“Viktor gets along well with humans,” Amaranth assured him on our way over. “And he’ll think well of the fact that you’re coming out to make a stand for Steff’s well-being.”

“Assuming he even lets us talk,” I added.

“Wait, why are we even going if we’re not going to get to say anything?” Ian asked.

“Well, I suggest you be open and direct with him, Ian,” Amaranth said. She looked at me. “And you control yourself until we’ve established why we’re there and he says you can talk to Dee. If she’s way involved, obviously we’re going to stay out of the way, and if I tell you to step outside, you get to stepping. A half-ogre smacking around a half-demon isn’t going to be conducive to Steff’s recovery.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“If he’s really concerned about Steff’s health, you’d think he wouldn’t make things hard for someone coming to help her,” Ian said.

“Well, I don’t expect him to be following strict protocol,” Amaranth said. “But since he considers it his due, at least from my Mack, it seems the respectful thing to do is to show him proper deference and let him establish that it’s not necessary.”

“What do you mean, at least from her?” Ian asked.

“It seems Viktor gets a little homesick if there isn’t anybody he can treat like yesterday’s toilet paper,” I said. “And since I’m responsible for the sins of the world anyway…”

I shrugged.

“Okay… so, masochist and all… but why the hell do you put up with that?” Ian asked.

“I don’t, mostly,” I said. “I avoid him. But when I can’t… well, it’s for Steff.”

“Is she really worth that?”

“Am I?” I asked.

“I’ll let you know when I’ve figured it out,” he said.

We bumped into Finbar, the canid resident alchemist and potion dealer of Harlowe, at the door to the fourth floor. Since he was a junior, I took a guess what he’d been doing there.

“Were you helping Steff?” I asked.

“Hey, it’s cool,” he said, throwing up his short-furred hands. “Viktor came and got me. I know better than to sell to her.”

“I didn’t mean… how is she?” I asked.

“Sleeping, I guess,” Finbar said. His eyes were kind of wide. “Also… well, I guess you’ll see.”

“They didn’t need healing potions, did they?” Amaranth asked. “Dee promised me she’d stay…”

“The cave elf? Yeah, she’s there,” Fin said. “They just wanted some foxglove extract and some other stuff I barely even use. I told the big guy he could have it for free, goodwill gesture, since I’m on his shit list anyway… though that’s really not my fault. Anyway, I’m getting out of here for a bit… I don’t want to be around if… well…”

“If what?” I asked, but he took off downstairs and didn’t stop, going down past his floor.

“What do you think?” Ian said quietly.

Feeling a little extra somber, we headed onto the floor. The door to Viktor’s room opened silently as we approached. Amaranth stepped through first into the dim room, and we followed. Only two illusionary candles were lit. Viktor knelt by the bed, where Steff was asleep, though trembling and sweating and… well… a little bit bulgy in places. Three of them, to be specific.

Dee, who must have heard us coming and let us in to avoid any loud knocking, was standing in front of the mirror.

“Shh,” Viktor said, barely sparing us a glance, though his eye caught on me and he whispered to Amaranth, “Remove that one from the floor if you cannot keep her quiet.”

“She’ll behave,” Amaranth said. “What’s happening?”

“After you left, I had a separate conversation with the elf,” Viktor said quietly. “We both came to a mutual agreement that it would be best for her to consult with experts before things took a turn for the worse. She contacted her people at Ceilos, confessed what she had done. They were furious, at her and at the one who gave the potion to her, but once they understood that the recipient was half-human, the recriminations were put on hold. They’ve been suggesting treatments.”

“Wait, you mean Dee agreed…” Amaranth said, surprised.

“Shh,” Viktor said again. He stroked the skin of Steff’s arm with the tips of two of his large, surprisingly long fingers. “We had a good talk after you left. It was… productive.”

Dee stood in front of the mirror, her own hood thrown back. She looked anxious, even physically pained. She was sweating and… well… sort of pale, probably with worry.

Inside the mirror were a pair of hooded figures… Dee’s people, I guessed… and a third one, a green-scaled gorgon with a bandage over her eyes. They weren’t facing the mirror, but were conferring among each other. There was a small flickering light behind them.

“Is something wrong with the mirror?” Amaranth asked.

“What do you mean?” I replied.

“It’s dark,” she said.

“No, there’s a candle or something behind the middle one, the main elf,” I said. “Magic mirrors don’t work in total darkness… even for races that can see without light, there has to be something to reflect.”

“I guess I can kind of see a shape in the middle,” Amaranth said.

The conference ended and the elves turned back to face towards us, though the gorgon remained as she was. The elf in the center of the image came forward.

“We feel that administering anything stronger than a sleep potion… a potion of slowing… would interfere with the transformation potion in ways we could not predict. If it were just a matter of muting the effect of it, we would not hesitate to recommend it, but we can’t be certain,” she said. “So, simply try to keep the half-elf calm. Also, while we’re unfamiliar with the heart remedy your apothecary supplied, the consensus is that it should not matter. Something to moderate the heartbeat is indicated. The surface equivalent should be fine. It might even be better, for a surface dweller. But it would be a good idea to also have something else to restart a heart, should it come to that.”

“I can heal a damaged heart,” Dee said.

“A ruptured heart can be restored to full health but still lie dead in the chest,” the gorgon said. “At least, it has proven to be so in our case. I’m told a mammal’s heart is a little more complicated, but I do not think that an extra chamber or two would make the difference there.”

“You must understand, Delia Daella, that we are as much in the cold here as you are,” the other elf said. “Our halfkind are examined thoroughly before undergoing the change, and even the sickliest elf will not have one sixty-fourth of the hidden lurking defects in the most robust of the fading kind. No offense,” she added to the gorgon.

“Is she talking to me?” the gorgon asked.

“Yes,” the lead elf said. “Please take that ridiculous thing off… your reflection is at least three hundred and twenty miles away.”

“And even if you did stone yourself, it isn’t as though we wouldn’t be able to put you right again immediately,” the other elf said.

“I don’t care,” the gorgon said. “Mirrors are terrible luck. Terrible. I know I’ll give myself a heart attack if I look at it, even if I do keep my membranes down.”

“I thank you for your advice, Alimnae,” Dee said, dipping her head to the middle figure, “which I consider to be quite invaluable, even if it is speculation.”

“You are most welcome, daughter of d’Wyr,” Alimnae said, bowing so low she went out of frame, though she sounded less than deferential when she came back up. “As the immediate crisis has been contained, I will point out that we would not have to speculate if you had not given our potion to a strange race.”

“When I made my oath of investiture, it was impressed upon me that in times of peace, my obligation to heal applied to anyone outside of my house equally, even faint kind or dweorg,” Dee said.

“This is true,” Alimnae said. “And this is why we are helping now. But no such intervention was required before you administered the potion to a person of untried mortal stock. You by your actions have created this situation, Delia Daella.”

“Perhaps my view of the initial situation from here is more clear than yours from Ceilos,” Dee said. “I saw a soul in pain and I acted in order to save a life.”

“Whatever distress this half-breed halfkind felt at being incomplete, I am certain it would have borne a more considered approach,” Alimnae said. “The Imperium will not make war on distant Durakesh over the death of a single citizen, and neither will the faint ones’ censure touch it. It would be our community here at Ceilos that suffered the brunt of the fall-in from such a thing… and that could very well spell the end of our beautiful mixed community of underdwellers living in the very ceiling of the world, our grand experiment in peace and diplomacy.”

“I am sorry, Alimnae, I truly am,” Dee said, with more emphasis and emotion than I’d ever heard her put in one of her apologies. It made me wonder how much she actually meant them. I’d always assumed she was just very controlled and reserved… which she obviously was… but if this was what an actual apology sounded like from her, then I doubted I’d ever heard one before. “I did not intend to administer the potion so hastily. I had been praying and meditating and thinking on the subject…”

“You might have thought to involve someone with a little more useful perspective in your meditations,” Alimnae said. “We have no authority to punish you, Delia Daella d’Wyr, nor would punishment beyond what the circumstances inflict be appropriate in this case. But as you are a daughter of your line and may be considered for a throne, I feel that it is imperative that your house be made aware of your conduct.”

“I… I understand,” Dee said, bowing her head. “Please, do nothing except what you think is fitting.”

“And don’t think she means we’ll be telling your mother,” the other elf said. “Your matriarch will hear of this directly.”

“You have as much of a treatment plan as we’ve been able to come up with, so I am going to leave Ehtra here with the reflection open,” Alimnae said. “In case there is any change. In the meantime… I have a harem full of halvsies who have much to answer for.”

“It was no one’s fault but my own!” Dee insisted.

“Shh!” Viktor said.

“That is very true,” Alimnae said. “I hope you will meditate on that fact in the coming weeks, as you continue to receive regular dispatches from your friends here in Ceilos. I have no authority to punish you, Delia Daella d’Wyr, but what authority I have I wield well.”

Alimnae turned and headed out of frame, taking the gorgon by the arm and leading her away as well. Dee turned around to face us. It was kind of shocking how sickly she looked.

“Well… we have worked out some preventative measures for Steff’s heart, as all are agreed that this is the weak spot,” she said, forcing a smile that looked almost painful. “The exact level of results we can expect are still unknown, but in terms of a negative outcome that seems to be the only real concern.”

“Well, that’s good,” Amaranth said. “If it comes to that… well, I read an interesting science paper about the idea that the heart can be massaged, just like any other muscle, though it’s not really a well-developed technique and there’s the problem of how to apply pressure to it behind the ribcage and skin and stuff, but with your mind… well…”

“It is something to keep in mind, but I fear that would be a desperate gambit for a desperate strait. Excuse me,” Dee said. She turned to the desk with Steff’s bones and her pilfered hand on it. With her left hand, she picked up a bowl of water with a sponge in it, then set it down and picked up just the sponge. She concentrated and the bowl started to lift into the air, but after it wobbled a bit she put it down. “I would be more useful if both of my arms were usable,” she said to Viktor.

“If you heal it before I tell you that you can heal it, I’m keeping it,” he said.

Ian looked at me. I just kind of shrugged. He started moving very quietly towards the door. I caught Amaranth’s eye and then did the same.

