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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Like what?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I like your top,” Two said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thanks, Two,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is ‘Mouse’ a… um…”

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

“I like Mouse,” Two said.

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

“It’s true,” Two said.

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

“That’s submission,” Amaranth said.

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

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

“Is Shiel her dom?” Nicki asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So… you noticed?” she said.

“Nicki did,” I said.

She laughed.

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

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

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

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

She sighed and took the paper from me.

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

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

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

“What?”

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

“Okay,” I said.

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

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

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

“If that happens, I’ll ask,” I said.

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

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

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

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

“I’ll have it back to you tomorrow.”

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

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

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

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

“I will,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”

“And screaming, of course.”

“Of course.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You sleep okay, baby?” Amaranth said.

“Yeah, mostly,” I said.

“No surprise visitors?”

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

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

Amaranth frowned.

“That could be a problem,” she said.

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

“Oh?”

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

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

I knocked on the door.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No pun intended,” Ian said.

“I beg your pardon?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You can’t actually like it,” I said.

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

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

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

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

“Interesting analogy,” Ian said.

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

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

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

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

“Yes, but this one came from me.”

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

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

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

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

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

“You don’t know, though,” Ian said.

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

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

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

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

“It’s more than that,” Ian said.

“Oh?” I said.

“It’s a plan.”

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

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

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

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

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

“That was rude,” Amaranth said to Ian.

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

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

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

The pitchfork. I had won it in the school’s labyrinth, where it had been locked away along with a cursed and blighted cornfield in some earlier age. It contained… or maybe had contained… a fragment of the mind of an ancient demon. The fragment wasn’t a fully-formed being in its own right, but it had the power to influence people who held the pitchfork, and even possess them. Dee had described it as overlaying the host’s personality with a template. Basically, the possessed person had their own memories and personality traits but with an infernal gloss. This had made for some serous “oh, shit” moments, not the least of which had been when a remnant of it got a hold of Dee.

Dee was a powerful subtle artist, telekinetic as well as telepathic. She was a highly trained fighter, as the dark-skinned elves of the underworld had something like universal conscription. Fortunately, she was also a cleric… and while the remnant of the entity was able to use her physical and psychic gifts, that piece had been destroyed when it tried to invoke her divine gifts.

The real pitchfork was still out there somewhere. It had been taken off campus through the machinations of someone… according to Dee, not the pitchfork itself… and vanished. I had to admit that I missed it. The labyrinth was used to train advanced delving students, and I’d been dumped into it naked and totally unprepared. The pitchfork was the only thing I’d had to show for it, and according to the rules and customs of delving it had been mine. More to the point, it had felt like it was mine.

My father had hinted that he was keeping it for me before, as a way to try to keep my interest. There was no way of knowing if he actually had it or not, or if he would ever return it to me or keep it for himself… but I believed he would have held it out as a carrot regardless of what the truth was.

But if the owl-turtle thing really could infiltrate his mind the way it had moved into Dee’s and visited mine, there was a chance I could learn the truth.

It was the worst kind of temptation: the kind where you really, really want to do something that you know you’re not going to do. I didn’t want to give the owl-turtle thing any further license to poke around in my head, I didn’t want to get any more deeply involved with my father, I didn’t want to have any reason to not eject him immediately the next time he came around… if that meant the pitchfork was out of reach, it meant it was out of reach. Knowing for sure that he had it would only put me that much more in his power.

Ian’s body was a warm and solid mass beside me. He stirred slightly as I struggled awake, his semi-hard cock brushing against my bare thigh. I hadn’t necessarily been trying to wake him up along with me but we were pretty well-entwined and the more I wriggled, the more his body responded. Pajamas had been a requirement when I’d shared a room with Two, whose sense of social appropriateness was not overly encumbered by flexibility… but now that she slept in another room neither of us had the habit of sleeping in clothes when we slept together.

Still mostly asleep, he cupped my breast, his fingers idly playing with the lock-shaped piercing over my heart.

“…morning?” he murmured.

“No,” I said. “Well, maybe technically. Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Is everything okay?” he said, slightly more awake.

“I’m not sure.”

“Mackenzie?” he said. He shifted off of me and sat up. “Don’t tell me it happened again…”

“No,” I said, once I took a moment to figure out what he meant. “Not exactly… it wasn’t him this time.”

“Someone new is invading your dreams?”

“Something old,” I said. I raised my voice very slightly. “Dee, are you awake and listening?”

“I am now,” she said. “Saying my name in an inquisitive inflection cancels my silence wards. Is something amiss?”

Her voice came quite clearly from a space in the air just ahead of us. This might have been slightly disconcerting, except for the fact that this meant it came from the middle of the bed… so it was extremely disconcerting.

I knew she wasn’t actually there, or even in the room with me. Elven voice magic was the flipside of their incredible hearing. An elf could whisper into an ear a hundred feet away, or shout something to a single person, or speak in a conversational tone that would be heard the exact same way by everyone in a crowded room. As a telepath, Dee didn’t use her voice magic often, but the infernal half of my mind meant it would not have been safe for her to respond to me mentally.

“Is it possible for your owl-turtle thing to have been in my dreams?”

There was a pause, during which I wondered if she was coming over to continue the conversation face-to-face. But then her voice sounded again from the empty air.

“It seems that it is so. And for that I apologize… though I would appreciate it if you would refrain from labeling it as mine.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“You had the owl-turtle thing in your dream the night after the other guy visits?” Ian said. “That seems a little… iffy… to me, timing-wise.”

“Yeah, I think so, too,” I said. “Though according to it, the timing isn’t a coincidence… it came because of him. It was offering to spy for me.”

“How?” Ian asked.

“The mechanics of the owl-turtle entity are not fully known to me,” Dee said. “Nor, so far as I can ascertain, to anyone else. It has impressed upon me the desire to know more about its own capabilities, in the past… this is the one matter upon which the two of us stand united.”

I nodded, then realized Dee couldn’t see what I was doing.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what it was talking about to me.”

“Let’s not be too quick to take this thing at face value,” Ian said.

“Thus far, the entity has been remarkably straightforward in its dealings,” Dee said. “Even when I would wish for it to be otherwise.”

“I’m just saying… are we sure that this is the real deal we’re dealing with?” Ian asked. “Mackenzie’s father shows up, and critically fumbles… then the next day here’s someone or something or whatever you want to call it trying to earn her trust specifically by offering to see what he’s really up to. If the man can infiltrate your dreams and alter the environment, is there any reason to think he couldn’t change his appearance?”

“While I am not certain that the word ‘real’ fully applies to it, I can assure you that the ridiculous owl-turtle thing is in fact a construct with independent existence,” Dee said.

“Right,” Ian said. “But just because there is a ‘real’ owl-turtle thing doesn’t mean that any given owl-turtle thing is the real one. Right?”

“I cannot vouch for its whereabouts during the night, but I can attest that it was not with me,” Dee said. “This is not proof that it visited you, but it is at least suggestive of that. If this is not in fact the case, I will most likely know by later this morning.”

“Is there any reason to think that a man who can manipulate dreams couldn’t have somehow corrupted an entity made out of dreams?” Ian said.

“With the owl-turtle thing, there is no reason to think anything, one way or the other,” Dee said. “But… my instinct is that it would take an exceptionally clever mind to have learned about it and learned enough about it to make such an alteration, all without detection.”

“Ian might be onto something, though,” I said. “It knows about the pitchfork.”

“Not to undermine the whole being onto something thing, but you know about the pitchfork,” Ian said. “Maybe it just knows what you know?”

“That would be consistent with my experiences,” Dee said.

“Which isn’t much,” I said.

“We have never been able to ascertain the fate of it,” Dee said. “Amaranth unwittingly bore it outside the boundaries of the campus, and there it vanished in a manner that prevented me from tracing it further. The presence of a full demon exercising powerful magic would explain the burst of infernal power that I detected, and if that demon has spent years concealing itself in forests it would explain why my attempts to trace it via spider-speak never mushroomed.”

“I think hiding himself from prying eyes is one of his specialties,” I said.

“Okay,” Ian said. “So, going on the theory that the owl-turtle thing is real and not acting under any outside influence… what’s its angle?”

“It made it sound like it’d be doing it just to see if it can,” I said. “Except it won’t do it if I don’t want to hear about the results.”

“The owl-turtle thing considers itself something of an avatar of self-awakening,” Dee said. “It believes its presence to be beneficial, and its ultimate goal is to help its host. Although I am not certain as to the efficacy of its methods, I do believe it would not mean you harm. However, it does have its own agenda, of sorts: continued existence. During our… my… time in Ceilos over the summer break, it took pains to conceal the extent of its existence from the more powerful priestesses and telepaths.”

“The extent of its existence?” Ian repeated. “What do you mean?”

“It could hide its presence from telepaths but was not able to do anything regarding my memories of it, so it pretended to be nothing more than an odd recurring dream of mine,” Dee said. “Which I suppose might be a somewhat apt description, though it only tells half of the tale. I was already regarded as being a bit …silly… and that aided its deception, as well as making me unwilling to pursue the matter further. But in light of its fear of detection, I find it very odd that it would volunteer to spy on a demon of sufficient power and subtlety to have remained active on this plane for as long as your father has.”

“Unless it thinks a demon is really in need of some enlightenment?” Ian suggested.

“That doesn’t explain why it would insist on asking for my cooperation,” I said. “Maybe it wants to learn from him, though. The way the man talks about getting inside my head, it sounds like he knows some special back way in… maybe the owl-turtle thing wants some help getting around.”

“This is a possibility,” Dee said. “I believe it is already learning from the man’s example. In the time it has occupied my dreams, it has never… to my knowledge… spontaneously visited the mind of another without drawing on my telepathy in a rather obvious way, barring the night when the walls of reality were weakened. I know there was no connection between our minds last night, so I must surmise it somehow ‘watched’ your father’s coming and imitated him. It could be that it desires a closer look.”

“It could be,” I said.

“Or perhaps its interest is in the pitchfork,” Dee said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It is all supposition,” Dee said. “But as Ian said, the dream entity knows what the dreamer knows… I have held a fragment of the pitchfork entity in my mind before. It is possible that this is what has attracted the owl-turtle thing’s interest to your father.”

“What would it want with the pitchfork, though?”

“I do not know,” Dee said. “Again, I believe its intentions are benign… but so were mine when I took on the pitchfork entity. I believe the best thing to do would be for me to confront it directly and ask it about its motives and what interest, if any, it has in the pitchfork. I do not believe it is capable of lying.”

“That would be a really convenient thing for it to let you think,” Ian said.

“I am aware of the possibility,” Dee said. “If it tells me nothing I will not conclude that there is nothing to tell, but if it has anything interesting to say on the subject of the pitchfork and its aims I see no reason not to believe it.”

“Doesn’t the fact that we’re talking about it mean it’ll know what you’re up to?” Ian asked.

