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

I had to admit, it worked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know about that,” Ian said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s a shocker,” Ian said.

“Oh, hush,” Amaranth said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mariel flitted over and buzzed angrily at her.

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

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

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

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

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

“That would take an illusion,” I said.

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

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

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

“Wow,” Ian said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Seems that way,” Ian said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I can’t believe that even at her…”

“At her what?” Hazel said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay,” Two said.

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

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

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

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

“Thanks, Two,” Ian said.

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

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

“What?” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re welcome, baby.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discuss this story.

Then there were the wild places.

Past the easternmost boundaries of the Mother Empire was one such land, Khazarus… a place so vast that it encompassed within it nearly every sort of terrain and every climate known to the world. It had some scattered human habitations, though it has never been brought under the control of any of the great human nations. It had never been mapped or surveyed in full. Some said that it was not entirely a part of the same world as the lands that surround it, and there was a kind of truth to this… it was a shifting place, where multiple worlds touched and overlapped.

Travelers from the west, in fact, knew the region as the Shift. They preferred that designation to its proper name, which they avoided for linguistic and theological reasons. A Metropolitan envoy sent to establish trade with some of the westernmost settlements within the Shift was reported to have said “it is a mad land, peopled by mad folk, ruled by mad kings and watched over by mad gods; it would take a mad emperor to wish to rule it.” These words were prophetic; the desperate compulsion to be the man who conquered the Shift and brought it to heel has destroyed more than one would-be world conqueror seemingly at the height of his power.

Traveling within the Shift was like stepping backwards through history, to a time two centuries or more before, when most people lived their whole lives within a few miles of the spot where they were born… when magic was a frightening and wondrous thing, embodied by strange beings or possessed by warlocks and witches who had to be treated with the utmost courtesy at all times, lest they blight the crops or bring some other misfortune. In the more hospitable south and west portions of Khazarus, there were towns and roads and some semblance of law and order enforced by the Khazar, a self-appointed divine emperor. Deeper in, human villages relied on the protection of local warlords or other powerful beings, or else they depended on their remoteness and lack of enviable resources to help them escape notice.

Three such villages stood on the shores of Mariinksy Lake… protectorates of the kingdom which the lake comprised. When orc warbands or wandering monsters threatened them, the villagers would pile into boats and make for the island of reeds in the center of the lake. Orcs knew better than to enter the waters, and most fell beasts instinctively drew back, as well, but the real protection was more than that.

The true kingdom of Mariinsky Lake lay on the other side of the reeds… on another side of the world, in fact, and the island on that side was large enough to house the inhabitants of all three villages, at least for short periods of time.

In exchange for this protection, the villagers provided the castle’s inhabitants with food grown in their fields, and with labor as it was needed. They also provided husbands… the swan maidens who ruled over the castle were misnamed only in the sense that they weren’t all maidens; they were indeed, however, all women… and according to the usual measurements of such things, very lovely ones.

Leda, the daughter of the ruling queen, did not expect to marry a boy from the villages. Royalty customarily waited for a mighty warrior or brave hero to come wandering through. This happened more regularly than might have been expected, if only because a certain amount of mightiness and bravery were required to wander through the Deeper Shift.

Rarely did a queen or queen-to-be remain single for more than half a century, though there were exceptions. Leda’s own mother loved to tell the story of how she’d waited for seven decades before Leda’s father came along, though the girl couldn’t help thinking that it hadn’t taken her that long to replace him

Leda was not that patient, though. She might therefore have seen an opportunity in what she thought of as her exile, but that was a charitable interpretation of events and Leda didn’t feel charitable.

The golden coach flew through the air, pulled by a V of geese with golden strings around their long necks. She sat alone inside it, a tall, slender woman with a mane of silver feathers spilling down the back of her neck and a build like a dancer. As the fabulous vehicle traversed the Northern Ice Reach , crossing the point at which north ceased to be, its occupant marked the crossing only by pulling the fur-lined mantle more tightly around her.

It wasn’t cold inside the coach, and she was not aware that it should have been, had not powerful magic been shielding her from the elements. The gesture was psychological, like a child hiding behind a blanket. She was insulating herself from the crushing boredom of a journey over lands that weren’t interesting to her, and the unrelenting injustice of being sent away from the only place in the world that mattered.

Mariinsky Lake… the center of the universe. Her kingdom. She’d never been so far beyond its borders as to be out of sight of the shore, and now it was so far away it might as well have been the moon.

And why?

Because of that man. The king. Her stepfather.

“Your mother and I have been thinking about your education.”

That was a joke, though she couldn’t bring herself to laugh at it. Leda’s mother had never shown any dissatisfaction with her troupe of tutors, most of whom Leda’d had properly cowed for years now. Why start all over again with a new bunch at this late point, especially when she was on the verge of being too old to throw a proper tantrum?