“Well, it seems like you have everything under control,” Amaranth said.

“Yes,” Viktor said.

“So we’re just going to go,” she said, following after Ian and me.

“Wait,” Viktor said, and the three of us froze.

“Yes?” Amaranth asked.

“Thank you for your concern,” he said. “We will talk later.”

Discuss this story.

Thursday, Astera 25th, 221

So, I get my essay back with a B. Big note on the front, too. Says, “Your premise is interesting but I wonder how firmly you actually believe it.” Fuck it, anyway.

I worked my ass off on that thing. I figure, either it’s good or it’s not. What the hell is Professor Nimitz doing, judging the sincerity of it? He just doesn’t like what I have to say.

I don’t care, though. Dead is fucking dead, right? A corpse is just raw materials. How’s it any different from the clay or whatever a golem maker uses? I mean, even without necromancy you can animate flesh or bones the same way you animate a carriage or a factory line or a dancing sword or whatever. They’re just objects. Necromancy makes them more useful, but once you realize that they’re objects it doesn’t matter how you use them.

When I die, I hope somebody uses my body somehow. I don’t care how. They can zombify me or eat me or turn me into a cute pair of boots, for all I care. For all I will care. I won’t be around any more to complain.

I wouldn’t mind being boots. Fashion immortality. That’s something, right?

I’m not suicidal, though. I don’t want to die. I hate the thought that I’ll have to. My fucking dad might live until the Last Battle, if he never gets bored enough to go on ahead, or careless. I’d love to outlive him on principle, but I’m not stupid enough to think that’s really going to happen.

I don’t care, though.

I don’t.

Lisa’s waiting for me when I get to the fountain.

Smoking, of course.

She offers me a cigarette. I give her a dirty look.

“My one vice,” she says. “And the only one you don’t have. How come you won’t smoke?”

“I told you,” I say.

“You told me you caught a cold,” she says. “So? Everybody gets sick.”

“Mortals get sick,” I tell her.

She laughs. Her laugh’s so annoying. Her voice is pretty good, but I can’t help hearing what she doesn’t want me to, especially when she laughs.

I want to strangle her, a bit. More when she laughs like that.

I wonder if she knows that. I wonder if she suspects how often I think about it.

“What’s so funny?” I ask instead.

“You are mortal,” she says.

“Only on my mom’s side,” I say. “I don’t want to spend my whole day coughing and hacking, okay? It happened once. If I don’t do anything stupid, I can hopefully go my whole life without it happening again.”

Lisa’s got that stupid bit in the front of her throat that human men have. She wears these ugly yellow or red scarves to hide it. When I imagine myself choking her, she doesn’t have it. Her throat is smooth and perfect.

I’m not serious about that, by the way. I mean, I think about it, but it’s just a daydream, a stupid fantasy. It’s something to jerk off to, something to sketch in my notebook. Not something I’d actually do.

Oh, don’t even pretend you don’t have fantasies that you’d never act on. Everybody does. I think the people who can’t own up to it are the ones who actually go off and kill somebody.

I’d totally fuck Lisa, though, if she’d let me, but as she says, her legs are “closed for renovations.” She won’t let anybody near her ass because she’s a good little Anankhan Khersian, or as good as she can be under the circumstances.

“I’ve been thinking about my name,” she says.

“Oh?” I say.

She does this like, every other day. I take out my notebook and flip open to the last page I was working on. I’ve got a sketch of her half-started. There’s a snake on a tree branch, with its tail hanging down and coiled around her neck like a noose.

I think it’s actually the scarves that do it for me. She looks like she’s half-choked all the time to begin with. She’d probably pass better without them. They draw attention to what she wants to hide. Humans have such dull eyesight and who looks at a throat, anyway?

“I don’t know,” she says. “I liked ‘Lisa’ when I picked it, but it seems kind of boring. I mean, there’s a lot of Lisas on campus, you know?”

“I guess,” I say. I add some half-assed shading to the drawing. I draw like my half-ogre roommate plays the harpsichord. Doesn’t matter. Since I can’t ever show anybody what I draw, it doesn’t really matter how shitty it is.

“So, have you given any thought to your ‘after’ name?”

“Well, I don’t see what’s wrong with Steff,” I say.

“Don’t you want to make a clean break, though?” Lisa asks.

I close my notebook. She’s giving me a look that makes me want to smack her a little. Kind of half-pleading. Like she wants me to give her permission to change her name. Like I’m supposed to be her partner in this.

Or co-conspirator, or something.

I take a deep breath and let it out through my nostrils. This is why I stopped hanging out on the TS tapestries. That and the drama.

“When I’m done with school, I’m gonna tell my dad to take a flying fuck at the dome of the world and move a million miles away,” I say. “That’s all the break I want or need.”

“You know why I hate you?” she says.

She does this all the time. She doesn’t actually have the brains to hate anybody, but she thinks it’s cute to say this instead of “You know what bugs me about you?”

I hate lots of people, and there isn’t anything cute about it.

“What?” I ask.

“You don’t care about any of this,” she says. “It takes me ninety minutes to get ready for my day and I’ve still got about a fifty-fifty chance of passing as a woman to people who don’t already know, but you can just pull on a skirt and you’re good to go. Even when you’re wearing jeans like today, you get taken as a woman more often than me.”

“If you really want to be taken as a woman, you just have to say the word,” I say. I smirk at her. She hits me with her bag.

She isn’t even really that cute. Lines like that do something to me, though. It’s like the gods hand me a set-up line, and I’ve got to use it.

I wonder if it would be a violation of her religious world view for me to fuck her between the breasts. Hers are real. She’s been taking potions of feminization for years. Since she was fourteen. Really understanding mom.

And the money to buy that kind of stuff.

“What?” she asks.

“Nothing,” I say.

“You’ve got that look on your face,” she says.

“What look?” I ask. I try to give her an innocent smile.

“The look that you’ve got something awful that you’re just bursting to say,” she says. “So say it.”

“I want to fuck your tits,” I say.

She punches me in the stomach. Hard. Femmed out or not, she’s still a full human and she’s still stronger than me.

“You asked!” I say, laughing. She’s so easy to provoke. Sometimes I wonder if I could get her to choke me, a little. It would be almost as good as the other way, and probably safer, since she wouldn’t really do it for real.

“I’ve got to scoot,” she says, flicking her cigarette into the fountain.

“You haven’t said no,” I remind her.

“To what?”

“The tit thing,” I say.

“No, Steff,” she says, getting up and smoothing her skirt. “N-O. No.”

“Your mom spent all that gold on potions and you won’t even use them,” I say. “How do you think she feels about that?”

“Bringing my mom into it’s not going to help,” she says.

“There’s poor, flat-chested children in the Argentus who’d kill for what you have.”

“Goodbye, Steff.”

I watch her walk away. My cock stirs for some reason. I’m going to have to stop tucking it down if it’s going to keep doing that.

She’s not that cute. She’s a year older than me and she’s fat. She outweighs me by like three times. She’s a fat, self-righteous know-it-all tranny and I wish to no one in particular that she’d let me in her pants.

I’m jealous of her breasts. That’s what it is. Simple jealousy.

I head back to Harlowe with my backpack in front of me. It’s annoying having a fucking hard-on, especially since I spent more money than I have trying to stop it.

I stop on the second floor. Moahr’s room. Door’s open. Some kid I don’t know is there. Looks like a dog. I mean, really. Fur and all.

Kind of hot. The fur/dog thing is, I mean. The guy as a whole’s kind of blah.

I knock on the door frame.

“Oh, hey,” Moahr says. He hands a stone jar to dogboy. About a third of Moahr’s alchemy shit is stone or metal stuff I guess he brought from Koboldland. “I’ll be with you in a second.” To dogboy, he says, “Now, when you do this for class, you want to use spider webs, but when you do it for your personal collection, use silkworm shit, if you can get it.”

“Got it,” dogboy says.

“Now go put that over on the windowsill,” Moahr says. “Uncovered. My assistant, Finbar,” he says to me. “How’d that dick numbing stuff work for you?”

The guy called Finbar chokes and almost spills the jar of whatever.

“Fine,” I say. “It wore off too quick, though.”

Moahr shrugs.

“That’s the way it goes,” he says.

“It didn’t even last an hour,” I say. “For what you charged me…”

“I charge what I have to,” he says. “First axiom of potionmaking: rarity of materials and difficulty are proportional to applicability of the finished product. That’s before you factor in supply and demand.”

“There’s a lot of demand and applicability for oil of impotence?” I ask.

“It doesn’t just work on dicks,” he says. “Numbness is useful for all kinds of shit, both offensive and healing, and anything with healing uses just about counts double. I could give you something that kills your sex drive…”

“No,” I say. “How about something that makes me not care so much?”

“About your dick?”

“About anything,” I say.

“Apathy?”

“Not apathy,” I say. “Just something so I’m not, you know, bothered.”

“How about happy?” he asks. “I can do happy.”

“About everything?”

“Easy,” he says. “Easier to make you happy about everything than some things.”

“How much will that cost?” I ask.

He shrugs, and looks at Finbar, who nods.

“We’ll have to work it out,” Moahr says. “It won’t be too much, though.”

“Why not?”

“Because happiness isn’t that useful, in the big scheme,” he says.

“Okay,” I say. “How long?”

“Come back tomorrow,” he says. “I’ll have something then, or I’ll know how long it’ll take.”

“Okay,” I say.

I’m halfway to the stairwell when I hear Finbar saying, “Dick-numbing oil?”

“He’s okay, for a faggot,” Moahr says. “Little creepy. The good thing about dealing to fags is they’ll give you head, if you’re hard up.”

Yeah, fat chance of that. Like I’d go near that ugly little goblin thing’s thing, or his dog-faced sidekick.

I don’t care. I really don’t.

I’ll care even less, if Moahr comes through.

Meanwhile, I know where to get a cheap substitute.

Viktor’s staring at his stupid keyboard like he doesn’t know what it’s for when I come in.

“Knock,” he says. He sounds pissed, but he’s not even playing anything, so I don’t know why he’s all bent out of shape.

