Alone with Ian and me in our suite, Amaranth frowned and chewed her lip when I told her in detail about the dream and the conversation that had followed it.

“I guess it was kind of… drastic,” I said when I finished. The word seemed a little inadequate, but it really only seemed that way when I tried to explain it to someone else. Inside my head I understood what I’d done and why.

“Well, yes, it might have been better to wait and think about your options before going straight to something so… irrevocable,” she said. “I’m not saying you did the wrong thing, baby. Just that you could have waited to be sure it was the right one.”

“When I picked up my mirror, I didn’t think I’d actually be putting anything into motion,” I said. “I just felt like I needed to do something, even something small and symbolic like finding out how to get a hold of Kent, while I was still feeling all… well… while I was still capable of doing something. I think if I had gone back to sleep and waited until later I probably would have found it easiest to do nothing and just wait for my appointment with Teddi.”

“Would that have been so terrible, though?” Amaranth asked. “I mean, not only might she be able to give you other options for keeping your father out, but she could have been a sounding board for the whole Law plan.”

“Maybe… but, Amaranth, I feel like I did the right thing,” I said. “I don’t know how it’s going to turn out. I don’t know if it’s the best thing. But I’ve had a great day and I feel good about what I did.”

“Then I’m glad you did it,” she said. She sat down on the bed and patted her lap. “Come here, baby, and I’ll get you ready for bed.”

That apparently entailed a torturous make-out and teasing session that heavily involved my nipple piercings and a lot of light, ticklish touches from the ends of her nails around the inside of my thighs.

Amaranth knew better than anyone how easy it was to set me off. I almost came three times while Ian watched. She knew exactly where the edge of that particular cliff was located, and she knew how to push me right up to the very brink of it before yanking me back from it. She got me panting and left me there… and I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard myself pant before. I hoped it sounded better farther away from my skull.

At the very least the sound couldn’t have been too distracting because Ian finished once just from watching… well, I think his hand helped, but under the circumstances I think that was the least that could have been expected. He was nearly hard again by the time Amaranth released me to take care of his needs, which I did without complaint.

One thing that had to be said about the whole denial thing: his sex life was definitely improving by any measurement.

Mine was… harder to say. The climax had always been more of about release and relief for me than simple pleasure. It was frustrating to have Amaranth work me up and then kiss me on the cheek and turn and walk away… but somehow that frustration made it all the more fulfilling for me to put my needs aside and get down on my knees in front of Ian.

It felt more like service, like a real gift I was giving him.

It was hard to explain, which made it all the more awkward when I found myself trying to do so to Nicki in class the next day. We’d sort of drifted in the topic of my sex life, ironically because I’d been asking her about what she would look for in a girlfriend. She didn’t really know what she liked, sexually, so she turned things around back to me.

“So, wait… Ian can just decide that you don’t get to get off for a few days?” she said.

“If that’s what he wants,” I said. I manged to say it without blushing, though I did incline my head. It felt more like a token of submission than embarrassment, though it was at least a bit of both. “It’s not a regular thing with us. I mean, it hasn’t been. We kind of just started it… I think we’re both getting to a place where we’re confident enough to try that kind of thing. Who knows where it’ll go?”

“Do you actually enjoy that?”

“I’m… learning to appreciate it,” I said, after some consideration. I didn’t want to sound like it was bad, but I felt like I’d only just barely brushed the surface of the good.

“More so than you would an actual orgasm or three?”

“No,” I said. “They’re… different styles of good. Good in different ways. It’s not something that could replace actually, you know, having sex all the way. Like I said, we’re just trying it, but now that you’ve got me talking about it my feeling is that in the long run it’ll kind of be like… like not having the same thing to eat every night. you know?”

“So you are into it?” she said.

I laughed a kind of sputtery laugh, that kind of came out my nose when I tried not to be too loud during class. Nicki seemed to provoke this reaction from me… in this case I wasn’t laughing at anything she’d said and I certainly wasn’t laughing at her. It was more that the question was unexpected. Normally the unexpected would make me freeze up for a moment.

With Nicki… I really couldn’t say what the difference was, but it was there.

“Well, I’m not out of it, I guess?” I said. “I mean, I don’t want to give you the idea that I’m reluctant or I’m just putting up with it for his sake… I’m not sure how I’d feel about it all the time or long-term, but it’s… a new experience. I’ve never had a chance to get used to having sex every day for a long period of time in the first place. In some ways, I’m getting more attention than usual. It’s not something I would have picked for myself… but it’s not something I’d turn down.”

“But you… you told him to do this, right?”

“No,” I said. “It was all his idea.”

“I thought that the whole sub thing was supposed to be voluntary?”

“It is,” I said. “I’m his sub, voluntarily.”

“So, would you normally tell him what you want and then have him make you do it?” she said. “I mean, that’s the impression I’ve had… the sub has the power.”

“Um… I think maybe some people do it like that that,” I said. “Maybe. I don’t really know. And, if I’m completely honest, there are some elements of me wanting someone else to take charge for the stuff that I want but I’m self-conscious about doing for myself… but really and truly, one of the things that I want is for someone to take charge. Period, and for real.”

“Oh,” she said. “Um… oh.”

“I have a feeling like I’m disappointing you,” I said.

“Oh, it’s not that,” she said. “I mean, not you, personally. I just had an idea about how the whole d-and-s thing worked that I guess was wrong… I’m not sure it’s something I can support.”

“Why not?”

“Well, you don’t have any control. It just seems really… unequal. One-sided.”

“The basic idea you were describing sounds one-sided, too,” I said. “I mean, you thought someone was calling all the shots for the other person. That’s still true.”

“Yeah, but it seems less squicky to think that the person who’s tied up or being whipped or whatever is the one in charge. You know?”

“I could see that,” I said. “But… if I wanted to be in charge, I wouldn’t want to be tied up. So to speak.”

“So… do you think you could ever be dominant?”

“N-no,” I said, with only a small sputter. “When I’m at my most confident… well, confident and self-aware… is when I’m most submissive. The times when I’m confident and really assertive, I have a small tendency to sort of be a bit of a clueless bitch. I don’t think there’s a lot of talent there waiting to be harnessed.”

“I can’t picture you being a… you know, bitch,” Nicki said, and it was adorable how much her voice dropped in volume when she said the word. “But then, I have a hard time seeing you as submissive. I guess that’s part of why it made more sense to me that you would be the one calling the shots?”

“You know, I’m really happy to be a passenger,” I said. “I’ve never really had a lot of feeling of control in my life, but I’ve also not had a lot of security. This gives me a feeling of both things at once.”

“I just don’t think I could do it,” Nicki said, shaking her head. “I mean, I’ve had dirty-tingly thoughts about women in leather with thigh high boots and whips, but it’s mostly thoughts about having sex with them while they’re slightly bossy, and maybe calling me, you know… names.”

“I can understand that,” I said. “I’m fond of… names, myself.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“A little bit,” I said. “But if you knew how rarely I’m the most experienced person in these conversations you wouldn’t blame me.”

“I’m not in-experienced,” Nicki said. “I just have had… different experiences. Then you have.”

“Well, most people have,” I said. I noticed that Professor Stone was kind of looking our way, so I added, “Let’s finish this conversation at dinner?”

“Okay,” she said. She was blushing. “I’m not like… I mean, I know you said I was welcome, but sometimes I like to eat lunch at different times, and…”

“Hey, you don’t need a reason to join us or not,” I said. “Real friendship isn’t an obligation… that’s something I learned from Puddy.”

“That doesn’t seem like something… oh,” she said.

After having spent a whole hour in Coach Callahan’s class the day before mostly trying the same couple of things and having my classmates catch on, I decided to spend the Thursday evening session working on feinting and faking people out so I could get around their defenses instead of powering through them all the time.

I figured that was the sort of thing the coach wanted to see from me… ways of handling situations where my usual tactics wouldn’t work or where my strength wouldn’t be such an overwhelming advantage. My strength and the speed it gave me still provided me with some benefits, because I could whip my staff around and reverse direction really fast. I wasn’t really great at it to begin with, but I picked things up as I went and I didn’t have to even be haflway good for another day.

As a half-immortal half-demon, I didn’t sweat much, but I still felt a little unnecessarily grubby after the unusual workout. I didn’t really have time to head back to the tower and take a shower, especially when I might need to eat in hurry to make my appointment with Teddi afterwards. There were shower facilities somewhere in the athletic center, but it would be a dry day on the plane of water before I ever set foot in them. I decided to just head back and change into a nicer, cleaner top.

I had a fitted T that had been a gift from Two. It was black, but it had a little bit more of a v-shaped neckline and some… reflecty-rectangle… things… making a kind of checkmark pattern around it. I didn’t wear it very often because I had a feeling I’d break the whatevers off of it if I wasn’t careful, and I was never careful… but I figured I could be careful enough for one evening.

As I carefully didn’t hurry to meet the others for dinner, I wondered if Nicki would say anything about the change. I really didn’t want to give her the wrong impression, that I was the kind of person who’d change clothes just for dinner.

It turned out that I’d had no need to worry, though, because she didn’t show up. Two noticed and appreciated it, though.

“I like that shirt,” she said. “It looks pretty nice on you.”

“You gave me this shirt,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Amaranth helped me pick out. She said it was more to your taste than my first choice. Otherwise it would have been nicer. You and your friend Nicki and I should go shopping sometime. She could help me convince you to wear more colors that are… colors..”

“My wardrobe is the most diverse it’s ever been, thank you very much,” I said.

“Yeah, ever since you bought that third pair of jeans things have really taken off,” Ian said.

“I have m… I do have more than three pairs of jeans,” I said. “I just… when I find a pair that I like, I get more of them. It’s more about comfort than appearance.”

“We could put sequins or rhinestones on the duplicates to make them more distinct,” Two said.

“I have only two questions,” Steff said. “Where would these sequins go and what would they spell?”

“On her pants,” Two said. “I have not thought about words. They could say… Mack’s Jeans?”

“There will be no writing things on my pants!” I said.

Ian gave Amaranth a meaningful look, and she smiled.

“I think we have some say in the disposition of your pants, baby,” Amaranth said.

“You didn’t say if you wanted to go shopping,” Two said.

I thought about it. It was in Two’s nature to keep herself busy, she had a wider circle of friends than I did, and since I wasn’t dating her and hadn’t needed her help with mental invasions we really hadn’t seen a lot of each other so far during the school year. And I had a feeling Nicki would be flattered to be asked along for her fashion expertise.

“Okay,” I said. “Well, we’ll have to ask Nicki, obviously… and I’m going to be kind of occupied this weekend.”

“With me,” Steff said. “And I think this sounds awesome. I can take you out for a little walk… I still remember our first time hitting the town.”

