You aren’t anybody,” Two says. “So that’s okay.”

Steff doesn’t have the self-awareness to know that she’s dreaming, but when she wakes up it will seem like it should have been obvious to her… so obvious that in the moment she awakens, she’ll manage to convince herself that she knew it was a dream and was just going with it.

There is no room in the fortress at Kilrest as big and expansive as the throne room in her dreams. While the ogres tower over her, they don’t build their structures any bigger than they need to. They lack the architectural cunning to build a great big hall with a high vaulted ceiling like the one Steff always imagined before she saw the real place, the one she still pictures more than half the time when she imagines her life after graduation.

Steff sits on her throne in the hall, and it is her throne. Viktor doesn’t factor into this dream. She has dreams about Viktor and she has dreams about Kilrest, but ever since they went there she hasn’t had any dreams about Viktor and Kilrest. Her sleeping mind cannot make them fit together. Her brooding lover does not fit with her idealized fantasy life of wicked decadence.

The hall is full of her subjects… ogres and reanimated skeletons and zombies… and her victims, which this time around consist entirely of people she went to school with. The ones who attacked her, the ones who teased her, the ones who snubbed her, the ones who happened to be present for the worst years of Steff Johnson’s life are being torn apart, being impaled on spits, being tortured to death in a dozen ways, but none of them are dying because Steff’s dark magic is too awesome to allow them that escape.

They’re starting to twist off Cindy Mears’s head now. What had Cindy done? Steff couldn’t remember anything in particular. But she was hot and effortlessly popular and Steff had popped so many boners over her while trying to figure out if she was a gay boy or a straight girl or what and that hadn’t made things easier for her.

Not that Cindy had been alone on that score. An adolescent male body is on a hair trigger to begin with. Adding in fifty percent elven blood… for a while it had seemed like everything turned Steff on, and this at a point in her life when she regularly found herself thinking of violent and/or morbid things…

It really was no wonder that certain associations had stuck in her head, though Steff has never had the self-awareness necessary to think about how she might have come to associate violence and death with sex. Even asking the question could seem to imply that there was something wrong with doing so, and Steff had spent too many years and too many tears convincing herself that she was fine to do that.

Life in her dream of Kilrest was so good. She didn’t feel like rocking the boat with a lot of moody self-examination.

“Why, yes, I do see your point,” Mother Khaele tells Amaranth in an utterly realistic and wholly plausible scenario in which the nymph has just pointed out the fundamental flaw in existing cosmological models which results in the perceived division between the so-called higher and lower races, the people and the animals. “You’ve worked it out quite nicely. In fact, I have to admit that I left that mistake there on purpose to see which of my children would be the first one to spot it, so that I would know who would be worthy of sharing my…”

At this point, Mack’s leg twitches in her sleep and she kicks Amaranth in the ankle, jarring her awake. She blinks her myopic eyes several times in the perfect darkness of the blanket tent before she realizes where she is and that her Mother’s praise had simply been a dream. She sighs, and tries to go back to sleep.

Moeli’s working the desk when She comes in, cool as ever. She doesn’t look at anyone when she comes into the room. She keeps her head down, thinking her important thoughts, but She‘s not afraid to say anything to anybody. Really.

She‘ll just blurt out things that would make a bugbear blush without even thinking about it. Just like that.

Eventually She sidles up to the counter, the way She does, like whatever She has got to do isn’t even that important.

“Hey,” She says, with that quiet, husky voice that drives him wild. “I, uh, found your notebook.”

“Oh?” Moeli asks. His hearts skip a couple of beats as She puts it down in front of him. He’d wanted to show his notebook to her, but he’d always chickened out. It was a million to one chance that She would be into something so weird.

“I hope you don’t mind I looked through it… well, I had to figure out whose it was. I thought the drawings of motorcycles were kind of cool. Did you do them?”

“Yeah,” Moeli said. “I did.”

“I like motorcycles,” She says. “I think they’re awesome.”

“I do, too,” Moeli says.

“In fact,” She says, leaning in close. “I’ve got one outside. A real one.”

“No shit?” Moeli says.

“Yeah,” She says. “Half-demons have motorcycles. But I can’t seem to figure out how to make it go. You seem like you know a lot about them, though. Do you think maybe we could try to take a ride… together?”

“Well, I’m kind of working now,” Moeli says. “And I can’t just walk away. Also, you said you weren’t into me.”

“I’m a bitch and I was lying to you for no reason,” She says. “Didn’t you know that?”

“Of course,” he says. “You know what? My shift’s over.”

Two has been sweeping for what seems like hours, and the ridiculous owl turtle thing is a distant memory behind her, as she’s sweeping in the way she’s been taught: one straight line until she comes to the wall or carpet, and then move over.

She doesn’t expect to find a wall or carpet any time soon. She doesn’t expect to find anything, as there has never been anything in the vast, flat, featureless plain except the post with the ridiculous owl turtle thing on it. But there had also never been a broom behind the post (that she knew of, anyway), and unfortunately for her, Two understands that one runs across unexpected things in dreams.

However, there are an infinite number of things she does not expect to run across, so it won’t necessarily have to be a wall or carpet or something else that would force her to turn around and start heading back towards the ridiculous owl turtle thing.

In fact, the first unexpected thing she runs across is her teddy bear, Hand Wash. In her dream, he’s as tall as she is, though he still just sits there with his firmly stuffed legs jutting out in front of him to support him and his upper body leaning slightly forward to keep him balanced on those legs.

“Hello, Two,” he says.

“Hello, Hand Wash,” she says. “I can’t stop to talk. I’m busy sweeping and I have to keep going until I’m done.”

“Sweeping? I thought you were dreaming.”

“I can do both,” Two says.

“I can’t do anything,” Hand Wash says.

“I know,” she says.

“I’m a teddy bear,” he adds.

“Yes.”

“I’m not even supposed to be talking,” he says. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” she says. “I forgive you.”

And onward she sweeps.

Ariadne knows the dream before it starts, because it’s the same one she’s been having for weeks now. That thing is in her class. It wears a mousey, unassuming little face, but the elven professor knows the fire and death and hate that lie behind that mask. She can’t say anything about it, though. She can’t do anything.

Nobody else sees. Nobody else knows.

Every time she turns her back, even if it’s only for a second, another of her students is gone. The thing is clearly responsible. Why can’t anybody else see this?

And now there’s more of it. More of them. It’s brought in its friends.

How much longer can this go on?

How long before the school’s overrun?

Something must be done.

Something must be done.

Amaranth, having just found out that she had aced all of her classes (as expected!), was getting ready to go home for winter break, but she was planning on taking the fast route home and traveling there in style. Steff had helped get her “dressed”, so to speak… arranging her on the platter with roasted potatoes and other vegetables, brushing her body down with garlic oil, and even stuffing an apple in her mouth for aesthetic purposes. Steff had wanted to use garlic butter, but Amaranth had felt that using an animal product would be more likely to bring Mother Khaele’s disapproval.

Now Steff is wheeling the trolley with the covered platter on it to the elegant dining room where her Mack waits along with Viktor and their new best friends, Iona and Feejee. This was such a brilliant idea, she thinks to herself, enjoying the smell of the garlic and the pepper and the fire roasted onions, and when she surprises all of her sisters by arriving home early and explains how she got there, they’ll all be so excited to try this… the ultimate carnal experience, the ultimate sharing of self… and the new phenomenon of responsible, consensual cannibalism utilizing renewable resources will put places like Tender Mercy’s out of business, she just knows it.

Who says you can’t have your cake and eat it, too?

And then the trolley stops and she knows that the moment of revelation is upon her and Mack is going to be so surprised and everybody’s going to think she looks sexy and delicious and she’s going to taste so good…

…and then Mack rolls over in her sleep, pulling on the blankets and Amaranth isn’t on the platter at all.

“Oh, phooey,” she says, and then she tries to go back to sleep.

Some dreams are simpler than others.

In Trina’s dream, everybody had four eyes, except for her, and this made them all freaks. Sara Leighton dreams that the teleport accident which in reality had joined her with her sister had actually sent her twin to another plane of existence. Tara’s version has it so that it merged them fully and they’d become one person. On occasion, they’ve each dreamed it the other way and broke out in a cold sweat in their sleep.

Feejee dreams of blood in the water.

Iona dreams of blood.

Kai, who often thinks of nothing but murder all day, dreams a surprisingly peaceful dream about her grandfather’s calligraphy pens. Suzi dreams of invisible cheeseburgers. Maliko dreams about her Sooni.

Scylla dreams that she’d made it to the damned rabbit before the snake-eyed bitch did. The snake-eyed bitch dreams of cutting off her pink skin and finding scales underneath. Gladys dreams of being up on stage, hundreds—no thousands—of people’s eyes upon her. Cetea dreams that she can use a damned mirror without it breaking.

Honey dreams absolutely nothing, as six crushed flower petals in a tall glass of vodka have rendered her oblivious even to oblivion.

“Hey, hey Two!”

“What is it, ridiculous owl turtle thing?” Two asks as the clearly impossible thing flaps its flipper wings in ungainly flight alongside her, oblivious to her attempts to sweep away from it.

“How come you never dream about your friends?” it asks her.

“I do,” she says. “Sometimes. But not when I dream about the workshop, because they weren’t in the workshop.”

“You never dream about them here, either.”

“They were never here,” Two says. “And anyway this is still the workshop dream. It’s just broken, and I don’t know how to fix it.”

“You could stop saying good morning,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says.

“No,” Two says, shaking her head. “I tried that.”

“You could stop freaking the hell out when it happens,” it says. “That’s what breaks the dream, you know.”