“The rate at which new information I take in filters through to it seems to vary somewhat, but there is a good chance it will be aware of my intentions,” Dee said. “This is why the straightforward approach is the best. If you will excuse me, I will restore my privacy spell and return to sleep… the connection between the actual passage of time and the apparent duration of a dream is always somewhat chancy, and I would like to have sufficient time for a long conversation, if necessary.”

“Okay,” I said. “Goodnight, Dee. Thanks for the help.”

“You’re welcome. Goodnight.”

No one said anything for a few seconds. There was no sense of a withdrawal, because of course Dee had never had a real presence in the room… but we’d been sitting up talking to her for so long that it felt like she had been there.

“Do you think she’s gone?” Ian asked after a while.

“I’m pretty sure she is,” I said. “I mean, she’d be correcting us if she could hear us assuming that she couldn’t.”

“So what now?”

“I guess we wait to find out what she learns,” I said. “If the owl-turtle thing is after the pitchfork… or even inordinately curious about it… I’m going to be even more inclined to say no.”

“I guess you’re getting over your attachment to the damned thing, then,” Ian said.

“It’s not that,” I said. “I just… well, imagine if it uses the owl-turtle thing as a conduit to Dee’s mind. And that’s not even getting into the possibilities just with it merging with the owl-turtle thing.”

“What possibilities are those?”

“To quote the song of the day: I don’t know,” I said. “No one knows. But how badly do you want to find out?”

“I get your point,” Ian said. “Anyway, what I really meant was what do you want to do now… try to get back to sleep, or something else?”

“I’m actually feeling pretty wide awake now,” I said. “But I can’t really think of anything constructive we could be doing.”

“I’m pretty much awake, too,” Ian said. “But there’s a thing about waking up next to my naked girlfriend… it gives me all kinds of ideas, and not all of them are necessarily constructive.”

---

‘Tis The Season! Please tip your web author.

My dear friend Two,

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

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

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

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

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

Postscript:

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

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

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

“I think I did a pretty good job.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is there anywhere to swim?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A kobold is a sort of goblin.”

“I am not certain that she’d agree.”

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

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

“That’s what I said.”

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

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

“You have family here.”

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

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

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

“It’s Tuesday.”

“Tuesday the what-th?”

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

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

“He has business to take care of.”

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

“Most kinds,” Two said.

Hazel sighed.

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

“You miss Shiel,” Two said, nodding.

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

“You do want their approval,” Two said.

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

“Do you approve of them?”

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

“Isn’t the reverse also true?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?” Two asked.

“Because… well…”

Two sat patiently while Hazel grappled with the realization.

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

“What?” Two said.

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

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

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

“What party?”

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

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

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

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

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

A seasonal meditation from your author:

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

Having a bed built for two people didn’t change much about the way Amaranth and I slept together. A good night’s sleep underneath her did nothing to change the malaise-y feeling that it should be the weekend. I spent a good five minutes or so when I first woke up thinking about how great it would be if I didn’t have to get up in the morning at all. So much of my academic day for most of the week was now made up of obligations… the survival course the school now mandated, and the combat class I’d agreed to take.

I only had one class to go to I actually liked, and sadly for the ambitions of my laziness, it was the first one of the day.

If I didn’t have to have those I could have filled my schedule with classes I wanted… and maybe I could have even found nothing but afternoon classes. I wouldn’t even have to crowd my schedule with three classes in a row. I was ahead of the game on credits, after all.

I allowed that kind of thought to run around my head until I felt Amaranth shifting above me.

“Ah, sleep,” she said, stretching out luxuriantly as she sat up. “Is there anything more self-indulgent? Well, I mean, when you don’t really need it, I suppose.”

“There’s definitely something about lying in bed when you don’t have to, yeah,” I said. “But maybe doing it when you can’t is even more indulgent.”

“I suppose that’s true… we do have places to be, don’t we?” she said.

“We could skip breakfast,” I said.

That seemed to tempt her. She even laid back down while she thought about it, so I felt rather than saw when she shook her head decisively.

“No, that’s how it starts,” she said. “Sleeping in every once in a while is not the worst thing we could do, but it’s too early in the year to think about that kind of thing.”

I knew she was right… I hadn’t exactly needed her to tell me that, but I had needed her help convincing myself of it, and I suspected she’d needed my help as well. We were using each other as enablers… just for the things we needed to do, not the things we wanted to do.

It was the right decision, too. If we’d stayed in bed another hour or so, we probably would have felt exactly the same when it was time to go to class. As it was, breakfast made a good dent in the Wall of I Don’t Want To Be Here.

“Be sure to tell me at lunch what you’ve decided about Saturday,” Amaranth said to me as we left the cafeteria. “So we can ask them or not, accordingly.”

“Right,” I said, succeeding so hard at not looking like I’d completely forgotten about the decision I was sleeping on.

“I knew you’d forget,” she said, giving my hand a squeeze. “That’s why I’m reminding you.”

I was pretty sure I’d end up telling her I just wanted to go with her, for the simple purpose of not making my life more complicated. With the distance of one night’s sleep I couldn’t think of any really strong reasons not to do a multi-date… but I also just wasn’t really feeling it.

When I thought about going to the dance with Amaranth, I could look forward to it… I could also imagine things going wrong, and there was a feeling of apprehension verging on anxiety even when I didn’t consider any specific possibilities, but that was normal, background-level worry for me.

When I thought about getting everyone involved, though, the background stuff went off the charts. It wasn’t that I was that much more worried about Steff or Ian… it was just the combination.

I didn’t know if my decision would please Amaranth the most, but at least I’d decided it and so didn’t have to worry about spacing it off once class began… or spacing off during class to ruminate on the possibilities. If I did that, I’d miss out on the only really enjoyable part of my schedule.

“I’m sure you will be happy to know that everyone who turned their assignment in on time has received at least a C,” Acantha announced at the start of spellbinding class. “Those among you who earned Bs and As may feel suitably proud. The two people who failed to turn a wand in to me by the stated deadline of three in the afternoon yesterday had their grades lowered one full letter level. You may all come forward to claim your wand and your grade by matching your ticket to the attached tag… hand the ticket to me and I will match it to your grade and record it after class. Make certain your name is written clearly and legibly on the ticket.”

The class at large didn’t look or sound excited at the prospect of mostly Cs. There was no mass rush to find out who’d scored higher. Despite the work I’d put into my binding I felt a little trepidation as I approached the desk where the tagged wands were laid out neatly in rows. This early in the semester it was hard to have a real feel for what a professor was looking for and grading on. One person’s “going the extra mile” was another person’s “what are you, some kind of smart ass?”

The dismayed noises and indignant cries that came from some of the first few students who ventured forward made me even more conflicted. It was easy to dread one’s grade in the midst of evidence that the teacher was a harsh grader… but on the other hand, maybe the operative word there should be “strict” and maybe not everyone had even tried to follow her guidelines. She’d made it clear that some people had done better than a C.

It was only the first assignment, I decided. If I’d done well on it than I had nothing to fear, and if I hadn’t then maybe I could learn what to do for next time. I went forward to claim my wand, which was easy enough to find. There was nothing particularly distinctive about it that I could point out in contrast to any of the other homemade ones that were just twigs stripped of park and shaped a little, but it was mine.

I put my claim ticket down on the desk, grabbed it, and retreated to my table before I dared to look at the note attached to it.

It read:

An entertaining variation. I am uncertain if you fulfilled the letter or the spirit of the assignment, but either way I resolve the question you have hit all marks on one or the other. While the point of the assignment in no way depends on learning and mastering the particular spell that I outlined, in order to prevent the taking of undue shortucts I will reserve the right to demand you demonstrate the understanding of any spell you substitute for in the future if I am not certain you are capable of it. You have more than adequately demonstrated your grasp of the basics of the binding techniques at the core of the exercise.

My heart stuck in my throat a little bit. There was praise there, but it wasn’t unmitigated praise. More than adequate… if a C was adequate, that sounded like a B.

But below that was the grade: 102. Even with her rather exact and precise handwriting, I had to squint to make sure that third digit wasn’t another 0. There was a break down below that showing how I’d earned the points above average, with +2 listed as simply being “extra credit”.

Acantha’s voice whispered in my ear.

“I gave you two extra points for the extra steps you took and for the fact that you finished it in class, but please do not learn the wrong lesson from this and rush everything again,” she said. “It was bold of you to do so when you had time you could have used to ask me how I would receive your attempt. This time you’re being rewarded for boldness. If you want to impress me further, you must next show prudence.”

I nodded. I appreciated the personal explanation about my grade, especially as it came as she was being swamped by people who were demanding an explanation for theirs.

“I don’t understand what I did wrong,” one student said.

“Nothing,” she said. “You will note that I took off no points.”

“But…”

“You put forth an average effort and you have received average marks,” she said.

“This is bullshit!” another student said.

“I explained my grading scale in advance,” Acantha said, “and I set a clear deadline based on the amount of work it would take me to evaluate each student’s efforts individually, and I was flexible enough to accept several assignments turned in after that deadline.”

“Did anyone get an A?”

“I have said as much on that subject as I am able to,” Acantha said. “Other people’s grades are other people’s business. If you are dissatisfied with yours I will be happy to explain in greater detail how I arrived at that figure or how you may earn a higher one in the future immediately following class or during my office hours.”

“I’d like to discuss my grade now,” the guy who’d questioned her credentials on the first day said.

“If you’d like to thank me for taking the time to grade the wand you rolled through my slot at some time after I left my office at four in the morning, the time to do so is…”

“I want to talk about it now,” he said again.

“Yes, well, you do not set the curriculum,” she said. “It would not be fair to the rest of the class to spend their time discussing your grade, and it would not be fair of you to expect me to drop everything to grade your late homework again in the future.”

“It’s only your job.”

“This isn’t my job, it’s a favor to a friend,” she said. “What is your name?”

I halfway expected him to say “La Belle”, but he said, “Roberts. Gareth Roberts.” He said it with a self-assured smirk, like it was supposed to mean something to her.

“Mr. Roberts, your choices number two: you may sit down and hear the lesson I’ve prepared, or you may remove yourself from the class,” she said. “There is no middle ground between those two options… and if you’re about to ask me if I know who you are, I’m afraid I will have no choice but to embarrass both of us by admitting that I don’t.”

“You’ll be hearing about this,” he said as he re-took his seat.

“Just make certain it’s during my posted office hours and we won’t have a problem,” she said, and she began a more in-depth explanation of the spell-chaining that had been at the heart of the exercise with the wands.

It was a little harder to follow than it might have been… she was clearly rattled by having to defend her grading and her authority, and had defaulted back to reciting whole columns of text in a breathless exhalation.