They’re sending me away to get rid of me, she thought, and then pushed that thought aside. Of course they weren’t. Why should they? She was beautiful and she was the crown princess, the heiress apparent. Even if her ugly, buffoonish stepfather didn’t like her all that much, he had to love her, the same as everybody else did.

“My human father could not have been as ugly as he was,” she said aloud. “If he had been, I would be as ugly as the baby is.”

She made a face, remembering her mother’s assertion that she had been that ugly as a baby. Clearly it was a bald-faced lie to spare the feelings of the babe and her father, but knowing that did not make it any less hurtful. It was just another example of the horrible favoritism that had invaded her beloved castle, destroying any sense of fairness or justice or equality. The baby was a princess, but she, Leda, was older, more beautiful, and in line for the throne.

I must have done something. Something bad. Something wrong. Something horrible. Unforgivable.

That was impossible.

Unless she knows about the boys in the rushes.

“It’s a plot,” she decided out loud. Her voice sounded huge in the small space, huge enough to drown out the one in her head. “A plot to get rid of me and put the ugly baby in charge of everything. All of that nonsense about poise and manners and language… just nonsense. I have fucking poise. I can dance on the water better than anybody. I have courtly manners. I know how to get along with everybody important. And language. This ugly thing they call Pax? What is it good for? The Khazar’s empire never reached Mariinsky. This new one won’t, either. It’s all a… a ruse.”

Having decided that her mother’s new husband meant to get rid of her permanently so that his own issue could be installed on the throne that was rightfully hers, Leda felt immediately better. She’d made sense of things. The unaccountable ill treatment she’d received from her mother and everybody involved in packing her up and shipping her off could now be accounted for.

She relaxed.

The world made sense again.

“Still the princess,” she murmured to herself. “Always the princess. Princess of the lake.”

Leda’s first glimpse of the far side of the world that wasn’t an endless expanse of snow didn’t come until much later, when the coach circled the town of Enwich, coming in for a landing outside… the geese knew better than to fly over the town’s walls. As bored as Leda had been on the long journey, she hadn’t been bored enough to find the world spread out below her interesting.

After a single hour of polar flight she’d made up her mind that the ice reach was representative of lands outside of Khazarus, and so she was surprised to find herself in a pleasant, sunlit place with rolling green plains and a glittering blue river stretching out below.

It might have been a pleasant surprise, had Leda been in a mood for feeling pleasant.

She spotted a reservoir upriver from the town. There were some houses—large, compared to the human huts she knew, but austere looking by her own standards—built up around it, and a few small pleasurecrafts plying its waters.

It looked so cramped to her, so forced and artificial. Looking up and down the river’s length, she could see standing pools of water in low-lying places alongside it, but she could see nothing that approached the size and beauty of Mariinsky.

Don’t these awful barbarians even have lakes?

The land around the town was hilly. The plains were bounded to the north, west, and south by forests. The sight of all those trees made her shudder. This was clearly a dangerous and wild place. There were probably orc attacks every week, if not more often.

The coach was met by some local dignitaries and a human man with a Khazarian accent… an old man, wrinkly and white-haired like humans got when they were used up. She thought brown hair was ugly, but somehow seeing a human with proper silver-white hair was even worse. Fortunately not many people lived to old age where she came from, but from the looks of the townsfolk who greeted her it seemed like things were different in Magisteria.

How horrible it must be, she thought, to be mortal and not die young. She felt moved to pity for them and gave them a sad smile, for which they seemed ridiculously appreciative. The Khazarian man… a professor somebody or other, she hadn’t been paying attention… was thanking the other men for coming out, and leading her towards a coach. It was black, but sleek and glossy, not terribly ugly.

“This will take us to the university grounds,” the professor said. “Coaches like this will be available for your use in the day and early evening, your highness. They will take you into and back.”

Leda liked the sound of that… not just the royal style, but the freedom of movement that was being proffered to her. Her mother had never liked the way Leda came and went, especially when she suspected she was going to the shore.

“Whenever I want?” she asked.

“They operate on a fixed schedule,” the professor said. “Every fifteen to thirty minutes, depending on the time of day, to accommodate the greatest number of students.”

So it wasn’t just her that received this treatment. That was disappointing.

“Are… are all the students princesses?” she asked.

The professor stared at her, and then laughed.

“I thought much the same thing when I first came to this land,” he said. “The buildings are all so big, and magical conveniences are so commonplace… even the poorest beggar can get healed of life-threatening injuries. This land officially has no distinction between peasants and nobles, but the poorest citizen of it lives better than most nobles in the Khaz.”

