A few minutes passed in silence, the man absently fiddling with her hair, and then he spoke.

“How you feeling now, sunshine?” he asked her.

“Perfectly at ease,” she lied. She was rarely at her ease around the man, and never when they were touching. But she didn’t want him to think she didn’t like it, that she didn’t like his attention or that she didn’t like him… and she’d seen the phrase in a book and it had impressed her.

Perfectly at ease. It sounded airy and sophisticated, like something a well-educated adult would say.

“That’s good,” the man said. “Can I ask you something about your mama?”

“I’d rather not talk about her,” Laurel Anne said. She slid her legs around, turning herself sideways so that less of her was in contact with him.

“Oh, I’m sorry… I shouldn’t have brought her up,” he said. “You come out here to get away from her, don’t you?”

“I come out here to be alone,” Laurel Anne said.

“Oh, well, excuse me, then,” the man said. He shifted her off his leg and started to push himself up off the ground.

“Alone with you,” the girl said, shoving herself forcefully back onto his lap.

“Oof!” the man grunted in an exaggerated fashion. “Alright, then… you come out here to get away from all the myriad and diverse people whom you might encounter at your home. I’m sorry I brought up one of those individuals.”

Laurel Anne scowled, and then laughed.

“Oh, ask your silly question,” she said.

“Well, she seems like an old-fashioned kind of lady,” the man said. “But you’re so young…”

“I’m not that young,” Laurel Anne said.

“I stand corrected once again,” he said. “I was just wondering how someone so modern, then, could have such an old-fashioned mother. Did she have kind of a late start?”

“I suppose so,” Laurel Anne said. “She was thirty, thirty-two or so when she met my father, if I have it figured out right in my head.”

“I’d trust your head,” the man said. “It seems fairly trustworthy, so far. How’d your folks meet?”

“On an airship.”

“Taking a cruise, were they? Oh, no, wait… you told me your daddy was an airshipman in the Imperial Navy.”

“Yes,” Laurel Anne said. “He was a crewman on the ship that carried Mama into the Shift.”

“You mean the Khazarus?”

“That’s dirty,” Laurel Anne said.

“What is?”

“That name is,” Laurel Anne said. “It’s blasphemous. The Shift isn’t holy… it’s all messed up. It’s the only place so wicked the gods themselves won’t walk there.”

“Is that a fact?”

“I… I don’t know,” Laurel Anne said. “It’s what mama says.”

“Do you suppose the gods could walk in… the Shift… if they wanted to?”

“I guess so. But it’s wicked there, so they don’t.”

“That’s interesting,” the man said. “Don’t you think the gods… the good ones… would want to go where it was wicked, so they could do something about it? If they were good, I mean… and if they were able.”

“I don’t know.”

“But what do you think?” the man asked.

“I really don’t know about this stuff,” Laurel Anne said.

“But you’re sharp. I respect your opinion,” he said. “I’d like to know what you think about this.”

“I think… I think they must be able to,” Laurel Anne said. “After all, they are gods.”

“So then you don’t think they’re good?”

“I didn’t say that,” Laurel Anne said.

“But you think they’re able to go into the Shift, this supposedly wicked and messed-up place, but they don’t go in there to fix it?”

“Well… maybe they could fix it, but it would take so much time that they’d rather spend it doing things to watch out for folks who don’t live in such wicked places in the first place?” the girl said.

“That’s interesting,” the man said.

“What is?”

“What do you think a god is, little lady?”

“The gods made the world that is,” Laurel Anne said.

“They made the world as it is,” he said. “But that’s what they did, not what they are, and anyway, you’re only talking about one race of them.”

“The gods aren’t a race. They’re… they’re the gods.”

“Alright, little lady,” he said. “Then one tribe, or kind, or pantheon.”

“My mama says that only the gods who were there in the beginning are true gods,” Laurel Anne said. “The children of the Great Star Drake. The others are all either their children, or are false gods.”

“False gods,” the man echoed, shaking his head.

“What, do you think you know better?”

“I wouldn’t say that I know better than you do,” the man said. “So let’s just say that I have a few different ideas about gods than you do.”

“Like what?” Laurel Anne asked.

“Well, the first thing you’ve got wrong is that those gods of your mama’s, I don’t think they can be the children of the Great Star Drake,” the man said. “I’d say dragons are more likely to be the children of the Great Star Drake.”

“But that doesn’t…”

“Make any sense?” the man said, quirking an eyebrow at her. “You mean, it doesn’t match up to what you’ve been told. But stop a minute and think about it. What is the Great Star Drake? Don’t tell me what the Drake did or what the Drake does, tell me what the Drake is.”

“He’s… a big crystal dragon?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the man said. “A big crystal dragon. Though you’re only half right. Kind of surprising, for someone as sharp as I know you are.”

“How am I only half right?”

“Well, you said the Star Drake’s a ‘he’,” the man said. “Tell me, what kind of a ‘he’ have you ever heard of that went around laying eggs?”

“Are you saying… are you saying the Great Star Drake is a girl?” Laurel Anne asked.

“I’m not saying a word about things I know nothing about,” the man said. “I’ve never been in a position to judge… not sure I’d be able to, on a dragon. I’m just saying that if the Great Star Drake laid those eggs, then maybe it’s time to rethink a few pronouns… and if not, then something else did and maybe we’re putting too much credit in the wrong place.”

“I can’t believe you’re saying that,” the girl said, shaking her head.

“Listen, darling… I’m glad you don’t believe me,” the man said. “I don’t want your belief. I’d like it just fine if you hear what I say, and you think about it, and you make up your own mind. You’ve got a good one, after all, and I think you’re old enough to use it.”

“Well, I should hope so,” Laurel Anne said. “So… what do you think about it?”

“’bout what?” the man asked. “What in particular, I mean?”

“Well what do you think the gods are?”

“That’s about a question and a half, isn’t it?” the man said. “Are we talking about your mama’s ‘true gods’, or gods in general, or what?”

“Whichever,” Laurel Anne said. “I just want to know what you think.”