“I don’t care,” Two says. “I have a different dream now. I’m sweeping.”

“But have you considered the ramifications of that?”

“No,” she says.

“Do you think there really was a broom on the other side of my post?”

“Yes,” she says.

“It was there because you dreamed it up,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. “You could dream up anything you wanted.”

“I don’t care,” Two says. “I’m sweeping.”

Dee is a child in the marketplace. One of her hands is being held by Dehsah, and the other by her mother.

No, that’s wrong. My mother never took me to the marketplace.

Dee is a child in the marketplace. Her mother, pretty Dehsah…

No.

Dee is in the marketplace, with her lover, Dehsah.

Dehsah hasn’t been out of the house since we became lovers.

Dee passes a fitful night, her subconscious unable to provide any dreams of succor which her conscious mind does not reject out of hand.

Amaranth looks beautiful in her wedding dress, and so does Mack. They are having an outdoor ceremony, of course, and even a hilltop shrine was out of the question under the circumstances, so they’re holding it in a beautiful elven forest bower. Everybody from Paradise Valley is there, and so are all the students she’d worked with during her years of study (in which she’d attained multiple degrees and many honors), and nymphs and satyrs and fauns of all stripes.

Mack had agreed to have a Mechan officiate, to get around her little disability, but when they get to the end of the aisle Amaranth sees that it’s not the scientist there at all, but Mother Khaele herself. Amaranth looks in alarm at Mack, but Mack is standing unharmed in the presence of the divine.

“Rest easy, my daughter,” Mother Khaele says. “For your love has redeemed this demon-tainted soul completely, and now I will happily join the two of you as one, after which you will be taken to your honeymoon in a carriage pulled by specially trained horses, who will join you for…”

“Sooni!” Mack blurts out, and Amaranth looks at her in confusion as the wedding dissolves and she finds herself in bed once more, where Mack blurts out Sooni’s name a few more times.

“Suzune-Darling, there is something you must know,” her mother tells Sooni, who sits anxiously by her feet, hanging on every word. Her mother is so wise and so beautiful, just like herself. “We have kept this from you for years, for your own protection, but now you must be told.”

“What, Mother?” Sooni asks. “What is it?”

“I only hope you can forgive my dishonesty towards you,” her mother says.

“I’m sure if you were not truthful towards me, it was for a very good reason,” Sooni says, bowing her head.

“You are such a good daughter, Suzune-Darling,” her mother says. She gets to her feet. “Perhaps it would be easier to show you than tell you.”

She turns around in a circle, and when she does her features have changed. It’s the same kind, wise eyes that are looking down at Sooni, but they’re yellow instead of black. The same calm smile, but with a shorter snout.

Her mother is a nekoyokai.

“Mother… you’re…?”

“Yes,” her mother says, nodding. “And not just that, but I am Queen of the Nekos. Which means that you, my humble daughter Suzune-Darling, you are the Neko Princess. You look like you do because you are half kitsu, but now that you know the truth you will be able to change between the two at will. You must keep your identity as Neko Princess secret, though, or else you will be in terrible danger.”

“That’s why Father always became angry when I acted like a neko!” Sooni exclaims.

“Yes. He was simply worried about you,” her mother says. “And you must know that Kai…”

“Kai is my true sister!” Sooni says. “I’ve known it all along!”

“Yes! Your heart knows the truth, Suzune-Darling, my Neko Princess!”

A door slams downstairs, pulling Sooni away from her mother. She sits upright in bed, shaking her head in confusion. What had she just been dreaming? It had been about her mother, she’s sure about that… but the details are all slipping away. Her mother and nekos.

Oh, well. It couldn’t have been a True Dream if I can’t remember it.

She reaches down and gets her mother’s shoes, the shoes she wears everywhere, even inside the house, off the floor and holds them to her chest as she lays back down, hoping her mother comes back to her soon. She had left a map of the Imperium with Prax circled on it at the family shrine, along with a brochure for the campus with her room number on it, but she wasn’t sure if her mother could come this far, or that she’d have the time.

She had a lot of work to do, her mother did. She was a very important person.

“My friend Hazel used to keep a dream diary,” Two says.

“Oh, so you’re talking to me now?” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says.

“I’m talking,” Two says. “I don’t think it matters if I’m talking to you or not, since you are not real. Her mother made her keep a dream diary from when she was eleven until she turned twenty-two. She made my friend Hazel write her dreams down every morning, and then she read it. She wanted to make sure that my friend Hazel didn’t get the curse.”

“No, she wanted to find out if your friend Hazel already had it,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing replies. “That’s a different thing. And it isn’t a curse.”

“I know,” Two says. “I told my friend Hazel that, and she said ‘Well, it isn’t a blessing.’ And then she told me not to talk about it.”

“But you are.”

“I’m dreaming,” Two says. “I’m not really talking.”

“So why can’t you stop yourself from saying ‘good morning’ to the man?”

It’s the war again.

The bridge.

Theona’s down by the bridge, trying to finish her spell of unmaking before the orcs overwhelm her. Jill can see that she’s just going to make it… get the spell off, that is. She doesn’t have time to finish it and escape.

The rest of Hydra Company… all four of the other survivors… have their hands full. Nora’s gone dead to the world again, seemingly conscious of nothing but the bow in her hands. Ironically she’s doing the most to help Theona, sending arrow after arrow at the thundering horde as it bears down on her.

She makes every shot she takes, and every shot is a fatal one, but she might as well be standing on a beach trying to shoot down the waves as they head towards the shore.

Mur-Si is… who the fuck knew where Mur-Si was? The most Jill could see was where she had just been, as ogres collapse with the legs cut out from under them and orcs die in fountains of spurting blood. Jill had been told… some hundred years before… that she had been bred to be the greatest warrior the world had ever seen… but the bastard elven hybrid is a strong argument that the Founders had wasted their efforts.

Jill and Fayborn are fighting back to back, Fay’s gleaming sword and Jill’s giant axe cleaving a circle around them. Jill keeps getting glimpses of the kid in the wizard robes down by the bridge, kneeling helpless and alone as she focuses on her spell.

“What’s the plan for extraction?” Jill asks.

“Soon as we see the bridge go down, we bug out,” Fay says. “Simple enough for you, Flattop?”

“What about The?”

“She bugs out, too.”

“She’s never going to make it back up to us,” Jill says.

“She might,” Fay says. “Didn’t think we’d make it this far at all.”

“We’ve got to get down to her,” Jill says.

“Can’t,” Fay says. “If she fails, we’ve got to be ready to try Plan B.”

“She’s our wizard,” Jill says. “What are we supposed to do to the bridge without her, have Mur-Si stab it to death?”

“Need to know basis.”

“You sent her down there to die,” Jill says.

“We were all sent here to die,” Fay says. “Some of us are better at it than others.”

Jill headbutts the orc in front of her and then charges through the gap left as it goes down, trampling goblins, shouldering past orcs, and dodging around ogres. Fay yells out behind her, something about sticking together, but let the bitch yell. She stands a better chance on her own than the neophyte mage who had, completely unwittingly, become the linchpin of the entire mission.

And as she thunders down the side of the ravine towards the bridge, Jill remembers that this has all already happened and that it’s just a dream, and she realizes she’s not going to make it in time.

The bridge starts to crumble and Theona stands and turns to run up towards her. The bridge is collapsing as a pair of ogres catch hold of her.

They don’t even have weapons out. Why would they? She doesn’t. If she’d been fighting them, they might have been forced to kill her, but instead they’ve got her in their hands…

“Opening the first charity brothel together was the best idea ever, Amaranth,” Mack says.

“Oh, it just seemed like the natural thing to do, after you and Two overcame your inhibitions and embraced the nymphly codes as a way of life,” Amaranth replies. “But this is just the start. Once we start teaching our classes, we’ll get more women of all races to subscribe to my new revolutionary philosophy and soon the entire world will be at peace because everybody will be too busy loving one another to hate anybody. Of course, some credit belongs to Mother Khaele.”

“No, she told me it’s all because of you,” Mack says. “And that you shouldn’t need to feel humble about it, but that’s just like you to think of her.”

“But, Mack, you couldn’t have spoken to… oh, poop. This is a dream again, isn’t it?” Amaranth says as she wakes up.

“Huh? What?” Mack murmurs sleepily beside her in the darkness.

“Nothing, baby,” Amaranth mutters, frowning. “Nothing.”

Leda is dancing across the smooth, glassy surface of the lake. It’s winter, her favorite time, but though a dusting of snow coats trees and the ground on the shore around the lake, the water remains unfrozen. Even in human form, though, it bears her weight. She leaps and she glides about in the moonlight, and then she heads for the thicket of reeds in the center of the lake, where on this side there is a small island, barely more than a bump of rock jutting up above the surface of the water.

That small island of reeds is the gateway to the other side, where her mother’s castle and where her true kingdom is. On both sides, the kingdom of Mariinsky Lake is not more than the lake itself, but on the Other Side, that lake is much bigger.

Even though she loves the castle and she loves the true lake far more than she loves the dreary, cramped one she’d just been dancing upon, she feels cold dread seeping down her spine as she passes through the reeds and finds herself on the large island with her home in front of her. It’s daylight on this side, but the sun doesn’t seem to warm her up much.

She knows what’s coming next.

Leda is a true princess: grace defined, possessing endless reserves of natural charm and refinement. But somehow—witches, probably—she screwed up and got herself exiled for four years to a moonforsaken frontier outpost in an empire of human barbarians. It was unthinkable, it was impossible… but it had happened, and it was going to happen again.

What would it be this time? Would she upset a tureen of soup? Lean against a priceless tapestry? Would she tread on an ambassador snail’s tail? Accidentally insult a visiting frog prince?