I wondered if it would make a difference to her if she knew that some of us appreciated her efforts, or if she knew someone among the students would have her back. The problem was that I didn’t know how to let her know that I did… or even how to have her back, once you really got down to it. It would take something like a do-or-die moment for me to stand up to a Gareth Roberts if his attention were focused on me, and I just wasn’t equipped to walk up to Acantha with a friendly smile and a greeting.

Maybe the most I could do was not be difficult and keep trying to impress her. Thinking about it just made me feel even more awkward and impotent.

“We will begin our next assignment Monday,” Acantha said at the end of the class. “I will go over the grading scale in more detail then, with specific examples. If anyone wishes to redo the first assignment and turn it in again, I will average their grades together if the second result is higher, but you cannot expect this courtesy to be extended in the future.”

I thought she was being more generous than she needed to be… even if she wasn’t great at sounding generous… but I also thought it wouldn’t get her a lot of slack from the students who weren’t happy with her way of doing things. I had to admit that I preferred teachers who started from the standpoint of an A being normal and took points off instead of keeping with the idea that C really does mean average, but that was just because it was the approach that was easier for us, not because it was necessarily right.

“So, there’s this dance tomorrow night,” Ian said to me at lunch, just after I’d taken a bite of chicken that suddenly swelled up in my mouth and tasted like nothing. It was just the four of us—him, me, Amaranth, and Steff—at the moment, which I had thought would be perfect for talking about the dance, if he hadn’t had the idea before I was ready to do so. “I was thinking it would sort of be like our anniversary. I mean, our first date wasn’t exactly my finest moment, but I think it’s worth recognizing how far we’ve come, you know?”

I forcibly swallowed the lump of food in my mouth, my gaze slipping sideways to Amaranth. She’d brought up the point that Ian or Steff might make their own plans for the weekend, but the whole time that we’d been talking about the subject, it had never occurred to me that those plans might very well have involved me or the dance.

“Oh, well, if you guys already have plans…” Ian said.

“I don’t know if ‘plans’ are the right word,” Amaranth said, in an impressively neutral voice. “The subject of the dance has come up, but I don’t know if anything definite has been decided.”

“Oh?” Ian said. He looked at me. “Do you think you’ll go, then?”

“I actually got asked by someone else,” I said. “I mean, asked if I would be there. It’s not like a date, and I don’t know if I’d want it to be. My thought was that if I was there with someone else, there might be less awkwardness.”

“Oh, yeah,” Steff said. “The more awkward people get together in one place, the less awkwardness there is. I don’t know how things could get less awkward than that.”

“Well, there’s a thought,” Ian said. “Who says you have to go with just one of us?”

“Unless it’s like that,” Steff said.

“We talked about that,” I said. “And I thought about it. But I really wasn’t sure how the dynamics of a multi-person date would work out.”

“Just as a point of interest, most dates are multi-person,” Steff said. “Unless they’re surrounded by quotation marks and involve a box of tissues and a small jar of oil of slipperiness.”

“Well, okay,” Ian said. “Let’s look at it a different way. Why do you need to go with any of us?”

“I can just say anything right now and nobody would notice,” Steff said.

“We’re all very impressed with your cleverness, sweetie,” Amaranth said.

“Because I don’t want to go alone,” I said to Ian. “And leaving everyone at home if I can’t figure out who to go with doesn’t really seem like the way to avoid hurt feelings and resentments.”

“I’m not saying that anyone stays home, unless they want to,” Ian said. “People go, they don’t go… why does it have to be a matter of ‘going with’ each other, explicitly? We’re all adult-ish… and in theory, being in this relationship… these relationships… whatever… it doesn’t work if we’re trying to stake out territory like a bunch of high schoolers.”

“Says the nineteen-year-old,” Steff said.

“Hey, you’ve got to grow up sometime,” Ian said. “I’m just saying, it seems a little middle school to worry about who’s going with who. I mean, we know who’s involved with who. If some of us show up at the dance, why does it have to be any different from when we all show up at lunch?”

“I think a dance is a little more special than a meal,” I said.

“Okay, it happens less often,” Ian said. “But we’re talking Generic It’s The First Week Of The New School Year Dance sponsored by Campus Something Or Other. It’s not that much of an occasion.”

“You said it was like our anniversary,” I said.

“Not an anniversary-anniversary,” Ian said. “More like a milestone. Anyway, I’m not so much interested in reliving any memories as replacing them with newer and better ones.”

“Well, I think Amaranth and I are definitely going,” I said. “So I guess I’ll look forward to seeing you there.”

“How about you, Steff?” Amaranth said.

“I might drop in,” Steff said. “Just to get a look at the new crazy.”

“The what?” I said.

“I mean the next perfectly well-adjusted individual to take a healthy interest in you,” she said.

“Have I ever mentioned how much your support means to me?” I said.

“I love you, too,” she said.

Two and Dee arrived at the table shortly after that.

“Our apologies for being late but we had an issue arise with our room,” Dee said. “I believe somebody entered it without our knowledge or permission, but it is difficult to excite any interest in this transgression on the part of our resident adviser or the campus guard.”

“Also, a card came for you but it ended up in our mail,” Two said to me after exchanging greetings with everyone. “I was going to turn it in at the counter but Dee slid it under your door.”

“What kind of card?” I asked.

“An appointment card, but I didn’t read it because it wasn’t addressed to me,” she said.

“An appointment card?” I said. “Was it from the healing center?”

“I didn’t read it because it wasn’t addressed to me,” Two repeated.

“It was from Professor Elizabeth Bohd and it directed you to appear in her office at five this evening,” Dee said.

“You weren’t supposed to read it because it wasn’t addressed to you,” Two said.

“My apologies to the recipient, but I have already explained to you that I was not able to not read it,” Dee said.

“Thanks, Dee,” I said. “That’s during my melee class, though. Was there any explanation?”

“None,” Dee said. “The handwritten portions of the document fairly leaped out at me, but they consisted of nothing but your name, room number, and the time and date.”

“She must have figured you’d be done with classes by that time,” Amaranth said. “You’ll have to either drop by during your afternoon break, or send her a message that you can’t make it and asking when she’d like to see you instead.”

“Or, alternately,” Steff said, “tell her to eat a dick.”

“Steff!” Amaranth said. “That’s not called for.”

“What’s not called for is a teacher calling her in on the carpet when she’s not even in any of her classes,” Steff said. “You aren’t, are you?”

“We don’t know that she’s doing that,” Amaranth said.

“Right, we don’t know anything because she didn’t feel the need to explain herself,” Steff said. “She didn’t invite Mack to stop by, she summoned her like a gen… genuine person one would summon.”

“I actually think this does constitute an invitation,” I said. “I mean, we don’t really know each other socially to the point where it would be appropriate for her to just shoot me an a-mail asking me if I want to hang out, and… well, she’s always very professional about things.”

“This isn’t professional, it’s rude,” Steff said.

“I mean, I don’t know if she knows another way to reach out,” I said. “I think she’d be too self-conscious to send me an echo or an a-mail… In her own way, she’s as awkward and gawky as any student.”

I was actually thinking about Dee when I said this. Dee’s stiff and formal manners and the stock she put in things like formal declarations of friendship and explicit invitations weren’t necessarily the same thing as Professor Bohd’s reserved manner, but I thought they shared a common root. Acantha’s torrential lectures could probably be put in the same category.

“What, now professors are more afraid of us than we are of them?” Steff said.

“I agree with Steff,” Ian said. “Bohd’s a big girl, and I don’t believe for one minute she’s afraid of the student body.”

“I didn’t say she was afraid,” I said. “I just don’t think she knows more than one way to relate to students, and that’s as students.”

“But you think she should go anyway,” Steff said.

Ian nodded.

“Because the benefit of standing on how right you are doesn’t measure up to what it could cost you,” he said to me. “You’ve got another three years here. It’s not crazy to think you’re going to need Bohd’s support at some point.”

“It’s not really a debate for me,” I said. “I like Professor Bohd, so I’m not going to blow her off. Maybe I’d like her better if she were a little warmer and less, you know, brusque about things… but there are enough people at this university who would be happy to smile while they kicked me.”

“As a woman in a ‘high magic’ discipline, she’s probably used to having to defend her right to the same respect her peers get,” Amaranth said. “And that’s without even considering her non-human ancestry. I don’t think any of us can judge her for being a little prickly.”

“Oh, come off it, Amy,” Steff said. “You don’t let Mack get away with prickling at people, and she’s got more demon blood than Bohd and she’s been out about it longer.”

“Professor Bohd is only ‘out’ about it in the first place because she wanted to support me,” I said, “and other students in my position. Anyway, it’s my decision.”

“And I’m proud of you for making it,” Amaranth said.

That meant a lot to me, of course… among the things it meant was that now I actually had to follow through with it.

She felt a presence like a light touch on her mind, which she thought of as a telepath’s knock… a polite way for the mentally gifted to let others know they were approaching. As always, it felt somewhat scattered, like she were hearing fragments of a single sound in the form of echoes. She understood this to be the effect of the minds of the snakes that wreathed her head. Any contact with her mind had to get past them as well.

She understood that it was considered polite among the elven telepaths, but her wreath-snakes didn’t understand about manners or subtle arts… they only knew that they’d heard felt something weird and didn’t know where it had come from, and they went wild looking for the source.

“I apologize, I did not mean to startle you,” Dee said out loud, coming around the set of large stones that concealed the exit shaft. She was wearing a long, shapeless woolen tunic that came to below her knees. It still left much more of her skin exposed compared to the full-body robes and cloaks that most of the subterranean elves wore. Cetea, in contrast, wore nothing over her glistening yellow-green scales except for a belt-like harness across her flat chest that held a series of pouches for convenient carrying of small items or animals.

“It’s not me you startled,” Cetea said, wincing as one of the snakes bit the side of her face in the sensitive area right around her tympanum. Gorgon manners said you didn’t react to your own bites, or mention anybody else’s. They were biting each other, too. She felt that more dully than her own bit, and at least it might knock a few of them out. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“It is not my sleep shift,” Dee said. “But they are re-consecrating the temple, and in my current state I cannot participate.”

“Don’t you outrank them?”

“I was little more than a novice before my… temporary reassignment of status.”

“I mean, socially,” Cetea said. “You told me you’re in line for your house’s seat. I doubt anyone else here could say the same.”

“Ah. I see what you mean,” Dee said. “It might be said that I am more important in the hierarchy of my house than any of the Ceilos delegates are in the hierarchies of theirs, but as we don’t belong to the same house or even hail from the same city that is not of consequence. Even within my house, my ‘rank’ has more to do with what is expected of me than any actual authority I wield.”

“I just think it molts that you’re being punished so harshly for something that you did at school,” Cetea said.

“The priestesses here have authority over me because I’ve been given over to their keeping,” Dee said. “It does not seem so harsh to me.”

“They took away all your robes and make you wear that scratchy thing,” Cetea said.

“You often do not wear any clothes,” Dee said.

“Yes, which makes uncomfortable ones seem all the worse,” Cetea said.