“Well,” he said. “Let’s separate it out: what is a god, and what is it that the gods your mama recognizes actually are.”

“What is a god, then?”

“It’s like this,” he said. “Imagine you’re walking alone through the woods, and you meet someone. He looks like a man, like an ordinary man. And he tells you: ‘Kneel, little lady, for a god am I. Kneel before me and pay me homage.’”

“Why would a god be walking through the woods asking g… women to worship him?” Laurel Anne asked.

“Well, let’s say you ask him that,” the man said. “Instead of kneeling and homaging. And let’s say he snaps his finger, and a bolt of lightning strikes you dead.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s a god,” Laurel Anne said. “A wizard could do that.”

“Sure could,” the man said. “How much would that matter to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re dead, aren’t you?” he said. “He said he was a god, you denied him, and yea, he smote your ass verily. Pardon the language. How can you say that’s not a god?”

“How can I say anything, if I’m dead?”

“Well, that’s a point,” the man said. “But I think you see mine: either you worship him, or he destroys you. Isn’t that godlike?”

“A real god’s like a thousand times more powerful than that,” the girl said.

“So if our man in the woods found a crowd of a thousand young ladies and either cowed each of them into worshiping him or obliterated them, you’d call him a god?”

“Not much of one,” Laurel Anne said. “More of a bully.”

“But if this bully were real and not all hypothetical, who could say he wasn’t a god?” the man asked.

“Someone more powerful than a bunch of little girls,” Laurel Anne said. “Paladins. Wizards. Heroes. Maybe he could get some people to call him a god, but then someone would block his stupid lightning spell and then kill him.”

“Well, if that were the case, he wouldn’t be much of a god, no,” the man said. “But what if our would-be god never runs into anyone with the power to defy him? What then?”

“That’s just dumb luck,” the girl said. “Not godhood.”

“Maybe it’s careful planning… but even if it is dumb luck, don’t you suppose your mama’s ‘true gods’ are lucky to be who they are?”

“Who else would they be?”

“Anybody. Nobody. Some people are born to positions of great wealth and privilege, little lady… and some people are born on a hardscrabble farm in the middle of a dangerous part of the world that’s shunned by goodly folks like your mama because their gods won’t have anything to do with it. Don’t you think luck’s got something to do with that?”

“I thought you were going to tell me what you think a god is,” Laurel Anne said.

“I am.”

“You’re going all over the place and running around in circles.”

“That’s quite a trick,” the man said. “Well, I’ll say it simple: a god is someone with enough power to say ‘I am a god’ and make other people agree. Mortal wizard, lich, emperor, dragon, giant, leftover bit of chaos… it doesn’t really matter what it is underneath. What matters is that it has the strength to enforce its claims.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” Laurel Anne said. “Things are what they are. If a dragon lands on a hilltop and tells a shepherd that it’s one of his sheep, that doesn’t make it so.”

“Maybe not, though I expect the shepherd would prefer the fiction,” the man said. “And I agree. Things are what they are. Words mean things. If I tell you I’m a table or a tree, that’s a load of nonsense even if I am stronger than you are. But you’re assuming that ‘god’ has a meaning beyond what I’m saying. If a strong and capable man bullies his way into an organization of weaker ones and says ‘I’m the boss’… well, if the others wanted to refute that, they’d have to do something about it, they couldn’t point to the definition of ‘boss’ while he’s bossing them around.”

“Well, yeah, but ‘god’ isn’t something you can do,” Laurel Anne said. “You can’t ‘god’ someone around.”

“It’s not something that most people can do, certainly,” the man said. “But you asked me what I thought a god is, and that’s my definition… and a more inclusive definition of godhood you will not find. Your mama’s gods are included in it. The things the elves call gods, they fit in just fine with it. If you asked the gnomenkind about their god or gods, they’d give you one definition, but it would probably fit. If you asked the goblinfolk about their gods, they’d tell you something completely different, but they’re included, too.”

“I thought goblins worshipped demons,” Laurel Anne said.

The man sputtered a bit at this, and then started to laugh.

“What’s so funny about that?” she asked him.

“Oh, nothing in particular,” he said. “But, no, they don’t worship demons. They worship gods, or so they call them, and who am I to say they aren’t? They fit my definition.”

“What are they, then, if not demons?”

“Leftovers,” the man said. “Moldy old leftovers someone forgot at the back of the cosmic fridge. Things older than demons, older than your mama’s ‘true gods’.”

“But they’re as old as time,” Laurel Anne said.

“If you say so, I won’t argue it,” the man said . “But these things are older still.”

“You know… your definition is not actually all that different from my mama’s,” Laurel Anne said, an impish tone in her voice.

“Oh, no? Were you not listening?”

“I was,” she said. “But the true gods are more powerful than anything. So no one can stop them from calling themselves gods… and if anyone wanted to say they were a god, the true gods could stop them.”

“What if the ‘false’ god lived in the Shift?”

Laurel Anne didn’t have an answer for that.

“So, do you want to know what I think about those ‘true’ gods?” the man asked her. When she didn’t answer, he said, “Well, I guess we can talk about something else. I understand if you don’t want to go against your mama.”

“I didn’t say that,” she said. “I was thinking. You said you wanted me to think, didn’t you?”

“That I did,” he said. “So, do you think you want to hear, or not?”

“Yeah, I guess,” she said.

“Well, I think you had it about right,” he said. “They are about the most powerful folks around… and they’ve been lucky or clever enough to avoid anybody who could challenge them.”

“Who could challenge them, if they’re the most powerful?”

“Do you know who’s stronger than the strongest man in the world?” the man asked instead of answering.

“Who?”

“The second strongest and just about anybody else working together,” the man said. “And all three of them could be killed by someone who’s a good archer, or a powerful wizard. There are all kinds of power, you see, and all kinds of ways of being powerful. If there was someone or something somewhere with no power but the power to kill the gods, for instance, wouldn’t you say that’s pretty powerful?”

“The gods are immortal,” Laurel Anne said.