Knowing that her doom was coming but not knowing what shape it would take was terrible torture, but no matter how much she fights against it, her body still insists on passing over the drawbridge, under the portcullis, and through the gatehouse. She exchanges polite pleasantry with the guards in their bright red uniforms.

Her mother and her stepfather are waiting for her in the throne room, and in between her and them is a gauntlet of respected courtiers, servants bustling around with important loads, and guests of high social rank. But no matter what Leda did, no matter how careful she was, something would go wrong because when she reached the throne room, her stepfather would smile that sneering smile at her and say those nine most hated words:

“Your mother and I have been discussing your education.”

And so the dream went.

“Do you want to know what I think?” the ridiculous owl turtle thing asks.

“No,” Two says. “I really think I do not.”

“I think you say ‘good morning’ because you want to.”

“I want to do what I’m told,” Two says.

“Among other things,” it says. “But I think you want him to acknowledge you.”

“No,” Two says, shaking her head. “You are mistaken.”

“I think you know you couldn’t go back to being a piece of lab equipment now that you’ve been a person, and you want to know if he could relate to you as a person.”

“No,” Two repeats decisively.

“I think part of you would like to have a conversation with him.”

“You are mistaken.”

“I think you want to know what he thinks about you… if he thinks about you. Does he miss you like you miss him? Would he take you back as you are now? Would he hire you as a free person? Would he like you?”

“No!” Two yells. She turns and clobbers him with the broom. “I hate you, some sort of ridiculous owl turtle thing!” she yells as she hits him again and again. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”

“Amaranth, you’re so smart!” the professor proclaims. “In all my years of teaching, I’ve never met a student who understood the material so quickly and so completely. That a nymph should be the one to…”

Under the covers, Mack begins to masturbate furiously. Amaranth, awoken once again, sighs, reaches over, and guides her lover’s hand to a slightly better spot. Mack moans in her sleep.

“At least somebody’s having pleasant dreams tonight,” Amaranth says.

“I’ll get it!” she declared, putting down the cake knife.

“Oh, no, honey, it’s your party,” Amaranth said. “You’re not doing any more work. Mack, baby, there are supposed to be cleaning supplies in one of these cupboards… why don’t you find them?”

“Okay,” I said, and I went around behind the counter, where she’d pointed, and started opening doors.

There were a variety of bottles and cans in one of them, some of them looking very old and crusty, with the labels faded or worn off or eaten away by the contents of other containers that had leaked or spilled. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, exactly. There were some paper towels, but I wasn’t really in love with the idea of getting down on my hands and knees and trying to scoop up the mess with them.

Hazel may have been tiny, but her little body had held in a surprisingly large amount of food just long enough to make it really gross.

“I believe one of us should do a ritual of purification on the food,” Dee said to Amaranth, before turning to me and bowing apologetically. “I am sorry, Mackenzie, but if there is something in particular you enjoy, perhaps…”

“I’m telling you, the food is fine,” Hazel said, a little shakily. “There’s no need to go pointing fingers and waving a bunch of wands.”

“I must say, I find your concern to be misplaced,” Dee said.

“Oh, so you don’t think it’s the food, either?” Hazel asked.

“I mean, I would hope the safety of your friends would be more important to you than your reputation as a cook,” Dee said. “In either case, a few simple prayers would lay the matter to rest definitively, and in the event that you are correct in your assertion, you’ll be…”

“It wasn’t the food,” Amaranth said. “It definitely wasn’t.”

“Perhaps a quick invocation, just to be on the safe side?” Dee suggested.

“No, trust me,” Amaranth said. “I, uh, already checked.”

“You called upon your divine powers in the presence of Mackenzie?”

“Oh, it’s a passive thing,” Amaranth said, too quickly. “Nymph sense. Like my ability to know things relating to sex.” She laughed. “Only, completely separate and distinct from that.”

“I see,” Dee said. “Well, you are obviously telling the truth about your certainty regarding the safety of the food, so I will trust your judgment on that matter. Hazel, if you would care to step outside for a moment, I will see to your ail…”

“She’s fine, too!” Amaranth said.

“I am?” Hazel asked, confused.

“Of course you are,” Amaranth said. “There’s no need for anyone to examine you.”

The conversation had distracted me from the task immediately at hand, but then something caught my eye… a familiar-looking bottle at the back of the cabinet. Its label was missing, but it looked like the potion Puddy had pilfered to clean up the evidence of my hunger-driven bathroom rampage.

I grabbed it and sprinkled a little bit on the mess… only a little bit, in case I’d chosen poorly and it did something to vomit aside from removing it, but it seemed to have the desired effect and so I poured on some more. The bottle was almost empty to begin with, though, and while I got rid of the, uh, chunkier parts, there was still some left when the bottle was empty.

I looked at Amaranth helplessly.

“That’s fine, baby, I’ll get the rest since I don’t have to worry about getting ucky,” she said, and she went for the paper towels while I tossed the bottle. “Wash your hands before you touch any of the food,” she told me. “I don’t think we want to find out what that stuff would do inside a stomach.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said automatically, then flushed with embarrassment remembering we were in decidedly mixed company, including several people I didn’t know. Then I realized they wouldn’t necessarily know the significance of those words to us, and I felt kind of stupid… and blushed harder.

I gave Amaranth a bit of a wide berth as she cleaned up the rest of the mess, but I slipped in beside her while she was washing her own hands.

“So, what’s up with Hazel?” I asked her.

“She can tell you herself after I’ve talked to her,” Amaranth replied. “If she wants to.”

“You can’t tell me now?” I asked.

“It’s not my place,” she said.

“You know I can keep secrets,” I said, annoyed. I’d kind of taken it for granted that Amaranth would tell me what she wouldn’t say in front of the room. Hadn’t we gone through this whole thing before, with Steff’s not-so-little not-so-secret?

“Baby, it’s not really anybody’s business but hers, though, so if she doesn’t feel like spreading it around, I’m not to going to say anything.”

“Oh, fine,” I said, and turned and stalked away to retrieve my cake plate.

The awkward silence that people had been stunned into was just starting to turn into awkward conversation. Ian approached me a little tentatively.

“Some party, huh?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. I tried to come up with some witty play on “throwing a party” and “tossing cookies”, but I couldn’t make it work in my head, and thinking about what had happened just made me feel sick to my own stomach.

“Everything okay with you?” he asked.

“Yeah, just a little queasy,” I said. “I used to have a big problem with nausea after eating, and though I’ve mostly got over it, seeing… well, I’m okay. I just don’t want to dwell, you know?”

“I meant with you and Amaranth,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “She won’t tell me what’s going on with Hazel, for some reason.”

“I don’t think she’s telling anybody,” Ian said. “I wouldn’t take it personally.”

“I’m not ‘anybody’,” I said. “She shouldn’t be keeping secrets from me. There shouldn’t be secrets between lovers.”

“Uh…” Ian said, freezing with his fork halfway up to his mouth.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“No, what?” I asked.

“Seriously, Mackenzie, it’s nothing,” he said.

“Oh, not you, too,” I said. “Tell me what you were going to say.”

“You don’t want to know,” he said.

“Don’t tell me what I want,” I said. “I just asked you to tell me what you were going to say, so obviously I do want to know.”

He sighed.

“You’re being a hypocrite, Mackenzie,” he said.

“I’m not,” I said. “Seriously, what were you going to say?”

“That,” he said. “You’re being a hypocrite.”

“What… how?” I asked.

“You keep secrets from me,” he says. “And it bugs the piss out of me, but I know you think you have a reason and that’s good enough… well, no, it’s not really good enough for me, to be honest, but it’s not like I can hold you by your ankles and shake you until the truth falls out, so I put up with it. It’s not a great situation, but I can tolerate it… but now Amaranth’s not telling you something that really probably isn’t any of your business, and it’s probably not going to get anybody killed or arrested, and it’s probably not anything you really should be worried about and you’re getting all bent out of shape over it because suddenly you don’t think there should be secrets between lovers.”

“Yeah, but… that doesn’t make me a hypocrite,” I said. “When I’ve kept secrets from you, it’s been… different from this.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much the definition of a hypocrite,” Ian said. “’It’s different when I do it.’”

“No, it is!” I said. “Ian, I hate doing anything that risks pushing you away, so I wouldn’t keep secrets from you if it wasn’t important. But like you said, whatever’s going on with Hazel is not a life or death thing, so she should be able to tell me.”

“But the only reason you have for why she should tell you is that there shouldn’t be secrets between lovers,” he said. “Either you believe that or you don’t.”

“Ian… you have to understand, there are some things I just plain can’t tell you about right now,” I said. “My life’s complicated… it even has lawyers in it. But I promise you I’ll tell you everything, someday, if I can.”

“I don’t even really care about that,” he said. “I’ve accepted that you have secrets just like I’ve accepted… well, everything. It’s just a little jarring to hear you bitching about Amaranth not wanting to talk about Hazel’s pregnancy.”

“Hazel’s what?”

“My what?” Hazel asked, from down by my legs.

“Uh…” Ian looked at her, appearing not so much stunned as at a loss for what to say. I could imagine him going through and discarding various ways of trying to cover for what he’d said. He finally gave up and just stammered, “Well, what do you think she was talking about?”

Amaranth came rushing over.

“Oh, Hazel, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” she cried. “I wanted to tell you in private after…”

“Oh, it’s fine, but… you’re wrong,” Hazel said, shaking her head. “I can’t be.”

“But you’ve been intimate with Andreas, though, haven’t you?” Amaranth asked.