“Then it’s a date,” Two said. “But not a date-date, except between Steff and Mack, and maybe Mack and her friend Nicki, and maybe Mack and her friend Nicki and Steff.” She paused and her face scrunched up as she worked her way through the various permutations. “It is perhaps substantially but not entirely a date-date, pending the acceptance of Mack’s friend Nicki.”

“Two, you’re one of a kind,” Hazel said.

“That’s our pseudowench,” Steff added.

“Set an alarm for your first class,” Ian suggested after I helped him relieve a sort of debilitating cramp that’s apparently caused by watching your naked girlfriend talk tough to government agents. “Your first class isn’t until like ten, right? You can get way more sleep that way. I’ll tell everyone at breakfast why you aren’t there.”

“Okay, but… everyone?” I said. “I mean, tell Amaranth…”

“Well, Dee might already know,” Ian said.

I waited a few seconds to see if she’d respond from the other room, but she didn’t.

“I think she’s become pretty reflexive about throwing up a wall of silence when you stay over,” I said. “Anyway, if it’s just people from the suite and Steff, yes, tell, but otherwise, just say I didn’t sleep well.”

“Okay, but I can’t always tell when Two’s friend is there.”

“I guess Hazel’s cool,” I said. “But seriously, don’t talk about this stuff in front of Nicki.”

“Not that I think it’s a good idea to spread this around, but you want to start by keeping secrets from her?”

“I don’t want to scare her off,” I said.

Ian headed back to his own room so he wouldn’t wake me up when he got up, and I settled back down for a few more hours of sleep, mercifully dreamless and mercifully alone.

I didn’t like to skip breakfast because it would be an easy habit for me to acquire. Not having my usual plates of sweet and savory goodness at the start of the day wouldn’t leave my stomach grumbling for the rest of the morning or my body crashing later in the day. Breakfast was a treat for my senses and a chance to socialize rather than a physical need. The intermingling of my immortal and mortal heritages meant that I didn’t actually need to eat or perform any of the other functions associated with eating.

But getting up for breakfast gave me one more chance to see my friends during days in which we’d all be off doing our own things. It gave me a chance to start waking up a little bit earlier than I needed to, so I could be sharper and more alert during my morning class. I didn’t have much advantage over the fully mortal in that department. Some diabolists have stated that demons could go longer without sleep than humans could with fewer adverse effects, but that aside the basic need was the same: about eight hours about once a day.

With the sunlight that managed to sneak in around the edge of the curtains and the sounds of life echoing all around the hallway, I didn’t manage to sleep all the way until my alarm. But with the suite all to myself and nowhere else to be, I was able to enjoy a long, hot soak in the tub… my first of the school year.

I’d had a complicated relationship with the shared bathroom in Harlowe Hall. I’d loved hot baths and showers, but the longer my first year went on, the more the bathroom had felt like hostile territory. It wasn’t just that I’d actually been physically attacked in them. Being in them meant I was sharing space with people who hated me, who felt threatened by me and were a threat to me because of that.

That had been a big part of the appeal of a private bathroom for me. But once everyone else got moved in, I’d started deferring to the others’ needs. The fact that Two and Dee both might need to use the bathroom had kept me from staking a claim to it for an hour or more at a time.

I realized as I sat enveloped in hot water and suds and steam that this had been a mistake. It would be a total dick more to take up the bathroom in the morning, but I had spaced out my classes to make sure I had time to myself during the day. A daily soak was probably not in the cards, but I figured I should be able to manage it once or twice a week and be better for it.

A bubble bath wouldn’t make up for lost sleep, but it was definitely a better start to the day than stumbling out of bed, pulling on some clothes, and staggering off in the direction of my local hazards lecture. I’d left the door from the bathroom to our half of the suite open so I’d hear the alarm in my mirror going off which meant I could forget about the passage of time and just relax, something that I badly needed when I reviewed what had happened in the night… when I thought about what I’d done, what I’d said.

By the light of day… or the light of a windowless bathroom, anyway… my actions did not seem half as clever as they had at the time. Standing up to my father had felt good, but it might have been better to not let him know I was going to be working against him.

I felt that it couldn’t have been helped, though. If I hadn’t acted so defiant in my dream, I couldn’t have acted that way awake. There was no way for me to put on a meek front and just pretend to capitulate to him, because it wouldn’t have been a front. Basically I was a recovering capituholic. I had no resistance to the path of least resistance.

Anyway, it was done and there was no way to undo it. If I got back to Kent and told him I’d changed my mind, I had no doubt that I would have to pay dearly for him to consider recalling the arrow I’d loosed. Rather than worrying about where exactly it would land when it came back down, I decided to focus on the present and my immediate future.

Ian wanted to assert more dominance… the thought of that left me tingly in interesting places. Submission might have been a close cousin to capitulation, but it was far more useful and it left me feeling full of direction and purpose rather than adrift and at the mercy of the winds and tides.

What would it mean in practical terms? Right now the answer seemed to be sex more often but with fewer orgasms. Then I thought back to how he’d phrased his suggestion about sleeping in… forcefully and matter-of-factly. It had also been reasonable, though, and definitely the right move.

I could definitely like this.

As long as I was comfortable and alone, I decided to work on my breathing, too. It helped that the air inside the shower curtain was warm and smelled like cinnamon and vanilla. I closed my eyes, slowly pushed a breath out, and then even more slowly drew one back in.

Submission.

I’d always had an easy enough time throwing myself into my schoolwork when it was subjects I cared about and classes I wanted to be in. Other times it was a struggle… a struggle that could be managed, but one that was easier to manage when the rest of my life wasn’t giving me anything else to fight against. That didn’t seem like it would be the case for the next while.

Was it possible that I was overlooking an easier way?

My day would start nicely enough, but the rest of it was made up of classes I didn’t particularly care for, that I had as a result of obligations that were forced on me. Okay, I’d agreed to take this second class with Coach Callahan in order to save my grade point average during my first semester, but the chain of events that had led me there had started with the requirement to take a weapon proficiency class.

But neither her class nor Professor Swain’s was really all bad, and even if they had been completely pointless and terrible, I still had to get through them and I had to do so with a decent grade.

I breathed in and out and thought about how it felt to to be under the palm of Amaranth’s hand, to be under Ian’s control. I thought about how good it felt to be following a process, to be given clear instructions… to have clear lines of authority.

Professor Swain was my teacher. She didn’t want to cross over to the main campus to teach a delving class three times a week any more than I wanted to be taking one, but she did it all the same… she did it, and that meant she was my teacher. She probably didn’t get a lot of respect as a gnome among humans, but she was a professor and she deserved it.

Callahan… as much as she clearly relished what she was doing, something in her seemed to chafe at it, too. Possibly it was the effort it took her not to kill any of her students. Whatever it was… well, she seemed at least mildly squicked out when I acted submissively in response to her, but she’d never complained about the results.

I worked the way that I worked.

By the time the alarm ended my bath, I’d managed to work myself into a state of utter calm and confidence that I didn’t break my concentration or start blushing when Acantha stopped and stared at me as I came into her classroom… later than I normally would have arrived, but still a couple of minutes before class began.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“Not a thing that I can discern,” she said. “Did you sleep well last night?”

“Actually, no,” I said.

“Whatever you took for it agrees with you.”

“That would be a bath,” I said, and she laughed.

Somehow she seemed a lot more relaxed than normal, too. That probably had more to do with the fact that some of the more unruly voices were gone from the room and in their absence the rest of the class seemed slightly more willing to treat her more like a knowledgeable professional than a substitute teacher in elementary school.

Twice during class Acantha said something to me about my attentiveness to the safe handling procedures. Attentiveness was not something a teacher had ever specifically recognized me for. It felt good… not just like a compliment, but like praise. I beamed more than I blushed.

I thought it was a good sign, too. She’d given me a perfect score and extra credit on my first assignment for exceeding the bounds of it, but she’d also told me she wanted to see my ability to work within confines… or as she’d put it, to show her I could be prudent.

I was hoping to see Nicki at lunch, but she wasn’t there and Ian told me she hadn’t joined them for breakfast, either. Maybe she wasn’t an early riser, but I had a feeling she’d need a dose of reassurance the next time I saw her. Hazel and her suitemates were with us, and so I didn’t want to get into the whole subject of who knew what about my nocturnal dealings at the table. Amaranth told me that Ian had said I had something to tell her about, and she suggested we wait until the evening when we could do it behind closed doors.

That afternoon I wasn’t moaning in my head about having to go to Local Hazards… I wasn’t even telling myself that Eloise’s geomancy would make it worthwhile, though I was still looking forward to that. I’d say I didn’t have any feeling about the class itself one way or the other, except I did… I felt ready for it. Not happy and not grumbly, just ready. It was coming up and I was prepared for it.

“Hey there!” Eloise said when I walked in. “Looks like someone got up on the right side of the bed this morning.”

“Yeah, and it felt so good I did it again a few hours later,” I said.

“Well, you look like a thousand gold,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you walk in with your head like that.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Up,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

“Nothing wrong with keeping one’s eyes to the ground,” Professor Swain said. “You can miss a lot of things if you aren’t watching where you put your feet. Of course, you miss a lot covering your feet up, too.”

“I like to go barefoot,” Eloise said. “But human culture frowns on it.”

“Shoes are a conspiracy to sell more carpets,” the professor said. “You’d get years’ more use out of your carpets if you didn’t wear shoes.”

“You won’t hear me arguing with that. I don’t wear shoes inside my own home,” Eloise said. “But the university actually requires them.”

“Mark my words, someone is getting a kickback there.”

By the time it was nearly the end of the day, I was starting to feel a little self-conscious for the first time since I’d woke up… but mostly I was aware of all the things that were missing. I was used to having a certain amount of background anxiety, a nagging doubt that I didn’t belong in whatever place I was or that whatever I was doing, I was doing wrong. A full calendar year at college had diminished my fears and made them recede from the front of my brain, but they’d always been there.

For the first time they’d left me completely alone for the day. As soon as I realized that, I kind of felt like I was due to get completely knocked on my ass by life… but then, I’d already faced my father and a government agent who would probably have no qualms about killing me in my sleep if he had orders to or if he thought it would further his cause. I’d already had my wake-up call, and I’d dealt with it, gone back to sleep, and got on with my life.

Coach Callahan reminded me near the start of her class that she wanted to see me taking more chances… pretty much the opposite of what Acantha wanted from me.

“The point of class is risk mitigation,” she said. “You take the opening that’s in front of you, you end the fight without messing around. But I know you have enough brains in that skull to not lose sight of that for part of a week. What I don’t want is for you to get too comfortable while you’re using your demon strength to blow past defenses. So today, tomorrow… you find other ways to take your classmates out, and you figure out how to do it as fast and hard as the obvious way. Clear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said… which got me a raised eyebrow, but Coach Callahan was the queen of doing what needed to be done, and I needed to be in that head space to make doing what she told me to second nature.