“Sorry,” I say. I head for his bed and reach underneath it. “I need to borrow a beer.”

“This early in the morning?”

I stop and turn around to look at him, to see if he’s joking.

“What is funny?” he asks.

“It’s like, one in the afternoon,” I say.

He looks at me like he thinks I’m joking, or something, then puts his hand up on his forehead like he’s slapping himself in slow motion.

“You forgot to go to class again,” I say. We’re only on the second week of school and this is like the third time he’s just completely zoned out at his keyboard.

He throws his head back and roars. He’s shirtless. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him with a shirt on except when he’s going to class. Somebody next door drops something.

My cock’s doing the shifty thing again. I probably shouldn’t stare at my half-ogre roommate. It’s a miracle he hasn’t killed me already. Just about any roommate would have had disaster potential for a “faggot” like me, but a big manly half-ogre was about the top of the chart. Even one who thought he was a musician.

They eat their dead. Ogres, I mean. Assuming that’s not humanocentric propaganda. Their own dead. Their enemies. Their slaves. Can’t let any meat go to waste.

Meat.

Raw materials.

Objects.

Maybe he’ll even make my skin into boots.

There’s no pretending my cock isn’t hard. It slips completely free of its makeshift prison as I watch Viktor.

He smashes his chair and knocks all the shit off his desk, then brings his forearm down on top of it and splinters it. He raises a fist over his magic keyboard and stops inches above it. He turns around, his red eyes flashing. His lips are curled in a snarl, and it makes his tusky pointy teeth more prominent.

His chest is heaving.

Mine, too.

His cock is rock-hard and sticking out as well as it can beneath his pants.

Mine, too.

Don’t notice. Don’t notice. Don’t notice.

He notices. His eyes lock right on to it. I wait for him to say something. He doesn’t, though. I realize that it’s coming. He’s going to kill me. He’s totally going to kill me and eat me and that’s going to be it.

“Get a beer,” he says. He sounds a little hoarse. “Get me one, too.”

So maybe I’m not dead yet.

Puddy wheeled around mid-stride, bringing her axe up and catching me in the forehead with the flat of the head. She didn’t have the space for a good swing, so it was more my momentum than hers, but it was enough to send me reeling with pretty colored lights exploding inside my eyes.

Shaking my head as though to clear my vision, I snarled and flexed my… well, my whole body sort of contracted in one powerful spasm. When my arms came up into my field of vision, I became aware that they were on fire.

I wasn’t terribly surprised.

I reached out one burning hand towards Puddy. She swiped with her axe and I took half a step back.

Two yelled something. Puddy twitched as if she wanted to turn around to face her, but she kept her eyes on me. I took a step to the side, trying to circle around. Puddy said something, but her words made no sense to me.

They were just a low, dull rumble. Sounds without sense.

They infuriated me, all the same.

She jabbed forward with the axe. It wasn’t a real attack, just a prod. I wanted to get that axe away from her. It was the only thing keeping me off her. I reached for it, and she swung at my hand.

I pulled back.

The axe could hurt me. It could kill me. Puddy knew it. She wasn’t letting me get close. If I got close, I could end it.

Fast.

Forever.

If Puddy would let me past the axe. That didn’t seem likely, though. She was watching me too closely.

She should have been watching Two.

The cute little mace came down on the back of Puddy’s head, with whatever strength Two could muster with both of her arms. More potent was the electrical jolt which lifted Puddy off of her feet and sent the axe flying from her hand.

She fell forward, landing heavily on the floor… unconscious, or at least stunned.

I wasn’t seeing her lying on the ground, though. I was seeing her standing over my bed, “jokingly” smothering me. I saw her leering at me, beckoning to me. I saw her hands on me… those same hands reaching for Two. I saw her leading me to the basement for the first time.

I fell on her, teeth bared.

“Baby, no!” Amaranth cried from behind me, her words cutting through the fog in my head. A heavy form crashed into me and long arms circled around me, knocking me down onto Puddy’s downed form and then wrenching me away to the side.

We rolled and wrestled around a bit. I howled in rage and frustration, and my flame increased threefold. A cry of pain and anguish from the soft form which had ended up beneath me which was choked off as my fire-wreathed hands found a throat and closed in around it, squeezing the life out of the stupid thing that had come between me and my target.

Suddenly half convinced that it was Puddy beneath me, I squeezed harder.

There was screaming all around me. Something jabbed me in the side, and pain shot through me with an explosive snap. All my joints seemed to pop at once, and my jaw locked tight.

The world went away for a bit, and I was laying on my back on the floor twitching and covered in water. There was a smell in the air… something cooking. Something burning.

“What…?” I murmured. My arms and legs were numb. Somebody was screaming their head off. I couldn’t sit up. I managed to turn my neck a little.

“Oh, fuck, Mack, don’t look,” Steff said, grabbing my head and turning it back towards the ceiling. “Don’t look. Two, get Dee. Don’t tell Kiersta. Mariel, shut up or I will shut you up.”

I could see Mariel helping Puddy unsteadily to her feet.

“If she dies, I swear to fuck I’ll kill you,” Steff said. “I don’t care if she comes back. You don’t get away with that.”

“I didn’t start this,” Puddy said. “And I didn’t even touch her.”

“I’m not dying,” I said feebly, though I wasn’t entirely sure. I still didn’t seem to have full control of my limbs. I started to sit up. Steff pushed me down.

“Don’t move,” she said. “Don’t look around.”

“Where’s Amaranth?” I asked. My voice sounded thick and slurred. There was a slight echo, but that might have just been in my head.

“Shh,” Steff said. “Help’s coming.”

“I’m okay,” I said.

“Shh.” Steff said.

There was a gasp from the doorway.

“Mother of mothers!” somebody said, and it took me a moment to recognize it as Dee. I’d never heard her with that much emotion in her voice. “Get her out of here. I will tend to Amaranth as best I can.”

“What’s wrong with Amaranth?” I asked. Had I been knocked out? Had Puddy done something else while I was oblivious?

“Nothing, hon,” Steff said. She ducked down beside me and pulled me up into a sitting position, then helped me to my feet. To Dee, she said, “If you can bring her around, she should be able to help.”

“What’s…” I started to ask, twisting around and out of Steff’s grip. I was still a little shaky, but I was able to get free and see what she hadn’t wanted me to.

Amaranth lay on the floor. Her stomach, chest, and parts of her thighs were covered with fresh, angry burns, as was her neck. The neck was the worst. Dee knelt beside her, chanting quietly.

My knees turned to water.

“Come on,” Steff said, tugging me towards the door. “You need to get out of here if Dee’s going to help her.”

“What did I do?” I asked, though I knew exactly what I had done.

“Help me, Two!” Steff said.

“Okay,” Two said, and there were two sets of arms supporting me and taking me out into the hall, which was now deserted except for Celia who looked totally lost. They leaned me against the wall, and then I collapsed crying against Steff.

“Hon, it’s okay,” Steff said. “The worst… she’ll just have to catch a coach back to school. That’s all.”

“You had to fucking interfere,” Puddy said, coming out into the doorway.

“Fuck off,” Steff said.

“Me fuck off? You come to my room spouting a bunch of bullshit, you attack me… nothing that happened is on me,” Puddy said.

“Oh, right,” Steff said. “You were just minding your own business, innocently beating the shit out of your girlfriend…”

“She w-w-wasn’t beating me,” Mariel said, and I could see that, though her eyes were puffy and irritated, there weren’t any bruises or other injuries. She hiccupped. “I w-wish she would. It would be b-b-b…” The words turned into a sob, and she threw back her head and wailed. Four arms reached out to Puddy, who stepped back and turned aside, and Mariel collapsed on the floor, pounding her tiny fists and crying.

“What the fuck did you do to her?” Steff asked, handing me over to Two who put her arms around me without a word.

“Nothing,” Puddy said.

“Bullshit!” Steff said.

“We broke up!” Puddy said, which only made Mariel wail more loudly. “Not that it’s any of your business, but we broke up!”

“I left my boyfriend for you,” Mariel said, getting to her feet. “I did everything for you. Three weeks we’ve been going out… three… weeks… and I’ve done everything you ever said!”

“The hell you did,” Puddy said. “We both agreed to vote for Mack. After I stopped drinking for you, you turn around and stab me in the fucking back and make me look like an idiot in front of my friends!”

“They aren’t your friends! They hate you! I hate you! And I am so fucking sick of Mack!” Mariel shrieked, her speech becoming faster and higher pitched as she spoke. “Ever since we got here, it’s been nothing but…” and after that it was an incomprehensible squeak.

A door opened up the hall. Kiersta poked her head out.

“Can you guys please … holy shit, what happened to your clothes?” she asked.

I reached up and felt the ragged, charred collar of my t-shirt that hung around my neck. It was all that was left of the garment. My bra was a twisted ruin. My jeans had fared only a little better.

“You’re dripping all over the hallway,” she said. “What the fuck did you guys do now?”

“Whatever we did, it’s your fault,” Steff said. “And if any of this gets out, I’ll make sure everybody knows.”

“Fuck it,” Kiersta said, and she disappeared back into the Leightons’.

“Hey, send Fin down here!” Steff called just as the door closed. It opened a moment later and Finbar stepped out, a little hesitantly.

“Hey, man, what’s up?” he asked.

“Healing potions,” Steff said.

“What?”

“Go get healing potions,” Steff said.

“You know that shit doesn’t come cheap,” he said.

“Do I look like I care?” Steff asked. “Go!”

Finbar went.

The twins popped out of their room.

“Hey, what’s…?” Sara started to say, but she took one look at Steff and they disappeared, too. I didn’t blame them. Steff looked like she didn’t know whether she wanted to break something or stab somebody, and was probably willing to do both.

A short while later, Dee came out into the hallway.

“I have done what I could,” she said. “That is not as much as I would like. The burns are slightly resistant. I touched her mind and put her into a healing slumber for now. As impolitic as it would be, we may have no choice but to take her to the healing center.”

Steff shook her head.

“I sent Fin for healing potions. There’s no way I’m letting anybody at the healing center see this… especially not when they’re afraid of a lawsuit from Mack,” Steff said. “There’s no way they wouldn’t put it together. I’m not handing them any ammunition. Not when Amy can just, you know, come back.”