“Yeah, but… we were, you know, careful,” Hazel said. “I mean, you have to be careful when you’re taking a roll with someone who outweighs you five to one, but apart from that…”

“That much?” Ian asked me quietly.

“Dwarves aren’t just taller than gnomes, they’re a lot bigger around and have much bigger skeletons,” I said. “She’s probably, what? Thirty pounds? Five to one’s probably a little low, actually.”

“Yeah, but… ouch,” Ian said.

“I’m sure she was on top,” I said, and instantly regretted the mental image.

“Ew,” Ian said. “Thanks for that.”

“No problem.”

“Hazel, honey… do you know about that stuff?” Amaranth asked. “About being safe?”

“Of course I do!” Hazel said. “I’m not some dumb kid, you know. I’m a good sight older than you, in fact. I could probably teach you a thing or… well, no I probably couldn’t. And I don’t think I’d want to. But my main point stands. I’m not some dumb kid.”

“I don’t think there’s supposed to be this much shouting at a party!” Two said.

“Sorry,” Hazel said, and we all said it, too, even though I couldn’t think of any shouting I had done. “It’s just, you have to be wrong. I wouldn’t be careless about something like that. I like Andy well enough to go a bit further with him than with any of the boys on the river, but it’s too important to fool around with something like that. I mean, I couldn’t quit school and leave Honey on her own, could I? I promised her family I’d stick close by her. And I’ve no intention of risking having a daughter. That, and Andy says that dwarven mums have seven month trimesters. I don’t know how that would work out with a mix, and I’m not keen on finding out.”

“Okay, but I know what I’m seeing,” Amaranth said. “And it’s obvious. I mean, it’s subtle… you can’t be more than two weeks gone, and dwarves do grow slowly… but once I thought to look for it, there it was.”

“Wait, is two weeks even long enough for her to have morning sickness?” I asked.

“And shouldn’t morning sickness be in the, you know, morning?” Ian asked. “Or is that a dwarf thing because they don’t see the sun?”

“Usually swelling and tenderness is the first symptom to be noticed, but every pregnancy is different and nausea can happen at any time,” Amaranth said.

“You did complain about your, er, delicate parts swelling up and hurting,” Honey said.

“Yeah, but that was because you kept stepping on them,” Hazel said, giving me a mental image to replace the one of Hazel trying to straddle the mountain of a dwarf. I liked this one a little better, though it was still kind of freaking me out trying to understand how it could have happened.

“That shouldn’t have hurt if they weren’t already tender,” Honey said.

“This is ridiculous,” Hazel said. She turned to Dee. “Miss Delia Daella. Dee. Please. You can point your big elfy brain at me and figure this out, right?”

“With your permission, I will,” Dee said, bowing. “Though it is unlikely to be definitive at this stage of maternity.”

“The stage I would be at, if I were,” Hazel said.

“Quite,” Dee said, and she concentrated for a moment. “I do indeed sense only your own mind within the confines of your body… however, this would also be the case if the baby is not sufficiently formed to have her own thoughts, so this should not be viewed as confirmation of a negative. I am, unfortunately, not sensitive to life itself.”

“Oh, don’t call it a her,” Hazel said. She looked like she was going to be sick again.

“What’s going on over here?” Celia asked, wandering over with Feejee.

“Amaranth says that Hazel’s pregnant,” Two said.

“Oh. Yeah,” Celia said. Her tongue flicked out between her lips. “Totally.”

“Is that what that is?” Feejee asked.

“Yeah,” Celia said. “It’s their hormones. One of the sisters who ran the school got knocked up and sent away. She hid it from her superiors under her robes, but she got sent to the healers after too many students said she tasted wrong.”

“That smell’s been bugging me all week,” Feejee said. “I didn’t want to be rude and ask.”

“Can we back the goat cart up a bloody second?” Hazel said. By this point, the entire room was paying attention, if not creeping closer. “I haven’t joined the pudding club just yet, unless it’s with the third coming of Owain.”

“Who?” Ian asked.

“I think that’s the gnomish god of war,” I said, remembering a reference to Magisterion I praying to all the gods of war he knew before going into battle.

Hazel turned to Two.

“Two, love, you listen to me, okay? I’m most certainly not in the family way, no matter what anybody says.”

“Okay,” Two said, nodding.

“Um, hey…” Steff said, hesitantly, from the doorway. She rapped on the open door. “Knock knock?”

“Oh, thank Owain!” Hazel muttered as we all turned to face Steff.

She looked pale… well, paler. Transparent, almost. The sleeves of her nice jacket were cut into ribbons, though she seemed unhurt.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“Hazel’s not pregnant,” Two said.

“Oh,” Steff said, blinking in confusion. “Okay.”

“We’ll talk more about this later,” Amaranth said to Hazel.

“I’m sure we will,” Hazel said as Amaranth ran over to Steff and gave her a hug, with me following close behind her. “Who’s up for some darts? And let’s get some music. Is this a party, or isn’t it?”

“Here,” he said. He shrugged. “I’m not sure if this counts as wrapping.”

“Thank you. I’m not sure, either,” Two said. She opened it up and it was a stack of gift certificates… for White House.

“You gave her gift certificates for the place she works at?” I asked. “Don’t you guys get free food anyway?”

“One free meal for every shift,” Two said, nodding.

“She won’t take anything more than she’s entitled to,” Kyle said. “It drives me freaking crazy the way she stares at the ice cream dispenser sometimes.”

“Is that everyone, then?” Hazel asked, looking around the room. Her eyes stopped on Amaranth and me. Amaranth cleared her throat.

“Steff will probably be coming by later,” Amaranth said. She turned to Two. “She had some important things to take care of, but she loves you very much.”

“I know,” Two said.

Dee had slipped around to stand beside me.

“Is Steff’s absence simply a bit of unreliability, or is something amiss?” she asked quietly.

“Um… something might be amiss,” I said. “But hopefully not too badly.”

“Your reassurance would be more effective if it were not for your record of badly underestimating the magnitude of problems in the recent past,” Dee said.

“It‘s really not that bad this time,” I said. “She does have a weapon that‘s probably evil, but we’re pretty sure this one’s not possessed by anything. Or at least, we don‘t have any reason to think it might be.”

“Is there any chance whatsoever that I’m simply failing to understand your strange surface humor?” Dee asked.

“Um, sorry, but no,” I said.

“And what is being done about this?”

“Viktor’s out looking for her,” I said. “Amaranth didn’t want to cancel the party for it.”

“Is that the best response, considering the potential threat to life?” Dee asked.

“I think Steff’s really more of a danger to herself right now than to anybody else,” I said.

“How so?”

“She’s got a life-stealing knife that heals the wielder in equal measure to the wounds it inflicts, and she was using it to cut herself and feel it heal,” I said. “We’re mostly worried about what it might do to her mentally or emotionally.”

“If that is truly the case, then I must agree with Amaranth,” Dee said. “Perhaps I am not as good a friend to Steff as I should be, but I would not subtract this small amount of joy from Two’s life to pull her out of the peril she has placed herself in.”

“That’s a little harsh,” I said.

“Perhaps my keen elven senses have failed me, but it appears to me as though you are here enjoying the party and not out searching for Steff, ” Dee said. “I may have stated it a bit baldly, but I believe Steff herself would not approve of canceling the celebration on her behalf.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I admitted. “Amaranth said she’d hate herself for missing it, but she’d hate it even more if everybody else did.”

“Alright, then,” Hazel said loudly, getting everyone’s attention. “We’ve decided to forego the traditional candles… or the candles that would be traditional for a birthday party, anyway… in order to head off arguments from the guest of honor. So, in lieu of that, Two, love, would you like to cut the cake?”

“Yes, I would,” Two said.

“Wonderful. Now, I spent a lot of time decorating this, so let’s all gather around and have an admiring look at it before we start the slaughter,” Hazel said. “Oh, actually can we get the cake onto the table and then we can spread out the rest of the spread on the counter?”

The cooking students jumped to work, moving the big cake box over to the card table. Hazel pulled out a chair and hopped up on it.

“You want to do the honors, Haze?” a pretty black-haired girl asked, gesturing to the lid.

“Are you kidding me? I barely got it on,” Hazel said. “You do it, and I’ll just give a little flourish or something.”

The girl said, “Okay,” and then went to lift up the lid while Hazel posed like she was presenting a prize..

When the box came open, I could see why she was so proud of the work… and why she’d been so cautious about how it was transported. It was a big sheet cake covered with pale blue frosting, with slightly darker blue roses made from mounds of frosting as a border around the edges. They almost doubled the height of the cake. The runes from Two’s forehead, from which she had approximated her own name, were also rendered in blue icing across the center.

“Oh, Hazel, that looks just lovely,” Amaranth said. “Very pretty… and I’m sure the people who eat it will agree it’s delicious.”

“Are you sure you can’t have a piece?” Hazel asked. “I promise you no animals died for it.”

“No, I’m afraid I really can’t,” Amaranth said. ”Butter, milk, and eggs are all animal products, even if they don’t result in death when they’re harvested.”

“Alright, then,” Hazel said. “I won’t argue with anything that leaves more for me.”

While Two started measuring the sides of the cake with her fingers in the air next to it, Hazel hopped down and went over to the counter, where she scaled a barstool and then pulled herself up to get the rest of the food arranged. She pulled a towel off a multi-tiered silver tray which held a bunch of delicious looking tidbits and unstacked and uncovered a bunch of plates that had sandwich makings on them.

“Nothing on these trays has wheat in it,” Hazel said, pointing to the silver tower, which held things like bits of fudge and cheesecake, and candied fruits and nuts. “And nothing on the bottom one has animal bits.”

