The question of exactly what to tell Amaranth and how to tell her began to weigh on me as soon as I closed the compact… I couldn’t lie to her, but I didn’t want to put her in an awkward spot in dealing with Lee. The easiest way to do it would be to tell her that he had thought of someone else who might know and could be convinced to come forward. That was the truth… or at least it was true, which was almost the same thing… and it might not be all that different from how I would have explained it if he hadn’t impressed the need for secrecy onto me.

But he had, and that meant that anything short of the whole truth… both what I knew and what I suspected… would feel like a lie. I’d lived my life by such “technical truths” before. It had been part of my initial strategy for dealing with life at MU, and it had been Amaranth who had first made me question whether it was any better than lying.

That Amaranth didn’t come to bed with me didn’t so much take away the pressure as much as it left me to suffer under it all night. I didn’t have any unwelcome visitors in my dreams that night, but that may have been a side effect of never falling into a deep enough sleep long enough to have any proper dreams. Every time I woke up I found myself treading over the same ground in my head.

Deciding to speak up and tell the truth should have made everything simpler, but things were only getting more complicated… I was back to half-truths and keeping things from people I cared about.

Of course, we’d made things complicated by trying to have the best of both worlds by sharing our information but keeping out of the investigation. I didn’t think I could be blamed for that… I’d already been more entangled in it than I should have been because of what I was. I couldn’t be blamed and it couldn’t be helped. Not unless I wanted to take a gamble on a straight-up anonymous tip.

By the time morning came around, I’d more or less made peace with the decision. This didn’t mean I was feeling great about what I’d have to tell Amaranth… or about the likelihood that I’d run into Feejee sometime before the hammer came down, knowing what I’d put into motion while she was none the wiser… but I’d accepted that it was likely to be the best of several bad choices.

I could avoid the bathroom for a while. I’d miss baths, but a couple days without showering wouldn’t kill me.

I was already awake when Two began preparing for her meditation session, though I begged off accompanying her… I needed more rest to make up for my lack of actual sleep. When I did decide I’d had enough of lying there in the semi-darkness, it was earlier than I needed to be up for breakfast or anything else… Two wasn’t even back yet. I had a moment of regretting that I hadn’t gone with her… what was the point of regretting? Learn from it and move on, I thought, and felt kind of better for it.

I’d spent the night beating myself up over things that were perhaps at least worth wrestling with a bit, but how to spend an hour of the morning wasn’t it.

I decided to go out and take a shower. It was cold in the dorm room and hot water sounded nice… if I ran into Feejee, well, that was going to happen eventually. I wouldn’t be lingering right near her in the other bathtub or anything, I’d just breeze past. Chances were good she’d be still be asleep, anyway.

I got my things together and headed for the door, but froze at the sound of voices on the other side of it. It was a little bit early for conversation in the hall. I was used to stray sounds coming in through the front of the room, as people headed towards the lounge or the stairs, but people didn’t really hang out in the hallway that much, and they especially didn’t do it early in the morning.

Very carefully, I leaned my head in close to the door and then put my ear against it. I wasn’t interested in eavesdropping… I just wanted to see if I could recognize the voices. I was interested in knowing who I might end up having to walk through to get to where I was going.

“…not going to… for you,” was the first thing that I heard. I couldn’t make out the whole thing, and I didn’t recognize the voice.

“Nobody’s asking you to spy,” said another voice, that I did recognize: Trina. “Just help Gladys here get into position where she can find something out.”

It probably said something that I assumed they were talking about spying on me, but they did seem to be pretty close to my door. On the other hand it wasn’t smart to discuss their plan so close to the intended target, but if one person was getting cold feet then Trina and Gladys might not have any choice.

The next thing I heard was a kind of buzzing hiss. I couldn’t tell if somebody was whispering and it was carrying weirdly, or if it was something else entirely.

I put my eye to the peephole… I could see Trina, Mariel, who was gesticulating urgently with all four arms and saying something to the speaker whose voice I hadn’t quite recognized: Twyla. Gladys wasn’t in sight, but the group was clustered just at the edge of the peephole’s distorted field of vision.

I hadn’t had nearly as much contact with Twyla, good or bad, as I had with some of the other girls on our floor. It was easy enough to forget that she was there. I wasn’t the least bit surprised to find that the other girls were trying to bully her into doing their dirty work for them.

I realized that whether or not they were talking about me, I could break up their little meeting and at least temporarily end Twyla’s predicament just by opening the door at that moment. Having realized that, I felt something cold and hard twisting its way around through the lower regions of my torso. I’d come a long way from feeling like I was going to throw up whenever people looked at me, but that didn’t mean I was comfortable just jumping into the spotlight.

Being led around on a stage by Amaranth was one thing… she was my owner, I was fulfilling my function as her toy… but race aside, Trina and Mariel were every bit the kind of girls whose attention I’d tried and failed to avoid in high school.

That thought was still crossing my mind when my hand went for the doorknob. The fact that it stuck a little meant there was no chance of dramatically throwing the door open and catching them off-guard, but Trina and Twyla were still standing there when I got it open. Mariel and Gladys were nowhere to be seen. Mariel moved very quickly and seemed to perceive time at a very different rate from the rest of us, and evidently Gladys had a similarly incredible reaction time and speed.

I thought about throwing out a chipper “Good morning” or something, but I wasn’t sure I could manage more than an awkward “hi”. I wasn’t even sure I could handle that. I managed to stop myself from feeling guilty at having busted them… they were the guilty ones, and the look on Trina’s face dispelled any doubt from my mind that I was the target of the planned espionage. She didn’t say anything, though, she just turned and walked off.

“You… um… might not want to stand there with your door open,” Twyla said, before heading down the hall towards the stairs or the bathroom.

“Um, thanks?” I said, then stepped back and closed the door.

What had that been about? Good advice for somebody with nosy neighbors, but what the hell could anybody see by looking in through my open door? Trina and company’s sudden interest in the goings-on they imagined to be… going on… in my room was no doubt related to Leda’s death, which meant that they suspected I had something to do with it. But since I didn’t, there was no evidence in my room, much less anything that you could see just by walking past when the door happened to be open. Still, I didn’t necessarily want gawkers hanging around outside of it… and I really didn’t want people trying to eavesdrop on what was happening inside it.

It hit me that what they’d probably been asking Twyla for was access to her room. It was right next to mine. I wondered why they’d be going to her and not her roommates, but I didn’t exactly keep up with the dorm politics of people who didn’t like me.

Since I couldn’t manage a shell of silence like the one Lee had used through my mirror, I’d have to ask Steff if she had a spare sound-damping blanket I could hang over that wall… that would put a serious crimp in their plan.