“Ian… Ian said they asked him about his burn,” I said. “After my flare-up in class. He lied about it.”

“They asked Two about hers, too,” Steff said. “Though luckily you had nothing to do with that.”

“What was that about, anyway?” I asked Two, who was still holding me. I’d stopped shaking enough to notice that she was shaking, too. “Why did you summon a demon?”

I’d meant to ask her that long before, but it had never seemed like the right moment. I didn’t think this particular moment could be any more wrong, but it didn’t look like the right moment would ever come, and the subject was up.

“I had questions,” she said quietly. “The library book didn’t have the answers.”

“Like…” I started to say, but then Finbar arrived with a duffel bag over his shoulder.

“Luckily I keep all my legal stuff in one place,” he said. “I brought everything.”

“Come on,” Steff said.

“You stay the hell out of my room,” Puddy said to Steff.

“Fuck you,” Steff said and breezed past her. I pulled away from Two and followed.

We all piled in, even Celia, who’d been standing dazedly in the hallway the whole time.

Amaranth looked a little better. What had been black was now red, and what had been red was pink. Her breathing was steady and peaceful. Though I could see the dried and cracked skin breaking as her chest rose and fell, her face was serene.

“Fucking cock balls,” Celia said.

“Oh, shit,” Finbar said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“I know,” Steff said. “Fix it.”

“This is gonna add up,” he said. “You know that?”

“Know,” Steff said. “Don’t care.”

“Right,” Finbar said. He set the bag down on one of the beds and rummaged through it. He handed Steff three small jars of unguent. “Rub this on her… well, anywhere that’s bad. Slather it on.”

Steff nodded and took the jars from him. She unscrewed the lid from one and began to daub the yellowish contents around Amaranth’s burns.

“Don’t be fucking dainty! Rub it in!” Fin said.

Steff grimaced, looked at Amaranth’s sleeping face, and began to massage the thick paste directly onto her wounds. She stopped when the scorched skin began to peel away.

“Keep going,” Fin said. “It’s supposed to do that… I think.”

“You think?” Steff asked.

“I’ve never used it,” Fin said. He turned and rummaged around some more while Steff continued to rub the unguent over Amaranth, using up one jar and then another. Her skin sloughed off. It was unsettling to watch, but I couldn’t look away.

I did this.

It was my fault. I’d done it to her. My rage at Puddy had overwhelmed me, and I’d nearly killed the first person who’d truly loved me in years.

Two’s arms were around me before the first tears spilled from my eyes.

“Tip her head up,” Fin said. Steff did, and he poured something down her throat. She coughed and spit up the bluish liquid. “Shit.”

He tipped her head back and poured some more of the potion in, then held her mouth closed. Steff tickled the front of her neck, and she swallowed. Finbar went and grabbed two more potions, which they force-fed her. Steff took another of the potions and gave it to me. I started to protest, but she gave me a look and I took it. I hadn’t realized how fuzzy my head really was until it cleared up.

Some of the burn ointment was on the floor with bits of skin dissolving in it, but the front of Amaranth was clean. There were a few pink spots where the worst of the damage had been, but other than that it looked like nothing had even happened.

“She should be awake,” Fin said. “Why isn’t she awake? Shit.”

“Her mind isn’t allowing her,” Dee said. “I will awaken her.”

She stepped forward and reached a shaky hand out towards Amaranth. Amaranth’s eyelids fluttered and then flew open. She gasped and a blue bubble popped out of her mouth.

“Amy?” Steff said.

“Um… hi?” Amaranth said. “What’s everybody standing around for?”

I threw myself down on her and clung to her like a lifeline, sobbing. There was a faint, slightly painful tingle from the residual divine power of Dee’s healing, but I didn’t care.

“She’s fine, okay?” Puddy said. “Can everybody please get the fuck out of my room now?”

“My room,” Mariel said. “This was my room first!”

“Yeah, well, it’s mine now,” Puddy said. She threw her head back. “Fuck!” she screamed. “What the hell do I have to do to catch a break? I’ve saved your ass how many times now, Mack? And you turn around and lead a fucking raiding party to my door…”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I got to my feet, and helped Amaranth out. “I was wrong about the circumstances… but I’m not going to let you keep hurting people.”

“What hurting people?” Puddy said. “I told you that wasn’t me. I’m sober now.”

“It was you,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m glad you stopped drinking…”

“If I’m not going to get any credit for it, maybe I should start again,” Puddy said.

“Come on, baby,” Amaranth said. She kissed the side of my head. “There’s really nothing else to say.”

“Everybody out!” Puddy said.

“I want you out, too,” Mariel said to Puddy, who ignored her.

Fin was the first one out the door, hightailing it back to his girlfriends’ room. The rest of us followed. A shriek from behind us turned us back around to see Puddy hauling Mariel towards the door by her upper forearm and throwing her out, slamming the door behind her and locking it.

Mariel’s scream was too fast to decipher as she hammered on the door with her four fists, tears streaming down her face. She seemed to exhaust herself in seconds, then kicked the door feebly and turned away.

“You can sleep in my bed if you want,” Amaranth said, holding out her key.

Mariel looked sullen as she took it, but said, “Thanks.”

She glared at me before she headed to Amaranth’s room. She obviously blamed me for everything that had happened. Was she wrong? I didn’t know.

Amaranth had stretched away from me to hand Mariel the key, and I clung all the more tightly to her when her arm was back around me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, hugging her. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

“I did it,” Amaranth said. “Not you. And I’d do it again.”

“Don’t say that,” I said. “I couldn’t live if I ever… if I…”

“I’d come back,” Amaranth said. “I have that. Most people don’t. If I have to throw my body away to stop you from hurting somebody else, I may be saving your life as well as theirs.” She kissed me. “Remember that, baby. If it ever happens. Promise me you’ll remember that.”

“I promise,” I said.

“I’m sorry I maced you, Mack,” Two said.

“It’s okay,” I said. “You had to. Who put me out?”

“I did that, too,” Two said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Let’s get to bed,” Amaranth said quietly. “Steff, you sure you don’t want to join us?”

Steff shook her head.

“I think I need Viktor,” she said. She looked pale and drawn, and was shaking now that the crisis was over without fighting.

“Okay,” Amaranth said. “Good night.”

“Night.”

“What the fuck happened?” Celia asked, still sounding out of it.

“We’ll tell you tomorrow,” Amaranth said. “Come on, Two… come on, baby. It’s been a long day.”

As understatements went, that one pretty much won. I think I was out before we actually got into bed.

Friday, Calendula 2nd (Night)

As the time for the meeting drew nearer, Hazel tried to solicit contributions for a pizza order to be delivered afterwards. This was not met with much enthusiasm, as three of those present did not eat cheese, and Honey and myself were both in favor of going to bed before too long.

“Come on, an army marches on its stomach,” Hazel said. “And as general, it’s my duty to set a good example.” She looked at me. “Come on, Mack. After your ordeal, don’t you think you deserve a nice pizza pie?”

The eternal siren song of the pizza party… it was tough for a former outcast like myself to resist, but tonight I had a bed calling my name. The fact that the bed would be full of Amaranth was icing on the cake.

“I’m sorry, Hazel,” I said. “It sounds tempting, but I really need some sleep. Some other time?”

“I suppose,” Hazel said. She sighed. “We’re going to have a rematch, anyway, right?” she asked Shiel.

“If you haven’t had enough already,” Shiel said.

“Never! I say we make this a weekly thing,” Hazel said. “How about it? Same time next Friday?”

“Why not?” Shiel said.

“Right,” Hazel said. “And we can do some pizzas for me and my supporters, and sandwiches or whatever for yours.” She looked at me. “You’ll be in my corner, right, Mack?”

“Definitely,” I said.

“Um, hon?” Steff said, tugging on my sleeve.

“What?” I asked.

“You kind of already made plans for next Friday, baby,” Amaranth said.

“Huh?” I said. Oh, right. My date with Steff, assuming it was still on. I hadn’t forgotten about that… no way in hell would I do that. I just hadn’t consciously put it together with the mention of “next Friday”. “Oops. Guess I wasn’t thinking.”

“We have really got to get you a calendar or a planner or something,” Amaranth said. “We’ll go to the bookstore tomorrow around lunchtime and see what we can find.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s probably a good idea.”

“We should probably get going,” Amaranth said. “The meeting will be starting soon.”

“Hon, the lounge is like right outside,” Steff said. She’d been watching the game avidly, almost to the point of forgetting about her relationship worries. “I’m sure we’ll hear them begin.”

“Yes, but Mack should make a strong impression by being there early,” Amaranth said. “To make up for her missed opportunities.”

“Is it possible for her to show up yesterday?” Shiel asked. She reached for a row of her soldiers and started picking them up.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Hazel asked.

“Are you really going to make me play this out to the bitter end?” Shiel asked.

“We can call it a draw if you like,” Hazel said.

“Not on your life,” Shiel said.

“Then we fight on,” Hazel said, and Shiel replaced the soldiers.

“I’m afraid you’re going to be short a couple spectators,” Amaranth said, putting her arm over my shoulders and pulling me in. “We have about a week’s worth of snuggling to catch up on.”

“That’s fine,” Hazel said. “As long as I’ve got my trusty lieutenant.” She patted Two’s knee. “You won’t abandon me, will you?”

“I do not would like to abandon anybody,” Two said. “But I’m tired, and I have to go to work tomorrow.”

“I’ll stay and watch,” Steff said. “I think I’m getting the hang of this game.”

“Maybe you should share it with Hazel,” Shiel said.

“Just how long do you think this game is going to last?” Oru asked. “I’d like to go to bed before too long, myself.”

“Not much longer,” Shiel said. “Two, maybe three hours. We should definitely have it wrapped up before midnight.”

“What?” Oru asked. “You’ve been slaughtering her.”

“Most of her long-ranged offensive capabilities are destroyed, but she’s still got quite a bit of her heavy cavalry, and those pikemen are positively entrenched,” Shiel said. “While her offense was disastrous, Hazel’s surprisingly skilled at fighting a defensive battle.”