Leda did not ask any more questions on the way to the university. When they arrived, the professor helped her down out of the coach and led her on a path of smooth stone past a low, broad building.

“That is the student union hall,” he said. “There are many services for students available within.”

“We have servants?”

“No… not as such. They are employees of the university, paid to provide a specific function. You will have to remember when speaking to them that they are your equals,” he said.

Not likely, Leda thought. I doubt they can dance on water.

“I suspect you will enjoy the dining hall, though,” the professor said. “The food is of a greater variety and quantity than you would have eaten, even in your mother’s castle. Most children of the Imperium take it for granted, even complain about the supposed poor quality and the ‘meager’ portions of meat, never realizing that in much of the world a family might not see so much meat in a week as they eat in a day. We are blessed,” he said, and he sounded genuinely proud, “to come from a harsh and meager place, that we can better appreciate the wonderful bounty enjoyed by those of the westering lands.”

He was mad, Leda decided… he sounded so deliriously happy to declare their entire homeland, the fabulous kingdom of Mariinsky Lake included, a harsh and impoverished place compared to this horrible land that had no peasants and condemned its citizens to the indignities of old age.

They passed by a fountain, an elaborate statue of three dragon heads spouting fire and water. Such artistry and enchantment… it would not have been out of place in the courtyard of Mariinsky Castle, and here it was standing out in the open for everybody to see, put there no doubt for the amusement of beggars and urchins. She saw other people… students, no doubt… walking past it without even noticing it.

It was like the Khazarian professor had said: the most wretched citizen of this hellish place was more accustomed to such wonders than she, the crown princess, was.

When the professor showed her to an immense building, several stories tall and attached to two other large wings, and told her that it was her residence hall, she only had a momentary flutter of excitement before she realized that what he probably meant was that it was the hall she would be sharing with other students, commoners who would show her none of the courtesy she was due and who probably thought nothing of living in a building this size.

She had only just arrived, and she was already starting to get used to it.

What a horrible thought.

“Well, Princess Leda,” the professor said, giving her a little bow and then spreading his arms out wide, a ridiculous grin on his face, “welcome to Magisterius University!”

Discuss this story.

“I thought we didn’t call people that,” I said.

“I’m sorry!” she said, though she didn’t sound it. “I just don’t know how else to describe your behavior sometimes. How could you forget that?”

“I didn’t, exactly,” I said. “I just…”

“Didn’t care?”

“Didn’t think of it,” I said. “It slipped my mind, that’s all.”

“Slipped your mind,” Amaranth said, shaking her head. “What else has slipped your mind?”

“It’s not a big deal,” I said. “Callahan hates me. This will just give her an easy excuse for yelling at me… save her the effort of looking for one.”

“I know you take pride in your intelligence… don’t you get tired of disappointing a teacher?”

“She’d be more disappointed if she didn’t have a reason to beat on me,” I said. “And for that matter, I don’t exactly consider her a teacher.”

“Mackenzie Jo Blaise,” Amaranth said. “She is a professor and you will treat her with the same respect you do any other instructor.”

“She doesn’t like being called a professor, so I won’t insult her by treating her like one,” I said. “That’s fair, isn’t it?”

“What’s fair is getting a failing grade for failing to make any effort to follow class instructions,” Amaranth said. “Are you doing so well in all your other classes that you can afford to blow off this one entirely?”

“I… I don’t see how it’s fair that a non-academic class can affect my academic scholarships,” I said. “They let the kids who are here for skirmish slide on academic stuff.”

“You know that for a fact, do you?” Amaranth asked.

“I know I’m not supposed to say ‘everybody knows’ stuff, but… everybody knows that,” I said. “Why can’t I get a pass on the physical stuff?”

“Baby, we have been through this so many times,” Amaranth said. “You need to learn how to defend yourself.”

“I know I do,” I said. “But I don’t think I should be graded on it.”

“And you think that should somehow happen without doing any work or listening to the teacher,” Amaranth said. She sighed. “I guess I’ll see if anybody has an extra one I can borrow when I’m working the dorms tonight.”

“Right, somebody’s just going to have an extra staff lying around,” I said.

“They very well might,” Amaranth said. “A lot of fighters train with multiple weapons, and even if it isn’t always feasible to have one of each, it’s not a big deal to have a quarterstaff tucked away. If you think about it, it’s a useful weapon to know, because you can usually find something to use as one in a pinch.”

“If it’s so easy to find something to use, why would people have one?” I asked.

“I’m just trying to get you out of trouble, missy,” Amaranth said. “If you’re going to say anything to that, I think it should be ‘thank you, ma’am’.”

“But it’s Callahan,” I said. “If she’s not on my ass for not having a staff, she’ll be on it for something else.”

“Don’t give her anything else, then,” Amaranth said.