I waited until Two got back before I went to take my shower. Mercifully, Twyla wasn’t in there, and even more mercifully, neither was Feejee. The bathroom was empty except for us, and nobody else came in until we passed Celia on the way out. It was an eerie reminder that with Sooni and her entourage and Dee gone, there were at least three dorm rooms standing empty because of Leda’s death.

That could be another reason Trina had been leaning on Twyla instead of going to the Leightons, I realized. Maybe they weren’t around to let her friend into their room.

Amaranth looked to be in a very good mood when she came upstairs to walk to breakfast with us. Once we were outside, she pulled on my arm to get me to walk a bit behind Two. That suited me, since I had things I needed to talk to her about, too.

“You know what you were saying yesterday,” she said, “about how they wouldn’t necessarily take my word at face value because I’m just a nymph?”

“I’m not sure that’s exactly how I put it,” I said.

“Oh, baby, I’m not saying I took it personally,” she said. “But you were right. It’s not that I have any special legal standing, it’s just my mother’s protection. So I was thinking about how to make my idea work, and I think I’ve come up with something.”

“Amaranth… we already contacted Lee,” I said.

“Yes, but I figured it would be at least today before he got back to you, and in the mean time I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” she said. “And once I did, the answer seemed so obvious, so simple. I couldn’t believe I didn’t think of it when we were first talking about this.”

“Well, the thing is… Lee did get back to me last night,” I said. “And, uh, he also had a kind of simple solution. Simple-ish. It doesn’t need anything from us, it keeps me out of it completely.”

“Oh,” Amaranth said. It sounded like there was some disappointment in her voice.

“Of course, I’d still like to hear what you came up with… it might be useful, if we ever… um… if this situation… it might be interesting,” I said.

I couldn’t even pretend I thought that we’d ever have a use for Amaranth’s plan.

If the same situation ever came up again, I was going to quit and move to another, less absurd plane of existence.

“Well… the thing is… I thought it was such a simple and obvious solution… elegant really,” she said, “that I couldn’t see any reason to wait…”

“Amaranth, you didn’t,” I said. I felt like the ground beneath my feet and the bottom of my stomach were both in a race to get to the bottom of a deep pit.

“Baby, you don’t even know what I did,” she said. “I promise you, it’s a really great idea, or else I wouldn’t have…”

“Well, what is it, then?” I asked.

“Like I told you: you made me realize that the problem is that the protection I have doesn’t belong to me, but my mother,” Amaranth said. “She is the one that the Imperium respects enough to back off of, not me. So…”

“So you asked her to get involved?” I said. Somehow I felt relieved… I didn’t know Mother Khaele, but somehow I couldn’t imagine she’d casually get involved in mortal legal affairs, and I had to believe she was used to being petitioned by Amaranth that she’d be inclined not to take her requests seriously. When she appeared on TV, she made the point about how often people died, right before a giant monster wave made the point for her.

“Not directly,” Amaranth said, which sounded even better.

“Indirectly involved?”

“I asked her sort of indirectly,” Amaranth said. “I mean, I thought if I just up and asked her she’d probably shut me down out of hand… she’s sort of getting in the habit of not really listening to me, sometimes. Also, she wasn’t available when I tried to commune. So I… well, it’s basically the equivalent of leaving a reflection. She’ll get the message when she gets back from… the thing she didn’t tell me that she was going to be doing this week.”

“She’s gone all week?” I asked, not even bothering to try to parse how a goddess could be “gone” or where she’d go to.

“That’s what it seems like,” Amaranth said, her lower lip wobbling. I gathered that this was a new experience for her.

“Well, then you just have to leave a new message for her,” I said. “Because Lee’s already taking care of it. Um… since you’re the one who left the echo, you could always just say that you handled it yourself.”

“I guess,” she said. I couldn’t tell what she was more bothered by: that her elegant and simple idea wouldn’t be used, or that Mother Khaele had apparently stepped out.

Actually, as soon as I thought that, it seemed obvious… and I felt a little unworthy of her for even thinking it. Of course she was bothered by the thought that her brilliant plan wouldn’t fix everything. She was Amaranth. But it was even more obvious that she wasn’t bothered half as much by that as she was by the fact that her mother, her goddess… the only constant in her life now that she’d left her home and lost her closest companion… had gone away without telling her.

Personally, I didn’t think that a goddess actually needed to update all of her followers with her travel itinerary, and Mother Khaele had evidently used some means of letting her daughters know that she was away and when she’d be back. Pointing that out to Amaranth didn’t seem terribly helpful, and I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I just hugged her.

That turned out to be the right thing to do.

“Thank you, baby,” she said when we were done. There were tears in her eyes and on her cheeks, but she was already done crying. “So… what did Lee say?”

“His thoughts were actually pretty close to yours,” I said, figuring this out as I said it. “Get someone, you know, powerful and credible to give the information. He had someone in mind but, you know, since the whole point is that we have nothing to do with it, we’re not supposed to know. Or talk about it.”

“That makes sense,” Amaranth said.

“So, basically… we can sit back and things should sort themselves out,” I said. “As much as they can be.”

“I need clarification!” Two yelled, from maybe thirty feet up the path. Two had a habit of shouting… and whispering… like a very small child, or someone who was accustomed to talking at one set volume. She understood the theory behind modulating what came out of her mouth, but the finer points of variation escaped her.

“We’re still going to breakfast with you, hon,” Amaranth called. “You can go ahead or wait for us to catch up.”

“Are you going to be doing anything before catching up?”

“We’ll be right there,” I said.

“Then I’ll wait,” Two said.

We didn’t keep her waiting long.

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Friday: Ian brings important news to the table, plus Goldman’s class.

“The investigators have set up shop here, on the first floor,” he said, frowning. “I wasn’t really expecting that.”

“Does that mean we should go somewhere else?” I asked hopefully.

“No, I don’t think so… they’ve asked students to stay in their own residence halls as much as possible,” Lee said. “Let’s head on in and get the lay of the land.”

We clambered out of the coach and headed down the slightly uneven concrete steps to the front patio. Lee entered the basement lounge ahead of us, holding open the door.

The room was fuller than I’d seen it any other time since the first weekend and its hall-wide meeting. It wasn’t just students, either. Some of the larger groups were sitting with humans, who I figured were their resident advisers, judging by their ages. The dean of non-human students, who probably hadn’t been back in Harlowe since the first weekend, was talking quietly to a couple of guys who were probably either somebody’s lawyers or plain clothes investigators.

The gorgon girl who lived in the room directly beneath me was standing with a couple of figures in all-encompassing black cloaks similar to the ones that Dee wore, and another person who looked like a humanoid mushroom standing about three and a half feet tall.

“It looks like there was an all-night Veil party,” Lee said.