“These look interesting,” Dee said, gliding over and looking at the candied fruits on the bottom shelf. She picked up a ring of sugar-glazed pineapple. “Is this a bit of confectionery which has been made to resemble fruit, or fruit which has been made into confectionery?”

“Er, the latter,” Hazel said. “Crystallized pineapple.”

“Crystallized?” Dee repeated.

“Preserved with sugar,” Hazel said. “There’s also orange peel, cherries, and apricots there, and toasted almonds.”

“Interesting,” Dee said. She picked up a cherry. “This appears to preserve the fruit’s shape to a degree, as well.”

“Well, yeah. They shrink a little as they lose their water, but you can still tell what they are.”

“Indeed. I considered and rejected the idea of sending some jars of plum jelly home because I did not believe the end product resembled plums well enough to have the same effect,” she said. “Is there any reason why plums could not be subjected to this process?”

“Er, none at all,” Hazel said. “Some folks enjoy candied plums. Me, I never trusted plums after I learned where prunes come from.”

“I see,” Dee said. She popped the cherry into her mouth, then made a surprised face and hurriedly swallowed it.

“Is something wrong?” Hazel asked.

“It was a somewhat stronger taste than I anticipated,” Dee said. She looked at the ring in her hand. “I do not wish to give offense, but I’m not quite sure I trust this.”

“Oh, I’ll take it if you don’t want it,” Hazel said, taking it from her. “Try the cheesecake squares… they’ve a smoother, richer taste. The fudge might be too rich, if you don‘t fancy strong flavors.”

“Forgive my trepidation, but are you certain this ‘cake’ was made without wheat flour?”

“No flour of any kind,” Hazel said. “It being called a cake is more a matter of function than of form.”

“You should try it, Dee,” Two said from the cake table. “It’s made from milk.”

“Is it, now?” Dee asked, picking up a red-and-white marbled square in a foil cupcake wrapper. “I sometimes think that if the surface has nothing else to teach us, we could learn quite a bit about a varied diet from the cultures here.”

“That one’s raspberry swirl,” Hazel said. “I was feeling experimental and I was cooking in small batches, so I made a bunch of different flavors. The brown ones are chocolate, of course, and the green and brown ones are mint chocolate swirl. The ones with crushed nuts on top are maple nut. The orange are… well, they aren’t purple-flavored. The reddish-pink are strawberry, and the white with specks is vanilla bean. The plainish sort are plain, just in case none of my experiments turned out.”

I’d headed towards the line to get a piece of cake once Two finished cutting it into exact perfect squares, but Hazel’s description of the cheesecake cups pulled me over. It seemed like it was going to take Two a while to get the cake cut to her satisfaction anyway.

“I think I’ll try an orange one,” I said, reaching for one.

“Oi, everybody’s being so dainty,” Hazel said. “Isn’t this a party? Don’t just take one, try a few… I didn’t make them for looking at!”

“Well, okay,” I said, and I took one of each. Hazel’s exhortations got the rest of the guests moving, and soon people were making sandwiches and eating cheesecake and popping fruit and nuts into their mouths. Two, meanwhile, was almost finished cutting. I’d finished my sampling of the cheesecake… the raspberry swirl and vanilla bean were my favorites, the other kinds all tasted like they had too much flavoring overpowering the taste of the cheesecake itself or not enough to stand out above it… so I wandered over to wait behind Kyle and Honey, who had patiently stood there while Two did her work.

“That’s very… exact,” I said to Two, watching her slowly draw the knife through the cake to finish the last line.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m trying to make the pieces fair. Though, they don’t have the same amounts of frosting on them.”

“Well, maybe different people like different amounts,” I said. “If everybody gets their own choice, that’s fair, too.”

“Yes,” Two agreed. She looked at Honey. “Which piece would you like?”

“Oh, I’m not particular,” Honey said. “But I guess, if it makes it easier to get started, that you could give me a corner piece.”

“Okay,” Two said.

Honey was right about the convenience of starting at the corner, but I had little doubt in mind that it was exactly what she wanted. Not only did the corners have frosting down two sides, but they had the thickest concentration of flowers on top. Kyle just asked for the next piece on the side, but when Two got to me I asked for a corner without hesitation. After all, she had just agreed that it was most fair if everybody got what they wanted.

Still, some people deserved special consideration, and while there were plenty of edge and center pieces, there were only two corners left.

“If you’re going to serve everybody else first, maybe you should pick your piece now and put it aside so you get the one you want,” I told Two. “After all, it’s your cake.”

“Oh, okay,” she said, and she took one of the other corners and put it on a plate.

I took my cake and went to stand next to Amaranth, who was talking about the logistics of dairy farming with Dee.

“The main problem, as I see it, would be feeding them,” she was saying. “I don’t know how well cows would take to fungus and mold. There are reindeer, of course, that eat lichen supplemented with small birds and rodents, which sounds a lot closer to the diet of your lizards, but… well, I don’t know if they’d be adaptable to the dark. It might take something like your orchard island before you could get a viable herd of anything going, and then… well, it takes more land to grow crops or grass for cattle than it does to just grow crops.”

“It is a puzzling problem,” Dee said. “But one I would not be in a position to solve in the near future, goddess willing. I will have to give it more thought, and reflect upon it in my meditations.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll figure something out,” Amaranth said. “And even if you can’t get a steady supply of fresh dairy, cheeses keep pretty well, if you want to expand the trade… smoked cheeses, especially, might work well. How‘s the cake, baby?” she asked, noticing I’d joined her.

“It‘s very good,” I said, after taking a big frosting-laden bite. The underlying cake was marbled chocolate and white. “People smoke cheeses?” I asked. I was picturing a bunch of cheddar slices hanging up next to a slab of bacon in a smokehouse. It seemed funny to me.

“Oh, yes, baby,” Amaranth said. “I think it’s done more for the flavor it imparts than anything else, in this day and age, but it’s not that uncommon. You’ve never heard of smoked gouda?”

“Oh, I guess I have,” I said. “I guess I just thought it was a type of… I mean, I never thought about what it meant, you know?”

Amaranth clucked and shook her head.

“People don’t understand where their food comes from,” she said. “You’ve probably never had cheese that didn’t come in slices or melted on top of something.”

“Yeah, but you’ve never even tasted cheese,” I said, a little defensively.

“No, but I’m sure there’s a difference between a big corporate dairy farm that churns out a million identical hunks of cheese and a little craft shop that produces individual wheels of cheese in distinct styles,” Amaranth said.

“Oh, there certainly is,” Hazel said. “We used to have cheese parties back in the shire. Everyone would bring their best for judging. Goat cheese, mostly, of course, but there’re a few folks who can afford to keep cows.”

Ian joined us, with a very plain-looking piece of cake from the center.

“Oh, did we run out of side pieces?” I asked.

“No, I asked for this one,” he said. “I don’t like a lot of frosting.”

“Hey, Hazel… what do you call these?” Celia asked, holding up half a boiled egg.

“Deviled eggs,” Hazel said. “You boil an egg, cut it in half, pull the yolk out, mix it up with other stuff and put it back in.”

“Awesome,” Celia said. “What do you do with the shell?”

“Well, you throw that out.”

“Oh, lame,” Celia said. “Hey, you should break the shell up and put it in the yolk with whatever this green and red shit is.”

“Er, I’ll do that next time, just for you,” Hazel said.

“You should,” Celia said. She popped the deviled egg into her mouth, closed her jaw, and then held it for a few seconds before swallowing. “Oh, fuckin’ A, usually I like my eggs whole because the inside’s nothing special, taste-wise.”

“Well, it’s just a little mustard and celery and seasoning,” Hazel said. “My mum used to make them when we went to visit my cousins downriver, and we’d sit out on the deck and have a little picnic in the sun…”

“Eggs and sun,” Celia said. “You’re talking my language.”

“Hazel, please, you’re making me seasick,” Honey said, and she did look a little green. She took the deviled egg she had been eating and folded it up in a napkin.

“What, just mentioning the boat makes you queasy now?” Hazel said. “Sorry if I’m not properly ashamed of my upbringing, but ’boat’ isn’t a four-letter word, you know.”

“Yes, it is,” Two said.

“It isn’t that,” Honey said. “Maybe something I ate? All of a sudden, I’m just… I don’t feel… I’m not quite…”

“Oh, don’t you dare throw up, Honey Callaway,” Hazel said. “Nobody loses their lunch when I’ve cooked it.”

“Believe me, if it were up to me…” Honey said, before putting a hand to her mouth. Her cheeks puffed out a bit and she ran for the door.

“Oh, fuck, what else did she eat besides the eggs?” Celia asked.

“Bit of everything,” Hazel said. “But it’s not my cooking.”

“Um,” Ian said. “Should somebody…?”

“I will go and see to her,” Dee said. “I believe I stand the greatest chance of finding her and of rendering aid, if it proves to be more serious than a simple stomach upset.”

“Hey, you can use your divine whatsit to make sure it wasn’t my cooking, right?” Hazel asked.

“Well, if you are not confident that such is the case…” Dee said.

“Er, no, I am,” Hazel said. Don’t go out of your way on my account.”

“Thank you. Now, if you will excuse me,” Dee said, giving the room a bow before heading for the door.

“What happened?” Feejee asked, coming up to us.

“Dee’s going to check on Honey,” I said.

“You mean Hazel?”

“No, I’m standing right here,” Hazel said.

“The other gnome,” I said.

“Both gnomes were here?” Feejee asked.

“The gnomes are here?” Iona asked, a piece of ham in her mouth.

There was a tiny noise, and we turned to look at the door and see Honey there, clearing her throat and looking rather sheepish. Dee was right behind her.