“What you really mean is I learned quickly,” Hazel said. “And sooner or later I’ll have learned enough to turn this thing around.”

“I find that unlikely,” Shiel said.

“Why risk it?” Oru said. “Crush her quickly and get it over with.”

“It’s going to take some time to do that without exposing my troops to unnecessary losses,” Shiel said.

“Why not just throw everything you’ve got at her?” Oru said. “You’ve got her dead to rights. You could lose ten men for every one she does and still wipe her out.”

“That would be poor leadership,” Shiel said. “And I prefer the term ‘soldiers’ to ‘men’.”

“Soldiers, men… they’re made out of rock, whatever you call them,” Oru said. “They’re not going to be leaving any widows behind!”

“Or widowers,” Steff said with a smirk. The roommates both glared at her.

“Take my bed, if you’re so bothered,” Hazel said. “I think Miss Shiel is being overly optimistic. Or did you forget I’ve still got my priests?”

“It seemed like you forgot,” Shiel said.

“Don’t you wish. I’ve just been holding them in reserve,” Hazel said.

This went on after we left Shiel’s room. Two went to wake up Dee while the rest of us headed to the lounge. Sooni and her nekos were already there. Sooni was dressed in a beautiful dress that was similar to but unlike her usual skirt and blouse combos. Its hemline fell quite a bit lower than her panty-baring skirts, but the way it hugged her curves was something to behold. I had to admit, it was actually kind of hot. Her hair was bound in thin braids which were piled in a cone on top of her head, with two spirals off to the side, each framing one of her fox ears.

I was expecting her to be furious at me for continuing to obstruct her ambitions by not bowing out of the race as she’d demanded. To my surprise, she greeted me with a big smile even before we entered the lounge.

“Hello, Miss Mackenzie!” she said as we filed in. I looked for a hint of aggression or predatory hunger in her face. Aside from the fact that her smile incidentally bared her impressive canine teeth, there was none. Her black eyes were bright and shining with what seemed to be genuine good will.

“Hi,” I said.

“Maliko told me you didn’t drop out,” she said.

Maliko was staring daggers at me from behind her. Her hand was over her shoulder, on the hilt of her sword. Sooni was oblivious to her pet’s hostility.

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“I think it will be so much better this way,” Sooni said. “Much more fitting.”

“Right,” I said.

“I’m so glad the two of you are getting along, Sooni,” Amaranth said. “I hope you’ll have a talk with your other friends about their attitude towards Mack.”

“Of course it’s natural that they’d harbor some suspicion until Mack’s proved herself,” Sooni said. “Though it will probably help when she stops associating with such terrible influences all the time.”

Kiersta came into the lounge then carrying the ballot box, the ballots, and a deck of cards. She walked past all of us an put them down on the counter, then turned and looked around the room.

“You’re not on this floor,” she said to Steff.

“I’m here for immoral support,” Steff replied.

“Oh,” Kiersta said. “Okay. Just don’t try to vote, or anything.”

Two and Dee arrived after that. Dee, appropriately enough, looked like she’d just woke up. Her long white hair was a bit on the messy side and her eyes were half-shut. Dee was wearing a black nightgown with dark green trim. Actually, upon a slightly closer inspection, the whole thing was green… just very, very dark. It was patterned, too, with spirals and swirls. You couldn’t really see them unless you stared.

The robe did not reach down as far as her all-enveloping priestess’s robes and her customary cloak, leaving her bare feet and ankles exposed. It was kind of interesting to note that her feet were about the same size as Sooni’s, though her toes were longer.

“Are you alright?” Amaranth asked Dee again.

“Yes, thank you,” Dee said. “My sleep was not particularly restful.”

Feejee arrived next, followed by Puddy and Mariel, who said nothing but took one of the TV chairs. Rather, they took the chairs that would have faced the TV had a TV been there. After that, everybody from the Leightons’ room came in, including Finbar. Kiersta didn’t say anything about the presence of another outsider, even a male. I guess her token protest of Steff had used up all her reserves of concern for the subject.

Rocky was the last one to arrive. Kiersta waited until five minutes past eight and then announced the voting was going to start. She didn’t ask the candidates if we wanted to say anything. I looked at Sooni, wondering if she was going to protest, but she just kept on smiling. I didn’t have anything prepared, anyway, and I’d used up most of my nerve on the chancellor.

It hit me then that I should have mentioned my talk with the chancellor, but Rocky had already gone over and filled out her ballot, and now Feejee was doing the same. I looked around the room, counting inside my head.

Assuming all the fifth floor girls at dinner actually were my supporters, that gave me eight votes including myself. Puddy and Mariel would be nine and ten, if they voted for me. Feejee could be number eleven.

Sooni and her nekos were four votes. Trina was definitely against me. I wasn’t even a person to her. I doubted Twyla was for me. It was hard to say, but my instinct was no. She certainly wasn’t eager to meet my eye. The Leightons would vote against me. So would Rocky. That was nine.

Twyla and Feejee were the only ones I was uncertain of. I’d had some okay conversations with Feejee. The only time I’d spoken to Twyla had been pretty close to disastrous, but maybe she would appreciate the fact that I’d saved her angel drawing. Or maybe she’d be offended or freaked. I counted Feejee as a yes and Twyla as a no. I’d find out soon enough if I was right or not.

Belinda and Leda hadn’t shown up again, and we were missing both Hissy and Celia. I tried to think of the last time I’d seen Hissy… had it been when she’d attacked me the previous weekend?

Her absence could be for any number of reasons. It didn’t necessarily have anything to do with our fight, or the horrified and horrifying reaction she’d had to reading my mind. She might not even have been missing for the whole week. The fighters weren’t always around the dorm, anyway, and I could possibly have passed her in the hallway without noticing.

Yeah, because giant lizard women are so easy to overlook…

The tiny pragmatic part of myself reminded me that her absence would help cancel out Celia’s, since Hissy had almost certainly voted against me before and would definitely have voted against me this time. I hated myself for thinking it, but it was true.

And where was Celia? I couldn’t say. She came and went from our group as she pleased, usually showing up when she had something she wanted to show off.

Sooni was down one likely previous supporter and so was I. As Shiel had said, nothing seemed to have changed, except for the presence of Puddy and Mariel. That could give me a two vote lead. I was still nervous.

After the nekos filed back to the ballot box one by one and filled out their votes, it was down to Sooni and me. She gave me a little bow and gestured towards the counter. I smiled nervously and went to cast my ballot, and then she did the same.

“That everybody?” Kiersta asked when she’d finished.

Everyone nodded.

“Anybody not vote?” she asked. “Last chance… anybody here from the floor who hasn’t voted?”

Nobody said anything.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m going to go count the ballots.”

The room was silent as she counted, then counted again.

“Another tie,” she said, to a chorus of protests from around the room.

“Recount!” the Leightons called.

“I counted twice,” Kiersta said.

I was looking around the room doing my own recount, trying to figure out who from among my expected supporters might have voted against me. I didn’t know Shiel that well, but she had said I was the better candidate, and she hadn’t denied it when Hazel had lumped her in with my supporters. Neither had Oru. I couldn’t say about Oru either way, but I had the feeling that Shiel at least would have felt compelled to speak up if that wasn’t true.

I could have been wrong about Feejee. Her face showed mild surprise, but that didn’t tell me anything.

Then I saw Mariel’s triumphant smirk, directed right at me. Puddy looked livid, but there was no way she could see Mariel’s face when the sylph was on her lap… a fact which was probably beneficial to Mariel’s well-being.

She saw me looking, though, and her expression changed… darkened. She tightened her grip on Mariel’s waist. I looked away. Had Puddy guessed at the same thing I had?

“According to the student handbook, in the event of a tie during the run-off, the winner is to be determined by lots or another random method,” Amaranth announced over the din, bringing my attention back to the matter more immediately at hand.

“You want to let me run this meeting?” Kiersta said. “I brought a deck of cards,” she said to Sooni and me. “I’ll shuffle, you each draw, and high card wins. Is that okay?”

“Of course,” Sooni said, without hesitation. Her smile had returned in full force. If anything, she seemed even more pleased.

Drawing cards? I supposed they couldn’t keep having elections indefinitely, and I don’t think I could hope to do any better. Too many of the absentees were against me. I looked at Amaranth for support. She shrugged and nodded.

“Okay,” I said.

Kiersta shuffled the cards a little clumsily, then pushed them together into a neat stack and set them down on the counter. I waved a hand at them.

“I voted first,” I told Sooni.

“No, please,” Sooni said. “It will be so much better if you draw first.”

“Better how?” I asked.

“It just will be,” she said. She leaned close and whispered, “This is the way it’s supposed to be.”

There was that word again. It was occasionally cute from Two, but otherwise, nothing good ever seemed to follow it.

“Hey, no whispering,” Kiersta said.

“Right, we’re rigging the election against each other,” I said. I sighed and closed my eyes, then took the top card off the deck. I lifted it up to my face and opened my eyes. It took a moment for my vision to focus, and another for my brain to register what it was seeing.

“Queen of cups,” I announced, smiling like an idiot with relief as I showed it around.

Sooni drew a card.

“Queen of swords,” she said, holding it up.

“The ranking of suits is…” Amaranth started to say, but Kiersta cut her off.

“Draw again,” she said.

I again offered Sooni the chance to go first, and she again refused. This time I drew with my eyes open, glancing at it briefly before displaying it to Kiersta and Sooni.

“King of swords,” I announced.

Okay, it seemed like Kiersta had done a really shitty shuffling job, but I wasn’t about to complain. Even if Sooni got another face card, odds were she’d still lose. She seemed utterly unperturbed, heedless of the odds against her. I might have wondered if she’d rigged the game somehow, except her smile was all bliss and no craft.

I turned to show the card to the room and the smile fell off my face. Puddy and Mariel had left. I could see them through the glass wall, heading down towards the end of the hall, Puddy hurrying Mariel along.

Shit.

“Sooni, draw,” Kiersta said.

I took my eyes off the hallway and watched Sooni reach for the deck. I glanced back, but Puddy and Mariel had vanished into their room.