It took me a moment to figure out what he was talking about… he was looking at Sooni, who was dressed in her latest Science Princess outfit. Maliko and Suzi were huddled around her. Sooni was bawling her eyes out, Maliko looked scared. Suzi looked oddly serene, as if she possibly didn’t understand what was happening.

Arrayed around them were men who looked like body guards… easterners, three who looked human and two who were canine yokai.

Interestingly, Kai was standing just outside the ring of bodyguards, looking sort of adorably stern in her baby clothes. She had a weapon belt strapped around her padded diaper, with a pair of long and short curved swords and wicked-pronged throwing blades.

“No, that’s actually just… Sunday morning,” I said.

“Ah, well… looks like Gregory’s not at the Crystal Palace any more but he hasn’t turned up here yet, either,” Lee said quietly, his eyes going back down to his tablet. “He might be at the admin building. Most of the agents and officers on premises are blanks to me… I don’t want any contact between them and you if he’s not in earshot of an uproar.”

“Is this one guy really going to make that much difference?” Ian asked. “I mean, if someone decides to play a little game of blackguard, paladin, with us don’t you think we can count on at least one honest cop hearing? Dorms aren’t known for efficient soundproofing.”

“Mike Gregory’s one of the ‘good guys’, no doubt about that,” Lee said. “But that’s not why I want him. I told you, I spent part of the morning studying him.”

“Um, no offense,” Ian said, “but I really hope you’re not staking everything on some hunch you gleaned from reading news clippings. I admit I don’t know much about these things except what I’ve seen on TV… but that sounds like something I’ve seen on TV.”

I nodded my own agreement. I trusted Lee… but I wasn’t sure what he could have learned in an hour or two that would make him seem so certain.

“Let’s just say that my firm’s information on Mr. Gregory is better than news clippings,” Lee said.

“What, do you have a psych profile or something?” Ian asked.

“I really can’t say anything about the specific nature of the information,” Lee said.

“Holy shit,” Ian said.

“Please do us all a favor and don’t go jumping to conclusions, or spreading them around,” Lee said. “Now, I’d rather not leave you completely alone but I’m kind of on my own here for the time being. Will the three of you be okay sitting tight here while I go up and have a chat with the people on-site here?”

Ian and Amaranth both looked at me. I knew they weren’t deferring to me. It looked more like they were sizing me up somehow… maybe wondering how well I’d handle myself if someone confronted us, or if I’d say or do something rash.

While that kind of concern had some basis ordinarily, I resented the idea that I couldn’t be counted on to control myself when it counted.

“Yeah, we’ll be fine,” I said, trying to force myself to be nonchalant. “Go on, have fun.” Okay, maybe I could stand being a little more chalant than that. “I mean, do what you have to.”

“Right,” Lee said. “If anyone official… imperial, provincial, school, or other… wants to talk to you, tell them your attorney is upstairs and will be with them shortly. Don’t listen to anyone who says you don’t need me. I’ll make this as quick as I can.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll be polite but firm,” Amaranth said.

“Okay, but if someone presses you to the point that balancing those two things becomes tricky, make sure you remember which of them is optional,” Lee said. “I’ll be back.”

He left us alone. We all looked at each other, but nobody said anything. Amaranth stirred as if she were about to speak and break the silence, but then she seemed to think better of it. It was like she shrank back inside herself.

The atmosphere inside the main lounge was somber. That didn’t seem too odd, considering that Leda was dead, but it was surprising that so many people would seem so deeply affected by her death. Sooni was the only one who was weeping so openly, but there were more tears throughout the room.

Harlowe was a place of insular cliques, in my experience… and indeed, the room was full of islands of people with no more than half a dozen students in each and many smaller than that. Leda had been standoffish… at the risk of speaking ill of the dead, she’d been more than a bit of a snob.

Then I became aware of an undercurrent to the scene: fear. I could feel it, I could smell it… and once I knew it was there I could see it on the faces of everyone in the room.

One of their own… our own… had died, been killed. Imperial suspicion was on someone from our building. Who wouldn’t be afraid? The fierce and feral-seeming had to worry about being accused and brought to trial for a crime they might not have done… or worse, accused and not brought to trial. The more conventionally vulnerable had to worry about becoming victims themselves.

I was probably creating a dichotomy that didn’t exist, I realized. I myself was proof that someone could look innocuous by human standards and still be both physically powerful and dangerous. The gnomish students would probably garner little suspicion, but everyone else would be fair game for the investigators.

Lee had kept my mind on my plight, my defense, to the extent that I hadn’t had much thought for the question of who might have done it. Now I found my mind turning to that subject.

The fact that Leda had been human-like and killed in water suggested one very strong possibility to me… or rather, one or two of them. If she bore bite marks and was torn apart to the point that resurrection didn’t seem to be in the cards for her royal personage, as it seemed was the case, then that made it even more likely.

Suspicion wasn’t proof… although it might turn out to be just as good for the imperials if it gave them a satisfactory resolution. Lee seemed like a good guy, and he definitely had my back… but that was the thing. He had my back. I was sure he’d want me to share my information about the mermaids if he thought it would help me out.

I couldn’t even say that he’d be wrong to do so. I hadn’t killed anyone. Feejee and Iona, by their own admission, had. Would it be such a terrible injustice if… say, Iona… were to take the blame for this one?

Of course it would, I realized. Someone had killed Leda. Trying to punish Iona for unrelated deaths without knowing for sure she was responsible for this one would only mean someone else might get away with murder.

And, of course, I’d had no interest in seeing Iona punished before doing so coincided with a chance to shield my own ass.

But maybe I was overthinking it… the investigators weren’t going to take the unsupported word of a demonblood murder suspect as damning evidence. They’d at least check Iona out because I had a lawyer who would use it against them if they ignored a tip that could clear me, and they’d either find proof of her involvement or…

…or the’d discover that under her smooth, red-tinged skin, she was hiding something a lot scarier looking than any demon and forget about finding evidence of anything else.

Also, I was thinking of this in terms of blaming Iona, but there was no way I could shield Feejee. While Feejee was hardly innocent… she seemed to be, in some ways, an innocent. She knew nothing but her people’s own peculiar system of morality. There was no connection in her mind between the idea of humans as people she could talk to and befriend and humans she could eat… or there was no conflict between the two.

I couldn’t wrap my mind around it, either way. I had the feeling that if she ate me, she might miss me afterwards, but I didn’t expect any remorse.

If Leda hadn’t died in water, I would be pretty sure Feejee hadn’t been involved. That she had been killed in the fountain muddied the… metaphorical water. It might even have made it more likely to be her than Iona… I could see Feejee not giving a second thought to the victim’s identity or standing as long as she was in water.

On the other hand, I could also see Iona just not caring. Feejee could overwhelm me with fear when she shifted into her less human-looking states. Iona was just plain scary, no matter what face she wore.