“Sorry,” she said. “False alarm, I don’t know what came over me. One moment I was fine and the next, I just… I looked over at Hazel and I started to feel quite nauseated.”

“Oi, first it’s my food and now it’s my face?”

“I’m sorry,” Honey said. “Like I said, I don’t know what came over me.”

“Well, at least now we know… I mean, now we all know… that it wasn’t the food,” Hazel said. “Because the day someone throws up after eating my cooking is the day… is the… is…”

She didn’t get anything else out.

Well, that’s not entirely accurate. She didn’t get any more words out. Everything else, everything she’d just eaten… that got out just fine.

“What’d you get?” I asked, looking at the little bag.

“A surprise,” he said. “I figure it fit the theme.”

“If you’re worried it’s not any good, you don’t have to do more than the card,” I said. “I don’t think her cooking classmates are…”

“No, I think it’s good,” Ian said. “It’s just a surprise.”

“Ian, it’s a college bookstore,” I sad. “They sell pens and paper and tourist mugs and lodestones for the fridge with the school crest on it. They don’t sell good presents.”

“Maybe you don’t know how to spot a good present,” he said.

“Hey, I spotted a great present,” I said.

“In a big chain bookstore in town,” he said. “That’s like finding hay in a haystack. I’m just a tiny bit more ambitious than that.”

He wouldn’t say anything more or let me get a peek in his gift bag, which had wads of green and purple tissue paper sticking out of it. We made it back to the room with barely minutes to spare. There were some more people there, but Hazel was chatting with them so I figured they must have been the guests. Kyle from the food court had showed up, too. I gave him the least weak hello I could muster, since he was standing off by himself, a stranger even to the other humans.

I hurriedly signed the card. Lacking any way to attach it to the gift bag, I simply put it inside its envelope and slipped it into the bag.

I was thankful I’d found a card that summed up what I wanted to say so simply and succinctly. A personal message was personal, but I didn’t know what to say to or about Two that could fit inside a card. She was the best of us, and not just because she was the innocent one. She had come so far since her first days at MU, and whatever of that progress could be said to be because of us, it could not be denied that after the first few hurdles, a lot of it had happened without us… and some, perhaps, had even happened in spite of us.

Amaranth arrived just after that. Her face told the story more completely than Steff’s absence did… they hadn’t been able to find her.

“I’m so worried, baby,” she said, without having to explain what she was worried about. “And even if she’s okay, she’s going to hate herself for missing this… I checked some of the places I thought she might have gone, but if she wandered into the trees or something… I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“What did Viktor say?” I asked.

“He was going to get another student who has a pass to the vaults to go and look for her there,” Amaranth said. “But, if she’d actually gone there like she said she was going to, she would’ve been back, right?”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “She might have gone there… she might even have intended to put the knife back, at least a little… and then got enraptured by it again once she got there.”

I found myself not believing it as I said it… Steff had already been off in her own special place when she’d left, supposedly to return the knife. If she’d decided to go play with it a little more before returning it, I couldn’t see her going to the place where someone might recognize it and ask her what she was doing with it. No, she’d probably go somewhere that she could be alone with no chance of being interrupted. After all, if someone saw her cutting herself again and again, they’d probably do something to stop her.

Unless they were into it, that was.

“Callahan,” I said.

“What?” Amaranth asked.

“She might have gone to Callahan’s office,” I said. “I mean, if Steff’s in a self-injuring mood and she wanted an audience or a partner… she wanted me to try the knife but I wouldn’t. She might have gone to Callahan next.

“Yeah,” Amaranth said. “Hopefully Callahan would recognize the potential for danger and take it away from her, though.”

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“She is a teacher,” Amaranth said. “Oh, they’re here.”

“What?”

“Dee and Two… Dee says they’re almost here,” she said. Louder, to the room, she said, “Everybody get ready.”

“Should we turn out the lights?” one of the cooking class girls asked.

“Um, I think she can see in the dark,” Amaranth said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Let’s do it anyway,” Hazel said. “Sake of form and all that.”

Amaranth started to reach to do that, but at that moment the door opened and Two walked in.

I froze up completely. It was only after the sound of the others yelling “Surprise!” was fading away that I remembered that this was the thing to do. It was too late to yell it myself, so I just kind of moved my mouth like I might have just said something and was only now closing it.

If I had been momentarily at a loss for what to do, I was in the very best of company… Two stood there in the doorway, just in front of Dee, and looked around from her classmates to her friends, blinking and thinking.

“It’s a surprise party, love,” Hazel said gently. “For you.”

“Oh,” Two said, and then she smiled rigidly. “What do I do?”

“You gasp and you shout how surprised you are,” Hazel said. “And then you enjoy the party.”

“Okay,” Two said. She gasped rather theatrically, and then yelled, “Somewhat!”

Now that she knew what was going on and had played her required role, she visibly relaxed quite a bit and headed for the food. It seemed likely that this was her idea of what a party was about. I knew she’d had class parties in her cooking classes that had probably just involved everybody bringing a dish, and she’d held her own little dinner party before. If she’d had any experience with parties in her former life, I had to imagine it would have involved holding a tray full of tiny foods or something.

“Oh, hold on,” Hazel said, and Two stopped. “Don’t you want to open your presents first?”

“Presents?” Two repeated.

“Yeah, some of us got you presents,” Hazel said. “Like it’s your birthday, you know?”

“But I wasn’t born,” Two said.

“Neither was I, but most people were, and they get birthdays” Amaranth explained. “So we wanted a day to celebrate you.”

“Oh,” Two said. “That’s fair.”

“You can open mine first,” Hazel said, holding up a box that was about a foot and a half across, though it didn’t seem to weigh much.

Two accepted it with a thank you and began carefully unwrapping it, first untying the ribbon and slipping it off and then finding the edge of the paper where it had been taped and undoing that. She got the plain white box uncovered and then opened it.

“Oh,” she said. “A stuffed alligator.”

She pulled it out. It was a very big, very squishy-looking alligator, but an alligator nonetheless.

“Like in the song,” Two said, and then she laughed. “Alligators don’t eat raspberries.”

Two’s laughter was like her singing and her crying: honest and uncontrolled. It was a lot more pleasant to hear, though. I wondered for a moment if we’d done her a terrible disservice by telling her it was okay to cry but not giving her a similar order for laughter, but I decided otherwise, for two reasons. One was that it didn’t seem to be necessary. She thought alligators were funny for some reason, and she laughed. Maybe Hazel had seen the need and taken care of it. Maybe she’d worked it out for herself by analogy to crying.

The other reason was that an order to laugh when things were funny would require Two to figure that out, which could be stressful for her and could also lead to awkwardness if she judged incorrectly.

“Why don‘t you set her down here for now, so you can keep your hands free ,” Hazel said, leading her over to the carom table. “You can put your gifts here as you open them, so they’ll be out of the way.”

“Okay,” Two said.

I wanted to press forward with my present, but Honey was sticking to Hazel’s side like she’d been glued there, and she held up her package, which was a long, flat bundle of paper with gold ribbon. Two opened it and found a pair of pens made from brightly colored feathers with designs painted on them.

“I didn’t know what you would like?” Honey said, her nervousness making it into a question. “But I saw these in a stall in the bazaar and I thought they were pretty?”

“Yes, they are,” Two said. “Thank you, Honey.”

“Oh, you’re quite welcome,” Honey said, and she relaxed, too.

Dee got hers in next, since she was standing right next to Two. It was a slim box wrapped in plain black paper.

“Oh, pretty,” Two said when she saw it. She opened it to find a rack of ten little jars of different kinds of jelly. “Thank you, Dee.”

“You’re very welcome,” Dee said. “I discovered the concept of jellied fruit while researching methods of preservation. I had seen grape and strawberry jelly in the cafeteria, of course, but I did not realize its true nature at the time, nor had I realized that the concept could be applied to other fruits.”

As strange as it was to hear somebody talk about jelly like it was some esoteric alchemical preservation, I could kind of understand her fascination. We all saw grape jelly, but did the average person stop and think about how it had come to be? Hell, there had been a steady trade of jars in and out of my grandmother’s pantry in the nine years I’d lived with her and I probably wouldn’t have been able to name ten different kinds of jelly without thinking about it.

“You don’t have fruit preserves back home, Dee?” Amaranth asked. “Considering how valuable fruit must be…”

“Had there been any sources of fruit in the nomadic ages, I’m sure preservation techniques would have been discovered,” Dee said. “But our magical orchards know no barren season, and the demand is such that there is never any surplus to speak of.”

I took advantage of the conversation to step forward with my gift bag, which I handed to Two. She took it, glanced down, and then looked at me in confusion.

“It’s my present,” I said. “For you. Your present from me.”

“Oh,” she said. “You’re supposed to wrap it, but that’s okay. I’ll take it this time.”

“Yeah, sorry,” I said. Apparently she didn’t know about gift bags. There’d be time to explain that later.

She set the bag down on the table and pulled the books out one after another, reading over the title of each one. She then pulled out the card, opened it, and read it.

“Oh,” she said, and she looked up at me, smiling. “You’re welcome.”

“You mean ’thank you’,” Amaranth said.

“No, I mean ’you’re welcome’,” Two said. “But thank you, Mack. It’s a very pretty card.”

“What about the books?” I asked. I didn’t want to sound like it was all about me or anything, but the lack of reaction was killing me. I thought she’d at least respond to the gnomish cooking book. “Do you like them?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t read them yet,” she said. “I think it would be rude if I did that at my party.”

“Oh,” I said, chuckling a little. It was a very honest answer. “Okay.”