She could still feel the anger and confusion of her snakes, but it seemed to be abating. She cautiously raised one taloned hand up near her head, just out of reach. She was rewarded with a snapping lunge that jerked her head to the side.

“Girls are restless tonight,” she said. “Does cold bother you? A walk out in the air ought to quiet them down.”

“And it will not put you out as well?”

“Not as quickly as them,” Cetea said. “But I wouldn’t want to do it unescorted. The thing about torpor is it makes my brain slow, to the point that I’m not a great judge of whether I’m falling into it or not.”

“For my part, I had not expected to find much warmth on the surface, so I will not miss it,” Dee said.

Cetea got to her feet carefully, trying to avoid moving her head too quickly and further riling her snakes.

“I cannot imagine what it would be like to have several animal creatures conjoined to my skull.”

“I can’t imagine what it would be like to not,” Cetea said. “Or to have big fleshy sacs full of baby food attached to my chest.”

“They are not always full of milk.”

“Celia called it ‘cow venom’,” Cetea said. “It was funny, after she explained what a cow was.”

“Celia knows a great many humorous terms for the differences between mammals and reptiles,” Dee said.

“I don’t understand most of them,” Cetea admitted.

“Your live is not measurably impovershed by this.”

“Let’s walk up the trail,” Cetea said. “I’m going to be sleepy on the way back, so I’d rather it be downhill.”

“That is sensible,” Dee said, and they started out up the mountain trail. Cetea walked slowly, holding her head erect.

“Do you often come out here at night?” Dee asked her.

“My summer… tutor, I guess… wants me to spend at least three hours up top. I had some issues last year with re-adjusting to the underground too quickly and then having to learn to cope up here. It’s not always at night, but it was raining during the day. It’s nice to not have to deal with the sun, but it’s not like I can take all my classes at night.”

“That is indeed a shame,” Dee said.

“Yeah,” Cetea said. “I heard someone talking about night school one time and got excited for a moment… but it turns out there is some kind of social gap between the kind of schools that offer everything as a night course and a university, and they don’t have the whole student accommodation thing… it seems like such a lost opportunity. Half the humans I met seem to stay up all night, anyway.”

“I am not certain if I would prefer night school to day,” Dee said. “If the sun makes it uncomfortable to be abroad during the day, it also makes it difficult to sleep during it. And physical discomfort aside, the sun does not bother me half as much as the stars at night do.”

“Why’s that?”

“They are so very… numerous,” Dee said. “Like a thousand glittering eyes in the dark, or slivers of light glinting off of teeth or blades. And they are so far away.”

“Isn’t that reassuring?”

“No,” Dee said. “You might think it would be, but… when the sun is in the sky, I feel like I can see the vault of the world. The ceiling is there. I know it, and I feel secure. At night, in the darkness… it’s like there is nothing to see. Like the sky goes on forever.”

“It doesn’t, though,” Cetea said. “The sky is… the sky. It’s up there. Solid as a ceiling of rock, or more so.”

“I know that,” Dee said. “One of my dormmates was more than slightly inclined to pontificate on facts such as that, when the topic arose. She told me that at night when I look up and see black, I am seeing the sky… I lacked the nuance of language to articulate how untrue that is.”

“What do you mean?”

“I see darkness,” she said. “When darkness falls on the bottom of a pit, I see the bottom by that darkness. Where the vault of a chamber is lost in darkness to light-seeking eyes, mine see it by that darkness. When I look up into the sky at night, I do not see darkness. I do not see the sky. I see nothing… nothing dotted with stars.”

Cetea shivered, an action that made her wreath of snakes rattle against each other and hiss in complaint.

“My former neighbor told me that the sun used to be a portal,” Dee said. “In the days when the gods would walk the physical realms freely and at will. In those days, the light of the sun was divine and would burn infernal creatures upon whom it fell. It was despised by creatures of chaos, though it held no power over them.”

“I’ve heard that,” Cetea said. “Or part of it, anyway. As part of Khersian myth. Humans say he became human in order to walk the world without restriction, and to become a ‘new sun’ for his people. I didn’t know how much of the portal stuff was real, and how much was just backstory for their myth.”

“I do not know either,” Dee said. “The celestial reaches are not a significant area of study among my people, and my informer on the subject would not be well-suited for investigating the truth of the matter. But it unnerves me to contemplate the matter, because if the sun is or has been a gateway to other realms, might not the stars be as well?”

“That’s crazy,” Cetea said. “Where would they all lead?”

“That is what I find unnerving.”

“I think the night just got colder,” Cetea said. “So why did you come up here tonight? I know about the re-consecrating, but the whole elven wing isn’t one big temple, is it?”

“No,” Dee said. “But… since I have a rare shift at liberty, I thought I would seek out your company.”

“Me? Why?”

“We… share experiences,” Dee said. “A frame of reference. And you are accustomed to speaking in Pax.”

“Most of the residents of Ceilos speak Pax.”

“But not habitually among themselves,” Dee said. “The elves who have been here longer can speak the gorgon tongue, and vice-versa. Going into the other races’ quarters in search of company feels like an awkward intrusion as it is.”

“Why do you need to leave the elven quarter for company?”

“I have never made friends easily, among my own people,” Dee said. “The station I occupy is not exactly the most crowded one.”

“And it’s not allowed for you to socialize with people outside it?”

“It isn’t simple to,” Dee said. “When I first arrived here, I spent my time in the halfkind den… they exist apart from the ordinary social order, so there are fewer strictures in dealing with them. Now, I am forbidden from having any contact with them. I do not think I would miss social contact, if not for the fact that… I…”

“Miss social contact,” Cetea said. “I understand, I suppose. You didn’t really have friends until you came up here, did you?”

“Not in the fullest sense of that word,” Dee said. “Of course, my language yields more precise degrees. Humans would say we have more than two dozen words for ‘friend’, but they all differ significantly from each other.There is duri, which is a state of invitation and openness. It usually leads to kezi, which is a mutual agreement to act in good faith.”

“Sounds more like a treaty than friendship.”

“It is a foundation for deeper understanding,” Dee said. “People have faults and it is easy to disappoint someone. Especially when you live in close quarters with one another. If two people agree to act in and assume good faith with each other, it can ease the way.”

“So why not assume good faith of everyone?”

“People have faults and it is easy to disappoint someone.”

“When you say that, do you mean that you can’t assume good faith of everyone because they have faults and will betray it, or you can’t assume good faith of everyone because you have faults and will be suspicious?”

“Everyone has faults,” Dee said. “So both interpretations are reasonable.”

“That makes sense, I suppose. On another subject, the summer is young,” Cetea said. “You could probably pick up some of the local languages before we go back to school.”

“I have actually been in the central library, doing that.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I’ve been studying primers on your language,” she said. She closed her mouth and made a series of hisses.

“Um… I’m not sure what you were trying to say there,” Cetea said. “It was something like ‘arm of the relative is not my…’ well, then it just gets rude. And half of it was just sort of making noise.”

“Evidently I require more study,” Dee said. “It is hard to understand the context of what I read when the illustrations are invisible to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I lack the necessary organs to apprehend heat patterns,” Dee said. “I can make out the writing because the ink is dark as well as heat reflective. The pictures, though, simply appear as an indiscriminate black mass… I can make out shades within the blackness, but they do not seem to correspond well to the image I’m meant to see.”

“Oh,” Cetea said. “I didn’t realize… I know you see things differently, but I didn’t know that would matter. I can see a light-drawing, when there’s light.”

“As can I,” Dee said. “It is curious to me how so many races that see by other media than light can see light as well.”

“Well, it’s useful,” Cetea said. “Most of the foundational myths I’ve heard have all or most of the races being made from a common plan. Which god made what race first is up for debate, but if everyone started from the same eye, it was probably a light-seeing one.”

“It could also be that the first race had an eye with capabilities that other gods could not duplicate,” Dee said. “Or did not feel their creations deserved.”

“I wouldn’t attach too much value to the first race, if there was a single first one,” Cetea said. “Anyway, why are you trying to learn from a book? I’d think, given the legendary sensitivity of the pointy elven hears, you’d pick up the subtle nuances faster just listening.”

“Ear,” Dee said. “The ear is the organ, and hearing is what it does.”

“Oh, really? That’s… confusing,” Cetea said.

“I do not imagine whoever devised it intended any malice.”

“I learned Pax as a child, but my primer didn’t cover things like ‘ears’… I never even really thought about what the little crests around mammals’ tympanal organs were called, and then when I thought I heard people calling them ‘hears’, I thought, ‘Well, that’s kind of clever, in an obvious way.’”

“In any event, I would most likely learn faster through immersion, but there is a strong taboo against eavesdropping, and… well, again I do not care to intrude.”

“Not without any… kuri?”

“Duri,” Dee said. “My culture involves clear boundaries and declarations. Not because we are naturally open. In fact, I find that we tend to be more guarded and perhaps a bit more given to intrigue than many other peoples. Because of that, we deal with each other most easily when we are most explicit about intentions. When I find myself in situations where everything is theoretically open but one must feel one’s way forward, it is… disorienting.”

“And a little scary?”

“Not ‘scary’ in the…”

“…fullest sense of the word,” Cetea finished. “I know. Well, consider this an invitation if you want it, Delia Daella. We can be friends if you want someone to hang out with, and I can help you with my language.”

“I appreciate that,” Dee said. “I could teach you my language in turn.”

“Thank you. I could always use another word for friend.”

Actual injuries are pretty rare in a mock weapons class… that’s the point of fighting with mocked blades. Even padding can’t completely negate the fact that real bodies were hitting a real floor, though, and the particular focus of this class meant that happened rather more frequently than in one that focused more on things like the natural give and take between evenly-matched opponents.

As a magically invulnerable half-demon, of course, I was as immune to petty bruises and scrapes as I was to cuts and broken bones from mundane sources… but I still felt the equivalent pain, and it lingered longer than the purely phantasmal effects of the mock weapons.

Also, I couldn’t say that the ephemeral wounds didn’t have any lasting effects. The experience of suffering crippling or even killing wounds over and over again throughout the course of an hour… well, something about that stayed with you. This was a known phenomenon, among those who engaged in mock combat on a regular basis. It had been studied to make sure there was no actual residual magical effect in play, and apparently there wasn’t. It was purely mental, or emotional.

I wondered if the long-term effect would be to erode the fear of death. If so, I had to imagine that suited Coach Callahan’s purposes. She was serious about teaching her students self-defense, but she’d also made it clear that she’d just as soon be teaching the art of other-offense.

Still, psychic bruises and all, I was feeling pretty good about things as I headed to meet the others for an early dinner at the Archimedes Center. My celebratory mood of earlier returned, this time unburdened by the knowledge that I still had one last all-important but not exactly favorite class to suffer through.

Amaranth noticed right away.