Sooni had her eyes closed and her hand on the top card. She was smiling triumphantly. I wondered again if she was cheating. I reached out, but felt no magic operating on the deck or her.

“Sooni?” Kiersta prompted.

Sooni said nothing, but flipped the top card over onto the counter. With her eyes closed, I saw it before she did.

She’d drawn the ace of wands.

Friday, Calendula 2nd (Evening)

We finished eating shortly after that, though Steff and I hadn’t actually eaten that much. Amaranth offered to help carry the shorter students’ booster seats back for them. Shiel declined, but Oru and the shirelings accepted, and Amaranth, Steff, and I each took one.

Without any prior discussion, we left them in a neat row along the wall beneath the shelf that housed them. One of the dining hall staff came over as we turned to go and started picking them up.

“Hey,” I said. “Don’t you think that they’re just going to need to use those again next meal time?”

“It’s a tripping hazard,” he said.

“For who? People going to the shelf to get boosters down?” I asked.

“Get off my ass,” he said. “I’m just doing my job.”

“Right,” I said. I reminded myself that he was probably just a student. There was no sense going off on him.

“Is this a written policy?” Amaranth asked.

“What?”

“That they have to be put up on the shelf in order to avoid tripping,” Amaranth said.

“If it’s a written policy, I’d like to see it,” Shiel said.

“It’s what we have the shelf for,” he said. “Why does it matter if it’s written or not?”

“If it isn’t an actual rule, then there’s no reason you have to put them back up,” Amaranth said. “If it is, then we certainly won’t blame you for doing your job, but it’s something we’ll have to take up.”

“Fine, whatever,” he said, putting the plastic seat back down and walking away.

“He’ll probably put them back up as soon as we’re gone,” Hazel noted.

“Probably,” Shiel agreed. “Ideally, we wouldn’t have to get booster seats at all, though I suppose the only way around it would be to make some of the seating different sizes to begin with, and that would arbitrarily limit our options.”

“I guess there really is no perfect solution for accommodating different sizes and shapes,” I said.

“No, but that just means you can always do better,” Shiel said.

The floor meeting wasn’t until eight, so we had some time. Hazel was eager to get back to her game with Shiel, and we all kind of mutually drifted along… except for Dee. She excused herself when we passed her room, begging off any further sociability due to a headache. She asked Two to make sure she was awake for the floor meeting.

“Are you okay?” Amaranth asked, frowning in concern.

“I fear that I overexerted myself,” Dee said. “My kinetic gifts have always been somewhat lacking.”

“Well, have a good nap, anyway,” Amaranth said.

“Thank you,” Dee said, then disappeared into her dark room.

“Guess we’re back to doing things the old-fashioned way,” Hazel said. “That might slow things down a bit.”

“That might be a good thing,” Honey said.

“How do you mean?”

“Some of your strategic decisions seemed a bit… hasty?” Honey said.

“Bold, I think you mean,” Hazel said. “Daring.”

“Oh, yes,” Honey said, rolling her eyes. “Daring’s the word I meant, to be sure.”

Eight people in a dorm room was edging towards crowded anyway, even without a battlefield sprawling over a good portion of the floor. Honey sat on Shiel’s bed where Dee had been. Two had a clear space on the floor next to Hazel. There was really no place for the rest of us larger types to sit, so we just stood at the edge of the room.

“Attack phase,” Shiel reminded Hazel once they were both settled down.

“I know!” Hazel said. “Hey, there’s a bottle of pop in my fridge and some cups if somebody wants to go get them. The door’s open.”

“I’ll go,” I said. Warfare, miniature or other, didn’t really interest me. Also, this might be a chance to have a word with Steff. “You want to help?” I asked her.

“I… I’d kind of like to see this,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

“Grab the bags of crisps off my desk, too,” Hazel said. “Oh! And there’s a big unopened tin of biscuits. That should do us for a start, at least until the floor meeting. We can order out for a couple pizzas after that.”

“I’ll be right back,” I said, exiting the room before Hazel could add anything else.

The gnomes’ room was more completely furnished than any I’d seen, with actual carpeting laid down and drapes on the windows. The beds had been made up to look more like something out of a catalogue than a dorm room. They’d brought some of their own furniture, including a pair of easy chairs, three curio cabinets, some shelves of ornaments, and a low, round table in one corner of the room with six chairs around it. An elaborate tea set was arranged on a tray in the middle of the table.

The strangest item looked like another curio cabinet with elaborate carving, but instead of shelves all it had inside was a round pendulum that swung back and forth with unsettling regularity. It was topped with a box displaying the numbers one through twelve, with three arrows pointing at various spots around it. One of them was actually moving.

I squatted down in front of the odd cabinet for a while before I realized it could be a timepiece, if the shortest arm was pointing to the hour and the longer, thicker one was showing about how much of the hour had elapsed. The longest, thinnest arm was sweeping around the circle at what seemed to be about one revolution a minute.

It seemed a terribly inefficient and backwards way of displaying the time. I wondered who had come up with it, and why they’d chosen such a circuitous route. Most timepieces simply linked an illusion spell into the timekeeping one. This had to have been a lot more complicated to enchant, on top of being harder to interpret.

Perhaps illusions were an underdeveloped discipline among the burrow gnomes? Or had been when the piece was made? It looked kind of old. It could be an antique or heirloom of sentimental value.

“Oi!” Hazel yelled across the hall. “You get lost in there?”

“Sorry!” I called back. “I’m coming.”

There was a mostly full three liter bottle of root beer taking up a good portion of the fridge, and a stack of plastic cups on top of it. I wrapped my arm around the bottle despite the uncomfortable cold and held the cups in my hand, then gathered up the snacks. I knew “biscuit” meant “cookie” in Mother Pax, and anyway, the big metal can had “assorted biscuits” written on it. It took me a moment to figure out the “crisps” she’d referred to were the bags of potato chips, though.

Bottle under one arm and tin under the other, my hands full of chips and cups, I returned to the field of valor.

“Oh, baby, let me help you with that,” Amaranth said, grabbing the root beer and then the cups. “You should have taken two trips.”

“How did you guys get all that stuff up to your room?” I asked, setting the snacks down by the bed behind Hazel.

“Honey’s uncle and her cousins brought most of it up the first weekend,” Hazel said. “The table and tea service arrived a week later.”

“It’s sort of the bare minimum for comfort,” Honey said. “But we manage.”

Amaranth was handing around cups of root beer.

“Well, this is kind of nice,” she said. “It’s like a party where everybody has their clothes on. Get the biscuits open, won’t you, baby?”

I picked it up and started looking for a loose edge to the seal. Steff took it from me and immediately peeled off the adhesive with her fingernails and popped the top off. It apparently had multiple foil-wrapped trays stacked inside it. She pulled the top one out and set the tin down, then opened it.

“Oh, those all look so good,” Amaranth said. She picked up the tin and found the ingredients. “Ooh, but they’ve got real butter,” she said, curling her lower lip. “Well, they look nice, anyway.”

There was an assortment of different goodies, including fairly plain looking chocolate chip cookies, what looked like square ginger snaps, butter crackers, some kind of flaky tube things, and a pair of oversized cookies or undersized pies, with yellow and red filling, respectively.

“They’re about the best you can get in town here, if you don’t want to pay for fresh at the bake shop,” Hazel said.

“Is that lemon?” I asked, looking at the yellow-filled one.

“Lemon tartlet,” Two reported. “They’re good. I like the raspberry ones, though.”

“Raspberry for the pseudowench, then,” Steff said. She handed the lemon to me and passed Two the raspberry, then offered the tin around. While Amaranth abstained, Oru and Shiel each accepted one. Honey took three and Hazel took five. Well, there was a full tin and it was theirs. I added a chocolate chip cookie and a plain chocolate one to my lemon pie thing.

I’d finished the smaller cookies pretty quickly and was nibbling on the pie, savoring the taste of it, when I noticed Steff and Amaranth smiling at me.

“What?” I asked.

Steff giggled and looked away, but Amaranth just smiled wider.

“Baby, you have got crumbs all over your face.”

I blushed.

“They’re crumbly,” I muttered.

“There’s paper napkins somewhere, if you want them,” Hazel said without looking away from the field. She seemed to be measuring distances on the field.

“It’s okay, I’ve got wipes,” Amaranth said. She took the tartlet away and set it down on the nearest desk, then pulled me by the hand towards the door. “Come on, let’s not get any more crumbs on Shiel and Oru’s floor than you already have.”

Steff followed us out into the hall. Amaranth produced a wet towelette and began dabbing at my face.

“Mother, did you get any of those biscuits into your mouth?” she asked.

“They were crumbly,” I said again.

“I bet you were adorable when you were a kid,” Steff said.

“She’s pretty darned cute right now,” Amaranth said. The used towelette vanished from sight. I wondered if there were any ramifications to making something disappear indefinitely, like a total weight or size limit. If not, it could be an efficient way of disposing of garbage. Before I could ask, though, she moved me slightly to get out of the sight of the doorway and kissed me.

Warm comfort. Amaranth’s kisses were sunlight, any time of day.

“You’re staying with me tonight, right?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Just try to keep me away,” she said. “We won’t even have to do anything, after the day I had… though, of course, I’m up for anything.”

“I think just sleeping will be more than enough for me,” I said. The day was catching up with me. It was hard to believe that it had only been that same morning that I’d made my way through the labyrinth. Going to afternoon classes had let my mind draw a line between the morning’s experiences and everything that had come after… but my body wasn’t quite with the program there. I turned to Steff. “Do you want to stay with us?”

She shook her head.

“No more sex,” I said. “Just… be with us.”

“I don’t want to push Two’s acceptance too far,” she said. “She’s been so great…”

She sniffed.

“What?” I asked.

“Just remembering that day we went to town,” she said. “After we got back… the hugging and falling all over each other like soppy idiots.”

“You said, ‘I love you guys’, and Two needed clarification,” I said. I was starting to get misty-eyed, too. “That you loved her, too.”

“This must have been after I left,” Amaranth said.

“Oh, yeah,” Steff said. “Sorry you missed it.”

“The year’s just starting,” Amaranth said. “There will be lots of other times… other moments.”