Contrary to my prediction to Ian, her classmates had brought gifts. They included a little beanbag penguin, a set of stirring spoons coated in different flavors of chocolate, a little self-warming teapot, and a bookmark that could pick up the contents of pages it had been put against. Judging from the picture of crossed utensils at the bottom, it was intended for use in cookbooks.

I hadn’t even noticed that Feejee was missing until she came back into the room with a giggling apology. She had a tiny gift bag with a fringe of tissue paper sticking out of it. The bottom was bulging quite badly. I guessed the contents were made of some particularly weighty substance, like metal.

“Sorry, I didn’t even think about a gift before we came over, so I had to run back and then to the store,” she said.

“Oh, you didn’t have to,” Amaranth said. “We only did because we care for Two so very much.”

“But I wanted to,” Feejee said. “I would like to be better friends with everyone. Here,” she said, holding the badly strained little bag to Two.

“Thank you,” Two said, forgetting to lecture Feejee about wrapping as she pulled out the contents. It was a heavy gold medallion on a gold chain. There were gasps and one “holy shit” from the non-Harlowe crowd. Two had gone rigid and pale, and she thrust both her hands, one with the necklace and one with the bag, out towards Feejee.

“I’m sorry, but I am not able to accept gifts of more than five silver pieces in value,” she recited.

“Oh,” Feejee said, looking a little hurt. “Um… is that a lot? I don‘t know what else… I have some pearls, too?”

“I don’t think that’ll make the difference, Feejee,” Amaranth said.

“I’m sorry, but I am not able to accept gifts of more than five silver pieces in value,” Two repeated, her voice rising a little in pitch and volume.

“But it’s not worth that much to me,” Feejee said. “I mean, I got it for free, so if you want to be technical about it, it’s worthless, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry, but I am not able to accept gifts of more than five silver pieces in value. Please consider a donation to Hearts of Clay as an alternative,” Two said, her arms beginning to shake. She looked and sounded desperate with the urge to divest herself of the forbidden gift. “Please take them,” she said.

Amaranth stepped forward and grabbed the necklace, putting it out of sight.

“I’ll just hold onto it as a sort of trust until we can talk to these Hearts of Clay people,” she said. “Two’s a free being. She should be able to decide for herself whether or not to accept a gift.”

“Thank you,” Two said to Amaranth. “And thank you for the thought,” she said to Feejee. “It was very nice.”

“Maybe you could sell one of your pieces of jewelry and keep that money aside to buy more reasonable gifts when you want to give somebody something,” I suggested to Feejee.

“Okay, but it’s not really that big a deal,” she said.

There was a soft knock on the door.

“Is this where the party is?” Iona asked.

“Yeah, come on in,” Amaranth replied.

The door opened and Iona and Celia walked in. Iona held up a wire basket with a plastic pouch full of bath products in it.

“Sorry it’s not wrapped,” she said, smiling a big, dazzlingly tooth-filled smile. “I didn’t have time.”

“That’s okay, I forgive you,” Two said, accepting the gift.

“Where’d you find that?” Amaranth asked.

“Oh, I had it on hand,” Iona said. “I’d meant it for somebody else, but I thought it might suit Two just as well.”

“Coconut lime body spray, body wash, lotion, and bath salts,” Two read.

“I love the taste of coconut,” Iona said. “And lime brings out so much taste in meat.”

Yeah, the mermaids’ privacy be damned… we needed to talk to Two. I trusted her more to keep the secret for Feejee’s sake than I trusted Iona. If Feejee ended up being caught in the same net because Iona wouldn’t reform her habits on land… well, that would suck for her, but if she was the worst-hit victim of the incident, it would be a very lucky thing.

Despite the last minute invite, Celia had not turned up empty handed, either. She had a rolled up piece of leather, which, when unfurled, had a scale-like pattern pressed into it. The hexagonal scales were dyed orange and turquoise, and the individual colored scales made a pattern of swirls and lines.

“Thank you,” Two said.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Celia said. “But, you invited me to your chicken thing and you didn’t invite Puddy, and that was kind of awesome. So… well, that piece is from my back. Two summers ago.”

“Wait, it’s what?” I said.

“It’s the skin off my back,” Celia said.

“That thing is you?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Do you shed?” I asked.

“Not naturally,” she said. “It’s a religious thing.”

“You flay yourself, religiously?”

“Every year on my birthday,” she said proudly. “Most girls only do it the first time, when they turn eleven.”

“That’s, er, a good year,” Hazel muttered.

“Auspicious year,” Honey agreed.

“I’m not so sure about the auspices of a year you start by getting skinned alive,” Hazel said. “Though, surviving it’s a good sign.”

“Well, you don’t just take a knife and start cutting yourself,” Celia said. “What kind of an idiot would do that? There’s a shaman on hand and everything.”

“I think as long as you’re being safe, it isn’t anybody’s business,” Amaranth said. “And I’m sure it’s a very personal gift to give.”

“It’s nothing,” Celia said, and she actually blushed. “It’s junk. I’m not happy with the staining. I’d be embarrassed to give it to anybody back home, who knows what a good skin piece is supposed to look like.”

“And speaking of personal gifts,” Amaranth said, beaming, “I think you should open mine next, Two.”

Under the gold wrapping paper, it was obviously a garment box, and I entertained a brief hope that she’d thought better of her initial plan. But the way the box wobbled in transit between them, it was obvious that one end of it was heavier than the other.

Two undid the paper with the same care as she had shown the other packages, and then lifted off the top.

“Oh, pretty!” she exclaimed, and she lifted out a long, glittery icy blue camisole. It seemed pretty voluminous, which meant that somebody had used an awful lot of material to cover up almost nothing, as it was completely see-through except for a pattern of flowers that would vaguely obscure the chest region. She held it up to her, and it became apparent just how roomy it was. I couldn’t see the shoulder straps working on Two’s narrow frame. “Oh, but I am afraid this is not the right size. This is too big for me. I think it would fit you better.”

“What?” Amaranth said. She’d gone very pale, and she grabbed it out of Two’s hand. “L-let me see that, Twoey, please.”

“Hey, my name isn’t Twoey,” Two protested, but Amaranth wasn’t paying attention. She turned away from everybody for a moment, and then turned back, holding out a clearly smaller version of the same garment.

“No, this is the right size,” Amaranth said holding it out. “Check again, I think you’ll find you were mistaken.”

Two did as she was bade, looking at the tag and then holding it up. She shook her head.

“It is my size, but this is a different one,” Two said. “It’s like you bought two of the same thing, only one of them is in my size and the other of them is in yours.”

“What? No,” Amaranth said. She shook her head emphatically. “No, you silly… just no.”

“Okay, but it looks like…”

“It’s probably best if you just drop it,” I said to Two.

“Okay,” she said. “But I don’t think I’m wrong.”

“Oh, and there’s more in there,” Amaranth said.

“No, there isn’t,” Hazel said. I hadn’t even noticed how close she’d come to the table with the box on it.

“What?” Amaranth said.

“I think there was,” Two said. “It was a heavy box.”

“No, that’s all she got you and that’s fine because it’s a very lovely present,” Hazel said. “So much that I think after the party I’m going to have a conversation with her about where she shops for presents for you.”

“Hazel, you’re being ridiculous,” Amaranth said. “Why is everybody trying to blow this out of proportion? It’s just a little…”

“I know little,” Hazel said. “It’s not a little anything. Two, love, Amaranth got you a nice… undergarment, and that’s all she got you.”

“This is a very confusing present,” Two said, looking sideways at the box, her eyelid twitching as she tried to reconcile what she knew with what she was being told.

“Maybe this will be less confusing,” Ian said, stepping forward with his gift bag.

“I hope so,” Two said. “My head is starting to hurt.” She looked at me. “You should pay attention to how Feejee and Ian did it. They know how to wrap presents in bags.”

“Told you,” Ian said. I stuck out my tongue.

She pulled out the tissue paper and inside it was a desktop model of a candy or gumball dispenser, the kind with a penny bank inside, and a little bag of fruit-shaped candies to fill it.

“The only thing I knew you like is candy,” Ian said. “But I didn’t want to get you just candy, so…”

“Oh, thank you!” she said, and the enthusiasm in her voice burned me like petty, petty fire.

“It’s going to be hard to keep the different flavors sorted out inside the globe,” I said.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I can sort them as they come out. Thank you, Ian. That was a very thoughtful present.”

“Try not to let your jealousy get the better of you,” Ian told me.

“I’m not jealous,” I said. “She just hasn’t read the books yet.”

I flipped first to the section on the transit center… while it had plenty of pictures, I already knew what the place looked like and it was short on information, so I started flipping through at random.

There were some glimpses of what were described as the “semi-public” areas of dwarven houses, and a diagram of the city with the portions where dwarves were known to own the underground rights shaded and a speculative map of tunnels laid over that. If they really did link up like that, then it would be possible for a dwarf to go all over town without going above ground.

It also had pictures of the trolls and ratfolk that had previously taken up the residence in the drain tunnels and old catacombs beneath the city, with a note that while neither had been sighted in years, both populations had been reportedly hunted to extinction at many points in Enwich’s history and so there was a standing bounty on them even when there were no reported problems.

The idea of those bounties bothered me a bit. There was no doubt that the two races were intruders in the human settlement or that they posed a real danger, but unlike most races they had no option of peaceful coexistence with or assimilation into human society.

Trolls were intelligent enough, but also different enough from most races that few people thought of them as being properly alive, much less in the same order of beings as humanity. Of course, that same logic had once been applied to the reptile and goblinoid races, and still was, to some degree. The ratfolk were recognizably mammalian and inarguably intelligent, but their resemblance and inferred relationship to vermin kept them from gaining the same “people” status.