“You have a good day today, baby?” she asked me after everyone had grabbed their food and sat down. Aside from her, , Ian, Steff, and myself, Dee and Two’s friend Hazel were also with us again. Two appreciated the benefits of having a job, financial and otherwise, so she was working. “I can’t really think of when I’ve seen you this happy… that is, I’ve seen you happy about things before, but I mean in general.”

“Yes, you more often radiate a sense of being pleased with yourself, or with some small thing,” Dee said. “Or, on occasion, contentment. You seem strangely… ebullient.”

“What’s ebullient called when it’s moored?” Hazel asked.

“Happy,” Amaranth said.

“Oh,” Hazel said. “Well, you might have just said so,” she said to Dee.

“I apologize if my choice of words obscured my meaning, as that was the opposite of my intention,” Dee said. “I was searching for the proper word to convey a particular form and expression of happiness. The languages of the surface world lack the nuance and subtle shades of meaning that I am accustomed to using, so I have been seeking to expand the depth and breadth of my vocabulary.”

“Oh, you got a word-a-day calendar, then?” Hazel said. “I never did see the point of those. Or the ones with the cartoons. I used to get a page-a-day calendar every year from my godmother on the Feast of Saint Owain. I mean, they were entertaining enough, but I never did keep use one as a calendar. It seems to me that anything worth reading every day is worth reading more than one page at a time, you know?”

“Indeed,” Dee said, proving that sometimes the right word for the moment isn’t one that conveys any nuance or shades of meaning.

“Anyway, I guess I am having a good day,” I said. “Though I wouldn’t have thought to call it that. I mean, nothing bad has happened. I made it through the day without any kind of crisis. The closest thing I had to a confrontation was with Sooni, and that… well, it was as much of a non-event as dealing with Sooni ever is.”

“So you’re celebrating the little victory of a day where Sooni’s just a minor irritation,” Steff said.

“She’s always a minor irritation,” I said.

“Except when she trashes the dormitory and puts you in the healing center,” Steff said.

“Perhaps she is a minor irritation with a poor sense of proportion,” Dee suggested.

“Anyway…” I said, “the point is that I made it through the day. Today and yesterday.”

“Um, hate to be the one to bring you down,” Ian said, “but two days into the school year without a crisis is hardly a record, hon,” Ian said.

“Well, yeah, it’s not so much all the horrible things that didn’t happen,” I said. “It’s more the fact that I’ve… okay, this might sound stupid.” In fact, now that I was voicing it out loud I was sure that it did sound stupid, and not at all certain that it wasn’t more or less just what Ian had said. “I’ve made it through all of my classes once today. I know now that I can handle this.”

“Was there ever any real doubt about that?” Steff asked. “I mean, yeah, Applied Enchantment isn’t for slouches, but it’s not like one of those courses where one student in ten makes it to graduation in a box, and the box usually is a lot closer in size and shape to a person than they are.”

“I wasn’t doubting it consciously, I suppose,” I said. “I mean, I’ve never stayed up nights wondering if college was something I could handle or not… it’s just, you know, the thing you do after high school. The done thing. But now it’s like I’ve let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. I wasn’t worried, but now I’m relieved. Does that make sense?”

“It makes sense to me,” Amaranth said.

“I guess so,” Steff agreed.

“I wasn’t ever really worried, though,” I said. “I mean, except for Coach Callahan’s class, which is way outside my comfort zone, and this design class I’m taking, which is a bit out there… but it seems like it’s going to be fun. Even if it’s not a subject I like, school’s something that I’ve always been able to enjoy.”

“Sure, if it wasn’t for those pesky classmates and teachers, I bet high school would have been a blast,” Steff said.

“Okay, actually going to school has never been a laugh riot for me but I was good at the graded stuff,” I said. “I like learning.”

“The problem I had was that my sophomore year didn’t feel any different from my freshman year,” Steff said. “I mean, you can let a lot more slide during your first year, or you feel like you can and you have no reason to know better yet. By the second year you’ve maybe encountered some consequences, or at the very least you can’t use the ‘it’s still the first year, I have plenty of time to make up for stuff later’ excuse. But… it doesn’t feel any different, so you don’t act any differently.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It feels different to me. I mean, not because I showed up and something just clicked into place and I felt different. I think it’s just that I’ve come far enough that I can look back and say, ‘Wow… look how far I’ve come.’ Less a rite of passage and more just… passage.”

“Ah, the wise sophomore looking back on her naive freshman self and wondering if she was ever really that young and innocent,” Steff said. “That’s a rite of passage for you.”

“I’m not saying I’ve got it all figured out,” I said. “Just that I’m in a better place now than I was a year ago.”

“Well, I’m glad that you are, and that you realize it,” Amaranth said. “And that your new year’s off to such a good start. What do you think of your new teachers?”

“They all seem pretty decent,” I said. “One guy seems like kind of a blowhard, but he’s team-teaching with Professor Hart, so it’s not too bad.”

“Wait, you think this guy’s a blowhard compared to Hart?” Steff said.

“Okay, maybe blowhard was the wrong word… windbag?” I said. “I mean he’s pompous and goes on and on.”

“Yeah, I think that’s more of a windbag than a blowhard,” Ian said.

“Blowhards are more… blustery,” Hazel said, nodding.

“I guess,” I said. “I’ve never really seen these terms defined precisely.”

“Clearly, there’s a calendar waiting to happen there,” Ian said.

“Another one of my teachers seemed kind of grumpy, but I guess she could also have been having a bad day,” I said. “I think it would be a mistake to judge someone by the first day of anything.”

“That’s a very good thing to learn,” Amaranth said.

“She seemed like the sort of person who might ordinarily be more cheerful,” I said. “She did this bit about her name being Bryony and not Byron-y that came off kind of snappish with how she delivered it, but I can imagine her meaning it as a sort of icebreaker.”

“Bryony?” Hazel said. “You got Professor Swain?”

“Uh… what’s wrong with Professor Swain?” I asked, suddenly worried. I’d been trying to give her the benefit of the doubt in order to compensate for the fact that I resented having to take her class, but it was possible that I was overcompensating.

“She’s a great big bloody hypocrite, for starters,” Hazel said. “She’s always had something against river folk, but come to find out she’s a quarter Tolkish on her mother’s side, and it doesn’t half show.”

“You know, everything you say sounds adorable,” Steff said. “I think it’s a combination of the accent and the fact that most of the things that come out of your mouth aren’t words.”

“Maybe you should borrow Dee’s calendar. What I mean to say is that she’s an… a lady of wandering interests,” Hazel said. At our blank looks, she added, “You know, prone to seek out, ah, random encounters.”

“So she’s a swinger,” Steff said. “She wouldn’t be the first faculty member.”

“Swinger?” Hazel said. “Er, no. I meant… well… she’s a member of the adventuring classes.”

“She’s an adventurer?” I said, and Hazel blushed.

“Oh, I wouldn’t put it so bluntly as all that,” Hazel said.

“Clearly,” Ian said.

“Really, now, Hazel… I wouldn’t expect you to be so judgmental about that sort of thing,” Amaranth said.

“Well, now, just because I might have what some people might call certain adventure-ous tendencies doesn’t mean I’m going to go arm-wrestle with trolls or whatever it is adventurers do,” Hazel said.

“Really, it’s a lot of search and rescue stuff these days, and carrying out relief efforts in disaster areas,” Amaranth said. “There is still quite a bit of the tomb raiding and the somewhat indiscriminate violence, but there are reputable adventuring organizations.”

“Anyway, like I said, she’s a hypocrite,” Hazel said. “I wouldn’t mind what she did in her misspent youth if she weren’t so high and mighty about how she imagines a girl like me must be spending mine. It’s like she’s all quirky and non-conventional until there’s someone in the room who isn’t the right sort and then it’s like she isn’t wearing trousers and doesn’t know the right way to hold a sword.”

“Did she use a sword, or did she pick up a dagger and use it as a sword?” Steff asked.

“That’s a myth,” Amaranth said. “A dagger isn’t actually a small sword, so a dagger in the hands of a gnome is just a too-big dagger.”

“Wait, is that a real thing?” Ian asked. “I mean, an actual myth? I’ve seen references to shirelings holding a dagger like it’s a sword, but I assumed it was just a joke about how small they are.”

“Oh, yes, always good for a laugh, that,” Hazel said.

“It’s the sort of thing that usually just gets played for laughs when it’s mentioned these days, but it was a persistent myth in elven society for centuries,” Amaranth said. “It sort of plays up the idea that elven-made weapons are just that light and graceful, and of course there’s pointing out the perceived inferiority of a smaller race.”

“You’re using the past tense, Amy-doll, but when you’re talking about elven culture of centuries past, you have to remember that not everyone from those days have passed,” Steff said. “But yeah, it’s pretty much an older elven thing… I think it only crossed over into human culture because of a few human writers who really buy into the whole mystique and grandeur of the elves routine. I don’t know why I blurted that out, Hazel… I really can’t stand the whole elven chauvinism thing.”

“To be fair…” I started to say, then hesitated. Not because I didn’t think Steff could take criticism gracefully, but because I didn’t have a lot of experience with giving it gracefully.

“Go on, baby,” Amaranth said.

“Well, you kind of have a tendency to do that,” I said to Steff. “I mean, at a conscious level you don’t want much to do with elven culture, but it seems like you’ve internalized a lot of it all the same.”

“Okay, I guess that’s a fair point,” Steff said. “But can you really blame me? I’ve spent roughly half my life so far immersed in it.”

“Well, you’ve got a lot longer than those few years to spend as you see fit,” Amaranth said. “Hopefully you can use them to grow out of that.”

“Eh, the whole personal growth thing seems to be more you and Mack’s kick,” Steff said. “I’ll be honest, the only reason I’m interested in learning anything at college is because there are some things I want to do that I don’t know how.”

“That’s… pretty much the definition of learning,” Ian said.

“Yeah, but I mean, if I wasn’t interested in subjects that are very hard to learn outside a formal setting, I wouldn’t be in one,” Steff said. “It’s possible to study necromancy on your own, but it’s sort of a tradition for that sort of thing to not end well in a ‘they called me mad, MAD!’ sort of way.”

“And because of this, instituting a formal course of study into the subject seemed like a good idea to everyone?” Dee said.

“No, I’m pretty sure they called old Dean Coombes mad, too,” Steff said. “Though probably not to his face. When he still had one.”

“Anyway… I’ve actually heard good things about Professor Swain,” Amaranth said.

“Who from… Honey?” Hazel asked. “That’d figure.”

With that, Hazel’s vitriol became a bit more understandable. I gathered that there was a bit of a class divide between her and her cousin. Gnomes who rode the river were regarded as shiftless and untrustworthy by those who could afford (or had inherited) proper burrows. Hazel belonged to the former category; Honey the latter.

“Just from other students,” Amaranth said. “I haven’t needed any of her classes because I tested out of herbalism, but a lot of my classmates have had her. They say she’s a good teacher.”