“Holy shit!” Ian said.

“What?” I said, looking around.

Hovering over the underworld contingent was what could only be the observer Lee had described as “some sort of eyeless fish-beast”… it was at least five feet across, generally flat and maybe three feet tall at the center, with wavy fringed fins protruding a foot and a half farther on each side. The front of it seemed to be all mouth, except for a small knob over the center of it from which a pair of whisker-like undulating antennae protruded. Its coloration was… hard to describe.

Dark and glistening, but just when I thought I was getting a handle on exactly what dark and glistening color it was, my mind slipped off it.

“Did I miss that thing somehow, or did it just show up?” Ian asked just as the thing faded back out of sight. “Oh,” he said. “Well, that’s… interesting.”

“It probably exists simultaneously on multiple planes,” Amaranth said. “Physical, ethereal…”

“The ether doesn’t extend that deep below the surface,” I said. “Probably some place stranger than that… somewhere that’s farther removed from anywhere up here. That could be why it seems to have trouble manifesting.”

It shimmered back into view, slowly turning in the air as it did. I had a distinct sense of unease as I realized that it was “looking” towards us, its long, whippy appendages streaming out through the air. Something rolled over me… a feeling like being pounded by a cold, strangely dry surf, and then the thing reoriented itself back the way it had been.

“Oh, so that’s how you say ‘mind your own business’ in extraplanar fishese,” Ian said. “I’ve been wondering.”

“Actually, it was just saying hi,” Amaranth said. “Introducing itself.”

“What’s it doing now?” Ian asked.

The fish turned its attention towards the door at the back corner of the room, where the stairwell to the boys’ side was. A moment later, the door swung open so hard and fast that I thought perhaps its attention had caused it to move, but then Dee came flying through it in a dark-dark green robe… as far as I could tell, her feet were on the ground, but there was really no other word for it but flying. She used the unearthly smooth elven stride, but she crossed the room over to the group of her compatriots far too quickly to call it “gliding”.

Her appearance took them by surprise. I could imagine the substance of what Dee was saying had something to do with her obligations to Steff, though I couldn’t understand a word of what she was saying, or even hear what the cloaked elves said to her in response. They were either sticking to telepathy or modulating their voices to a degree Dee wasn’t bothering to do. They seemed deeply concerned with her state of dress, though… one of them actually stripped off her cloak, revealing herself to have spiky black hair, and tried to throw it over Dee’s body. Dee batted it aside mentally, her voice getting slightly louder.

“Do you think we should go help her?” Amaranth asked.

“It looks like she’s doing okay to me,” Ian said.

“We probably shouldn’t be getting involved with anything right now,” I said. “Remember what Lee said?”

“I think we could support our friend without getting entangled with officialdom,” Amaranth said.

“Right, except we’d be supporting her to ambassadors or lawyers or oathspeakers or whoever those are,” I said.

“Looks like it doesn’t matter anyway,” Ian said, as Dee threw up her arms and then turned and zipped back towards the door.

The woman who’d taken off her cloak made a lunge for her, but the other one grabbed her arm and held her back. As soon as Dee was out of sight, the uncloaked one shook her head sadly, then let out an audible “oh!” and disappeared. The discarded cloak seemed to pick itself up and then settled itself into an elf-sized shape.

“Apparently they’re privacy advocates?” Ian said.

There was a loud scoffing sound from behind us. I turned to see Trina had just come in. All three of her eyes looked bleary and red.

“I can’t believe you’re joking at a time like this,” she said. “Or actually, I can. Come on, Gladys,” she said half over her shoulder, apparently not even realizing that her friend had fallen behind her at some point and wasn‘t even in sight. “Let’s go find Mariel.”

“…she sure told me?” Ian said as Trina headed for the stairs.

“Everybody deals with tragedy differently,” Amaranth said.

I thought that maybe Trina’s way of dealing with it differently was by dealing with it exactly the same way she dealt with everything else, but I didn’t say that. I looked around the room, looking for something else to say, something else to talk about… and I was again struck by the amount of fear there seemed to be. Some people even had the look on their face that I recognized as being a certain kind of “guilty”… the look that says you know you’re going to be punished and you at least halfway feel you deserve it, irrespective of anything you’ve actually done. It looks the same as being guilty to a lot of people… particularly people who think that the innocent don’t have any reason to fear punishment.

“I think the really sad thing is that no one’s really dealing with what happened yet,” I said. “I don’t know who’d be mourning Leda, but right now everybody’s worried about what happens next… everybody’s waiting for the hammer to fall.”

“We’re sort of lucky, in a way,” Amaranth said, nodding. “Or we will be, if Lee’s right and he can get them to move on from you fairly quickly. You know you’re under suspicion, and you can look forward to a quick resolution.”

“I can hope for one,” I said. “It’s not a guarantee. I think I’d rather not be under suspicion in the first place.”

“Well, yes, but you can’t choose that, any more than you were able to choose your birth,” Amaranth said. “And even the people who don’t share your circumstances are under a cloud… they just don’t know exactly how bad it is yet.”

“Amaranth… I know you’re trying to look on the bright side, but it sounds to me like you’re talking about ’having a big enough problem to notice it’ like it’s a good thing,” I said. “And yeah, Lee’s got confidence and I’ve got confidence in him, but he‘s always been pretty upfront about the fact that there are no guarantees. There are a lot of things that could go wrong… there’s no way of knowing for sure that I’ll be cleared of suspicion, much less that it‘ll happen quickly.”

“Um, your coat’s buzzing,” Ian said.

“Oh!” I said, and I pulled my mirror out of my coat pocket and flipped it open. “It’s Lee,” I said for the others’ benefit as I accepted the reflection. “Hello?”

“Hello, Mackenzie?” he said. “Yes, I think things either got a whole lot simpler or more complicated. They have a demon expert here insisting there was no infernal handiwork in the killing.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” Amaranth said, leaning over my shoulder. “Wouldn’t that make things simpler for Mack?”

“For a demonblood who’s under suspicion?” Lee said. “Very likely yes. For Mackenzie Blaise? That depends.”

“Depends on what?” I asked.

“On your relationship to a Martha Blaise.”

Next time: Do you really need a teaser?

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“Is everything okay?” Ian asked her.

“So far,” she said. “I need to talk to my Mack later, about something… but you guys have fun, okay?”

“About what?” I asked. As if I didn’t have enough to be worried about already without one more thing hanging over my head… well, okay, so it was probably statistically likely that what she wanted to talk to me about was just one of the things that was already hanging over my head. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing!” she said. “Nothing new, I mean… I just think that maybe we might want to have a talk with Ian about a few things, before… before tomorrow.”

“Before tomorrow?” Ian said. “That would be tonight.”