That’s not to say all would be sunlight and hugs, or even twilight and firm handshakes, if only Enwich would throw open the city gates and extend an olive branch to the oppressed trolls and rat people… I didn’t know that they had any inclination to get along with humanity, the rat culture being what it was and the troll culture being… well, they didn’t exactly have one. It was possible that an individual troll somewhere might have picked up on civilized ideas and decided they sounded good, but unless two such trolls happened across each other and then fused and split, there would be no way of spreading that idea.

Still, the possibility that even one troll could go against the grain was why the standing bounty bothered me. At the end of the day, though, I didn’t have a better solution. “Maybe one troll somewhere wants to be friends” wasn’t the sort of thing that a public safety policy could be based on.

Ian came over a bit before seven. I heard Amaranth calling out a greeting to him, so I was at the door even as he was knocking on it.

“Whoa,” he said when I opened it. He smiled. “Moonlighting as a jack in the box?”

“The money’s good, if you can stand to work in a cubicle,” I said. He gave me a kiss on the cheek.

“So, what’s the plan?” Ian asked. “You said there was stuff to carry?”

“Oh, yes, I’m so glad you’re here, Ian,” Amaranth said, hurrying over. “Steff isn’t around and we were counting on her help.”

“She isn’t back yet?” I asked, a sinking feeling in my stomach.

“No,” Amaranth said. She turned to me. “Is something wrong, baby? You said she just had to hand in an assignment or something, right?”

“Uh… maybe we should duck into the room for a minute,” I said.

“Baby,” Amaranth said sternly, “is there something you should have told me before?”

I blushed and mumbled down at the floor, “I didn’t want to say it in front of Hazel.”

“You could have said you had something to tell me in private,” Amaranth said. “Hazel of all people wouldn’t have been nosey.” She sighed. “Come on, though… let’s step inside so we can hear it.”

“Uh… am I stepping, too?” Ian asked.

Amaranth looked at me.

“Yeah,” I said. “I just don’t want this getting around the open hallways.”

We headed inside and closed the door.

“So… what’s going on?” Amaranth asked.

“Steff… well, she took a dagger from the necromancy department,” I said. “For me to use in Callahan’s class. But I didn’t like the look of it, so I told her to put it back. She accidentally cut herself with it…”

“Sure, accidentally,” Ian said.

“It was!” I said. “It was tucked into her belt without a sheath and it ended up slicing her leg.”

“I could see you getting cut up like that, but not a half-elf who carries twin daggers,” Ian said. “Haven’t you ever noticed the way she flips them around for fun sometimes?”

“Not really, no,” I said. “I don’t pay a lot of attention to weapons.”

“She could probably juggle them blindfolded,” Ian said. “You’re not going to convince me that she just like slipped and cut herself.”

I couldn’t exactly protest that Steff wouldn’t cut herself on purpose, since she’d gone on to do just that in front of me, but that just made me more positive that the first cut had been an accident. Steff wasn’t the sort of person who’d feel the need to stage a whole elaborate thing as an excuse to cut herself.

“It was an accident,” I said. “If you’d seen it, you would know.”

“Hey, I’m not saying she did it on purpose,” Ian said. “But… evil looking blade from the necromancy department, improbable accident… some weapons are just bloodthirsty, you know?” I stared at him. “What? I’m just saying…”

I shook my head to clear away the shock.

“No, I think you’re right,” I said. “See, it turned out it’s a vampiric knife, and so every time she cut herself the life energy it stole just healed the wound.”

“Every time?” Ian repeated. “It kept doing it?”

“She kept doing it,” I said. “The first time was an accident… or at least, not her fault, but she liked how it felt. She thought it was just a weird self-healing weapon until I got cut, too.”

“Steff cut you?” Amaranth said.

“Just a little nick!” I said. “Which she expected to heal immediately. She wanted me to see what it felt like, the rush…”

“Did she ask your permission first?”

“Well… no,” I said.

“I can’t believe you didn’t say something about this sooner, baby,” Amaranth said. “You’re supposed to tell me when somebody hurts you, and even if it’s Steff, well… you know she’s fragile.”

“But it seemed like she’s really had it together, lately,” I said.

“Because she’s been doing therapy and getting alchemical and psionic adjustments,” Amaranth said.

“‘Psionic’?” Ian asked, raising an eyebrow over the odd choice of wording.

“Yeah, I know,” I said to him. “But let’s not start a whole side argument.”

“Considering what you’ve just been through, it’s unbelievable that you wouldn’t think about what that dagger could do to her,” Amaranth said. “Even if it’s just giving her a rush, she’s a little… addiction prone?”

“I did think about it!” I said. “That’s why I told her to put it back where she found it as soon as I saw it, and then more so when we realized what it did. But what was I supposed to do, call the guards on her?”

“You should have told me so I could tell Viktor,” Amaranth said. “Which I have got to go do, right now.”

“What about the party?” I asked. “Not that this isn’t…”

“It’s very important, but so is the party,” Amaranth said. “Imagine how Steff would feel if we canceled because of her. You two go see if Hazel has anything else that needs carrying over. I’ll be there by the time it starts, hopefully with Steff. You said she was going to the necromancy department?”

“She said she was,” I said. “I don’t know if she ended up there.”

“Okay, I’ll just… ooh, maybe we should wait, see if she actually doesn’t show up before we… no,” Amaranth said, shaking her head. “It’ll be better to be wrong and worry Viktor for no reason than to risk… I should just go and do it, before something happens. See you in a bit, baby.”

She gave me a quick kiss and then rushed off for the stairs. Ian and I headed for Hazel’s room. The door was open. On the low round table was a big white box, much longer and wider than it was tall.

“Hello, you two… where are Steff and Amaranth?” Hazel asked when Ian knocked on the doorframe.

“Amaranth is looking for Steff,” Ian said. “We can help with anything that’s left to do, though.

“Oh, well… it’s just the cake that’s left to take over, really,” Hazel said, gesturing to the box. “The rest of the stuff’s there already. Honey’s keeping an eye on it.”

“She’s going after all?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” Hazel said. “I expect Oru chewed her ear off a bit over it, but try to keep Honey Callaway away from… well, anyway, the cake is sort of a two person job… two big persons, that is.”

“Well, there are two of us,” Ian said.

“Right,” Hazel said, her eyes on me. “Didn’t Amaranth say that Cecelia might be interested in coming?”

“Yeah, okay… I guess I’ll go ask her if she wants to help carry the cake,” I said, thinking she must have meant Celia.

“Wait, are we just taking it for granted that you would drop the cake?” Ian asked me.

“I’m not offended,” I said. “If the choice is Steff or me… well, it’s like you said about knives.”

“No offense to your one, Ian, but I’m not taking any chances with this,” Hazel said. “Amaranth said she could get the whole thing over all by herself with her nymphly ways, but I’m not for anything that means letting it out of my sight like that.”

“Yeah, I’m so not offended,” I said. “I really don’t want to be responsible for the safety of Two’s cake. I’ll go see if Celia’s in.”

I headed down to the end of the hall. The door to Celia and Feejee’s room was closed, but there was a kind of music consisting of rhythmic drumbeats and rattles coming from behind it, along with an odd sticky-sweet smell. I knocked on the door and curls of smoke spilled out as Celia opened it.

“Are you smoking?” I asked her, moments before I noticed that the fragrant purple-gray vapors were wafting off of her skin. The whole room behind her was enshrouded in fog.

“Yeah, I think so,” she said. “It’ll wear off in a bit. I think. It’s been going for about half an hour or so.”

“What the hell did you take this time?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think it was meant for internal use, though.” She hiccuped, and a big cloud of the stuff popped out of her mouth. “Pardon.”

Spending a weekend as a statue hadn’t imparted any common sense to the snake-eyed girl, it seemed. Whatever… I was there to beg for a favor, not pass judgment.

“Um… anyway… you know that party for Two is tonight, right?” I asked.

“Oh, are you having a party?” Feejee asked from deeper inside the room. I saw her dark form coming through the fog, ominously resembling some deep sea creature breaking the surface of the water. I had a bad feeling about where this was going to end up.

“Uh… it’s this thing for Two, and her friends,” I said.

“I like Two okay,” Feejee said. “And you know, I’m serious about hanging out with you more often, Mack. I really am.”

“No accounting for taste,” Celia said. She shook her head, which made something in her throat rattle. I stared at her, wondering if she knew or suspected exactly what Feejee’s interest in me was.

“Um… I was going to ask if you would help us carry the cake since I’m not allowed to touch it, but I’m not sure Hazel would let you near it in your present state.”

“Oh, I can help!” Feejee said.

Yep. There it was… we couldn’t say, “Thank you for helping us carry the cake, now please leave so we can start the party.” I couldn’t say yes without implicitly inviting her.

“What’d Cecelia say?” Hazel called, coming down the hall towards us.

“She said you don’t call me ‘Cecelia’ and I won’t call you ‘snack food’,” Celia said, stepping out into full view. “I told you only my mom calls me that.”

Hazel didn’t respond; her eyes were bugging out at the sight of Celia’s vaporous aura.

“She’s indisposed, but I don’t mind pitching in for Two,” Feejee said cheerfully, joining us in the hall.

“Oh, well… many nipples make light work,” Hazel said. “It’s Feejee, right?”

“Yeah,” Feejee said. “Can I invite my friend Iona, too? She doesn’t know Two but I’m sure she’d like the chance to.”

“It’s a party, isn’t it?” Hazel said. “The more the merrier.”

Oh, yeah… this was just going to go swimmingly.