“Oh,” Hazel said. “Well, I wouldn’t know about that… I haven’t actually had her, and I’m not sure Honey ever did show up for her class.”

“It is possible for someone to have one or two blind spots but be a perfectly decent person otherwise,” Amaranth said.

“That’s all very well and good, unless you happen to be the person who was trod on for innocently occupying that blind spot,” Hazel said. “And when the person doing the treading isn’t the first… or the eleventy-first… to do so.”

“I’m trying to keep an open mind,” I said. “Anyway, I met her teaching assistant today and she seemed pretty cool, so even if Professor Swain isn’t the best teacher I won’t always have to deal with her.”

“Oh, right, the hot one,” Steff said.

“I thought you were more interested in cold ones,” Ian said.

“I’m thermoflexible… but no colder than room temperature, please,” Steff said. “Anyway, she seemed pretty adventurous. Oh, Amy, you met her… she’s the one you asked to give us the message about lunch.”

“Oh, Eloise?” Amaranth said. “She’s lovely. She’s a secular druid… raised Khaelean, but a pretty staunch secularist now.”

“Are you allowed to consort with heretics?” Ian asked.

“To be really technical about it, she’s an apostate,” Amaranth said. “A heretic is a co-religionist who differs on key dogma. The funny thing is that she’s a lot more dogmatic about some things than I am. I mean, when she was talking about why she stopped going to circle… well, I thought there was more wiggle room on a few issues than she did. I think maybe it had more to do with the attitudes of some of the leaders of her particular circle than anything else.”

“What exactly was the issue?” Ian asked.

“Something personal,” Amaranth said. “And no, I don’t mean any of the things that you’re probably thinking… if I meant sexual, I would say that. It’s personal because it’s hers.”

“Fair enough,” Ian said. “Though honestly, of all the religions I might expect someone to leave over sexual restrictions, the worship of Mother Khaele wouldn’t quite be at the top of my list.”

“Well, maybe some folks decide they want to settle down and find a little more… I don’t know… structure, as time goes by,” Hazel said. “There are folks in the shires who run through the woods in the altogether when they’re young and say they’re worshipping Owain the Wild, but most of them grow out of that by the time they’re ready to start a family. Or the time they find themselves with eleven months to be ready to start a family.”

“Which one’s Owain the Wild?” Ian asked.

“God of nature,” Hazel said. She shot a quick glance at Amaranth. “He, er, lets Mother Khaele help sometimes with the smaller day-to-day stuff he doesn’t have time for, is the way we learn it.”

“I imagine she appreciates that,” Amaranth said, the corner of her lip twitching upwards.

“What does this Owain the Wild look like?”

“Well, like a gnome, of course,” Hazel said. She added, “He has a fig leaf on.”

“Why would he need a fig leaf if his followers run naked?” Ian asked.

“Well, so they can spot him if he shows up at their pagan orgies, I suppose,” Hazel said. “Though honestly, most of the pictures I’ve seen of him, the artist put a proper suit on him for modesty’s sake, and then put the fig leaf over that so you can tell it’s him.”

“Is this suit at all like the suit worn by Owain of the Four Waters, or Owain the Bloody?” Ian asked.

“Well, first of all, I have never seen any of these gods in the flesh myself, and so we’re talking about artists’ representations here. And there are only so many ways an artist can render a respectably liturgical waistcoat,” Hazel said. “Anyway, it’s a big family and there are bound to be some hand-me-downs, and I’m not for having a theological debate with you if that’s what you’re rooting around for, Ian Mason.”

“I just can’t believe you don’t find it suspicious that…”

“Well, there you go,” Hazel said. “You can’t believe. We can. That’s why it’s called faith, isn’t it?”

“I guess,” Ian said.

“You should be an Arkhanite,” Steff said to Ian. “We love questions about our beliefs, but don’t ask me why.”

The conversation continued from there, in much the same way: jumping from topic to topic, friends needling friends… friends occasionally bristling at friends. It wasn’t exactly what you’d call climactic, any more than anything else had been so far.

I didn’t mind that one bit. While I’d been honest when I said that it wasn’t just the trouble I’d avoided so far that I was happy about, I was grateful for having been given some breathing room by fate or Owain the Merciful or whoever looks out for little half-demons, and I wanted to enjoy it for as long as I could.

It seemed more like a restaurant than a cafeteria, at least compared to the one in the student union. It was still buffet style, but more of the food was self-service, kept in heated or cooled trays on islands in the middle of the floor. The line of counters in front of the prep area were only for made-to-order stuff, which had been added to the menu as a solution to the problem of students with more specialized diet needs.

Goblinoids and reptilians can’t digest milk and its products. Neither, for that matter, can a lot of mammalian humanoids. Some races have traditionally preferred food that was quite a bit more or less cooked than local human cooking methods traditionally leave it. Vegetarians… whether by nature, divine edict, or inclination… also found themselves with a lot more options at the Arch.

We all had more options. My dietary needs weren’t being served, but I had them well enough in hand that I wasn’t going to ask the food services folk to procure a bit of human virgin blood every month for me. The rest of the time, I was happy to take advantage of the sandwich station that would make me a grilled chicken sandwich with a ton of bacon on it.

It had taken some serious prompting for me to rediscover the joys of solid food. I had a bit of a sweet tooth, but I also had a craving for meat that I could use to gauge the approach of my other craving.

“Would anybody have any objection to eating here more often?” Amaranth asked. She had a grilled eggplant sandwich, on bread that had been certified vegan.

“I wouldn’t,” Two said. She had taken a brownie sundae with her plate of food, on which there was an artfully arranged bit of chicken, asparagus, and mashed potatoes that were collectively smaller than her dessert, which she was eating first “to prevent excessive melting”. Two had always eaten… her original function as a living reservoir of magical power was enhanced by her having true-to-life life functions… but she had also only discovered the joy of doing so during our freshman year, and dessert was still one of her favorite things.

“I confess I find myself conflicted on that score,” Dee said. She had the top of some kind of mushroom, as large as a steak and prepared in the same fashion. “While the food here is certainly more palatable… and it is easier to avoid troublesome grains… I do believe that the stated goal of fostering a welcoming atmosphere for all, while laudable, has not been met.”

I had somewhat naively wondered if the reason she’d pulled her cloak around her and lowered the hood over her face was just because the more open construction left her feeling exposed. Now I realized what I… what most of us… had overlooked. I was so used to seeing Dee and Steff hanging out together that it had never occurred to me how uncomfortable she might be in a place where surface elves gathered, or a place that was in part a monument to surface elves and their culture.

I didn’t want to be too conspicuous about looking around, but I didn’t have to be… a group of five elven girls was lounging around just outside the low wall around the dining area, glaring daggers at our group. They were wearing gowns of gossamer-light material in the style that Steff’s more generously cut dress imitated. Two of them had scarves over their mouths, and one had a lacy veil covering her whole face.

“Yeah, I’m not really digging that part of the scenery myself,” Steff said. “I mean, there are reasons I lived in Harlowe and not Treehome, even before I met Viktor, you know?” She put her hands under her breasts and gave them a little shake, saying something else about how the bouncing bits didn’t help the bouncing bits helping the bouncing…

“Close your mouth, baby, your sandwich is falling out,” Amaranth said.

“Wow, I wish I could break her that way,” Ian said.

“I wish I could break her every way,” Steff said.

“I’m sorry, I guess I was staring a little bit,” I said, blushing madly.

“Oh, honey, you weren’t doing that, believe me,” Steff said.

“There’s nothing wrong with honest and open appreciation of your lover’s physical form,” Amaranth said. “Anyway… I guess I wouldn’t want to make you two have to choose between being uncomfortable and dining with us.”

“Why give them the satisfaction of letting them know they can run you off?” Hazel said.

“Hazel’s right,” Steff said. “Fuck those bitches right in their vaginas.”

Across the crowded floor, the elves visibly stiffened, their own sidelong conversations skidding to an abrupt halt. As vulgar as it was to anyone who understood Pax, among elves it was a bit like accusing a gnome’s mother of having sex on a boat while wearing shoes. Even in mixed-sex relationships, elves avoided procreative intercourse as a way of managing their unaging population.

“That isn’t quite what I said,” Hazel said.

“Whatever,” Steff said. “If they’re going to glare, that means they’re uncomfortable, and if they’re uncomfortable they can leave.”

“For the present time, I am inclined to agree,” Dee said. “I may find that my resolve weakens as my desire to eat in peace grows, but for now I say let them scowl as they will. We are as welcome here as they are.”

“You know what would really give them something to scowl at?” Steff asked.

“No, but I greatly fear that I am about to learn,” Dee said.

“If you and I just started making out in the middle of the room,” Steff said.

Dee gave this suggestion the response she thought it deserved, which is to say that she ignored it completely. Our audience, which could hear every word we were saying, was not as good at controlling its reaction… they all looked a mixture of revolted and embarrassed and were starting to slink off, giving as much of an impression as they could muster that they were leaving of their own accord, because they had better things to do.

“I’d expect elves to be more grown-up,” Hazel said. “Aren’t most of those folks in their fifties or so by the time they go off to school?”

“Yeah, but elven kids don’t get to join grown-up society until they turn a hundred,” Steff said. “It seems pretty awesome for the first decade or so but then you run out of stuff to do. Some of them end up joining human society, since they’re technically adults under Imperial law… but their own folks will treat whatever they’re doing as a childish hobby, sometimes even after they come of age. Like, ‘Oh, you’re still playing at being an investment banker?’”

“Ah, see, dwarves aren’t anything like that,” Hazel said. “My Andy had to work for a living for better than eleven years before they’d let him come here. Dwarves don’t get anything for free. They owe their clan service for every year they’re raised. Not a bad system, to my mind. Let kids be kids, let grown-ups be grown-ups, and in between they get plenty of time to find out how the world really works while their noses are to the grindstone.”

“Would you really want to do more than a decade of hard labor before you got to do anything you wanted with your life?” I asked.

“Can’t say how it would have suited me, since it didn’t happen,” Hazel said. “But, I mean, it seems like a better way of making sure everyone goes out into the world with her head screwed on straight than what most kinds of folks do. If Andy and I ever do have a kid… and we have given it a fair amount of thought, since, you know, last year… I’m not sure I’d mind raising them the dwarven way. At twenty-eight, he’d be just about grown-up anyway.”

“Really personal question,” Ian said.

“Ask it,” Hazel said.

“What would happen if you two had a girl?” Ian asked. “A little half-dwarven girl. Would Andreas go all grrr-smash on her when she grows up?”

“Well… that’s one of the reasons we’re still thinking,” Hazel said. “Neither one of us would mind a boy… we both have our reasons to not prefer a daughter… but so far as I know there isn’t any way to work that out in advance.”

“There isn’t,” I confirmed.