“I mean, before tomorrow night,” Amaranth said. “I want to talk to Mack about some things so that we can talk to you, probably sometime tomorrow during the day, before it’s too…morrow night.”

“Before it’s too ‘morrow night’ for what, exactly?” Ian asked.

“Nothing, probably!” Amaranth said. “Hopefully… probably. Almost definitely. But I don’t want to just blurt it all out, I need to talk to Mack about it first.”

“Wow, you all have some complicated lives,” Winnie said, and then she giggled nervously. I winced. I was getting a headache.

“Can you excuse us?” Ian said. “Mackenzie wanted to dance.”

“Oh, sure,” Amaranth said. “Please, go on… enjoy yourselves.”

We moved away from Winnie and her, but instead of putting his arms back around me, Ian said, “So what is it she wants to talk to me about, eventually?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Could be a couple of different things…”

“Oh, that’s good to know.”

“I don’t want to talk about anything right now,” I said. “I just want to dance, okay?”

As I said that, the nice slow love song that was playing hit a long sustained note and then faded away. A peppy faux-elven song with a fast crystal bell beat started playing… it wasn’t my kind of thing at all, but I tried moving my arms a little bit. Ian made a valiant effort to get into the groove, but his heart just wasn’t into it, and I was just not enough of a natural dancer to keep it up without someone to dance back at.

As we were not talking and I didn’t have anything else to distract me, my eyes took in the crowd. There was a group of girls… Argenti, or probably Argenti-Imperials… sitting on one of the couches by the nearer the edge of the dance area. They were wearing feathered and beaded masks and stylish dresses, like it was a real masquerade ball and not a Veil party full of college students.

I felt a twinge of envy… they’d obviously spent some time planning things out, and then selecting just the right masks and outfits to set them off. Ian had made a good effort at coming up with a costume, but it was cheap and gaudy and while that was very much in the spirit of the occasion I felt like if I’d just made a little effort a little earlier, I could have come up with something more… well, just something more.

I made up my mind not to leave it to the last minute, next time… whether “next time” was another costume party or whatever. I’d be ready.

They looked poised and confident… one wearing black just radiated the kind of cool self-assurance that normally left me feeling tiny and insignificant. Maybe I was maturing a little, but it didn’t bother me. If anything, I caught a little of it myself. I felt a bit less self-conscious and started moving a little bit more.

I felt kind of good… dancing felt kind of good, and it was better than standing there moping about stuff I couldn’t do a thing about at the moment. I had the weirdest flash of deja vu at that feeling, but it didn’t last long.

“Guess you caught the bug finally,” Ian said, as we both picked up the pace a little.

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. I gave him a smile, raised my hands and shook my hips a little bit… it felt weird, but it must not have looked terrible because he moved in a little closer.

“Somebody slip you a potion?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I just… maybe it’s the fact that it’s Veil? It was my favorite when I was a kid. My mom said…” I trailed off, something connecting in my head. “I guess that’s it.”

“You guess what’s what?”

“Why I felt so good all of a sudden,” I said.

“Because it’s Veil?” he asked.

“No, because… well, it’s kind of silly,” I said.

“What?”

“I just kind of feel like I did when I got home from school and I wasn’t feeling so great, but my mom would give me a smile and… well, it was hard to be sad around my mom. I don’t know if that makes any kind of sense.”

“Sure it does,” Ian said. “She was your mom.”

We danced our way through a few songs. People came and went, the occupants of the couch changed a couple of times, but eventually we’d moved out more towards the middle of the floor.

I was doing a pretty good job of avoiding looking at Puddy, but in doing so I caught sight of Trina and her body-painted friend, half-dancing next to each other while Trina ran her mouth… I really couldn’t understand the appeal of body paint, in a school full of glamour students. I might have supposed that Semele just plain didn’t know anyone who could glam her, but I thought Trina and Mariel were semi-tight. I couldn’t imagine she wouldn’t have tipped Gladys off.

And it was a lame costume. I might have been wearing a fur bikini, but at least I was something. She was just… naked and green and glittery. There was a whole crowd of guys dancing around her. Some of them weren’t even dancing, just standing there and ogling her.

“Who are you staring at?” Ian asked. He started to move around me.

“I’m just looking, not staring,” I said. “At Gladys, the painted girl… and don’t you look, she’ll think we’re staring.”

“Oh, we wouldn’t want that.”

“How come she gets all those guys hanging off her, anyway?” I asked.

“Do you want more guys hanging off you?” Ian replied.

“I mean, compared to Amaranth,” I said. I looked back over at her and saw that since we left her, she had attracted a guy or three, but they weren’t staring at her body with as much open interest as Gladys was attracting, and one of them actually seemed to be looking at Winnie for some reason. “When there’s a completely nude and incredibly gorgeous nymph around, why would anyone…”

“You’re doing it again,” Ian said. “Or maybe still.”

“What?”

“Do you even know that girl?” he said. “Or are you just ragging on her because you don’t like her friend?”

“They don’t like me,” I said.

He stopped dancing and just stared at me.

“What?” I said.

“Mackenzie, I don’t mean to be… mean, but… did you have any friends in high school?”

“Yeah, everyone wanted to be friends with the cool demon girl,” I said. “I didn’t.”

“How about elementary school?”

“I don’t know, I guess I was just pretty much normal, I guess,” I said. “I wasn’t, you know, the super-popular one, but I kind of turned around the age that stuff gets really pronounced, anyway. But I had friends. School friends, anyway.”

“You were, what… nine when it happened?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh,” he said.

“What?”

“Well, you kind of act like a third grader about this stuff sometimes,” he said. “I just wonder if maybe that’s got something to do with it.”

“You really think I act like a third grader?”

“Um… sometimes,” he said. “About certain things. Don’t get all mad…”

“I’m not all mad,” I said. “I’m hurt.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t be,” he said. “I’m not just saying this to be a dick, Mackenzie.”

“Yes, the fact that you really mean it makes it less hurtful,” I said.

“I just thought that maybe if I pointed out what you were doing, you could learn to recognize it when you do it yourself, and that could be the first step in, you know… not doing it,” he said.

“So now you’re trying to fix me?” I said.

“No,” he said. “I’m not that stupid. But I am stupid enough to think I can help you, if you want to fix yourself. Or, you know, make a personal improvement… maybe that’s a better way to put it.”

“Just answer me straight up,” I said. “Do you even like me?”

“I like you plenty, a lot of the time,” he said. “I’d like to like you more often. But what I’d really like is if you were…”

“If I were what, exactly?” I asked.

“Happier.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. Righteous anger had been ready as my default, but that wasn’t going to work.