I could think on my feet. I could solve problems. But when someone was coming at me with an axe or sword and the problem involved hurting them before they hurt me, I needed to be completely in the submission zone.

By telling me she wouldn’t be counting how well I did for the next two days as long as I pulled out something by Friday, she’d given me the freedom to experiment. I started by trying for less direct victories… making opponents come to me and knocking their legs out from under them and then finishing them while they were down. That was something that would have been completely against my nature if I’d been doing it for myself.

As it was, they went red before the second blow about half of the time that it worked… but I made myself follow through anyway, because stopping to see if the extra blow was needed was not what Coach Callahan wanted to see. It was not the point of the class. If they were red, my phantasmal weapon would pass through them like the phantasm it actually was. No hurt, no foul.

That’s not to say that it worked every time. I hit the floor sometimes, and some of my classmates were agile enough to avoid a low blow without losing momentum. I received my first jump-kick that day. Even though it was real and not phantasmal, I couldn’t complain because it didn’t harm me any more than an illusion would have and I think the girl who did it was probably reacting in the moment. It took me by surprise, though, and gave her enough time to finish me off.

By the half hour mark, my record for the day was four and three and my opponents were less willing to come at me. Since I wasn’t being graded, I tried throwing my staff at one of them. It spun into his sword with enough force to knock it out of his hands and send it flying, but I didn’t have a follow-up and he had my staff. He didn’t have enough strength or skill with it to score a quick victory with it, and so I was able to wrench it back from him after taking a blow to the head and one to my arm.

The arm injury kept me from doing a one-hit kill. I wasn’t coordinated enough to swing the staff in my off-hand very effectively.

I won that fight, anyway… eventually. I might have had a harder time letting go of my feelings about conflict and violence and just getting down to what needed to be done if I hadn’t been deep in my submissive state, but by the time I finished I was way out of it. Battering a guy into submission required me to let go of my own… my altered mental state was able to carry me right up to the door and even knock on it, but it couldn’t carry me through it.

Being purposefully submissive instead of just bending with the most aggressive source of pressure could make my life easier and better, but it seemed submissiveness was not going to be the answer to everything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Like what?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I like your top,” Two said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thanks, Two,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is ‘Mouse’ a… um…”

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

“I like Mouse,” Two said.

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

“It’s true,” Two said.

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

“That’s submission,” Amaranth said.

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

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

“Is Shiel her dom?” Nicki asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So… you noticed?” she said.

“Nicki did,” I said.

She laughed.

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

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

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

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

She sighed and took the paper from me.

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

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

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

“What?”

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

“Okay,” I said.

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

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

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

“If that happens, I’ll ask,” I said.

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

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

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

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

“I’ll have it back to you tomorrow.”

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

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

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

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

“I will,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”

“And screaming, of course.”

“Of course.”

My dear friend Two,

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

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

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

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

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

Postscript:

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

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

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

“I think I did a pretty good job.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is there anywhere to swim?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A kobold is a sort of goblin.”

“I am not certain that she’d agree.”

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

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

“That’s what I said.”

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

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

“You have family here.”

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

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

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

“It’s Tuesday.”

“Tuesday the what-th?”

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

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

“He has business to take care of.”

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

“Most kinds,” Two said.

Hazel sighed.

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

“You miss Shiel,” Two said, nodding.

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

“You do want their approval,” Two said.

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

“Do you approve of them?”

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

“Isn’t the reverse also true?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?” Two asked.

“Because… well…”

Two sat patiently while Hazel grappled with the realization.

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

“What?” Two said.

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

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

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

“What party?”

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

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

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

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

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

A seasonal meditation from your author:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amaranth noticed right away.

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

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

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

“Happy,” Amaranth said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It makes sense to me,” Amaranth said.

“I guess so,” Steff agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Clearly,” Ian said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Go on, baby,” Amaranth said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, right, the hot one,” Steff said.

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

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

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

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

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

“What exactly was the issue?” Ian asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What does this Owain the Wild look like?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I guess,” Ian said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Really personal question,” Ian said.

“Ask it,” Hazel said.

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

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

“There isn’t,” I confirmed.

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

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

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

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

“Did you say Nae?” Amaranth said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How did it go?” she asked.

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

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

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

“So, how was your day?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hi, Mack,” Two said.

“Hey, Two,” I said. “Hazel.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Satisfied?” Dee suggested.

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

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

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

“Was and am,” Hazel said.

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

The others, now plus Shiel, were playing Shiel’s war game when I got back. I hadn’t been expecting it, but I wasn’t terribly surprised… I had been gone for hours, and others had wanted to play. Two had gone to see if her friend Hazel was back and if she wanted to play. There were two games going at the moment, with Ian playing Shiel and Steff playing Dee.

The questions about how my session went didn’t go beyond “How did it go?” and my answer of “Good, I think.” wasn’t scrutinized, which was nice. It was good to be able to just sort of slip back into things.

“Do you want in on our game, Mack?” Steff asked me. “If you jumped in with a fresh army, you’d probably stand a pretty decent chance of catching up even as a newbie.”

“Yeah, still not interested in playing army,” I said. “Thanks.”

“I’m not interested in war myself, in particular,” Shiel said. “Violence for self-defense and even pre-emptive strikes can be justified to secure rights, but armed struggles and the periods of chaos they cause tend to go poorly for the least powerful groups. I’m more interested in the tactical side of it. Every situation is like a puzzle, and finding the right tactics will unlock the solution.”

“I can see the intellectual appeal of that,” Amaranth said. “Though, I wonder why you couldn’t get the same effect using something more abstract than warriors holding weapons? I mean, I know they’re not actual people fighting and dying, they’re just game pieces. But if it’s just about problem-solving, why not go all the way and just have different game pieces?”

“Well, it’s not just problem-solving,” Shiel said. “Not even for me, and of course other people play for their own reasons. I suppose on a practical level, it keeps things easy to relate to and allows more diversity in choices. I mean, if you changed the generic infantry to Unit Type 1 and the generic cavalry to Unit Type 2 and made their pieces abstract symbols or numerals, there would be nothing about the 2s that told you at a glance that they cover more ground in a move, or why. And there’d be less reason to make up different subtypes. If goblins on wolf-back or riding on giant swamp rats became Unit Type 2.50 and 2.51, what would the point be?”

“Making them people lets you turn it into a story,” Steff said. “I think you’d like that, Mack.”

“Okay, but it’s still big troop movements and all… that’s not what interests me in fantasy or in history,” I said. “It’s the individual stories. I mean, when I did modern Magisterian history in high school, our text books was this super patriotic one that focused on all the ‘adventuring opportunities’ that imperial troops had during the Chaos Wars and all the little conflicts that followed it, but the part that interested me were in the sidebars where they had personal accounts from people who’d served, or people who’d been there during a battle. That’s something I can get into.”

“So give the little people names and make sure you have one of them tell the others about his girl back home just before you move them into arbalest range,” Steff said.

“Maybe you’d be more interested in roleplaying games, then,” Ian said.

“Yeah, can you picture me sitting around on Friday nights playing Subways and Scientists?” I said.

“Yes,” Steff and Ian said at the same time.

“Anyway, Shiel,” I said. “To get back to what you were saying… how does the puzzle-solving approach even work when the movement of the other pieces are controlled by someone else?”

“You have to look at your opponent as being part of the puzzle,” Shiel said. “If I’m playing against a seasoned player, I have to expect that they’ll recognize certain gambits, but because of that I also can predict their responses to a degree. When I play against Hazel, I have more freedom to move but I also have to react more within the moment. She’d probably win half her games out of luck if she played against some of the tournament players in the warrens. They’re too used to playing against people who share the same unspoken assumptions that they do.”

“But even if you’re doing everything ‘right’ and you’re tailoring your tactics to your opponent, you could still lose,” I said. “I mean, they could be doing the same thing, or they could realize what you’re doing.”

“Yes,” Shiel said. “But that’s life. Sometimes you do everything right and you still lose. We call that… well, the word is bolkub, but it translates as ‘cave-in’. Because nobody does any new excavation on a whim. Everything is checked, double-checked, and triple-checked. All the tools and materials used are enchanted as powerfully as the armaments and fortifications we use at the outer layers of the warren. But sometimes, even with all that…”

A tic of sorts passed over her face that gave me the impression that her skin was shrugging.

“Sometimes the best-played game ends in a bolkub,” she said.

“What do you do then?” I asked.

“Lose,” she said.

Two came back, and after exchanging greetings, she said, “My friend Hazel says to say that she’ll be more than happy to come and teach Shiel a thing or two about that game of hers if Amaranth thinks she can keep her mind and her mouth on her own business.”

“Oh, well, that’s terribly mature of her,” Amaranth said. Two was looking at her expectantly. She added, “It’s not like she’s going to be able to avoid this forever. What’s she going to do when she’s ten months pregnant?”

“What happens at ten months?” Shiel asked. “Is that when the fetus becomes public property?”

“What? No..”

“I guess it’s still none of your business, then,” Shiel said.

“I am inclined to agree,” Dee said. “Perhaps you should take into consideration that her recalcitrant attitude towards discussing the matter with you does not necessarily equal recalcitrance in ‘dealing with’ it.”

“But if she won’t even admit to herself…”

“What she admits to herself is known to herself,” Dee said. “It may or may not resemble anything that she admits to you.”

“Two’s still waiting for a real answer,” Ian pointed out.

“Oh!” Amaranth said. “I’m sorry… Two, please tell Hazel that her business is her business, I guess.”

“That’s okay, I forgive you,” Two said. “Please excuse me while I tell her that.”

When she came back with Hazel a minute or so later, I really thought Amaranth’s eyes or mouth were going to leap out of her skull, but she restrained herself.

“That’s right,” Hazel said, and that’s all she said before negotiating her entry into Ian and Shiel’s game. If the miniature stone warfare held any appeal for me, it was the social aspect, and by that I meant it was fun to watch Hazel valiantly try to convince herself, Shiel, and possibly the tiny soldiers that she was winning. She was like a one woman wartime propaganda department.

At least she seemed to be having fun, and maybe that was the key to her outrageous bravado… she wasn’t trying to beat Shiel, she was enjoying the process of losing. In an actual war, there would probably be worse people to be stuck in a desperate situation with than Two’s friend Hazel.

Steff and Dee’s game was a good deal quieter, and had been even before Two brought Hazel in. It was kind of weird to watch the two of them doing something together. With the game in between them, there was a level of comfort they didn’t usually show. There were so many reasons the two of them might not have worked as friends. There was the racial rivalry that Steff couldn’t shed no matter how much she outwardly rejected elven attitudes, and to Dee Steff was not just other but lesser, no matter how much she might protest otherwise. They were both prejudiced, but both were better than their prejudices.