Steff looked like she was going to say something, but she didn’t. Amaranth kissed her, and then I did, and then I kissed Amaranth. We kissed each other in turns. This seemed to me to be the essential weakness of polyamory; there were doubtlessly lots of different ways in which multiple people could have sex, but only two people could kiss at a time the way it was meant to be done, lips together and arms around one another.

There was something to be said for it, all the same.

I wanted to be kissing both of them.

“Oh, my fucking Khersis,” one of the Leightons said, startling me out of an embrace with Steff. I turned to see it was Sara. They were coming up the hall with Trina, Twyla, and Finbar in tow. “Will you freaks please get a room?”

“Hey, I don’t think boys are even supposed to be in here after dark,” Tara said.

“Yeah, I don’t think so,” Sara agreed. They were both looking at Steff, despite the fact that their furry-faced boyfriend Finbar was there. Not only that, but they were carrying a bottle of some clear liquor and a little carrier with six bottles of beer. It seemed a little hypocritical for them to complain about us bending the rules, and downright unlikely that they’d do anything more than give us shit about it.

“Well, none of us girls will say anything about your boyfriend, then,” Amaranth said, stepping between Steff and the twins, who hurried into their room without another word. Trina gave me a big dumb smile as she went in. Twyla was staring at the floor. Fin looked apologetic, but didn’t say anything.

“Twats,” Steff said when their door had closed and locked. “I’d love to cut off one head and see how long the other one takes to die.”

“Now, that’s a little excessive,” Amaranth said.

“You think? Did Mack tell you what they did?” Steff asked.

“When?” she asked.

“Today,” Steff said. “Just this afternoon.”

“It was nothing, really,” I said. I’d had enough of the Leightons and their stupid, childish antics for the moment, and wanted to forget about the whole thing.

“Baby, you know that’s not how it works,” Amaranth said. “If somebody’s giving you a hard time, you need to tell me about it.”

“You didn’t act like it was nothing earlier,” Steff said. “They threw their shitty toilet paper and a cigarette into the tub with Mack.”

“They were smoking?” Amaranth asked. “You should have told Kiersta.”

“I did,” I said. “She said if she didn’t catch them at it, she couldn’t do anything.”

Amaranth was scowling.

“We should go have a chat with Kiersta right now,” she said. “They’ve got beer and vodka in there right now. She couldn’t help catching them in the act.”

“Amy, Fin’s in there,” Steff said.

“Well, you know what they say,” Amaranth said. “If you lie down with… um… actually, that might be a little racist. The point is he should pick his company better.”

“But Twyla didn’t pick her roommates,” I said. “Let’s just let it go. I don’t want to get a bunch of people in trouble because of the Leightons.”

Steff shook her head, and sniffed again.

“What?” I asked.

“You’re so stupid,” she said. “I mean, good.”

“Uh, thanks.”

“No, I mean it,” Steff said. “Except for Fin, who really is an okay guy, there’s nobody in that room who isn’t a total bitch…”

“Twyla isn’t,” I said.

“Do you think she’s going to vote for you?” Steff asked. “And it’s no wonder Trina needs that extra eye. It’s the only way she can see with her nose so far up Gladys’s ass. None of them are worth a tenth what you are, even Fin, but you’re being all noble or wishy-washy or something and not nailing them when you have a chance.”

I shrugged.

“I’m not comfortable ‘nailing’ people,” I said. “A lifetime of being the nailee…”

“It’s frustrating to watch you,” Steff said.

“I think it’s one of her finer qualities,” Amaranth said. “As long as she’s not letting people walk all over her, I mean. Which is why you need to tell me about these things, Mack.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. I remembered something. “Um… kind of on that subject?”

“What, baby?”

“This one really is nothing,” I said. Amaranth looked at me over her glasses and I quickly added, “But I’m telling you anyway… Maliko kind of threatened me in class, if I ‘touched Sooni under her clothes’, or something like that.”

Amaranth sighed and shook her head.

“That poor, dear, sweet girl,” she said, chewing thoughtfully on her lip.

“You’re both crazy,” Steff said. “Crazy and stupid and crazy stupid and stupid crazy. I hope you know that.”

“We know,” I said, smiling. “And we love you, too.”

Steff turned her head and dropped her eyes to the floor.

“Hey,” I said quietly. “It’ll be okay.”

“I don’t want to lose you,” she said quietly.

“You won’t,” I said.

“Or Viktor,” she said.

“Sweetie, Viktor loves you,” Amaranth said. “And he knows you’re going through a hard time. He makes rules to help you. He won’t do anything capriciously, or just to hurt you.”

I tried to force a laugh. “If anything, I should be worried, not you.”

Steff didn’t seem reassured by that.

“You should come to the meeting with us,” I said. “Unless you’ve got something going on, I mean.”

Steff shook her head.

“We got our rep elected last week,” she said.

“Then if you don’t mind, I want you by my side,” I said. “Win or lose, I want you there.”

A string of colorful, gnomish-accented curses from the open door made us jump.

“On the subject of winning and losing…” Steff said.

“You want to watch the game,” I said.

Steff nodded.

“Okay,” Amaranth said, and we went back in to watch the battle until it was time for the meeting.

I finished my tartlet and had two more… they’d made it through two layers of the tin while we were in the hall, though Hazel and Two had saved out the lemons for me.

I didn’t really follow the game that well, except for the fact that Hazel was losing, very badly and very poorly. Shiel didn’t appear to mind, and Hazel seemed madder at herself or the situation than anything. I think she was having a good time, somehow, all the same. It was nice, with store brand root beer and imported cookies and friends all around, even if it was a bit cramped.

“What?” Steff asked, without much interest.

“It was with Ian,” I said. “And Amaranth.”

“Huh, a three-way?”

“Um, kind of,” I said, surprised by the lack of inflection in Steff’s voice. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if what we had done actually counted as a “three-way” since Amaranth had mostly been there in a support role. “I decided I was ready to, um, be fucked, and Amaranth…”

“You know what? I don’t really want to hear about this right now,” Steff said. “Okay?”

Was she jealous, too? I’d wondered how the hell polyamorous relationships worked without running into this kind of problem, but Steff had made it sound like juggling the commitments was as natural as anything else. I hated to think that it might turn out to just be talk, when I was starting to come around. Maybe I was greedy, but I didn’t want to have to choose.

“We didn’t… I mean, I didn’t let him… the thing that you want to do is, um, still there,” I sputtered, feeling my powers of articulation growing within me like a thing that doesn’t grow very well at all inside a person. I had a hard enough time talking about sex when I could feel it, and I wasn’t feeling it now. “We just, you know… the regular way. In front.”

“I said I don’t want to hear about it!” Steff said, backing away from me almost as fast as she’d jumped away when Dee had startled her. She looked near tears. “Fuck, will you quit being so damned pushy?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I… I didn’t know this would upset you. I thought you’d be happy.”

“I’m happy,” she said. “Okay? I’m thrilled. I’m ecstatic. But I’ve got stuff on my mind… like… you’re about to meet Viktor. That’s big.”

“Okay,” I said. I decided to use this segue to throw Steff a bone, so to speak. “Um, you know how I keep telling you I want to wait until I can give you a surprise before we go any farther?”

“Yeah, that’s fine,” Steff said. “Whatever.”

I stared at her.

“What?” she said, growing more and more agitated as she spoke. “I said it’s fine. I can wait. You think I’ve just got to fuck everything I see? Just because I have a cock, that means we’re going to fuck?”

“I’m sorry, forget it,” I said.

“I wish I could,” Steff murmured.

“Um, so… Viktor?” I said, trying to bring the conversation back to where it had been going before I’d somehow knocked it off course.

“Oh, yeah,” Steff said, settling down quite a bit in an instant. She got kind of a dreamy look in her eyes, the kind that was almost a sigh in itself, when she thought about Viktor. It was the only time her eyes didn’t look hungry… or, right now, haunted. “Viktor.” She turned to me, full of earnestness. “The thing you have to know, Mack, is that Viktor’s… well, he’s kind of integrated the whole dominance/submission thing in with his native culture. There’s some protocols you’ll want to know about, just so there’s no misunderstanding.”

“Protocols?” I repeated.

“Mmm hmm,” she said. “Courtly decorum, ogre-style. There’s a couple of big rules. Don’t look him in the eye, and don’t speak unless directed to… not if you’re spoken to, not even if you’re asked a question. Wait until you’re told to answer, or to speak freely.”

“That’s going to make it hard to have a conversation,” I said.

“Honey, you have to understand that if we were all out in the hinterlands, you’d be so far below him you barely exist,” Steff said. She stopped walking, so she could turn and face me directly as she spoke. The set of her face was serious, the way it was when she talked about the importance of self-defense. “You’re a furnishing, okay? You’re a rug or a wall hanging.”

“Or a table,” I said, thinking of my bizarre dream. I ducked my head, and in doing so noticed Steff’s dick twitching, growing hard beneath her skirt.

She made a frustrated sound, turning and trying to flatten it in what I assumed had to be a painful manner. I turned my head and didn’t say anything until she turned back, her erection visibly receded but not gone. There were tears on her cheeks, but she pressed right on.

“It’s not like he goes around challenging strangers to grappling matches before he’ll let them talk to him, but… you’ve submitted to Amaranth, Amaranth submits to me, and I am submitted to him,” Steff said. “That creates a relationship. I’m his… well, I can’t say the ogre word without hurting myself and spitting on you, but it basically means I’m crushed beneath the sole of his foot. Amaranth’s position would translate to “beast”, and legally she’d have the same status and lack of protections as any animal. You… you’re a thing, an object, and fuck!”

She’d sprouted an erection again, and reacted much the same way as the first time.

Okay, I have to admit it would have been fucking hot as hell to have Steff tell me I was an object with no rights, if it wasn’t disturbing to see the way she kept getting upset by her own arousal. That wasn’t Steff. I wondered if it had something to do with Viktor… another protocol? Was Steff not allowed to be erect in his presence, or without his permission, or something?

“Um, if you need to take care of that we can… do something,” I said.