“Mackenzie, I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have…”

“No,” I said. “You’re right. It isn’t fun being like that… I guess my first reaction is to defend whatever it is I’m doing, but if I stop and actually look at it, I’m not really proud of myself.” I sighed. It didn’t seem likely that I’d be able to recapture the same feeling I’d had before I spotted Trina. “Maybe I should go.”

“Well, you shouldn’t be proud… but you don’t have to beat yourself up over it, either,” Ian said. “I mean, punishing yourself for it isn’t going to change what happened… is it going to actually change anything next time?”

“I don’t know, I like to think that Amaranth’s helped me change some,” I said. “A little, anyway.”

“Okay, but does she do that by making you feel even shittier about yourself, or because she gives you something to aim for?” he asked. “Come on… this is your first Veil party as a grown-up.”

“So I should act like one?”

“So you should enjoy it,” he said. “It’s a party. Dance. Meet people

“You know what?” I said. “I think maybe part of the problem is that even here, even when I go out, I’m not really meeting new people. I mean, you try… but a big campus party, or the drama students on lunch hour… there’s too many people. I’m not good with big groups. So I don’t really connect with anyone.”

“Winnie tried to connect with you.”

“Yeah, well, Winnie bugs me,” I said. “And maybe that’s not her fault, and maybe it’s not fair to her, and maybe I’m a horrible person, but I can’t just turn off a dislike like that.”

“Semele tried to connect with you,” he said. He smiled a little.

“Semele sounded more interested in disconnecting with me,” I said. “Maybe… maybe next week, we should do something together with people. Not like this, going to a place where other people are, but… you know. An activity. You know?”

“Oh, sure, all the kids are doing activities these days,” Ian said. “It’s the hot new thing.”

“Smartass,” I said. “I mean something like that time we played cards, only, you know, pick people you actually like and not, you know, the people who happen to be in your dorm and are antisocial enough to not have anything else to do on the weekend.”

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll do that, and this time, you don’t get drunk and try to eat and/or have sex with anyone.”

“This is it,” I said. “We have concocted the best plan ever.”

We both had a good, only semi-awkward laugh at that… but somehow that seemed to make Winnie’s laugh at something unrelated cut across the dance floor and find my ear.

“Hey, can we just get out of here?” I said.

“What, you want to go back to your room already?”

“No, just for a bit,” I said.

“You mean go outside? Aren’t you going to be cold?”

“Probably, but I just really need to get out of here,” I said. “Not for long… probably just until the cold makes me miserable enough to forget why I left here.”

“Okay,” Ian said, looking around. “Amaranth has your coat?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Could you please go get it for me?”

“Um, yeah, I don’t see her,” he said. I looked over to see that Winnie was talking to Semele, who looked like she’d just got out of the shower. “I could go look for her if you want, but I wouldn’t look very hard because I’m afraid I’d find her.”

“Maybe we can just go hang out in the hallway,” I said… right as a group of latecomers let out a bunch of screams.

“Oh, that’ll be fun,” he said. “Listen, this is a dorm… there’s going to be lounges on the floors, if you want to go up and just sit down somewhere quieter.”

“But are we allowed to just…”

“Oh, don’t do that,” Ian said. “I’m sure if we looked really carefully in the rulebooks there would be some little thing about students who are residents of a hall and hours of visitation or whatever, but… they’re hosting a party. They know there are going to be people who don’t live here hanging around.”

“Okay,” I said. “I just… I don’t like feeling like I’m going out of bounds.”

“Well, if we get up there and see a sign with a skull-and-crossbones on it, we’ll know to turn back,” Ian said. “Or else, you know, proceed with a lot of caution.”

Discuss this story on the Livejournal feed.

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

I had to admit, it worked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know about that,” Ian said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s a shocker,” Ian said.

“Oh, hush,” Amaranth said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mariel flitted over and buzzed angrily at her.

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

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

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

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

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

“That would take an illusion,” I said.

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

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

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

“Wow,” Ian said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Seems that way,” Ian said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I can’t believe that even at her…”

“At her what?” Hazel said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay,” Two said.

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

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

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

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

“Thanks, Two,” Ian said.

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

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

“What?” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re welcome, baby.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discuss this story.

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

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

This means she’s dreaming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you try what I said?”

“No,” Two says. “I did not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That isn’t very funny,” Two says.

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

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

“And who told you to sweep?”

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

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

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

“Miss Ruth says that practice makes perfect.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How will you know when you’re done?”

“When I’ve swept the whole place.”

“But it’s endless.”

“Yes,” Two says, and she smiles.

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

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

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

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

“You aren’t supposed to hate anybody.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah,” Moeli said. “I did.”

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

“I do, too,” Moeli says.

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

“No shit?” Moeli says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hello, Two,” he says.

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

“Sweeping? I thought you were dreaming.”

“I can do both,” Two says.

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

“I know,” she says.

“I’m a teddy bear,” he adds.

“Yes.”

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

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

And onward she sweeps.

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

Nobody else sees. Nobody else knows.

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

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

How much longer can this go on?

How long before the school’s overrun?

Something must be done.

Something must be done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some dreams are simpler than others.

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

Feejee dreams of blood in the water.

Iona dreams of blood.

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

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

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

“Hey, hey Two!”

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

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

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

“You never dream about them here, either.”

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

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

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

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

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

“But have you considered the ramifications of that?”

“No,” she says.

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

“Yes,” she says.

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

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

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

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

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

No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her mother is a nekoyokai.

“Mother… you’re…?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But you are.”

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

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

It’s the war again.

The bridge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about The?”

“She bugs out, too.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Need to know basis.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She knows what’s coming next.

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

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

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

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

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

And so the dream went.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” Two repeats decisively.

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

“You are mistaken.”

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

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

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

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

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

After messing around the ethernet function a little, I decided to try for Ian before I got too absorbed, but he wasn’t answering. I reluctantly closed the mirror on my way up the stairs after the third time I caught my foot on a step… the last thing I wanted was to break it the first day I had it. There was no telling how long I’d get to keep it, or if the next replacement would be half as cool.

I opened it back up as soon as I got to what I thought was my floor, and then found myself trying to force my key into the lock of what turned out to be room 317 while gazing at a Mecknights tapestry I hadn’t checked for a while. The door opened from inside and I stumbled forward, bouncing off the flat chest of a scaly, snake-haired girl I didn’t recognize.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Uh…” I said, then realized what I’d done. “Wrong floor, sorry.”

Dozens of little yellow eyes rolled and she shut the door in my face.

“Who was that?” somebody said inside the closed room.

“That spazz from upstairs.”

“Oh my kosh, I have to tell Trina right now.”

Cheeks burning, I managed to keep the mirror closed on my way back to the stairwell and up to the actual fifth floor. I was back at the tapestry again by the time I was at my door, though I tore my eyes from it to check the number before I tried to jam my key into the lock. That probably would have gone a little bit better if I’d kept my eyes on what I was doing. I was still fighting with it when I heard Steff calling “Hey!” from the end of the hall.