The slaver with the hilariously ironic name of Mercy had once offered me an almost unfathomable sum of money if I would have a girl with one of her “pet” half-demons, so she could breed even more of them. This was her back-up plan… her own preference was that I sell myself to her. As horrifying as the whole thing was on the surface, it would have potentially required me to have as many children as it took to get a girl one.

“Mother Khaele hears prayers on that score, but it’s an area where it’s really hard to say if she ever really answers them,” Amaranth said. “There’s definitely no mortal power that can force the matter.”

“Doesn’t dating a dwarf get awkward when you’re rooming with a kobold?” Ian asked Hazel. “Or two kobolds, I guess.”

“Closer to one and a half,” Hazel said. “Granted Shiel’s just a bitty slip of a thing to begin with, but Nae’s downright, what do you call it, diminutive. And quiet, too… I could almost forget she was there most of the time.”

“Did you say Nae?” Amaranth said.

Nae… that was why the tiny kobold in my class had seemed slightly familiar. I’d only seen her once before, and that time she’d been fully ensconced in bondage gear, but her size was very distinctive.

“Yeah,” Hazel said. “You know her? Guess I shouldn’t be too surprised… I guess you’re sort of into her scene, aren’t you?”

“We’ve met her in passing,” Amaranth said.

“Anyway, she’s obviously got nothing to say against dating a dwarf, and as long as she is, then Shiel can’t say anything against Andy without it getting all awkward-like,” Hazel said.

“So she and Caron are still together, then?” Amaranth said.

“In a manner of speaking,” Hazel said. “Obviously Caron can’t visit her here… dwarven men and women mix like oil and water, if ‘water’ means ‘fire’… and this is men’s territory, in their eyes. Nae said that Caron is letting her have her liberty while she finishes her education, though she doesn’t seem to be in any real hurry to chase after anyone, or be chased.”

I exchanged a look with Amaranth. We both knew… or strongly suspected… that the “liberty” in this case was more literal. Nae’s education had been previously interrupted by Caron’s entirely legal enslavement of her, as punishment for trying to steal from her store on a dare. Caron claimed to have offered Nae freedom papers many times since then, but Nae had always torn them up. If she’d re-enrolled in the university it meant she must have finally accepted them.

The realities of slavery in the Imperium were brutal. We’d come all the way up to the point of nearly abolishing the institution about half a century before, when it had become apparent that legally and philosophically an entity could either be a person or property but not both. The improvements in enchantment and automation had helped bring us to that point by making slave labor less economically feasible… golems were expensive, but so were slaves, and golems lasted longer and could be made to fulfill specific purposes better.

With demand for slaves slacking, universal rights activists had pushed for legal abolition. Unfortunately, the entities that were in favor of the status quo wielded more power and influence, and so when the question had come before the Dread Tribunal, they had ruled that yes, a person could not be property… but rather than ruling the institution of slavery untenable, they had ruled that slaves weren’t people.

That was the end of any legal protection slaves had enjoyed. They now had fewer rights than a hunting dog or a draft horse… the notion of trying to get animal cruelty laws to apply to intelligent, free-willed beings had been too bitter a pill for many abolitionists to swallow.

There was now a slave welfare movement separate from the abolition one, but the fact was there wasn’t a lot of opposition on either front. The changing economic situation meant that slavery had become a plaything for the rich and powerful. Out-and-out slave labor still existed in places where modernization was seen as too expensive, and those places tended to be remote and far removed from the public eye. There was no public face of slavery any more because the public in general rarely had to face up to it.

I’d had plenty of opportunities to think about it in the past year, having been targeted for slavery by Mercy, but for most people it didn’t even impinge on their consciousness. It was easy to forget that slaves existed, or to accept their lack of personhood as a matter of actual and not just legal fact.

Even my passing acquaintance with Caron was tied up in the issue… she had tried, albeit somewhat half-heartedly, to trap me in a position where she could sell me to Mercy. She used the Imperium laws on slavery… which allowed shopkeepers with clearly posted signs to take thieves as slaves… to basically enforce her own legal death penalty, since that was what usually happened to people Mercy owned.

She shrugged it off as no more than people who try to steal from her should expect or deserve, but it was impossible for me to think of her as a good or even decent person. That made it difficult for me to know what to think of Nae, at once her victim and loving partner.

It had been Nae’s disapproval that had made Caron’s efforts to snare me half-hearted, but Nae stayed with her knowing that she was the sort of person who would sell another into bondage and death. She’d accepted her legal slavery as a point of pride until it became inconvenient and then she’d cast it off, an option most slaves didn’t have.

The appeal wasn’t completely foreign to me… after all, I enjoyed the feeling of being objectified through play. I found it relaxing to yield control. During my first year with Amaranth, I had encountered the idea that what I was doing was disrespectful to the people who really were used as toys and treated as objects under the law.

It had gnawed at me, but I’d come to understand the comparison was false. I hoped one day to have the resources to make a real contribution to the cause of abolition, but for the present time… regardless of what I did or did not do with Amaranth… I wasn’t condoning or participating in the institution of slavery. We treated each other with decency, and we tried to do the same for others.

Of course, for all that I condemned Caron, there was the fact that I enjoyed the benefits of citizenship in a country that had been built with slave labor and that still gave cover to atrocities. It was something I’d always known about… well, not always. We were all children once.

My adolescence and what followed had not given me much room to believe that the world was a fluffy place full of bright shining golden lights… I knew there were ugly things in it because I’d been told that I was one of them, and I feared what golden lights there were as things that would only harm me.

My grandmother had always believed the Imperial Republic of Magisteria’s government was only flawed insofar as all mortal governments are flawed. She’d made it clear that she believed it was the next best thing to governance by the divine hand of Lord Khersis himself. I’d been pretty willing to accept the dichotomies of good versus evil that she had set up for me when they impugned my soul, but to my credit I’d sometimes been less willing to believe her when she started talking about the faults and failings of others.

Oh, sure, I swallowed quite a bit of her prejudiced bullshit… I was nine when she first took me in, and I was taken in as only a child can be. I was still unraveling the assumptions she’d planted in my head after more than a year of freedom. But I’d never been willing to believe that the plight of slaves was something they brought on by themselves, or that it was the will of Khersis.

“Wow, I guess Nae’s not very popular,” Hazel said, misattributing the sudden silence around the table. While Ian and Steff hadn’t been present for our interactions with Caron and Nae, they knew the story. Dee probably did, too. She was the model of discretion, but she was also a telepath and empath with elven hearing who had lived in the room next door to me for my entire freshman year.

“Nae seemed like a sweet girl,” Amaranth said. “Or young woman, I suppose. We just don’t know her very well.”

“Ah, I know what you mean. She’s an odd duck,” Hazel said. “Wears a collar and sleeps on the floor. It can be hard to get past that sort of thing.”

“We probably just need to spend more time with her,” Amaranth said.

“Well, you’re welcome to come over any time,” Hazel said. “She seems like she could use a few more friendly faces around… she jumps at everything. Even her own shadow’s afraid of its own shadow. Anyway, we’ve a bit more room for entertaining than you do, I expect.”

“Yeah, I’m already planning on coming over this weekend,” Ian said. “If not sooner… but I’ve got my first battle of the year on Saturday, with all my own soldiers for the first time.”

“Oh, right,” Hazel said. “Shiel said you’d started carving.”

“Well… most of them I bought or traded for,” Ian said. “I did carve some of them myself. Granted, they’re all earth elementals and stone giants, but still, it’s a start.”

Even though Ian had worked his way through his gladiatorial aspirations, he hadn’t given up the idea of play-fighting… he’d just taken it to what was either a larger or smaller scale, depending on how you looked at it. Even if it was just because big hulking creatures that happened to be made out of rock were easier to make than little finely detailed humanoid soldiers, I thought it was kind of fitting that his army was skewing towards the plane of earth. Despite his pyromantic father’s hopes for him, Ian had a lot of earth influence in him.

While I couldn’t bring myself to be excited over massive war games involving tiny playing pieces, I was glad that a topic of conversation had presented itself. I knew that serious issues like slavery or the lurking menace that people like Mercy posed to me personally weren’t about to go away just because I didn’t acknowledge them, but they also weren’t going to be solved by stewing over them.

I’d just made it through the first day of my second year. It was a small accomplishment, but big accomplishments… like finishing a year of school, or graduating… were made of little ones. If I’d learned anything in my first year, it was that getting small things done was better than waiting for big ones to happen. It was how they happened.

And so… surrounded by friends, enjoying better food than we’d come to expect, I looked back on the close of my first day, and forward to the next one.

Friday: Another familiar professorial face or two, and more refugees from the other side of the story.

Despite my whole worldly and wise “I never left” thing, I did feel pretty accomplished at having made it through the first day of classes without anything dire or completely embarrassing happening. I guess it was probably a sign of how far I had come in a year that I didn’t consider my performance in class to be a failure.

Yeah, I’d lost my first fight but so had half of the class. I’d stumbled, but I’d also impressed Coach Callahan… and I’d done that by doing what I needed to do. That felt like an achievement. I was in a bit of a celebratory mood when I headed for dinner at the Archimedes Center.

I’ve never been a huge fan of architecture in general. That’s not to say that I turned my nose up at it or anything… it wasn’t like I went around going, ugh, another building or anything. I just didn’t really notice it all that much. The buildings on campus mostly ranged from what I thought of as big, blocky institutional-style… like Harlowe Hall… to a slightly more modern and sleek institutional-style, like the student union and Weyland Hall, where Ian had lived the year before.

The Archimedes Center was noticeably different. It was more like something you’d find in a zoo or museum that just got a bunch of money for building modern, exciting exhibits than anything that screamed “I belong on a school campus.” It was a circular building with a dome on top. The whole thing had been devised as a marriage of elven and dwarven building methods and sensibilities.

The walls were made out of stone and the dome was made out of wood… of great big twisting tree limbs as thick as trunks that had been grown in place. The “timbers” that supported the dome on the inside were made of stone carved by dwarven crafters, and the stone blocks that made up the wall were held in place not with mortar but with a kind of vine that the elves used for joining things… when put under pressure it released a sticky sap which then hardened even as the vine remained alive and continued to produce tiny white blossoms and leaves.

The whole metaphorical image was of elves and dwarves putting aside their differences and coming together, but the truth was that for all their differences, the animosity between elves and dwarves was a little overblown in the minds of humans. That’s not to say that they were naturally the best of friends or anything, but it wasn’t like they were competing for the same land or resources. There was a rivalry there, and a lot of ancient insults, and even in modern times there was friction caused by differing values, but mostly elves and dwarves didn’t exist in the same space.

The Arch addressed that by functioning as a sort of embassy in “human territory”. Elves and dwarves both maintained their own lodgings near campus, but they very much stood as worlds apart. I’d actually managed to see the more public parts of the dwarven one, and even that had involved a private invitation and a blindfolded trip through secret passages beneath the school.