“Sure, and so are the elves,” the man said. “Doesn’t mean they can’t be killed, does it?”

“Are you saying… are you saying that there’s something in the Shift that can kill gods?” Laurel Anne asked.

“I’m saying that’s as likely a theory as any as to why they won’t go there,” the man said. “Of course, the real question is, what was a pious and saintly woman like your mama doing in a place so wicked and godless?”

“I don’t know,” Laurel Anne said. She shrugged. “Mission work, I guess.”

“Carrying the word of the Lord of Humanity to a place with few enough humans and the gods fear to tread,” the man said. “Oh, yes, that makes sense.”

“Well, I don’t know what else she would have been doing there,” Laurel Anne said.

“What else indeed,” the man said.

Hey, Adele fans… click here (link now fixed!) to bid on a chance to be inserted into Mikki’s next Adele story.

Discuss this story on the Livejournal feed.

A few weeks back I said the reason I wasn’t doing a bonus story showing what’s been going with Barley was that this question was going to be resolved elsewhere… for those of you who missed it, that’s gearing up over in More Tales of MU.


Laurel Anne had always been a fast reader, but it took her almost two months to finish the man’s book.

It wasn’t just that it was big, or that she could only read it when she was alone… after all, she usually did her reading when she was alone, and she was better than most people at finding a secluded spot with no one around.

But she found herself lost when she tried to pick it up. Starting from the same place was no good… she figured out right away that even though it had all the same characters in all the same places, and had long passages that were exactly or nearly the same, there was so much added that it wasn’t the same book she’d been reading, and she got lost trying to pick up from where she’d been.

So she went back to the beginning of the book… and at first, at least, she was just as lost. There were passages in the book… long ones… that she just didn’t understand. She pored over them line by line, reading them over and over again, putting them together with bits of things she’d heard, small things she’d glimpsed, until she thought she understood them.

Then she read them over and over some more.

The book made her feel strange. The same lightness she’d felt looking at the cover came over her when she read the scenes that had been excised from her original copy. They played out in her head at odd moments when she was in class, or in her bed.

Her inability to finish the book deviled her, because the best place to read on her own was the woods but she didn’t want to bump into its owner before she’d finished it. The book became a guilty secret in more ways than one.

Eventually, she did finish it. She wasn’t quite surprised when the first time she took a stroll through the woods, the man reappeared. She wasn’t sure why she expected to see him. Of course, he might have been looking for her, since she had kept his book for weeks and weeks… when she first spotted him coming through the trees, her first thought was that he might be angry, but then she saw him smiling.

“Hey, sharp lady,” he said. “You finish the book?”

“Yeah,” she said. She swung her backpack, a faded hand-me-down from Jo, off her shoulder, demonstrating its weight with the book inside it. “I did, and brought it back.”

He waved a pale hand dismissively.

“Oh, keep it,” he said. “I’ve got more copies.”

“I couldn’t,” she said. “It’s kind of big… Mama would find it, sooner or later. But thanks.”

“You know, I notice you don’t talk about your daddy nearly as much as you talk about your mama,” he said.

“Well, he isn’t around much to talk about,” Laurel Anne said. She added, with a touch of pride, “He’s an airshipman.”

“Well, that’s a fine thing for him to be, but what about you?” he asked. “Do you ever get lonely with no daddy around?”

“Maybe,” she said, dropping her head a little. “But he loves me, and he’s doing important work for the emperor.”

“Sure he is,” the man said. “So, you didn’t have any problem with the book, did you? Understood everything okay?”

“Mostly…”

“Oh, some parts can be confusing, when they’re new. I can show you some pictures that might clear up the hard parts, if you’d like.”

“Maybe,” Laurel Anne said, her face turning pink. She felt hot, even though it was a cool autumn day.

“But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself… I didn’t even ask how you liked it.”

“It was fine,” she mumbled.

“Fine? That’s not an answer,” he said. “That’s what you say when you don’t want to think of an answer. Hey, we’re friends… if you didn’t like the book, you can tell me… I’ll give you back your copy, and maybe we’ll wait a few more years before we try you on any other grown-up books.”

“No, really, I liked it fine!” Laurel Anne said. She blushed furiously. “It just… it made me feel things.”

“Good things, I hope?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Yes. But…”

“But you don’t know how to handle them,” he said, nodding sagely. “Because nobody ever talked to you about these kinds of feelings. Just like nobody ever talked to you about those other feelings you have.”

Her eyes went wide, her red cheeks going white.

“How… how…” she stammered.

“You aren’t the only sharp one,” he said. “That’s why I like you, in fact… most people are so dull, you know, and not only that they aren’t any fun. Listen, Laurel Anne, those feelings you have… all of them, they aren’t anything bad, but most people wouldn’t understand them.”

“Don’t have to tell me that,” Laurel Anne said.

“They’d tell you you’re wrong for feeling them, if they knew about them.”

“It isn’t something I do on purpose!”

“Of course not,” the man said. “It just happens, and really, that’s a beautiful thing. You’re a special little lady, Laurel Anne, and don’t ever let anybody tell you otherwise.”

“So why can’t I feel you?” she asked.

“Well, because I’m special, too,” he said. “Not like you are, of course… that’s the beauty of being special. Nobody’s special the exact same way as anybody else. Now, can you tell me, is there anybody else around right now?”

“No,” she said. “There isn’t.”

“You sound real sure about that.”

“I am,” she said.

“You don’t even have to think about it?”

She shook her head.

“I just know,” she said.

“Interesting,” he said, scratching his chin thoughtfully.

“What?”

“Well, it seems to me like that ought to be harder than it is,” he said. “If you can do that much without even trying… I wonder what sorts of things you could do with a little effort?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, some folks… special folks, I mean… can look inside people’s heads and see what they’re thinking,” he said. “And some can do more than that.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, different things,” he said. “We’ll talk more about them later. But right now, you’re sure that nobody’s nearby?”

“I’m sure.”