Amaranth, Two, and I were spectators, though Two was engaged with the games much more than Amaranth and I were. There were times where she pointed out a missed opportunity or a rule infraction in the making… though never to Hazel, which made me wonder if Amaranth wasn’t the only one to be given a topical ultimatum. It hardly mattered, though, since Shiel caught Hazel’s errors anyway.

Saturday gave way to Sunday, where a trip to the library helped me slide a little bit closer to normal. Not the old, familiar normal, if there had been one… a new normal, with some comforting features. The very structure of the week did a lot to help people adjust to things, I realized… you did something for a few days and it was new and different and maybe scary or uncomfortable and you kept waiting for it to click. Before it could, though, here comes a break in the rhythm and then you’re back it. Something like going to class didn’t become a routine on its own… it was going back to class after a break that made it feel like one.

I received a brief and apologetic a-mail from Lee that explained nothing but said that he would understand if I would prefer to seek other representation and that he would do what he could to help me find it.

I didn’t respond immediately, because I didn’t know how to respond to it… I thought if Lee were trying to drop me as a client he’d be more direct about it, so it seemed like he really sincerely believed I’d want nothing to do with him. Unless the encounter in Embries’s office had been his idea, and I doubted that, I couldn’t see why.

It was Wednesday afternoon before I knew it, and that meant I’d made very little headway on the sheets Teddi had given me. Teddi was understanding about it.

“Remember what I said about writing?” she asked.

“And not knowing what to write down?”

“Yes,” she said. “Narrowing your gaze like this is a necessary step, but it’s a skill that has to be learned. Have you ever kept a journal?”

“I’ve tried it, in the past,” I said. “I couldn’t really make a habit of it, and anyway, I was always more interested in things that were happening to other people, or things that weren’t happening to me.”

“Like journalism?”

“More like fiction,” I said.

“Well, let’s try something else then,” she said. “Between this session and the next one, I want you to make a note… mental note, or a written one if necessary… any time you find yourself saying or thinking something like ‘Sometimes, it just feels like…’ or ‘I don’t understand why…’. Those are the sorts of things that might make good starting points. They seem to work for other people.”

“So, is there anything we can actually do now besides just talking?”

“You seem to expect me to tell you that it’s pointless to be here,” she said.

“I guess I have low expectations,” I said. “Not about this, or you, specifically… just in general. I can’t exactly get away from the fact that you’re working at a handicap with me.”

“Well… I’ve already told you how we can try a mental contact, but your… conscientiousness… about that has me researching other alternatives,” Teddi said. “For instance, there are spells that allow communication through thought.”

“Wouldn’t they have the same problem?”

“As it happens, no,” Teddi said. “If a spell picks a word out of your head and conducts it to mine, it’s no more a direct mental contact than when you do the same with your voice. It still wouldn’t be the same thing that I’m used to doing, but I’ve been told by my colleagues in the College of Communication that if such a spell is properly attuned… or rather, improperly attuned so as to suit our purposes… it can pick up stray thoughts, things lurking beneath the surface, bits of memories, and so on.”

“I’m not sure I want to be the test homunculus for someone’s mind-magic,” I said.

“Alright,” Teddi said. “I just wanted to show you that there are possibilities out there. Do you mind if I keep looking into them?”

“No,” I said. “Feel free.”

“Okay, so if you don’t have anything specific you want to address, how about we go back to something you said last time?”

“Okay, sure,” I said.

“You said you could do a lot of damage, if you were careless,” Teddi said. “And that you had done ‘some’ damage already. Would you mind if we explore that?”

“The damage?”

“The feeling,” she said. “The fear. Do you see yourself as a threat, Mackenzie?”

There was a cold prickle of suspicion in my stomach, as involuntary a reflex as Amaranth’s need to help Hazel sort out her troubles or Steff or Dee’s reactions to each other. I could imagine someone from Law or the IBF poring over my file and saying “Gotcha!” or “Aha!” or something when they find the part where I admit I think I’m a threat to others.

“I’m not sure that I’d say it in those words,” I said.

“Noted,” Teddi said. “Or, unnoted.”

“My girlfriend… she’s immortal,” I said. “Not just ageless but immortal. I mean, it’s sort of situational but nothing I can do here could harm her in the long term. But I can still hurt her. She’s… been burned. Anybody else, any of my friends… some of them could defend themselves if something went wrong, but if I just lashed out with all my strength at the wrong moment…”

“How often do you use all your strength?”

“Never, that I can think of,” I said. “But I’m clumsy, and I’m kind of impulsive. I’ve been known to overreact.”

“Physically?”

“Not so much, I guess,” I said. “But if I can’t control my emotions, it could happen anyway.”

“Let’s follow that, then,” she said.

I did my best to explain to her how violence made me feel… the practiced disdain I put on for those who reveled in it, and the very real and very visceral churning of my gut at being involved in it… and even the perverse hunger for it I’d felt when under demonic influence, notably my own. That was difficult to talk about. It took up a lot of the session without actually going anywhere or resolving anything, but getting that out still felt… well, it wasn’t an accomplishment, exactly, but it was something.

“The really awful thing is,” I said, “is that if I’m honest with myself… what worries me the most is what would happen to me if I did something bad. The consequences to me. I mean, I’d be devastated if I killed someone, but… I’d also be dead, most likely.”

“It’s not easy to face that as an eighteen-year-old,” Teddi said.

“But other people do,” I said. “It’s a dangerous world.”

“It is, but a surprisingly large number of people go for years without giving a thought to how dangerous it can be,” she said. “It sounds like you can’t avoid it.”

“Well, it’s not like I spend every day thinking about death,” I said. “Or that it even comes up that often in so many words… my grandmother sort of managed to instill in me a generalized terror of it. Of… messing up, and then being killed. She made it very clear that she’d be the one to do it, but she also made it clear that if she didn’t someone else would. She used to keep buckets by my bed, two with regular water and one with holy water, in case I had an ‘accident’. When I got better at controlling my fire, she got rid of the regular water, but the holy water stayed. When I left for good, I thought about kicking it over out of spite, but… well, I gave it a wide berth. I’m honestly surprised I don’t have a bucket phobia.”

“That’s pretty poor parenting,” Teddi said. “To put it mildly. Could you feel the sanctity of the water?”

“It didn’t exactly radiate divine energy, no,” I said. “I figured it’s sort of inert. I might have, if I’d held my hand over it or something, but I didn’t ever do that.” I thought about the demonstration my grandmother had given me, with her own hand and the hot oil, but I wasn’t ready… wasn’t able… to share that yet.

“My understanding is that water doesn’t hold sanctity any better than it holds magic,” Teddi said. “Outside of a specially consecrated vessel, it becomes just plain water pretty quickly. Even a holy vessel can’t keep it in if it’s open… that’s why clerics reconsecrate the fonts in the temples so often.”

I realized as she said this that I knew it… that was pretty much a fundamental property of water. It was pure. It washed things away. The very reasons that so many religions liked it symbolically made it a poor choice for a sacramental liquid.

“Even if she was bluffing about that, I don’t think she was bluffing in general,” I said. “And even if it was just regular water… well, maybe she didn’t want me to be killed or maimed accidentally. She could have blessed it herself as she dumped it over me.”

“True,” Teddi said. “And I don’t want to minimize what she did to you, either. The effects were the same, regardless.”

“So, yeah… I grew up with it being pounded into my head that tomorrow or the day after I would probably go on an evil rampage and be slain,” I said. “And I still have that in my head, even when I’m trying to plan for the future… which I am. I mean, I’m in college to try to have a life and a career, and I’m making plans for the summer, sort of.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Not going home, for one thing,” I said. “I mean, back to my grandmother’s. I have the opportunity to stay on campus, helping one of my professors and going to classes during the summer, but… well… I’m starting to appreciate the importance of breaks in life.”

“What’s that?”

“They let you come back to things,” I said. “The funny thing is that I’ve gone from thinking I’m mostly going to be killed in my sleep one night to facing the prospect of living halfway to forever. I’d never really thought about how long half-demons live. Half-elves can live for centuries, if not millennia, and they probably inherit more of the ‘mortal failing’ stuff since both of their parents are from this plane. If I don’t die tomorrow, I could live a thousand years… but all I really want is to have a life. A lifetime. And now that I’m thinking about it, it almost feels like these few years could be the most dangerous ones of my life.”

“More dangerous than living with a woman who threatened to kill you in your sleep?”

“Well, back home… when I was in high school, I mean… she sort of protected me, too,” I said. “She made it clear that she would ‘destroy’ me, but she was also going to wait until I did something to deserve it. Here, I’m more on my own. Whatever consequences would or wouldn’t fall on someone who messed with me, there’s no… well, I mean, I’d like to think that if someone out-and-out murdered me there’d be a criminal investigation and all, but for someone who sees me as a threat or a monster or a non-person it’s all really diffuse and abstract compared to having someone specific in their face saying ‘no, you can’t kill her’. Back home, my grandmother was a force in the community. No one would mess with her. Here, if someone looks at me and thinks, ‘I could make the world a better place by taking her out of it,’ what’s to stop them?”

“Have you been attacked often?”

“Not on a daily basis,” I said. “And more often by the people in Harlowe than by random human students. But it would only take one person who doesn’t think there will be any consequences for killing a half-demon or doesn’t care.”

“Wouldn’t that have been true back home, too?” Teddi asked. “It must have crossed your mind that someone might not have had as much respect for your grandmother.”

“My world was smaller there,” I said. “I’m pretty sure there are more people living on campus than there were in the town I grew up in, and that includes the outlying farming communities.”

“So it’s a matter of odds,” Teddi said. “But the world is a bigger place than MU… why do you think you’d feel safer outside it?”

“Fewer people would know I’m a demon,” I said. “Okay, yeah, I’ve attracted a bit of attention, but if I keep my head down for the next three years, then who out there is going to know who I am?”

“Do you think hiding would feel safer”

“Not hiding, so much as not revealing,” I said.

“Do you regret revealing yourself as a half-demon?”

“It happened,” I said. “It wasn’t really my choice. Circumstances just sort of piled up on me…”

“And these circumstances are unique to a college campus?”

“Possibly,” I said. “Possibly not. I guess I don’t really know if I’ll be able to keep the secret any better out in the ‘real world’… but it’ll be another chance to try.”

“And if it doesn’t work out, will you pick up and move? Keep your head down for another four or five years? Like you said, you could live a very long time… if you don’t get this right the first hundred times, you might have a chance to try again.”

“Yeah, I see your point,” I said. “Really, I don’t want to live a life in hiding or on the run… and that’s why I think I’d probably be dead if I did screw up. Even if I could run and get away, I wouldn’t be a college student, I wouldn’t grow up to be an enchanter, I would never have a good house and a good life… I’d be another monster hiding in the wilderness, skulking around the edges of civilization… which I suppose means that in a really fucked-up sense I’m afraid of turning out like my father.”