As we had observed at breakfast, there were some interesting things going on with the Arch’s message… it was, in theory, a monument to harmony among all the races on campus but the two races it reached out to explicitly were two that were already pretty accepted as part of Imperial society.

There could be many different reasons for that, but one of them was that the person who gave most of the money to build it had been an elf who wanted to see elven students more connected with campus life. Making the center about the dwarves in equal measure had, from his point of view, been an expansive gesture of tolerance. The university had shaped his vision to at least tacitly encompass all races… was it that their dedication to equality causing them to leverage the boon they were being given to do the most good, or was it them lazily using something that was happening already in order to exert the minimal effort and say they’d done something?

There was no way to know what their intentions were, or what the results would be in the long term.

Even though I shouldn’t have had far to go at all, the others were all at the Arch ahead of me… I kind of took the long way around to it, since I had forgotten that we had agreed to eat there until I was coming up to the entrance to the student union.

Again, it was kind of astounding for me to realize how little I cared about that. Taking a wrong turn or overlooking something had always made me feel like a big awkward failure in the past, and considering how absent-minded I can be that meant I had pretty much always felt like a big awkward failure. Now it happened and I just sort of enjoyed the stroll about campus.

The fact that no one else seemed to mind or consider me to be late helped, too. Everybody was kind of spread out around the floor, checking things out. Two and her friend Hazel were over by the dining area, looking at the origins of certain typical elven and dwarven dishes. Ian was sitting on a couch, fiddling with his lute… not playing it, but doing some sort of maintenance with the strings.

Tightening them? Tuning them? I couldn’t say. He was all bent over it, looking very serious and attentive about it, whatever it was.

The Center had a very open-air floorplan, with low walls dividing it into different sections but not obstructing the line of sight. It was something like a museum combined with an elaborate lounge… it was meant to be educational, but its designers had been wise enough to realize that students would learn more from it if there were plenty of reasons to spend time there. One day into the new semester, more students seemed to be passing through to see what it was all about than actually looking at any of the exhibits. If that was all there was to it, most of them would never come back.

So there was food, in the form of the second sit-down dining hall on campus, and Melina’s… an elven bakery chain that also served coffee. There was music from crystals suspended in the ceiling, there were places to sit and talk or sit and think, and there was a raised area in the center of the floor where people could give performances or cultural demonstrations.

Amaranth was among those who were actually interested in the displays, in particular a botanical arrangement of small flowering trees, and some kinds of fungus and moss growing on rocks shaded by the trees.

“Hi, baby,” she said. “You have a good first day?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I really think I’m going to like both of my classes… both of my classroom classes, I mean. I think I had a good start in my melee class, too.”

“That’s good. Just don’t go thinking it isn’t a ‘real’ class,” Amaranth said.

“I’m taking it seriously,” I said. “I’m just… if I think of it in terms of whether or not I like it… well, I don’t like it, so I’d rather not think in those terms. I’m in it. I’m committed to it. And, like I said, I think I had a good start.”

“How did it go?” she asked.

Trying to describe it did diminish my enthusiasm a little. It was awkward, as Amaranth liked violence even less than I did. She’d managed to get an exemption from both the weapon-carrying requirement and the class requirement on moral grounds, and that wasn’t easy. Her status as a nymph probably helped her there… Mother Khaele was one of the more active deities in the mortal sphere, and she considered nymphs and their male counterparts to be under her protection. Being the goddess of nature meant there was no shortage of reasons to avoid pissing her off.

“It sounds like she just wasn’t ready,” Amaranth said, after hearing of ponytailed Meaghan’s plight.

I was surprised to find that my first inclination was to respond that she had no one to blame but herself. I stopped myself from saying that… I couldn’t imagine feeling good at all about scorning someone’s lack of preparation for fighting. In the pause I realized that Amaranth wasn’t talking about fault, she was just empathizing with the girl’s position… and that was something that I could do, too.

“So, how was your day?” I asked.

“Good,” she said, but the way she frowned when she said it wasn’t exactly subtle. “Good, but busy… I may have taken on too much. This early in the semester it’s hard to say, but some of my classes seem like they’ll be pretty demanding.”

“Well, you still have time to change your schedule, if you decide it’s best to postpone one of your classes for a semester,” I said. It would have been shorter to say “you still have time to drop a class”, but that seemed like the sort of thing that would make her dig in her heels. Maybe she wouldn’t need to drop a class, but it would be better if she looked at it with clear eyes.

I’d learned a lot about how to deal with someone who had that kind of short-sighted stubbornness… mostly over the summer, when I’d been by myself.

“You shouldn’t try to compete with your toy, Amy,” Steff said, appearing right next to us. “That’s not a good look on anyone.”

“I’m not competing,” Amaranth said. “I just saw a bunch of classes that I was interested in, and they all fit into my schedule. Anyway, I think I’ll be able to manage. It’s really only one more full-sized class than I took the past two semesters and then one hour a week of Dwarvish poetry.”

“Oh, yes,” Steff said. “Roses are red, violets are none of your business… back the fuck off or I’ll break all your fingers.”

“Dwarves don’t write many poems about flowers,” Amaranth said. “It’s really more about practical things and the joy of craftsmanship. That’s not to say that there’s no feeling in it… dwarves can be very sentimental. Like ‘The Song of the Smith’… the poet regretted that he would not be able to teach his daughters metalworking himself, so he crafted a poem that conveys both his instructions for them and the feeling and sensation of working metal as he experiences it, so that they can share in it.”

“I bet their love poems are hilarious,” Steff said. “How do I love thee? Let me count the paces.”

“It’s not like elven culture’s much less gender-segregrated,” I said.

“No, but elves have the good sense to have sex with each other when they’re shunning the opposite sex instead of periodically getting together for a baby-making brawl,” Steff said. “And anyway, that’s mostly a middling thing… young elven boys have this whole extreme machismo/girls-have-cooties things going on that a lot of them grow out of by the time they start century number two.”

“It’s not that I have any special affection for Dwarvish poetry,” Amaranth admitted. “I mean, I’m curious about it, but I really wanted to take the Elvish poetry survey. But… well…”

“Surely you do not doubt the ability of our resident Elvish poetry expert to remain impartial in her grading?” Dee asked, drawn over to our conversation.

“I couldn’t say that she would treat me unfairly,” Amaranth said. “But it seems like taking one of Professor Ariadne’s classes might seem a little… unnecessarily antagonistic?”

“So you count on her to treat you fairly just as long as you’re nice enough to never put her in a position where she has to,” Steff said.

“Well, it’s not like any of us has had any trouble with her for almost a year,” Amaranth said. “Even if she still harbors some resentment towards Mack, that doesn’t mean she’s kept up on campus gossip or would otherwise know that we’re together.”

“Amy, doll, I know you think you’re defending her, but ‘maybe she wouldn’t think to penalize me for dating her nemesis because she doesn’t know we’re dating’ isn’t a defense,” Steff said.

“I suppose not,” Amaranth said. “Anyway, I think we can all agree that it’s better to avoid trouble than provoke it.”

“Yeah, as long as you have the luxury of taking another one hour fluff course,” Steff said. “What if completing your major depended on a class that was only being taught by a raging bigot?”

“That would be something I couldn’t avoid, and I’d deal with it,” Amaranth said. “But for a one hour class that’s completely elective, it didn’t seem worth it.”

“To take another passageway,” Dee said, “if one wished to learn the extent of the professor’s bias or hostility, adding a one hour class to one’s schedule might be a good way to gauge that. It could be taken and dropped… or even completed at a disadvantage… with minimal impact on one’s academic career.”

“I suppose,” Amaranth said. “But I don’t really… what would that prove?”

“A point,” Dee said. “I believe I may add that to my schedule for next semester.”

“You’d really take a class with her just to prove a point?” I asked.

“Not solely,” Dee said. “I initially signed up for her class last year out of a desire to learn more about the surface elves from their own perspective. I would be… charitably hesitant… to conclude that I learned a larger lesson in that area. If Professor Ariadne should prove to be better than I suspect her of being, I will still achieve one goal.”

Two and her friend Hazel ambled over to joins us. Hazel had a box of some kind of little pastry bites in one hand and a cardboard coffee cup in the other. This was the first I’d seen of Hazel since the past spring. However frosty a reception she might have received back in her hometown, it looked like the summer had agreed with her. Her brown hair that had been a mess of curls before was shorter, as curly as ever, but more sort of styled up. She’d traded her floor-length farm dress for something a bit… wenchier, for lack of a better word.

She had a white peasant top that was tight enough and cut low enough to reveal that she actually did have curves… maybe one more curve than would have been fashionable for a human woman, but I believed gnomes appreciated a bit of belly.

Her long-pleated skirt did stop just above her ankles, to my surprise, and they showed off an odd sort of adornment: she had a red string with a single clay bead on it, wrapped around her left ankle, and a silver chain with bells on her right one. The furry hair on her feet wasn’t gone completely, but it had been very neatly trimmed and shaved into heart shapes.

“Hi, Mack,” Two said.

“Hey, Two,” I said. “Hazel.”

“Hello,” Hazel said. She held up the box, offering it around. “Anyone want a lembit? They’re pretty good.”

“No, thank you,” Dee said. “Wheat products disagree with me.”

“I kind of avoid baked goods unless I know they’re vegan,” Amaranth said.

“Not likely,” Steff said. “It probably has about a pound of butter in each one.”

“Nothing has to die to make butter, last I checked,” Hazel said. “Granted I haven’t kept up on the latest trends in extreme milking.”

“It’s still an animal product,” Amaranth said.

It was hard to say because I hadn’t exactly made a habit of peeking at Hazel in the shower, but it seemed like she’d filled out a little bit, and I didn’t just mean in the belly. She’d always had a womanly figure, underneath those dresses, but she looked a bit more… more. Though it might have just been that she had a more flattering support system in place.

“Oh, you, go ahead and stare… I’m secure enough in my what’s it called,” Hazel said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just… you look nice, Hazel.”

“Darn right I do,” Hazel said. “So, we doing this dinner thing? Not to be all impatient, but I’ve already been here more than an hour.”

“She’s been eating the whole time,” Two said.

“Snacking isn’t eating,” Hazel said. “It’s a stopgap measure at best, and there’s a danger in that if it goes on too long you won’t be hungry at all, and where’s that leave you?”

“Satisfied?” Dee suggested.

“Full isn’t satisfied,” Hazel said. “Full just means your hunger has been accommodated.”

“Baby, go tell Ian we’re ready… oh, never mind!” Amaranth said, as Ian, having finished whatever he’d been doing, had put his lute in its case and was heading over towards us.

“Hey,” he said, giving me a kiss on the cheek. “We all here now?” He looked around. “Two, wasn’t your friend Hazel here?”

“Was and am,” Hazel said.

“Alright,” he said. “Let’s go see what tolerance tastes like.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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