“Good,” he said. “Because I want to talk about your other feelings for a bit. If you aim to keep reading at a grown-up level, you’ve got to learn how to get them under control, you know?”

“I tried,” Laurel Anne said.

“Of course you did, but you can’t be expected to handle something like that on your own,” he said. “There are some things that I do when I get all ‘het up’ like that. Maybe if I show you, we can figure out something for you to do.”

“Why can’t I just do what you do?” Laurel Anne asked.

“Well, this is getting into the ways men and women are different… I know I don’t have to explain that to you, after you read the whole book,” he said, and she blushed again. “Come on, let’s just go a little deeper in the woods… I’ll show you those pictures, and we’ll see what we can work out for you.”

Two years later, Laurel Anne was still meeting the man in the woods. Sometimes he’d give her a magazine, sometimes a book. A couple of times he’d shown her some illusion crystals. As time went on, he brought these little gifts less often, but he always had something new to teach her… and whether it had to do with being ‘het up’ or what she’d come to think of as her special gift, she did her best to listen to her older, wiser friend.

She’d been uncomfortable with the physical contact at first. In fact, she was still uncomfortable with it, two years on, but she wouldn’t give up the thrill of it all for anything. The secrecy was exciting, and it was flattering having an adult who listened to her and showed such interest in her. He’d been right about her mother not understanding… right about her mother being a hypocrite… and he always had time for her.

“You were right,” she told him, as they lounged on a gentle slope beside the Sykekill. “All I had to do was give Jenny a little ‘push’ and she told Becca how she really felt about her new shoes.”

“How’d that make you feel?”

“Well…”

“Come on,” he said. “You don’t keep secrets from your friend.”

“A little bad, actually,” she said. “They were both screaming at each other when I left.”

“She was lying,” the man said. “You told me yourself that Jenny was a two-faced lying bitch. You just shot a piece of honesty inside her empty head. How can honesty be a bad thing?”

“I guess it can’t,” Laurel Anne said.

“You should never feel guilty about using your special gift, so long as you’re careful about it,” he said. “Just think about what somebody like Jenny would do to you, if she had your power. You know what kind of a person she is… what goes through her head.”

“She’s horrible,” Laurel Anne said. “She thinks she’s so sophisticated and mature since she spent the summer in the city. I wish I could… could… make her wet herself in front of the whole class. That would show everybody what a baby she really is.”

“Well, that’s not so easy to do.”

“Why not?” Laurel Anne said. “I could just give her a nudge.”

“Could you pee your pants on purpose?”

“I’m not allowed to wear pants,” Laurel Anne said.

“You know what I mean,” the man said. “I tell you what, I’ll give you ten gold and a change of clothes if you can wet yourself right now.”

“You probably don’t have ten gold,” Laurel Anne said. “And I know you don’t have a change of clothes. And Mama would want to know where they came from.”

“Maybe I don’t have ten gold, but it doesn’t matter because you couldn’t do it if you tried,” the man said. “You can make a body decide to up and do anything it might do naturally, but most folks can’t piss themselves on purpose. That’s what comes of spending an entire lifetime trying not to do something.”

“So I can’t do it,” Laurel Anne said. “Oh, well. It was just an idea.”

“It was a good idea,” the man said. “It really would serve her right.”

“But you said I couldn’t…”

“I said it wasn’t easy,” he said. “You’d have to reach deeper than you have before, not just mess around with the surface. It would take a lot of practice and hard work.”

“Just to make Jenny Miller make a fool of herself?” Laurel Anne said. “I don’t know if that’s…”

“Not just for that,” he said. “If you pulled it off, why, there’s no end to the things you could do.”

“What could I do?”

“Sharp lady, the question is what couldn’t you do,” he said. “Let’s you and me have a little fun, and then we’ll get to work on this.”

“Couldn’t we get started right away?” Laurel Anne said. “You said it’ll take a lot of practice…”

“That’s why we should relax a little first,” he said, putting an arm around her. “All work and no play… have I ever led you wrong, Laurel Anne?”

“No… okay,” she said.

It was after the start of summer, after a very interesting school year, that she felt the first signs of sickness. This was after missing her monthly bleeding. Her cycle had never been the most regular thing, but it usually showed up sooner or later.

Her period wasn’t the only thing that went missing… the man who had been a constant presence in her life simply stopped showing up, leaving her to piece together what was happening to her on her own.

She worked it out less than a day before her mother did. Her mother had always been extraordinarily canny about things… that was one reason Laurel Anne had never tried any mental manipulations on her. Maybe it was just her earliest memories of the indomitable woman towering over her, but she always got the impression of solid iron from her mother.

If she could have controlled her mother the way she did her classmates, she might have been able to go on with her life the way she always had, but now there was no question of going back to school in the fall. Mama sent her to live with Jo and her husband before she started showing, “for her health.” Laurel Anne despised the lie as she despised all of her mother’s hypocrisies, and she hated being sent so far away from the woods where she and her man had always met. Though she’d seethed at his abandonment before, she forgot about his previous absence and blamed her mother for separating them.

In the course of time, she gave birth to a son. If she’d known his father’s name, she might have given it to him… it was only then that she realized how strange it was that he’d never told her it. She named Aidan instead, after a character from one of the books they’d shared. Jo had her own child and another on the way, so young Aidan was put up for adoption and Laurel Anne went back to her mother’s house.

She could have gone her whole life without setting foot in that place again, without seeing that woman… but doing so was her only chance of seeing her man again. She didn’t tell him about his son… there were no secrets between them, but she felt sure he’d be tormented by the thought of what had been.

She’d lost Aidan, and she didn’t want to inflict that loss on him.

If Laurel Anne had been eager to learn, eager to please before, now she was driven. The man seemed pleased with the change that had come over her, even if he couldn’t possibly have guessed the source. She spent more and more time with him. Having missed a whole semester of school, missing days didn’t seem like any big thing.

The next time she came up pregnant, she was eighteen… a year older than Jo had been when she’d wed, and too old for Mama to send her off or get rid of her baby. The old woman’d had words to say about that, of course… they’d started with “So long as you live under my roof.”