“That isn’t particularly ‘fucked-up’,” Teddi said. “It’s a good thing to be concerned about, as long as you’re doing so healthily. Did you ever meet your father?”

“Yes and no,” I said, then made the decision to not talk around this at all. There were enough impediments in our conversation as it was. “He comes to me in dreams sometimes… I know it’s actually him, or actually someone and not just me because they aren’t like my regular dreams. They’re more coherent, lucid.”

“That’s actually pretty common with dream visitations, when one mind is sharply stronger than another,” Teddi said. “There are no hard or fast rules about anything relating to dreams, but if one party is asleep and the other party isn’t, the conscious party can usually exercise a fine degree of control or impose a viewpoint.”

“So much for the ‘this is my dream’ thing,” I said. “I suppose that only works in television shows.”

“If it is your dream, then you do ultimately have certain powers, usually including the ability to wake up,” Teddi said. “Lucid dreams are often fairly easy to wake up from. If it happens in the future, you might try that.”

“That’s… really kind of obvious, in retrospect,” I said.

“Well, it’s why they pay me the shiny bucks,” Teddi said. “What does your father do in your dreams?”

“He tries to give me advice, mostly,” I said. “At least, that’s what he tries to pass it of as. Just fatherly advice… but he does things like refer to people as insects, and one time he was dismembering people, which kind of undermines his whole ‘really-I’m-just-a-concerned-father’ routine. He’s… not the sort of person you’d want to take advice from. But even when he’s not really hiding the fact that he’s evil, he’s still… well, there’s something compelling about him. I’d really like to be able to shut him out for good.”

“That is something I might be able to help you with. I’ll have to do some research. It’s a difficult situation,” Teddi said. “You probably realize that things could get complicated for you if you sought any official help in dealing with him, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m hoping that he’ll lose interest, but I’m not sure that’s worth hoping for. It seems like he was already willing to wait until I moved out from my grandmother’s house.”

“So, you think he has plans for you.”

“I’m sure he does,” I said.

“Do you have any idea what they are?”

“No, and I don’t want to know,” I said. “If he offered to share them with me, I’m sure whatever he’d tell me would just be like a wriggling bit of bait on the end of his hook. Steff, my… well, you know who Steff is. She said something like, when you’re dealing with someone you know is untrustworthy, you don’t figure out if each thing they say is worth trusting or not. That’s what untrustworthy means.”

“I’m not sure I would endorse that absolute a view as good advice when dealing with people in general,” she said. “But there is some truth to it. A person… and I’m talking about denizens of this plane in particular… is not categorically trustworthy or not, but there are points where you have to go, ‘This isn’t worth my time. This isn’t worth the grief.’ And I have the impression that you’ve been learning that.”

“Yeah, I suppose I have,” I said. “If there’s a big moral to my first taste of semi-adulthood, I suppose that’s it.” I realized then that I knew where I needed to start. I realized right after that realization that we were getting near the end of the session. “Um, in case I forget, could you please make a note to ask me about Puddy next time?”

“Duly noted,” she said, and because she picked up her tablet when she said that I realized that she hadn’t written anything down before that. “On the subject of noting things, I’d like to ask you to try something for next time.”

“Okay,” I said. “What?”

“When I said you should write it down if you find yourself thinking ‘sometimes it just feels like…’, I was only half-joking,” she said. “I’d like you to forget about the sheets and try to keep a journal. Write down what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling. This isn’t homework. You’re not going to be graded on it. You don’t even have to show it to me, but if you do it, it might help you see patterns that you’re missing, or pick up on threads that you’d want to address if only you knew they were there.”

“If therapy and writing are so much like each other, what makes you think I’ll be any better at dealing with a blank page?” I asked.

“Nothing in particular,” she said. “But when one thing doesn’t work, you try another one.”

“I’m sorry I’m so difficult to work with,” I said.

“None of that,” Teddi said. “I told you that you’re not my challenge for the year. You know, a lot of people end up doing the ‘Oh, by the way, here’s what’s really on my mind.’ thing as they’re on the way out the door, and they don’t commit to talking about it next time.”

“I guess I did commit to talking about Puddy, huh?” I said.

“Oh, you can still back out,” Teddi said. “This early in the process, if it comes to a question of you showing up versus staying away in order to avoid dealing with something, I’d rather you show up… and I mean that. Mental healing can be a struggle, but sometimes we have to ease our way towards a place where we have the strength to conduct that struggle. As long as I can tell you’re easing, I’m always going to think it’s worth your time to be here.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll try to remember that.”

“I’ll send you another reminder.”

Maybe it was the fact that the nexus hallway was a narrower space than the lunchroom or the venues for the dances I’d been to, and less formal a gathering than the classes I attended… but then, I hadn’t felt this way when Hazel’d had her community potluck on Sunday. I’d been aware of a spirit of togetherness, but it had felt like something external to me… something I could see and maybe touch, but not something I could be included in.

Even when a good number of other students had come together in protest or whatever they’d been feeling when I got banished to the labyrinth, I’d felt more surprised and overwhelmed by the surge of support than I’d felt any real kind of connection to those who’d turned out.

Maybe that had been a mistake… maybe if I’d reached back out more, followed up on that a little bit, I might have been able to carve out more of a place for myself.

“You go to a human university, you can’t expect everything to be your size unless you’re a human,” Oru was saying as we approached.

“Actually…” Pala began, a little bit hesitantly. She seemed eager to speak up, but uncertain of her right to do so… it was easy to see how less invested she was in the topic than the two principal combatants.

“Is it a human university?” Shiel replied. “I mean, it’s definitely human-owned and human-ran, and naturally it’s very humanocentric…”

I could understand Pala’s hanging back from the conversation and her look of mild amusement. The problems of the shorter races might interest her in the abstract, as she had her own version of the same issues to deal with, but she’d have less reason to be emotionally involved than the goblin or kobold.

“Well, naturally. So what are you even arguing for?” Oru asked.

“I didn’t expect… hi, Two!” Pala said, seeing us.

“Hi, Pala. Hi, Hazel,” Two said.

“Hello, Two,” Hazel said. “Pull up a floor and join the, er, fun.”

“As I was…” Pala started to say as we sat down, but Oru and Shiel were too engrossed in their debate to notice.

“Well, the fact that it remains a de facto human institution doesn’t matter,” Shiel said. “The moment they started accepting enrollment from other races, they’ve defined themselves as a university for all of those races, but by not making their facilities and services equally accessible they’ve done so poorly.”

“To hear you speak, I’d think you don’t want them to let anyone in at all,” Oru said.

“No, explicitly excluding other races is its own failing,” Shiel said. “The most that could be said for it is that it’s honest. Here, they’re saying that all races are equal, but they’re rating our needs differently. Their actions have proven…”

“I didn’t expect things to be my size, is what I was saying,” Pala said. “I just said that I would like for them to be so.”

“Well, there you go,” Oru said.

“Wait a second,” I said, adjusting my position… sitting on the floor could be uncomfortable enough, but the sloped floor in the nexus made it even more awkward. “You’re all talking about how big Pala is?”

“I was talking about how small the buildings are,” Pala said.

“Not specifically about her, no,” Shiel said. “She’s merely serving as a convenient example of how humans have prized their own accessibility over others.”

“When I mentioned it, I thought I was talking specifically about me,” Pala said. “Did I say it wrongly?”

“You said it fine, love,” Hazel said. “Goblin-type ears just have a lot of room for words to echo around in.”

“Oh, don’t you start,” Shiel said.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Hazel said.

“I know what you meant, Pala,” Oru said. “And I’ve been inconvenienced for my size, too. But like I said, there’s got to be a practical limit on the amount of special accommodations they can make.”

“I think it’s more of a special accommodation when everything around you,” Shiel said, “the buildings, the doorways, the furniture, the lifts, the bathroom facilities… literally everything is designed specifically to accommodate you and people like you.”

“Isn’t that what you’re asking for?” Oru asked.

“Not for buildings made for any one type of person, no,” Shiel said. “For everyone. If they made a building that was truly accessible to everyone, each accommodation that was made to achieve that goal would be less ‘special’ and more routine.”

“Wouldn’t that get really expensive really fast?” I said.

“Buildings are really expensive to make, I would imagine,” Shiel said. “But people come up with the funds for it if a building needs to be built. That kind of money on a building is considered reasonable, right? Normal. But who defines what’s normal?”

“The people who live there,” Oru said.

“Okay, so if any of you tall folk came back to my warren, or Oru’s village, or the shire of Logfallen, you wouldn’t be able to get around very well,” Shiel said. “You wouldn’t be able to walk through any of the portals, or fit in furniture… well, we don’t really use ‘furniture’… but you wouldn’t be able to stand up in our tunnels. And it wouldn’t be because we did anything to exclude you. We just constructed them the way we normally do. Our definition of normal excludes non-kobolds.”

“Well, again, there you go,” Oru said. “It’s not on purpose, it’s not to keep anyone out… it’s just doing what you’d do normally. Can we ask for more?”

“If we don’t, we deserve what we get,” Shiel said. “My point is that what’s ‘normal’ is entirely up to the people making the definition, so there’s no reason it can’t be defined more broadly.”

“So why not start at home?” Oru asked. “Why not start digging bigger warrens?”

“If I had any input on warren construction… or much of anything else… maybe I would. But our warrens are inaccessible for reasons of self-protection, and self-determination,” Shiel said.

“And humans don’t get to self-determine?” Oru asked.

“‘Human society’, by nature of their imperialistic impulses, is intrinsically pluralistic,” Shiel said. “Their culture touches and envelops a lot of other races. What we do in our mining communities by ourselves is different than what humans do. If we went so far as to put up a sign that said ‘No humans allowed!’, would it make a difference to anyone? Humans don’t have to pass through our tunnels to get anywhere. Humans aren’t surrounded by our warrens. And as a race they’ve shown a tendency to go into other peoples’ lands and do whatever they want anyway.”

“Well, if you’re talking about what’s fair, why does it matter how many humans need to pass through your mines?” Oru asked. “If it’s the principle of the thing you ought to make sure humans and giants and orcs and gelatinous thingies can fit comfortably in your tunnels anyway.”

“If we were inviting humans and ogres and ‘thingies’ into our warrens and these warrens were the only source of certain advantages they would need to get along in a kobold-dominated world, then yes, it would be horribly unfair of us not to accommodate them,” Shiel said.

“Aren’t you maybe overstating the case?” I said. “I mean, I think in general I’d agree with your side over Oru’s, but humans control something like less than twenty percent of the land on the surface of the world, and most of that’s split between two empires that haven’t exactly gotten along that well, historically.”