I turned to see her coming out of Oru and Shiel’s room.

“Hey, yourself,” I said.

“Is that a new mirror?” Steff asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Pendragon was having problems with theirs, and… I guess I lucked out.”

“Awesome,” she said. “So… how was the big date?”

“Surreal,” I said. “I think we made a kind of progress, though.”

Steff grinned from ear to ear.

“Oh, you nailed her, didn’t you, you little slut?” she said.

I shook my head.

“She nailed you?” Steff asked. “I’ll be the first to admit I’m not clear on all the options when it’s all scabbards and no swords.”

I glanced at Sooni’s closed door, and then gestured towards my room.

“Let’s get out of the hall and I’ll tell you about it,” I said. We headed into my room, where I did my best to explain what had happened, and how I had felt. I didn’t think I did a very good job of it.

“I guess I can kind of see that,” Steff said after I told her why I’d turned Sooni down.

“You’re the one who told me that rape is the absence of choice,” I said. “Sooni wasn’t being coerced, but she was doing what she thought she had to do. If it wouldn’t have been rape, it would have been… rape-ish?”

“Too close for comfort, anyway,” Steff said. She shook her head. “It would have been so incredible, though. You love everybody you have sex with, and that’s nice… but you need a healthy dose of hate to get really hot.”

“I don’t know about that… I think I do just fine with love. Anyway, I’m having a hard time hating Sooni right now,” I said. “That’ll probably change the next time I see her abusing her nekos… though, honestly, I’m having a hard time feeling sympathy for them, which is awful of me… no amount of Kai being bitchy excuses what Sooni puts her through.”

“You’re way too forgiving,” Steff sad. “When I don’t like somebody, I start imagining them enslaved and tortured in worse ways than bad cosplay.”

“Well, let’s just leave it at things are a lot more complicated in her life than I thought,” I said. “We aren’t having sex, and we aren’t enemies. I don’t know if we’re friends yet. She didn’t seem to want me to leave, though. Even after we spent the day together, she kept asking me to hang out more… she wanted me to go to the arena or the pool.”

“The pool?” Steff said, her eyes lighting up. “Mmm… you know, the deep end is like thirteen feet deep?”

“I’ll pass on that forever,” I said. “Five feet was deep enough for me.”

“Sorry,” Steff said, putting her hands on my hips and pulling me towards her. Her skirt was tenting out in front of her. “I just can’t get the image of you thrashing helplessly around out of my head… I’d love to get you alone in there sometime and just throw you in.”

“Steff, that would seriously scare the fuck out of me,” I said. I’d panicked when my feet had momentarily lost contact with the bottom in the penthouse pool… the idea of thirteen feet of water, more than twice my own height…

“I know,” Steff whispered, sliding around behind me, her dick poking into the back of my jeans. “I could tie a weight to your feet, or just wait for you to get tired… watch you sink to the bottom, and then slowly stop moving…”

“Let’s talk about something else,” I said. Even if drowning wouldn’t technically kill me, I didn’t really want to deal with Steff’s death fetish. “What were you doing in Oru’s room, anyway, watching the news?”

“What? No, it’s all that earthquake-tsunami and updates from overseas now,” Steff said. “Even the local people are hardly mentioning campus stuff any more, and what’s there is just rehashing. We’re playing stone soldiers… me and Hazel versus Shiel.”

“What, two against one?”

“Yeah, we had to combine our forces to make a decent army,” Steff said. “Hazel’s using her own forces that she had the dwarves churn out for her, and I’m using some humans I bought off Shiel and converted to undead.”

“Very necromantic,” I said.

Steff giggled.

“It’s all in the details,” she said. “Make the armor a little ragged, replace the eyes with gaping sockets, make some exposed bone… they’re a little crude, but I guess that kind of fits, right?”

“I guess, if you’re into that sort of thing,” I said. “So, where’s everybody else?”

“Well, Dee… went off somewhere. I think she’s praying or something. Two’s working, of course,” Steff said. “So is Amy. I gave her a pretty good going-over this morning, but she says she feels like she’s falling behind… if you ask me, she’s trying to score points with Mom, or prove that you’re not a distraction, or something.”

“Really?” I said. “It seemed to me… well, it kind of seemed like she was giving up.”

Steff shook her head.

“Don’t you believe it,” Steff said. “If I believed it, I’d be fucking some sense into her right now… she’s just trying to prepare herself for the worst, which is kind of pointless since if that happened, nothing would prepare her for it.”

“You don’t think it’s going to happen, then?” I asked. “You don’t think Mother Khaele is going to forbid her from being with me?”

“Hon, I think she’s going to realize she’s spent too much of her divine attention on such a small problem already,” Steff said.

“And she’s not going to take the next logical step of ending the relationship before it took any more of her time?” I asked. An image… or rather, a series of images… popped into my head. They differed in particulars: a lightning bolt splitting the air and striking me, the earth swallowing me up, a radiant column of light obliterating me… basic wrath-of-the-gods stuff. “Or flexing the tiniest little bit of her divine might and ending me?”

“Mack, she isn’t going to just up and kill one of her nymphs’ girlfriends,” Steff said.

“Are you sure about that?” I asked. Now that I’d thought about it, the idea was darkly irresistible. “You saw her talking to that reporter at the festival, right? People are dying every second and she shrugs it off. A little elemental upheaval and one hundred thousand people are dead. Do you think she batted an eye at that? She just added that to the tally and then went on to the next disaster.”

“That’s a little different than righteously smiting down somebody for dating your daughter,” Steff said. “I just can’t imagine… well, I never thought I’d hear myself saying this, but I just can’t imagine a greater divinity being so petty.”

I started to retort, but I bit back the urge. Steff had once called Khersis an “asshole” over my inability to pray to him following my demon awakening. There was nothing petty about Lord Khersis’s enmity towards demonkind, though, and I wasn’t going to throw Steff’s blasphemy back in her face to score a point in an argument.

That would be petty.

“Why the sudden burst of piety?” I asked instead. That seemed a little more fair, and less confrontational.

“Don’t know,” Steff said. “I mean, I don’t think I’d call it piety, but… well… did you see the shit on the news? I used to think the ogre badlands were a whole world away. We actually went and found where Yokan was on a map to try to figure out if it got hit or not… you know, out of curiosity. Looking at how far it was from there to East Reaches, and from the East Reaches to the coast… it’s a big fucking world, Mack, you know?”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “I don’t think I knew before today, but I know now.”

“Right,” she said. “Exactly. And I got to thinking, and the way I figure it, right at the moment Mother Khaele was putting in her little appearance at that festival, on the other side of the world, that whole thing was just getting started.”