Well, Laurel Anne could take care of that. Her mother would have to settle for bossing around her younger brothers… she was an adult, and she had a man who lived in a house on the other side of the woods, who thought she was beautiful and special and sharp, who’d be overjoyed to learn that they didn’t have to hide out and sneak around any more.

She just needed to find him, and then everything would be just fine.

He looked the same as she remembered, though he was young enough that this wasn’t more than a little jarring. If he’d been eighteen or so then, he would be in his mid-twenties now, and in Laurel Anne’s limited experience, people who weren’t growing up or growing old didn’t change much from year to year.

“Me,” he agreed. He held the flower out for a few more seconds before seeing that she had no intention of taking it, then stuck it through his buttonhole. “How’ve you been keeping yourself, Laurel Anne?”

“Dry,” she said.

“Sharp as ever,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t come back around for so long, but I thought you might be a little sore over our last meeting.”

“That was a dirty trick,” Laurel Anne said.

“Now you make it sound like I dunked you in the stream on purpose,” he said. “I was in earnest about teaching you, but then your babysitter showed up screaming her head off about something and I thought it was best if I made myself scarce before she got the wrong idea.”

“That was my sister,” Laurel Anne said.

“Your sister?” the man said. “Can’t say I see the resemblance… anybody ever told you that you end up with all the looks in your family?”

“She got the wrong idea anyway,” Laurel Anne said. “She thought I threw myself in the creek. If you’d have stuck around, you could have explained… if you weren’t just trying to drop me in the water, I mean.”

“I promise I wasn’t, but I wasn’t sure I’d get a chance to explain… I mean, the folks around here don’t act too kindly towards strangers,” he said.

“Shows what you know,” Laurel Anne said.

“What don’t I know?”

“My mama says nowhere in the world treats strangers better,” Laurel Anne said loftily. “She says hospitality is sacred.”

“That so?”

“Yes,” she said. “She says she’s never turned a stranger away from our door.”

“Your mama have a lot of sayings?” the man asked.

“I guess.”

“She ever tell you, ‘A place for everything, and everything in its place,’ or something like that?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Well, that one kind of trumps the other one,” he said. “You follow?”

“No,” Laurel Anne said, shaking her head.

“Well, let me put it to you like this… do you actually get many strangers knocking on your door?”

“Not many,” she said. She was trying to remember if there had ever been a stranger that came knocking on their door. Her mama did take a lot of visitors, but she seemed to know all of them. The ones who might have been strangers to her usually came with somebody from town, who introduced them.

“You ever go into the city with your mama?” he asked.

“Sometimes.”

“You see any strangers then?” he asked. “Hungry strangers, poor strangers?”

“Sometimes,” she said, shifting uncomfortably.

“Your mama ever show them much hospitality?” he asked. “She ever offer them a crust of bread or a copper coin? She ever ask them if they need a roof over their heads?”

Laurel Anne said nothing. She had a few vivid memories from when she was younger… as vivid as her ones of plunging into the creek… of asking her mama if they could do something to help the people they saw on the streets, and being told to mind her place.

“Ever?” he prompted.

“They didn’t come to our door,” she said.

“Can you imagine her treating them any better if they did?” the man asked her. “See, I’m sure your mama’s a charitable soul. I’m sure she puts money in the poor box and I’m sure she gives to the food pantry and I’m sure she prays for them, but when all’s said and done she expects them to stay in their place while she stays in hers. You remember that word I told you last time?”

“Yes,” Laurel Anne said. She lifted her book and lowered her face, making a big show of resuming reading it. “I even know what it means, thank you very much, but I don’t think you know as much about my mama as you think you do.”

“Ah, horse feathers,” the man said. He pulled the book out of her hands and closed it, then slipped it inside his jacket.

“Hey, I was reading that!” Laurel Anne said.

“I’ll give it back,” the man said. “Just take a little walk with me first.”

“A little walk along the creek?” she asked, giving him a skeptical look.

“If that’s what you’d like,” he said. “Though I wouldn’t expect the same old conjurer’s tricks to impress you, now that you’re a sophisticated young lady.”

“I am pretty sophisticated,” Laurel Anne admitted. “But I don’t go walking in the wood with strange young men.”

“Strange? Strange? You’ve known me since you were five years old,” the man said.

“The only thing I know about you is that the last time I talked to you I ended up halfway drowned,” Laurel Anne said. “And that you stole my book.”

“Do you really think I wish you any harm?” he asked. “It seems to me that walking through the woods by yourself has got to be more dangerous than walking through the woods with anybody, even a stranger.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Mathematically,” the man said. “Either I mean you harm or I don’t, right? It’s a toss-up, like spinning a coin… fifty percent chance either way. But the same is true for anybody you meet walking through the woods… if you’re alone, you might run into any number of people who mean you harm. If you’re with me when that happens, then you’ve got somebody who might be inclined to help you. My fifty percent cancels out theirs.”

“That’s only if you don’t mean me harm,” Laurel Anne said.

“Right,” he said. “But if I do… well, you can’t be murdered twice, so it doesn’t hurt your odds to go with me.”

“I don’t think that’s right…”

“Well, it isn’t often that girls have a head for math.”

“I do so have a head for math!” Laurel Anne said.

“Then you see my point,” the man said.

“Maybe I do,” she said. “But I’d still say I’m safer right here than I would be walking through the woods alone with you.”

“How do you figure that?” he asked. “I mean, seeing as you’re already alone in the woods with me. Are you safer here than in any other spot?”

“Maybe I am,” Laurel Anne said. “People come through here all the time. Is that why you want to get me away from here?”

“Well, you caught me,” he said, taking off his hat and crumpling it in front of him. “I’m not exactly what you call a ‘people-person’, you see… that’s why I take these walks through the woods. I don’t normally ever approach anybody… I’m too shy, and like I said, the folks around here don’t take well to strangers. But you have such a kind face, and you aren’t like the others… I could tell that right off.”

“Where are you from?”