“Okay, a human-dominated continent,” Shiel said. “Or sphere of influence. The Imperium surrounds or borders every kobold warren known to us in this part of the world. It would take about ten percent of the Imperial military forces to wipe out every one of those communities in under a year.”

“Oh, you’re making that up,” Oru said.

“No… it is just an estimate, obviously, but it’s based on the actual strength of the imperial armed forces, the typical defenses of a kobold warren, and historical engagements between human and kobold forces on kobold turf,” Shiel said. “We don’t have the same capabilities as dwarves. We don’t have their same investment in and knowledge of shielding and secrecy runes, in traps, or fortifications. No matter how much we dig in, we could be dug out. All of which means that humans will never have to worry about us the way we have to worry about them.”

“Why would you ever sit down and figure out something like that in the first place?” Honey asked. “It’s so… morbid.”

“I think about it because they think about it,” Shiel said. “You don’t think the imperial government has done studies and war games and divinations to figure out how to permanently pacify or eliminate the other races that share its domain?”

“You’re looking well, Honey,” I interjected. Up closer, she was noticeably down a little weight and a little sleep, but she seemed relaxed, almost relieved. In fact, it was hard to say how exactly but now that she’d drawn attention to herself she was practically radiating an almost tangible sense of relief.

“Oh, I’m just glad the whole thing… well, it’s nice to know it was just a monster attack, you know?” Honey said. She hiccuped, or giggled. “Not a murder after all.”

Any guilt I might have felt from not immediately divulging the truth was wiped out by seeing how much calm the idea gave her. Perhaps that was a good sign for the campus mood. After contemplating the implications of a horrible murder, “just a monster attack” didn’t seem so bad.

“Look, the thing we’re overlooking is that this was an all-human university,” Oru said. “They made the choice to open it up to all races. Doesn’t that say something? About their willingness to accommodate? About their intentions?”

“I think inviting members of every race to come to your university but not making it fully accessible to them says something, alright,” Shiel said. “It says that it’s all still yours. I mean, apart from the university’s actual owners, who do you think has the greatest sense of ownership, of belonging: the human students, or the non-humans?”

“Is that a real question?” Oru asked. “This university was built and founded and run by humans, and it’s in the middle of a human empire. Obviously humans are going to feel more at home. Not that I feel particularly unwelcome… I mean, I can be made to feel unwelcome in a room with no humans in it as easily as one that’s full of humans. I just think it’s more a matter of… economics, I guess you’d say. I think a lot of it is.”

“A lot of what is?” Sheil asked.

“The stuff you talk about,” Oru said. “All the racism you think is everywhere. Doesn’t it really come down to money and power?”

“Well, yes… it comes down to power, and money is a form of that,” Shiel said. “Racism without power would just be prejudice. Ugly, but irrelevant.”

“Except I don’t think it’s about race,” Oru said. “I mean, okay, yes… some people don’t like goblins. I call that racism. You’d probably call it prejudice. But it’s not like I care what some hairy, round-faced breast ape thinks I look like, right?”

“But human attitudes matter because they’ve got the power,” Shiel said. “Including most of the money.”

“Okay, yeah, right now there’s a lot of money in human hands, but they’ve got a lot more hands than we do, and they’ve been collecting money for longer,” Oru said. “As a race, I mean. But a rich goblin who didn’t want to live in the lowlands could go and buy a house on a hilltop, or a townhouse in the city…”

“Or a cityhouse in the town,” Hazel added.

“…or whatever… and there are poor humans, who are way worse off than anyone in my village,” Oru said. “I mean, everybody there has a house. I doubt the humans treat them any better than they treat us.”

“So there’s classism and racism,” Shiel said. “I don’t know why you think this is better than just racism.”

“I don’t think it’s racism and… classism,” Oru said. “I don’t even think there’s that much classism, unless that’s a fancy word for ‘some people have more money than you do’. But I also just don’t think there’s as much racism as you think there is.”

“Um… didn’t you tell me that you didn’t like going out at night because you were afraid of being attacked by fighter students?” I asked her. I had to wonder how much her current stance was being informed by her desire to disagree with the extremity of Shiel’s position. I had a hunch that left to her own devices she’d be less sanguine about the general state of human race relations and on-campus equality… but when Shiel said something too extreme for her to support, she ended up arguing against the whole thing.

“Yes, but… that’s just people being stupid,” Oru said. “Thinking ‘goblin equals monster equals kill it!‘ But it’s not like I walk into a sweet shop and the shopkeeper says, ‘Oh, you’re a monster. I can’t take your coppers because monsters are for killing.’”

“So you’re fine with the idea that you might get randomly killed for your race as long as you can buy sweets?” Shiel said.

“I’m not ‘fine’ with being killed, but it’s dangerous outside for everyone,” Oru said. “More humans get killed by ghouls, so I suppose that ghouls are racist against humans?”

“Hold on, now,” Hazel said, in a surprisingly serious voice. I could almost feel something shifting inside her, like a card had been flipped over or a puzzle piece had locked into place. “I think you’ve got a point, Oru, but I don’t think it’s the one you mean to make.”

“What do you mean?” Oru asked.

“Oh, this should be good,” Shiel said.

“I mean, we’ve the same sorts of problems in my shire, only we’re sort of an insular lot, so it’s all one race, see? But there are definitely what you’d call ‘class divisions’, and you see the same sorts of things you’re talking about across the classes.”

“Not really,” Honey said. “I think our society’s really very… egalitarian. I mean, we did away with most noble titles before the Imperium did, and peasantry before that. I think it’s like Oru said: some people just have more money. You have to expect that, unless you do away with money entirely… but it’s not like money plays favorites.”

“Just because we stopped naming the classes doesn’t mean they went away, Honey,” Hazel said. “Or that people don’t know them. Look at your family. Look at mine.”

“We’re cousins, Hazel. We are family.”

“You know what I mean,” Hazel said. “Your folks. My folks. You could put them in a line, with you at the front, us at the back, and most any random folks from town falling somewhere in between us. That’s class.”

“If you think the folks in town looked down on you, Hazel, it might be because of the way you walked around like you had a chip on your shoulder all the time,” Honey said.

“Are you saying your folks didn’t look down on my dad and me?”

“Well, if you want to bring that up… but if that’s a matter of class, Hazel, it’s that your father didn’t have any class, of the other kind, and you didn’t have the chance to pick any up from him,” Honey said. “And that’s sad, but that sort of class is something a person of any station can acquire, not a… social… division… thingy.”

“Except…” Shiel said. “Except that it’s not really a different sort, is it? It still refers to social standing.”

“It is,” Honey said. “I meant class as in classy, as in… classiness.”

“Yes, but that means ‘having class’,” Shiel said. “You see, ‘classy manners’ are manners associated with people ‘of a certain class’. Anybody can learn them, but if your parents have them, you learn them growing up. If everybody else around you shows them, then that becomes like your idea of what normal default behavior is. The fact that it’s a special advantage you possess that others don’t doesn’t even occur to you.”

“Some advantage,” Honey said. “It’s just… one way of behaving. So what if Hazel learned other ways? Is she really worse off because she doesn’t know how to fold a napkin?”

“Hey now! I fold them better than you do,” Hazel said.

“She is pretty good at that,” Two added.

“Well, yeah, because you practiced it every day all summer long after my mum said something about it,” Honey said.

“After she snapped my head off, more like, ” Hazel said.

“The point is that you practiced it and you got better at it, and anybody could do that,” Honey said.

“The point is that your ‘classy’ behaviors act like a filter,” Shiel said. “Keeping the ‘right’ sort of people above the ‘wrong’ sorts… it can be used to sort out who gets dinner invitations, who’s allowed into the ‘respectable’ establishments… if the class stigma’s strong enough, that becomes self-policing as people who don’t know the etiquette end up staying away for fear of embarrassment…”

“Is it anybody else’s fault if they do?” Honey said.

“Yes. It’s the fault of people who would use social stigma as a weapon,” Shiel said. “These are just some examples of how people of a lower class end up with reduced opportunities.”

“Oh, yes, right,” Hazel said, nodding. “I could talk all day about ‘reduced opportunities’ compared to Honey.”

“That’s not ‘reduced opportunities’, that’s just being poor,” Honey said.

“Trust me, Honey, that reduces your opportunities,” Hazel said.

I found myself nodding along with Hazel. Growing up with less money than everyone else in your class was an almost daily lesson in “reduced opportunities”. I wasn’t sure how much of it came down to class… my grandmother was respected and “the right sort of people” in the eyes of most, and she owned her own home even if she’d never exactly rich, but her respectability hadn’t in any way been passed down onto her daughter the single mother.

“Alright, then, so it’s reduced opportunities to spend money,” Honey said. “If you’ve got one gold and I’ve got ten gold, then I can buy ten times as much. Stands to reason.”

“Yeah,” Oru said. “Stands to reason.”

“Yeah, only maybe there are more things in the world that will do you lasting good that and cost ten gold than cost one,” Hazel said. “Maybe we each need one gold for food to live on and here comes a thrilling investment opportunity that costs nine more. Or even one more. I couldn’t… if I couldn’t afford to come to university, you’d have an opportunity I don’t.”

“So? You can make a good living without a university education,” Honey said. “I was thinking about being a teacher, once. You just need to know your figures and your letters to teach the young ones.”

“You think anybody ‘proper’ would have let me teach their children?” Hazel said. “Assuming I could even live on what they give the schoolteachers.”

“Well, money’s not everything.”

“No, just food and shelter and decent clothing and anything else,” Hazel said.

“Miss Ruth told me the best things in life are free,” Two said.

“Yeah? Did she say that as she took money out of your pockets?” Hazel asked.

“No,” Two said. “She said ‘Best I hold onto that for you’ when she did that.”

“Is she keeping a lot of your money safe, then?” Hazel asked.

“Not anymore,” Two said. “I donated it to Hearts of Clay.”

“I’d ask another question but I don’t think I’d like the answer,” Hazel said. “Anyway… my point is that there’s class, and it’s real, and it doesn’t need race to make a mess of things. Though I’m pretty sure race is in there, too… tallfolk don’t even know about river people, and they still look at me like I’m not there.”

“It’s all real and it’s all related,” Shiel said. “Lower class correlates with less money, which is less power, and class tend to correlate strongly with races, even intraraces.”

“Whatra-races?” Oru said.

“Like hobgoblins and goblins,” Shiel said. “Or arguably, hobgoblins, kobolds, and goblins.”

“Oh, sub-races,” Oru said.

“I don’t like the connotations of that word,” Shiel said. “I am not sub-goblin.”

“I didn’t say you are,” Oru said. “It’s just a word… the proper one. Hobgoblins, kobolds, and goblins are all sub-races of the same race.”

“And what race is that?”