“Just back the fuck off, okay?” Steff said. She’d turned to face the wall and seemed to be… well, hurting herself. “Gah… I need to make a stop.”

“Okay,” I said.

I followed her into the stairwell and up the stairs. She stopped at the third floor landing and darted into the hall. I followed, with an odd sense of vertigo mixed with déjà vu. The male juniors’ hallway was laid out identically to my own freshmen girls’, though of course reversed… but the doors had quite a few more decorations, many of them involving musicians, popular fighters, or women of different races in various states of undress. There was also an undeniable yet subtle difference in the atmosphere.

Steff went to a door and knocked. It was answered by a naked girl. Not a nymph, not a nude non-human, but a naked human girl, covered in sweat and… well, probably more than sweat. Her hair was matted to her skin.

“Who is it?” a gruff male voice said from inside the darkened room.

“It’s Steff,” the girl said over her shoulder. “Come to play with us?”

“Um, I kind of want some time to myself,” Steff said. “If you don’t mind.”

“No, it’s cool,” the girl said. “My ass’s starting to get pretty sore. I could use a break.”

“Thanks,” Steff said, and she went in, closing the door behind her. The naked girl leaned against it. She gave me a quick glance which ended in a rather unimpressed look.

“Hi,” she said, smiling politely.

“Hi,” I said, trying and failing not to look at the mess between her legs. It was… well, a lot more like what my mental picture of a pussy was than the neat little folds of flesh Amaranth sported.

“My fucking vibrator got stolen,” she said, as if this explained everything. “I left it in the bathroom once and it just vanished. Blessing in disguise, living next to Harlowe. These guys are animals… and it doesn’t even count.”

“Whose room is this?” I asked.

“Rorick and Jay’s,” she said.

“The faun?” I asked. I’d met Rorick once, at the same time I’d met Viktor.

“And satyr,” she said. “I’m Kyla, by the way. You’re the psycho skank, right?”

“I’m what?” I asked.

She laughed.

“The demon girl,” she said. “I heard you led a caravan in Weyland yesterday and then tried to kill everybody. This guy who’s a friend of… well, he’s not really a friend of anybody but he hangs out with anybody, you know? He called you the psycho skank.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. Well, I had some idea but I could honestly say I didn’t know what “leading a caravan” had to do with anything.

“Whatever,” Kyla said. “You got a cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke,” I said.

“That’s the only problem with this place,” she said. “Nobody does. They look at me like I’m the freak when I do.”

“You smoke inside the dorm?” I asked.

“Not mine,” she said. “But here? Nobody cares what happens here. It’s fucking great.”

“So, you just hang out here and… fuck all the time?” I asked.

“Just a couple times a week, but it’s a great way to kill time,” she said. “It’s hard to masturbate when you have a roommate, you know? But I guess you’re bi and shit, so you probably don’t let that stop you.”

She looked at me with so much disgust that I couldn’t contain my own any more.

“Have you looked at yourself?” I asked.

“So what?” she said, glancing down at her body. She waved her hand as if it would brush away the accumulated bodily fluids. “None of this counts.”

“What does that even mean?” I asked.

“They’re not human,” she said. “You’re not human. Nothing here matters.”

“What, we’re not real people?” I asked.

“Exactly,” she said. “No offense. Fuck… I wish I had a cigarette.”

“How do you think your partners would react if they knew how you felt?” I asked.

She laughed.

“They don’t give a shit,” she said. “Partners? They like to fuck. I like to fuck. It’s no more real to them than it is to me. Steff’s the same. He or she or whatever likes to fuck and doesn’t care about anything else. But I guess you know that.”

“I don’t think you know her as well as I do,” I said.

“Whatever,” Kyla said. “Sweet fucking Khersis, you’re touchy for a harlot.”

I didn’t say anything. I was done talking to her.

A few minutes later, the door opened behind her and Steff came out, looking a little flushed in the face, and shaking quite a bit, but also looking quite a bit calmer.

“I think your friend needs a screw, too,” Kyla told her.

“Oh, fuck off, Kayla,” Steff said, giving her a shove back into the guys’ room.

“Touchy!” Kyla said. “And it’s Kyla.”

“Um, you… better?” I asked.

“Loads,” Steff said. “Worked out some… stress.”

“What exactly…”

“Look, Viktor’s waiting for us,” Steff said. “He didn’t give me a time frame… he just told me not to come back without you… but I’d rather not keep him waiting.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Oh, um… also, he may want to play a bit first,” Steff said as we headed back for the stairs. “If so, just try to, you know, shut it out and just wait till it’s over.”

“Uh, I don’t think Ian would like that,” I said. I was fairly sure I wouldn’t like that, for that matter.

Steff gave me a double take.

“Wow, does he have some crazy jealousy issues or what?” she asked.

“Hey, not everybody’s as open as you are,” I said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the way you do things, but that doesn’t mean it’s right for everybody.”

“Yeah, but… to not even let you listen to another musician?” Steff said. “I don’t like to judge another person’s dynamics, but that’s pretty fucking nuts, Mack.”

“Wait, when you said ‘play’, what were you talking about?” I asked.

“Viktor’s music,” Steff said. “Such as it is.”

“He plays music?” I asked, making sure I was understanding.

“Well, he’s got a keyboard,” Steff said. “I don’t think he’ll ever be very good at it, but it makes him happy, you know?”

I kind of remembered Steff making a passing comment about Viktor taking a musical composition class, but my mind hadn’t attached any particular significance to that.

My mental image of Viktor came entirely from Steff’s almost bragging stories about being sent to the healing center, and one brief encounter in the main hallway when he’d propositioned Amaranth. He’d just walked up to her and said “hey,” as if that was all that needed to be said. Though, in this case, it had been. “Hey.” It didn’t take much of a line to pick up a nymph.

“What did you think I meant?” Steff asked.

“Well… um… I thought you meant ‘play’ as in, you know… play,” I said, blushing and turning away.

“Talk about a one track mind,” Steff said, leering wickedly and leaning in. “Don’t you ever think about anything else, you dirty, fi… um… filthy…”

“What?” I asked when she seemed to get hung up. “Why’d you stop?”

“Anyway, the point is that if he tells you to tell him what you think of his music, try to say something nice,” Steff said. “I always pretend I can’t understand it but that I know it’s good. If you can’t bring yourself to lie, be vague.”

“You lie to Viktor?” I asked, shocked.

“Only about this one thing,” she said. “But it’s the whitest of white lies. He cares so much about it, and it’s not like anybody back home is going to be able to tell how bad he is. Anyway, let’s get a move on.”

Steff headed briskly down the hall and I followed her. I almost ran into her when she stopped just past one of the doors.

“Hold on,” she said. “I have to make one more quick stop.”

She knocked on that door. Finbar, the canine alchemy major who was dating one or both of the Leighton twins, opened it about halfway. He stood in the opening. Behind him I could see a curtain. Considering that he did a thriving trade in homebrewed potions, I could understand why he valued his privacy.

“Hey, uh, Steff,” he said, a little nervously. “What’s up?”

“Can I, um, come in?” she asked.

“You know I can’t sell to you,” Finbar said. “Even leaving money out of it, the big man says I can’t give you anything that isn’t strictly for healing purposes.”

“This is for healing, believe me,” Steff said. “And… maybe we can work out some kind of… trade?”

“Sorry, but I’m not really interested in your kind of trade,” Finbar said. “Even if I didn’t have a girlfriend… or maybe two.”

He blinked and tilted his head to the side as if thinking. Apparently he didn’t know for sure, either.

“Look, if I can just come in and explain…” Steff said.

“Somebody sees you coming out of my room?” Finbar said. “After the big man told me you’re off limits? Not worth my life, buddy.”

“But…”

“Sorry, Steff,” Finbar said, and he closed the door.

“‘Big man’?” I asked.

“Oh… Viktor’s got this silly idea that I can’t be trusted with potions,” Steff said.

“What were you looking for?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Steff said. “Just a stray thought. It’s not important.”

“You said it was for healing,” I said. “That sounds important.”

“Oh, I… I just said that to try to convince him to deal with me,” Steff said, wringing her hands. “It’s really nothing.”

“Okay,” I said. Steff was lying, and she was nervous and visibly upset about something. Well, if I got a chance to be alone with Viktor… and I was even allowed to speak… I’d talk to him about it. “Um, is there anything else I need to know before I meet Viktor?”

“Oh, right,” Steff said, calming again. “Well… I could spend hours drilling you in specifics, but just remember the whole ‘object’ thing and you won’t go wrong. Try not to move unless you’re moved or told to move, stay where you’re put, don’t react if he handles you.”

“‘Handles’?” I repeated.

“Yeah. Not like sex play, per se, but more like… well, inspection. He will respect your safeword but it’s not in his culture to respect your space,” Steff said. “Oh, and we’ve got this neat soundproofing trick set up… partly so he won’t be disturbed when he’s ‘experimenting’ but it also comes in handy when we have guests… so, if you feel the need to scream, go ahead.”

“Scream?”

“Yeah,” Steff said, smiling. The familiar hunger was starting to come back into her eyes, mixed with the wistfulness she showed when she spoke about Viktor. It was… well, kind of a disquieting mix, actually. “He hasn’t said anything one way or the other, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that he’ll want to watch me, you know… hurt on you a bit, to prove you’re sturdy as I said.”

“Oh,” I said, shrinking back a little. Instead of being encouraged as she normally would have been, Steff reacted to this as if cold water had been dashed in her face.

“Shit, honey, if you don’t want to… I mean, you know your safeword, right?” Steff said. “Anyway, I’d never actually harm you… though considering your nature, that leaves quite a lot of things wide open… oh, shit.” She’d managed to get hard again. “Fuck! Why the hell won’t this stupid thing just lie down and die?”

“I thought you loved your thing,” I said.

“I hate it!” Steff said, turning away. “I hate it so fucking much!”

“Steff, seriously… are you okay?” I asked, reaching for her shoulder.

“Don’t touch me!” she said, whirling around. I watched her compose herself with an effort, though she was still breathing hard. “Okay… I’m okay.”

“Steff…”

“I said I’m okay,” she said. She smiled. “Let’s go meet my man.”