“I have a little place on the other side of the woods,” he said.

“That sounds like a long walk,” Laurel Anne said.

“It is,” he said. “Last time I saw you was the first time I walked this far. Would you like to see where I live?”

“I’d like my book back,” Laurel Anne said, holding out her hand.

“Certainly,” he said. He reached into his pinstriped jacket. “It is yours, isn’t it?”

He held a book out with a flourish. Though it had a similar cover, and she could see her yellow ribbon bookmark hanging from between the pages, she knew right away that it wasn’t hers. It was much too thick.

“This is wrong,” she said, taking it anyway. Its weight was very satisfying in her hands.

“You weren’t reading Summers in Athanasia?” he asked.

“I was, but this is… different,” she said, looking at the cover. The faded illustration of the elf lord and his human maiden were similar… the figures were the same, but the position was… different. She felt an odd lightness looking at them.

“Oh, silly me,” he said, pulling the book out of her hands. “I accidentally gave you the unabridged edition.”

“Unabridged?” she echoed as the thick tome disappeared inside his jacket. He placed her own book back in her hands. It felt so light as to be almost insubstantial.

“Forgive me, child…. what would you think of me if I had let you read that?” he asked. “I don’t think you’d begin to understand…”

“I’m not a child!” Laurel Anne said.

“Well, certainly you aren’t, but by the same token, you are not a grown woman, and a book like that might confuse…”

“I’ve been reading on my own longer than anybody my age,” Laurel Anne said indignantly. “I’ve read plenty of books with things I didn’t know about in them, and I’ve never been confused by them.”

“Well, you are sharp and sophisticated, for your age,” the man said, scratching his head. “But… well, if your mama found you with a book like that, she might have questions about where you’d got it from.”

“She won’t find it,” Laurel Anne said. “And if she does, I won’t tell… I’m no rat.”

“So, you swear not to tell her about me?”

“Sure I do,” Laurel Anne said.

“Well, I suppose that’s alright, then,” the man said. He pulled the tiny volume out of her hands and replaced it with the heavier one. She looked down at it… the biggest book she’d ever seen, outside of a librum or the big dictionary… like a hungry child looking at a great big piece of birthday cake. “I’ll take a rain check on that walk, for now… I can tell you’re eager to get back to your reading, and after all, now you’ve got twice as much to do.”

“Yeah,” she said, not looking up from the cover of the book. It almost looked like they were doing something… indecent… but if they were, the lady didn’t appear to be objecting much. “You’ll come back, though?”

“Certainly!” the man said. “When you’re done with the book… it’s a favorite of mine, you see.”

“Oh, I’ll take good care of it!”

“I had no fear,” the man said. “But, you see, I’ve never met anybody else who’s read it, and I think it would be fun to have somebody to talk to about it… and of course, I could bring you more books to read, if you like that one.”

“I’m sure I will,” Laurel Anne said.

“I’m sure you will, too,” the man said. He turned and started to walk away. “Happy reading!” he said, then strolled off through the woods, whistling as he went.

“Come on down here, Laurie!” her sister called. “We have to stick to the shallow parts!”

The trees and bushes that hugged the winding streambed screened her from view, though she wasn’t that far away, Laurel Anne thought. Though now that she stopped to notice it, it did feel like Jo was farther away. They were supposed to stay in eyesight of each other, and they would have been if not for the trees, so she was fine.

“Why? I’m not chicken!” Laurel Anne Blaise called back.

They’d put their packs and flask down at the broad part of the Sykekill Creek, where you could almost walk across it… the part where the older kids did. Laurel Anne didn’t see how hunting crawdads in the little trickle around the rocks could possibly be a challenge worthy of her clearly advanced talents, so she’d gone upstream a bit to find a different approach. Most of the deeper parts of the stream were at the bottom of steep banks with nowhere to stand, but she’d spotted a little part where the slope was a bit more gentle, and at the bottom there was a shelf that was a good three feet wide at the widest spot.

“It isn’t about that, dummy!” Joanne said. “You have to look in the shallows because they don’t go in the deep parts!”

“But I can see them here!” Laurel Anne Blaise called back. She couldn’t, actually, but she got see some sun glinting on the water that might have been hiding some of the big buggy things. The little platform, which seemed to have been made just for her purposes, continued on a good ways up the stream, but Laurel Anne didn’t dare go any farther afield from her older sister to see if there was another way down. Anyway, the one she’d found was good enough. “I’m climbing down, there’s a place to stand here.”

“You can’t see them from the top of the bank and you aren’t climbing down,” her bossy older sister said, and Laurel Anne could hear her crashing through the bushes, could feel her coming closer.

Well, if Jo tore her dress running after her like an idiot, that wasn’t Laurel Anne’s problem… she would hear about that from Mama… in the meantime, Laurel Anne knew she had to make her move. Once she got to the bottom and proved there were crawdads there… and probably bigger ones since they had more water… Joanne would have to admit that she was right.

She turned around and started backing down the slope, bracing her knees and feet as she went. She knew right away that it was steeper and slipperier than she thought, but she went a little slower and just told herself that if she slipped, she’d just hit the dry part, and that was where she was going anyway.

She’d had to hitch up her skirts to do this or else they’d be absolutely ruined, instead of just dirty, but there was nobody around to see except for Jo. If there had been anybody else, she was sure she’d know about it.

That wouldn’t stop Jo from giving her heck about it or telling Mama on her, but if she was fast enough she’d be at the bottom. It would be close, though. She could tell her sister was getting closer and closer, but she thought she probably had to be near the bottom.

Then…

“Laurel Anne Blaise!” Joanne shouted from above, and between the sound and the sudden blast of anger, Laurel Anne was so startled she lost her grip on a clump of weeds. She slid down all the rest of the way, her knees and shins taking a beating from hard dirt clods and scratchy plants.

“Look what you made me do, dummy!” Laurel Anne yelled up.