“Well… goblin, I guess,” Oru said. “That’s why we’re called ‘goblinoids’.”

“We’re called ‘goblinoids’ by humans because they met you first,” Shiel said.

“Yes, and so if they’d met you first we’d be koboldoids,” Oru said. “Do you think I’d be complaining?”

“Honestly? No.”

“Well, there you go!” Oru said. “And you don’t have anything to complain about. ‘Teeth and claws may rend my flesh’… is there a way to make that rhyme in Pax?”

A couple of human girls, one with sandy hair and freckled skin… and maybe just a trace of La Belle ancestry in her face, though that could have been my imagination… and the other with dark hair in long, tight braids… had wandered over and were standing a few feet away, listening to the conversation.

“Oh, hello, Irene,” Shiel said when she noticed them. She said the name with a long e audible on the end.

“Hello, Shiel,” the darker-toned girl said with a distinct Metropolitan accent. It was so weird hearing those vowels coming out of a person over three feet tall. “This is my friend I was telling you about, Jeanie?”

“Hi,” the other girl said.

“Oh, right, you wanted to trade soldiers,” Shiel said. It seemed like such a random thing to say, until I realized she was talking about her game.

“Well, yeah,” Jeanie said. She gave a nervous little laugh. “The only thing is, I don’t have any soldiers, yet…”

“Oh, well, I do sell them, but I’ve kind of got a backlog for that,” Shiel said. “I’ll do a trade if it gives me something I can use immediately, but otherwise I’d end up selling my way right out of the game, and I’m not prepared to do that for any price.”

“Oh, yeah, I can respect that. The thing is that I don’t have any soldiers,” Jeanie said, “but I’ve been making… landscapes, I guess… for Irene and she said you might like them?”

“What kind of landscapes? Do you mean battlefields?”

“They’re painted mats,” Jeanie said. “You can roll them up like a poster… I made the first one for a class. I use memory parchment, so you can switch it between two different pictures I made, one that’s more open and one that has a lot of trees, and if you touch two points with fingers on different hands it’ll show you the distance between them. The next one I got fancier… it does that, and you can also turn on a grid if you just want to be able to eyeball it.”

“Interesting,” Shiel said, and to my shame I almost agreed with her. Interactive maps were a lot more interesting than make-believe warfare. “Detailed maps are awesome, but the problem is that even if you can toggle between two of them, that’s two identical maps that you’re going to be fighting on again and again. It might be nice to be able to re-fight the same battle with different forces, but I like being able to change things up more.”

“Oh, well, that was just my first attempt,” Jeanie said. “My second one had three maps stored in it, and I copied the shape of a skirmish field for it… so you can rotate it and get six different starting positions. I had another brainwave while I was working on it… too late to work on it… but for my third map I cut the memory parchment into smaller sections and then attached them together, so you have a bunch of different sections that you can change independently of each other.”

“How long have you been working on these?” Shiel asked.

“Three days,” Jeanie said. “I get an idea in my head and it tends to take over, you know? I use the clone and stamp brushes a lot, but I have a good variety of trees and things because each one I have everything I’ve done before to draw on plus whatever new I make. Anyway, each section of my newest map has five different landscapes… I couldn’t make them too different because the edges have to match up or it looks all blocky.”

“Couldn’t you get around that by not permanently attaching the sections?” I asked. “Just leave the pieces separate and let people put them where they want. If you did it that way, you’d have an easier time trading, too… you wouldn’t have to finish a whole five-way map for each person you wanted to trade with.”

“I don’t know how thick this memory parchment is, but it seems like that might be messy,” Shiel said. “It seems like they’d be easy to move or scatter.”

“I guess I could attach them to cardstock or board or something,” Jeanie said. “I’m trying to find a way around the sectioning, though, because I’m looking at ways of putting more special effects in, like fires and poison clouds and things… that’s going to be hard enough if I’m not enchanting a hundred sheets individually for each map or whatever.”

“Well, then you either make a transparent overlay that you put over the whole map, or a baseboard enchanted to display the effects a short distance above it,” I said. “I don’t think I could do it, but I can see how it would be done. You’d just need a bunch of conditionals and tiny little illusions, or something. Illusions are generally pretty cheap. It would still be a lot more work than just storing paintings in memory parchment.”

“True,” she said. “And honestly, if I made all of them do that I’d never have any finished for trading. If I could figure out a way to copy them without losing the quality.”

“What about that clone brush you mentioned?” Shiel asked.

“Oh, it’s good for picking up a few inches from here and putting it there,” she said. “But I’d need something a lot more heavy-duty to retain a whole painting, even a square foot at a time, with the level of color and detail I use. The school’s autoscribes just aren’t set up for that kind of thing… I mean, nobody outside of publishing houses has that kind of equipment just lying around.”

“Or bored enchanters,” I said. “Hey, Two,” I said, right at the same time that Hazel did.

“I believe I could copy your paintings, Jeanie,” Two said.

“She wants twenty-five percent,” Hazel said. “Cash goes to her, any figures you get in trade you can give to me and I’ll pay her for them.”

“I’d have to see what you can do first,” Jeanie said.

“Yeah, that goes for me to you,” Shiel said. “But if they’re workable I think we could come to an arrangement.”

“They’re more than workable,” Irene said. “Believe me, she paints like you carve.”

“With a chisel?” Pala said.

“You two are in the apartments out on west campus?” Shiel asked, and they nodded.

“Yeah, in the senior housing. We’re crashing in Pelinor tonight, I think,” Irene said. “You could walk back with us with tomorrow morning if you want, or we could make a time to bring one of the maps over?”

“That’s a long walk for me, and I’ve got class in the morning,” Shiel said. “But I should be in my room from three on… it’s top floor, east side, last door on the right before the lounge.”

“Cool,” Irene said. “I also wanted to talk to you about this meeting that some of us are brewing up for a new campus group… we don’t have a faculty sponsor yet so it’s not official, but this is just kind of a planning thing…”

“Oh, there is Ian,” Pala said, pushing herself up and craning her neck uphill. I looked up and saw that Ian had indeed entered through the doors at the back of the hall. He was with Winnie, Puddy’s cousin with the annoying laugh. “Did I tell you he said he was coming?”

“No,” I said, trying not to scowl at his choice of company… or the fact that he had any. I wanted to talk to him about what had happened in the bathroom with Iona, which would necessitate going off alone with him. “It’s okay. Excuse me, I’ve got to go tell him… hi.”

I’d given up on trying to make up an excuse at the last moment, when it had occurred to me that I could just say I was going to say hi to him and it wouldn’t be suspicious at all. That information had arrived a few seconds too late to be useful, and I blushed at the awkward sentence that had fallen out of my mouth.

“Ah… young love,” Irene said, grinning. “Fresher, right? Were we ever that young?You go run and tell him ‘hi’, then.”

Apparently awkwardness was the perfect camouflage in some settings.

Soon: Ian and Mackenzie quibble over word meanings. And there’s sex. It’s almost like something that might happen in Tales of MU. Later: Puddy.

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“No, it’s… kind of a front hallway, I guess,” I said. “It connects the dorms in this cluster together.”

“Oh,” Pala said. “It looks more like a sitting room to me.”

She had a point… there were the most people than I’d ever seen in the nexus since after the first day when people had been moving in and getting to know the area. Now there were people sitting all over the gently sloped floor. Some of them were eating dinner from the corner store, or fast food from the student union.

There were more human-only groups than otherwise, but it was a relief to see that they were sharing the space with a good number of Harlowe students, some even in mixed groups. Even in the absence of stupidity-fueled violence, I had figured the press conference’s “revelation” would have kept everybody buttoned down inside their dorms… instead it looked like a good number of people had decided to split the difference to obey the letter of the safety guidelines and the spirit of camaraderie.

Hazel’s little “community outreach” initiative on the day of the killing hadn’t lost all of its momentum in the following days, it seemed. I looked around to see if I could spot her… I saw Oru and Shiel, and as soon as I saw them I realized that Honey was with them, looking better and more relaxed than she had in recent days. She actually waved at me when she saw me looking at her. After a second of being stunned, I waved back.

“Well, this is nice,” Pala said. “Everybody seems so friendly. It makes me wish I lived on campus.”

“Not everyone in the dorms are friendly, but yeah, it is nice to see.”

“And the ceiling is so high!” she said. I’d never thought about it, but it really was… especially at the southern end of the hallway. The floor followed the general contours of the sloping ground, but the ceiling was flat. “I hope that the rest of it is like this, because this and the student union atrium and the gymnasium center are the only places on the campus where I don’t have to stoop.”

“Oh, well… it’s not quite as spacious inside the actual dorms, no,” I said, trying to picture it in my head. I’d never given that much thought to headroom in the hallways. Harlowe Hall seemed like one of the bigger dorms, in terms of its proportions. There were larger dorms, and dorms that housed more students, but Harlowe had been built during a period when the fashion for institutional building designs called for broad hallways and high ceilings. The towers were similar, though their layout was a little more… involved. “Did you do much exploring of the dorm where the Veil party was?”

She shook her head.

“The party room was nice and big but the hallways leading out of it looked very… cramped,” she said. “And I was not sure where I was allowed to go.”

“Well, you’ll probably be able to get around in Harlowe,” I said. “But it won’t be like this.”

“Oh,” she said. “Then I believe I will just.. hang out… in here for a while, if you think that’s okay. I mean if you think you will be safe. You won’t be attacked in your own dorm, do you think?”

It had happened before, but I didn’t want to say anything that would make Pala feel guilty about staying behind when she was clearly enjoying being able to stand upright with a roof over head. She’d been “hired” by Ian to protect me from out-of-control human vigilantes, not the random assaults of my dormmates.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. I looked around the gathered groups of students… some of whom were looking at us, but more eyes were drawn towards Pala than me… and made a decision. “I’ll come back down and hang out, too, once I’ve dumped my stuff off in my room and found out what everyone else is up to.”

“Oh, okay,” she said. “I should mirror to Ian to let him know you are safe.”

That made me realize that I should probably do the same thing, since he was worried enough about me to engage a student bodyguard… but I didn’t want to step on Pala’s toes. She was doing this for a grade, and I didn’t know what all affected her score.

“Okay, would you please tell him where we are so that he can come hang out with us if he wants?” I asked. I thought about adding that I love him, but asking Pala to tell him that seemed weird… so then I considered asking her to tell him that I’d said hi, but that sounded weird for different reasons. “Tell him I said thanks for the escort.”

“Okie dokie,” Pala said, nodding. I watched her mouth mumble over the words as she committed them to memory.

“Oh, um… and thank you, Pala, for doing it.”

“You are welcome,” she said. “I think I am more likely to get full points for guarding your body than anyone else I could have. Because of the danger, you see? Many of my classmates have been marked down for assignments where there was no real threat.”