“It might have been close,” I said. “But I don’t know if you could say it was right at the same…”

“No?” Steff said. “Do you remember how she left all of a sudden? Like something big was happening?”

“Now that you mention it… I kind of do,” I said. “But why would she stop to talk to a national TV audience and not give some kind of warning, if she knew that was coming?”

“How would that have helped?” Steff asked. “‘Oh, by the way, if you happen to have a mirror link to anybody on the other side of the world, tell them to head for high ground.’”

“But in the time she took to vent about Amaranth, or whatever you want to call it, she could have appeared before the easterners,” I said. “Or just done something about the wave in the first place!”

“Look who’s blaspheming now,” Steff said, grinning.

“I’m serious, Steff,” I said. “If she’s going to be involved with mortal affairs, why bother messing around with… affairs… when she could have saved those people?”

“Hon, as an Arkhanite, this is the sort of thing I think about all the time,” she said. “It’s usually in terms of ‘if the gods exist’ and ‘if the gods have power’, but I’m pretty well willing to admit Mother Khaele’s existence at this point, and no matter how you frame the question there aren’t any good answers. But you’re a great big geek… there’s a reason that earthquakes happen, isn’t there?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The thinking is that fire and air that builds up in the crust of the world has to escape and be released to their own layers. If it doesn’t happen in good time, the explosion when it does happen is worse.”

“Right,” Steff said. “So if there hadn’t been an earthquake at that time, in that place, it might have blown a hole in the bottom of the ocean or something later.”

“I’m not saying Mother Khaele should have stopped it from happening,” I said. “But she could have done something for the people.”

“She was doing her job,” Steff said. “The people had their own gods who could have been looking out for them. But say an assembled force of divine beings had teamed up and got everybody to evacuate the coasts.”

“Yeah, say they did,” I said. “Where’s the downside?”

“Maybe there isn’t one,” Steff said. “But if they’re doing that, what about all the people who died from fires or plagues or war or basic stupidity at the same time?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe the gods should just a more pro-active stance on that stuff anyway.”

“Okay, but… where does it stop?”

“Maybe it stops when everybody’s safe!” I said, suddenly very angry about the whole thing. Until Mother Khaele had entered the conversation, I’d been thinking of the tsunami as something that had happened without warning… but she had known. “When whole villages aren’t being wiped out in the blink of an eye, when nobody has to grow up without a mother, when people aren’t buying and selling each other… when you can’t hop on a crystal ball and order up a side of somebody just because you have money to burn.”

“That wasn’t you, Mack,” Steff said quietly. “If you believe me about anything, believe me about that… I’ve seen you hungry and that wasn’t you. I may have let my excitement at the idea… well, it was too late to fix, anyway… but you had nothing to do with that.”

“But it shouldn’t have even been an option,” I said. “Why do we have laws that let people be treated as commodities?”

“Mack, hon… that’s life,” she said. “There are poor people everywhere. There are people who can buy and sell other people’s lives in every society. Some are just more honest about it than others. If the gods came down from on high… if Lord Khersis walked the world again and he said ‘You guys cut out this slavery shit right the fuck now!’ and he made it stick somehow, people would still be people. There might not be any establishments like Tender Mercy’s, but it would still be a dog-eat-dog world.”

“Maybe some people are going to be evil assholes no matter what we do, but there are still degrees,” I said. “Making things difficult for them, making it illegal, making it socially unacceptable… I mean, I know the past wasn’t some golden age or anything, but if you look at history… it used to be that people who owned slaves were expected to show some responsibility for them. There was a social contract you had to follow.”

“That was a sham, though,” Steff said. “Slaves didn’t have any more rights back then than they do now, and it’s like Shiel says about kobold women… if the masters let their slaves have some freedom or dignity, the fact that it was up to them in the first place just kind of underscores the whole thing.”

“Okay, but… if somebody butchered a slave like an animal for meat, there would have been one hell of a stigma,” I said. “A lot of times, saying something ‘just isn’t done’ is more powerful than a law. But these days nobody cares. You can order everything on the ethernet, everybody is expected to mind their own business, and the only contracts that matter are the legal ones.”

“But what are you going to do?” Steff asked. “It’s never going to change… there’s too much money in slavery.”

“Way back when, slavery was legal because it was an effective way of getting labor for farming and building,” I said. “These days, there’s enchantments and automata for taking care of that kind of thing. Slaves are a total luxury, and the only people making money are the slavers.”

“Right… and they’re catering directly to the wealthiest and most powerful people in the imperium,” Steff said. “You see the problem?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t even know why we’re talking about this,” I said. “We were talking about Amaranth, and then the wave…”

“We’re in college,” Steff said. “Pointless bull sessions go with the territory, especially when big world-shaking events are in the news. Oh! But I was saying it would be petty. Could you really see somebody who’s concerned with things like earthquakes and hurricanes stopping to wipe out one relatively harmless half-demon? I mean, Khersis himself doesn’t go around doing the direct smiting any more. Why is she going to step outside her sphere to get rid of you?”

“She took the time to talk about it,” I said. “On TV…”

“That’s why I’m not ready to give up,” Steff said. “That can only be a good thing… it means she’s thinking about it and not just reacting, which makes it less likely that she’s going to just throw up her hands and give it up as a bad job.”

“But it doesn’t mean she won’t,” I said.

“Eh… smite happens,” Steff said, shrugging. “Anyway, I should probably get back… I mean, I’d love to give you a consolation prize since you missed out on the foxy love…”

“It wouldn’t be a consolation prize,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “But I’m kind of committed… we’re a couple hours in already and if I quit they’ll just be wasted.”

“I think it’d be a bigger waste of time finishing the game,” I said.

“Yeah, you’d probably rather play with your little Mecknight dolls,” Steff said.

“Actually, I’ve got another toy to play with,” I said. I held up the black compact.

“Good deal,” Steff said. “I’ll come around after we finish losing to Shiel… Hazel’s talking a big game, but she’s just hammering us. I think we need to work on our tactics… or I need to stop playing with Hazel. Anyway, I’m learning. I’d ask you to come watch, but I know you’re not interested…”

“And I’m banished,” I said.

“Well, yeah,” Steff said, shifting uncomfortably. “I hope you don’t mind me hanging with Shiel…”

“It’s okay,” I said. “She’s got her reasons for supporting Oru, I guess, and I don’t even blame Oru that much.”

“Too forgiving,” Steff said, shaking her head. “Oru’s a cunt and you know it. Anyway, I’ll be by later… oh, and Feejee was looking for you earlier.”

“She was?”

“Yeah,” Steff said. “She said she has some new sauce she wants you to try. I swear, everybody’s turning into a cook with the pseudowench in residence.”