“You stay right there!” Joanne said. She was almost shrieking now, like Laurel Anne had actually fallen into the creek. She looked at the slope, which looked like a minor disaster area after the sister-induced avalanche. She started forward, then backed up. “Hang on,” she said. “I’m going upstream to find a way down. Don’t try walking along the creek by yourself.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Laurel Anne said. “I’m catching crawdads!”

“You aren’t going to catch any crawdads because there aren’t any!” Jo said. She sounded like she was having what Mama called “the hysterics“. “The water’s too deep and too fast and… ooh… just wait there! Don’t move, don’t go near the water.”

Laurel Anne watched sullenly until her sister turned and started tramping off through the bushes. She felt her sister’s presence going away.

“Whatever you say, Jo,” she said when she was sure her older sister wasn’t going to just turn around an yell at her some more.

She crawled around until she was looking down into the water. She wasn’t so stupid as to just crawl out towards the edge without checking to see if the ledge was strong… at least, she wasn’t after she thought of doing that. She pushed down on it hard and bounced a bit. It was pretty solid, except for the edge which was crumbly.

But it wasn’t like she was going to do something silly like stand up on it. She was just going to lean over and grab some crawdads.

Her first look into the water was disappointing. It was murky and brown, not clear and shining like the water downstream where they’d set up their “camp”. Of course, she told herself, the water was deeper, which meant the crawdads might not be right up on top. They’d be suckers if they did that. Hadn’t she wanted a challenge?

She pushed up her sleeve and then reached into the water. She couldn’t reach as far as she wanted, because she had to use one hand to hold the sleeve up and because she didn’t quite dare to inch any further out. But she got her arm in the water up to just below her elbow and started to feel around anyway.

“Find any crawdads?” a voice said suddenly, and she gave a yelp and scrambled back from the water.

A man was standing there… a young man, or a big kid. Laurel Anne had a hard time figuring out which was which sometime. Her mother called them all “young man”, though, so that’s how she thought of this figure. He was a man, but a young one.

She might have wondered why she couldn’t feel him when he was standing there as plain as day… feel him in the way that she assumed without thinking that everybody could feel others, even if she’d got some odd looks from Mama and her teacher the few times she’d tried to talk about it.

She might have wondered that, but all she could think about was the fact that he was standing on the fast-moving water like it was a sidewalk.

He seemed tall to Laurel Anne, though part of that was just in comparison to her young self. He hunkered down a bit. As he was standing down on the water and she was kneeling up on the ledge, this made them closer to level. He was dressed in a suit, but somehow it was less boring and stuffy than the suits she knew. It was a very dark red color, almost purple or black but definitely red, and it had little tiny gold stripes running lie threads up the legs of the pants and on the jacket. He wore a hat that matched it. The brim of the hat shaded his eyes, stopping her from getting a good look at their color. She thought that they were dark like her own, though.

All his clothes looked old and kind of faded, but they weren’t torn or tattered. He had a narrow face, with a small nose and thin lips, which were curled in a sort of half smile.

Laurel Anne Blaise decided she liked his suit. She wasn’t sure about the rest of him.

“No,” she said, remembering his question and composing herself. “You scared them all away.”

“Oh, did I?” he said. “So sorry.”

“What are you doing out on the water like that?”

“Walking,” he said. “Just taking a little stroll. I heard some yelling and crashing and thought I’d come and see if anybody needed my help, but I can see you’ve got things well in hand.”

“Well, yeah,” Laurel Anne said. “Tell that to my sister. But how do you do that?”

“Do what?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow.

“Walk!”

“I just put one foot in front of the other,” he said. “Been doing it that way almost my whole life.”

“On water, I mean.”

“Oh, you see, the water’s less wet in this part of the stream,” he said. “They mixed in too much earth when they were making it. Try it yourself… you’ll see it’s solid.”

“It is not,” Laurel Anne said.

“I’m standing on it, aren’t I?” he asked.

She wasn’t stupid, though. She’d just had her arm in the water. She demonstrated, dipping her fingers into the water and flicking some drops at him. He twirled nimbly away from them. “You are a liar.”

“You are one sharp lady,” the young man said. “I wouldn’t set one foot out here if I didn’t know I wouldn’t fall in, and neither should you.”

“Why don’t you?” Laurel Anne asked. She looke at him suspiciously. “Are you a wizard?”

“No, ma’am,” he said, pushing up the brim of his hat with a finger by his temple. “That I am not.”

“My mama says that wizards are men who’d sell their soul to a demon for power, if one asked nice enough.”

“That’s what she thinks,” the man said. “How ’bout you? You’re sharp, what do you think.”

“I think Mama doesn’t like wizards much but she’s nice to them when the washer acts up,” she said.

“And that, young lady, is what we call a ‘hypocrite’,” he said, sitting down on the bank beside her, with his long legs stretched out in front of him, the heels of his shoes resting on the water. “You remember that word, and when you’re old enough to understand it… and your mother… a little better… you keep it near the tip of your tongue. I expect you’ll get whole worlds of use out of it.”

“I know what a hypocrite is,” Laurel Anne said. “And my mother is not one.”

“Oh? What is it, then?” the young man asked.

“It’s a bird pony.”

“A bird pony?” the man repeated, confused. Then he threw his head back and laughed. “A bird pony! Of course it is. Didn’t I say you were sharp? You already taught me a thing or two.”

“So tell me how you can walk on water.”

“Well… a long time ago, some moldy old elf said that nobody can ever step in the same river twice,” he said. “You ever hear that?”

“No, but it isn’t true,” Laurel Anne said. “I’ve stepped in the river bunches of times. Bunches and bunches of bunches.”

“Well, maybe it’s true for some people,” he said. “And me, I’ve got it twice as bad. I can never step in the same river once.”

“Why not?”

“Because I try, and this happens,” he said, lifting up his head foot and bringng it down on the surface of the stream. “See? It just plain doesn’t work.”

“No, how does it really work?” Laurel Anne asked.

“What, you don’t believe me?” he asked.

“No.”

“Well, you are sharp,” he said. “I think you’re the sharpest lady I’ve ever met yet. In fact… well, no, you’re probably not that sharp.”