“Are you going to be penalized because I wasn’t actually attacked?”

“No,” she said. “Our battle effectiveness is graded separately. Even for non-threatening assignments we can be graded on procedure and form.”

“How do they grade that?”

“We write up the assignment afterwards,” she said.

“How do they know you actually did the procedures, then?” I asked.

“The grade is for knowing, I suppose,” she said. “And you have to know it to write it up. Also, we are shadowed sometimes.”

“Do they tell you when?” I asked.

“No. But if you do not note the shadow in your write-up, you fail.”

“How are you supposed to… oh,” I said, grasping the point of the exercise. “I guess that makes sense. Anyway, I’ll be back.”

I headed into Harlowe, climbed the stairs up to the fifth floor with minimal trippage… my shoes had picked up a little moisture outside and a sole slipped off one of the steps on the last flight, jarring me… and headed to my room. Two was sitting at her desk eating a muffin and working on her homework. I’d been hoping to see Amaranth, but she seemed to be alone.

“Hi, Mack! Amaranth and Steff said to tell you that they’re in Steff’s room,” Two said. “They’re in Steff’s room. Sooni left a note for you on the markerboard in permanent markers. I cleaned it off, but I copied it down for you first. Also, you left the door unlocked. You shouldn’t do that when nobody’s in the room.”

“”Hi, Two… I didn’t leave the door unlocked,” I said.

“It wasn’t me,” she said. “Be more careful.”

That would have been more than a little troubling even if I didn’t know that my floormates had been trying to spy on me… I always locked it reflexively, and I knew Two would do so with a conscientiousness that was better than a reflex.

Trina was a minor subtle artist. Dee could take a door off its hinges with her power. I doubted Trina was anywhere near as strong or skilled as she was, but it wouldn’t take much power or skilled at all to pop the lock since it was easy as turning the knob on the inside of the door. Puddy had shown some facility with getting doors open, and would have even had the opportunity to make a copy of the key when she had been my roommate. Any number of students might have learned a form of magic sufficient to get the door open… again, the locks weren’t exactly the most rigorously protected things in the world.

And that was only considering my floormates… my father had managed to physically enter my room at least once.

Suddenly, my dorm room felt a lot less secure to me than it had before. I’d have to investigate options for warding it… something to keep out demons would be problematic for obvious reasons, but something to make the lock a little more robust and maybe let us know when somebody was in the room and we weren’t would be nice. It would have to be a dorm-legal solution, of course, or else Two would object.

“Did Amaranth and Steff say how long they’d be?” I asked. No sense dwelling on something I couldn’t immediately address.

“No, they said we shouldn’t wait for them for dinner,” Two said. “Here is the message.”

She handed me a sheaf of notebook paper on which she’d drawn a brightly colored rainbow background surrounding a heart-shaped white space, with the message, “Hello, Miss Mackenzie! Reflecked Me Please!” written in big curly letters, surrounded by bizarre smiley faces. The misspelled word had been crossed out with a writing pen, and “_^^reflect” written by it. At the bottom, there was a line of characters in the Yokano language, and then a big loopy signature saying “Sooni” in the Draconized script of Pax.

“You didn’t do all this by hand, did you?” I asked.

“No, I scribed it,” she said, which made sense. Two had begun her life, essentially, as a piece of intelligent office equipment.

“Well… I suppose I’d better see what she wants,” I said. I got my mirror out and flipped it open. “Suzune Hoshinotama, Prax,” I told it. I didn’t know if she’d be on campus or not, but she had such a distinctive name that even the province should be enough to identify her.

The swirling mist that usually preceded a reflection had barely started to form when it disappeared. At first I wondered if there was some kind of interference, or if Lee had put a block on outgoing reflections that weren’t to him… but then I heard Sooni’s voice.

“Hello? Hello, Mackenzie?” she said.

“Sooni?” I said. It was weird to be talking to her and seeing my own face reflected back. Watching my lips move as I spoke was weirdly disconcerting.

“Hello!” she said.

“Something’s wrong with the image, Sooni,” I said. “I can’t see you.”

“Oh, well… I turned it off,” she said.

“Why would you do that?”

“Because… because… because I was looking forward to the sound of your voice and I did not want anything to distract me!” she said. Sooni was such a terrible liar, it was a wonder she could even fool herself as often as she did. “Anyway, something is wrong with your mirror because I could not reflect to you!”

“Yeah, well, it’s not actually my mirror,” I said. “It’s really for keeping in touch with my lawyer.”

“Lawyers!” she said. I heard the sound of her heavy wooden sandal hitting a hard surface as she said that. “I am so tired of lawyers… my father’s lawyers have been all around me all week. I am being strangled to death by lawyers! But they say I can have my room back soon.”

“Well, that’s good,” I said.

“But they say my father says I need more ‘supervision’,” she said.

Well, that’s good, I thought.

“Anyway… I’m just so glad that you got my message!” she said.

“Yeah, Two gave it to me,” I said. “Um… so… what’s up?”

“I needed to talk to you because I wanted to apologize to you for trying to drag you into my investigation,” she said. “I see now that I was not being fair to either one of us. I am sorry. I hope you can forgive me.”

No matter how curious I was about the chain of thoughts running through Sooni’s head, had to be safer to graciously accept her heartfelt apology than to ask her to elaborate on the reason behind it. She was making a considerate gesture and I was making one in return. Asking her how she’d arrived at the conclusion that such a gesture was warranted was the conversational equivalent of saying, “Please, sir, I enjoy this sausage… would you show me how it’s made?”

These were the thoughts that went through my head mere moments after I asked her, “What do you mean?”

“Well, I was expecting too much of you,” she said. “You are my dear friend, but you are not a trained investigator with trained investigative skills. I should not have placed such a heavy burden on someone with your meager abilities.”

“…that’s… nice of you to say,” I said.

“Especially since I did not need your help after all!” she said. “Don’t you see, Mackenzie? I had the power to solve the case of the… dead… bird… girl… princess all the time!”

“I… what?” I said. The thought that she might have stumbled over the actual killer didn’t even occur to me… I just didn’t want anybody else to have to put up with being arbitrarily made the villain of Sooni’s story, for their sake and hers. Many people wouldn’t put up with random accusations, magical assaults, and shoe-flingings. “Sooni… they said it was a monster attack.”

“Yes!” Sooni said, with such triumphal joy in her voice that I could just see her beetle-black eyes sparkling. “And just the other day I was saying, I was saying aloud, that I did not see how any person could possibly have done such a thing to poor Lydia.”

“Leda,” I said.

“It might have seemed like a chance remark at the time, but in my experience investigations often turn on such remarks,” she said. “Obviously my intuitive powers of intuition had already grasped what the so-called ‘imperial’ investigators had missed.”

“Obviously,” I said.

“Of course it is for the best that my involvement remain secret,” she said. “There is no sense embarrassing the authorities by letting everyone know they have been shown up by a plucky and spirited girl detective.”

“Well, that goes without saying,” I said, fighting the urge to roll my eyes. I didn’t know if she could see me.

“So anyway… all that I really need from you is to keep your eyes and ears open for my next case,” she said. “I don’t need you to help me solve it.”

She seemed to have forgotten her plans to design and sell clothing as quickly and completely as she’d forgotten about representing Harlowe on the student senate. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing… it was something she had a genuine talent for, but she had seemed to think that the real money was in dressing up like characters from her favorite TV shows, and also that all that was needed was for me to somehow put together an a-commerce ready weavesite for her.

“I’ll let you know if anything comes up,” almost seemed like a neutral, non-committal enough response… except that Sooni’s definition of a binding promise roamed a bit far afield of most people’s.

“Sooni, I don’t think I’m the one to…”

“Nonsense! I believe in you!” she said. “Oh, I have to… bye!”

From the abrupt cut-off, it sounded like she’d been interrupted. Perhaps some of the supervision that she had mentioned had just walked into the room.

I sighed and snapped the mirror shut.

“There’s a bunch of people hanging out downstairs in the nexus,” I said. “Including Pala and Hazel’s cousin Honey. Do you want to go join them?”

“Hallways are supposed to be kept clear,” Two said, her nose wrinkling as if she found the violation distasteful.

“Well, it’s not really a hallway,” I said. “It’s more like a courtyard that got a roof and floor put on.”

“Which made it a hallway.”

“It’s big enough that you can still walk through it when people are sitting in it,” I said. “That’s a pretty good definition of clear.”

“Maybe,” Two said doubtfully.

“Would you rather argue about this or go down and hang out?” I asked, and then watched while she thought it over.

“I would rather go down and hang out,” she decided. “Then stay up here and argue about it. But I would like it best if the hanging out were somewhere else.”

“Well, yes, but we’re not going to be able to make that happen.”

“I know,” she said. “I will be ready to go down with you very shortly.”

She cleaned up her muffin crumbs, put away her homework, and then checked her face in the mirror. I didn’t know what she was checking. Two didn’t wear makeup regularly… she didn’t need it to look like most women did with makeup in understated natural colors… and her hair seemed to fall into place like it had been designed to.

It probably had.

“Pala said you guys are friends now,” I said as we headed downstairs.

“Yes,” Two said. “She is also friends with Suzi.”

“Is Suzi really your friend?” I asked.

“Yes,” Two said.

“Are you sure she doesn’t just like you for your baking?”

“No,” Two said. “But I do not think it matters why she likes me as long as she does and is nice to me and is happy to see me. That is being friendly, and being friendly is like being a friend, and if she is always perfectly friendly to me then she is exactly like a friend.”

“Is she really always perfectly friendly?” I asked.

“No,” Two said. “But my friends Hazel and Dee both agree that you can’t expect people to be perfect. You have to make allowances.”

“Well, just don’t make too many allowances,” I said.

“I won’t,” she said, then gave me a hug and said, “I only make so many allowances for you because you’re like a sister to me.”

“That’s nice of you,” I said.

As much as I loved Two, it was very possible that for the sake of our friendship we’d need to find a different roommate arrangement before too long. She was making friends fast enough that she had other options. For that matter, she’d probably get along fine with her original roommate, Dee, now that she was sleeping better.

We headed back down to the hallway, where Pala had lain down on her side next to the small folk, who had also been joined by Hazel. As she had been in the tunnels around the arena, Pala was lying with her head pointed downhill. Oru and Shiel seemed to be having an argument. I wasn’t exactly too fond of either one of them… Shiel was argumentative and into war games, and Oru… well, she was a biter. And goblin bites hurt.

Pala seemed to be a participant, too, but she had the same emptily pleasant smile on her face as usual, like there was no disagreement happening at all… or at least none worth getting upset about. Whatever the argument was, she probably had less stake in it personally than the others.

Soon: The unpolished dialogue that’s been carried over from my last two draft chapters is withheld again. Why? Clearly just to annoy you.

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