“How sharp?”

“Sharp enough to learn the trick from me,” he said. “But if I was wrong, you’d get your dress all wet.”

“Jo would kill me, and Mama’d kill me again later,” she said.

“Right,” he said. “So, we should probably better not risk it, not for the small, off-chance that you are as sharp as I am.”

“But I am!” Laurel Anne said. “You said I taught you a thing or two!”

“Well, I did say that,” the man said. He stood up and brushed off the leaves and dirt from the back of his pants, then turned to face the little girl. “I’ll tell you what, we’ll do this, but it’s safety first. I’ll hold your hand. That way, if you don’t get the trick right away, you won’t get much more than your shoes wet. Alright?”

“Alright,” she said.

“Now, you scoot back and stand up properly back on the bank,” he said. “You don’t want to try to stand up on water, not before you’ve got the trick down.”

“Right,” Laurel Anne said, standing up.

“Now, just watch what I do,” he said. “Watch carefully,” he said, taking several long steps parallel to the shore, lifting his foot up and bringing it down flat with exaggerated care. “Can you see what I’m doing?”

‘I… I think so,” Laurel Anne said, and she believed this to be true… at least she did according to the childhood logic that insisted that even if she couldn’t quite understand what she was seeing, she’d work it out before it became too important.

“Are you sure?” he asked, crossing his arms and stepping backwards. “Because I’m not going to do this if you aren’t sure. If you go and get your socks wet, I don’t want you saying I made you do anything you didn’t want to.”

“No, I’m sure! I’m sure!”

“Well, if you’re sure you’re sure,” he said, and he slowly reached out one long, slender arm to her. She put her tiny little hand in his. “When you’re ready, just… take a step.”

“Okay,” she said, and lifted one foot and stuck it in front of her. Some small instinct, a little voice which told her there was nothing there and if she leaned forward she would topple and fall, was holding her back. She tried to ignore it. She didn’t want to look scared or stupid in front of… of… what was his name? She had a sudden realization that she’d just spent the past few minutes talking to a stranger! But he was nice, and she’d put her hand in his and he hadn’t done anything bad. “Oh, by the way,” she said. “My name’s Laurel Anne.”

“I’m pleased to meet you, Laurel Anne,” he said, giving her a gentle tug and turning in place to usher her forward with a sweep of his free arm. As she held her breath and started to bring her foot down and forward, he said, “My name is…”

Splash! Her foot crashed through the surface of the water like nothing, and the rest of her followed. Her new friend’s fingers slipped away from hers like they’d never been there, and then her head was under. She cried out, and water filled her mouth. She was too stunned to kick her legs for a moment… and then when she tried, her soaked garments clung to her and something hard and sharp snagged her underskirts. Hands grabbed her… not the strong, sure hand that had just clutched hers, but smaller ones, and she was hauled her up until her head was above the surface.

“Oh my kosh, oh my kosh, I told you, I told you, I told you,” Joanne repeated, pulling on Laurel Anne, who clung to the overhanging shelf and did her best to help her sister get her out of the cold, dirty water. “What were you thinking? Mama’s going to kill you! No, she’ll kill me! Oh, what were you…”

“Man,” Laurel Anne said. She coughed, spitting out some water and a bit of a leaf.

“‘Oh, man’ is right!” Joanne said. “I’m taking your little behind home and telling Mama what you did, before she decides to kill me instead.”

Once she’d recovered from her shock, Laurel Anne regained most of her sense of adventure, though she never went crawdad hunting, even in the shallows, and she was more respectful of creeks and rivers than she’d ever been before, but she never gave up on the neighborhood of the creek entirely.

Years later, she still went back into the trees, but she did it to get away from the increasingly cramped house and the noisier kids in the neighborhood. She’d take a book or three, pack up a salad and a flask of juice, and then head out for a quiet spot to do some reading. She liked the sound of the creek, so she’d often sit within earshot of it, or situate herself down by the ford she’d once shunned, if nobody else was there.

She could still tell when other people were around, and sometimes what they were feeling or what they were up to. She knew now that it wasn’t a normal thing… or if it was, it wasn’t something that you talked about. It was like her monthlies, but without the hygienic requirements that had necessitated her mother talking about them stiffly and briefly. Having concluded that there had to be something dirty about them, Laurel Anne didn’t think about them often. She never thought to herself, “I’ll take a quick look around and see if I can feel anybody there.” She simply felt what she felt and she went on with things.

She thought about the man and the day by the stream… well, not often, but more often than other things that had happened when to her around the age of five. She wondered who the man had been, and what he had been up to… not so much how he’d been able to walk on water. As a mature young lady of twelve, it took more than a little bit of magic to impress her.

How he’d been able to vanish so fast that Jo hadn’t seen him, when she’d been near enough to not only see Laurel Anne tumble in but to pull her out… that was something Laurel Anne would like to ask him about.

There was an obvious explanation for that, of course, but she tended to ignore that. A five year old could fool herself about a lot of stuff. But an overactive imagination couldn’t produce a whole conversation with a man she’d never seen before. Her youthful stubbornness had convinced her to climb down the bank, but it wouldn’t have been enough for her to decide she could walk on water.

So, she thought about the man… less often as she got older, because there was never anything new to think about him.

On the other hand, she’d never stopped coming to Sykekill, either.

She never talked about him, of course, after a few abortive attempts to tell Jo the whole story and to convince Mama that her dip in the creek hadn’t been entirely her fault. He was like those feelings of hers, the feelings which told her that she was alone, that there wasn’t another soul around for miles.

A shadow moved onto her book as she turned the page. This happened often, as a bird flitted overhead or a leaf shook itself loose from the tree she’d picked for a seat… but this one didn’t move on. It was like a branch had suddenly shifted right into her light, casting a line of darkness. She looked up to see what was causing it, and banged the back of her head on the tree trunk.

“Hello, sharp lady,” the man said. He held out a calla lily, which had cast the shadow. “Where were we, before we were so rudely interrupted?”