“It won’t matter,” I said. “Even if I don’t do anything, she’ll just rag on me for not reading up on stickfighting like she wanted me to do.”

“Are you listening to yourself?”

“Of course I am,” I said. “I wish you would. I’m telling you, it’s hopeless. She hates me, she keeps singling me out and giving me extra stuff to do, and she’d probably fail me no matter what, so why should I bother?”

“This is the same thing all over again,” Amaranth said. “You came back to the dorm yesterday with an armful of library books. Why didn’t you just check out a stickfighting book then?”

“I was doing research for a history paper,” I said. “I have to do a ten minute presentation on the history of the region for Hart.”

“When’s that due?”

“Um… he hasn’t assigned a due date yet,” I said.

“And you gave it precedence over something for a class that was only two days away?”

“Don’t get mad at me for saying this, but… it’s not a real assignment,” I said. “Callahan didn’t even specify a book, she just said I should go to the library and read something on the subject.”

“Baby, can’t you see that she’s making things easy on you?”

“I can see that you’ve never met Callahan,” I said. “Last time she sent me after a book she at least told me which one to read.”

“Do you think she does that for very many other students?”

“No,” I said. “As far as I can tell, it’s just me… which is what I was talking about. She singles me out.”

“A teacher singling you out for individual attention in a class you’re behind in is not a punishment,” Amaranth said. “Clearly, she’s trying to meet you halfway but you don’t feel like even shuffling an inch closer to her.”

“Again, you’ve never met Callahan,” I said. “‘Close’ is not where you want to be, with regards to her.”

“Well… maybe it’s about time I did meet her,” Amaranth said. “Does she have office hours tomorrow? I’ll try to get you a staff, and we’ll go in so you can apologize to her for not studying, so that when you start class that afternoon you’ll be doing it on the right foot.”

“You want me to apologize for not doing her bullshit extra homework?” I asked.

“I want you to apologize for making her waste the time she spends on you, and promise not to waste any more of it,” Amaranth said. “From here on out, you’re going to listen to her… no, scratch that. From here on out, you’re going to obey her.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.

“I am not kidding you, I’m ordering you,” she said. “And I want you to think about how much it disappoints me to order you to do something you should be doing on your own, something that you’re determined to fight me on even when I’ve made it clear that I think you should be doing it.”

“I… I… yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Maybe you do have a future and maybe you don’t,” Amaranth said. “But you definitely won’t if you fail out of college in your first year. Is that what you’re doing? Just being reckless because you don’t think it matters?”

“What? No!” I said. “It’s just… don’t be mad at me for answering the question, but it doesn’t seem like it should matter.”

“Well… I guess I can understand that,” Amaranth said. She sighed. “I don’t like fighting any more than you do, but being a nymph gives me privileges you don’t have… I’m free to sit it out, I can choose to ignore it, safe in the knowledge that most people will just leave me alone and those who don’t can’t kill me. But you aren’t a nymph, and you aren’t immortal, and I know that isn’t fair, but it’s what we’ve got to work with.”

“I don’t want to meet with Callahan,” I said.

“That’s not a punishment, baby,” Amaranth said gently. “It’s an attempt to salvage things, to patch things up a little before you have to see her in class. I think you’ll be better off if you do it.”

“I’ll go back to the library during lunch tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll get a book, I’ll look at some pictures, and then… if you find me a staff I can borrow… I’ll be set. I mean, I won’t be some master of quarterstaffing or anything, but she can’t be expecting much from two days, with no actual practice.”

“Okay, but… if you’re sick of her yelling at you, maybe you should take the first step in opening another line of communication with her,” Amaranth said.

“I’m not sure she has other lines of communication,” I said. “I think yelling’s pretty much it.”

Amaranth glared at me.

“What?” I asked. “I thought you were trying to understand my position.”

“Being understanding of your position doesn’t mean I have to condone your unrelated prejudices,” Amaranth said. “Think about her position. First, she’s teaching in an open field, with a large group of students. She’s got to speak loudly to be heard. Second, she’s a woman teaching a traditionally male-dominated subject. She’s got to show her students she’s serious or they’ll walk all over her.”

“Or… alternatively… she’s just insane,” I said.

“I’m done discussing this,” Amaranth said. “You get your book, I’ll get a temporary staff… we’ll get your own as soon as you can… and you start obeying Coach Callahan the same as you’d obey me.”

“Can’t I just obey her the same as I would any other teacher?”

“Apparently not,” Amaranth said. “Do me a favor and find her on the weave. I want to see what her office hours are. Even if you don’t want to talk to her, I feel like I should.”

“Amaranth, what are you going to do?” I asked. “I don’t think she’s going to talk about another student’s situation with you.”

“I just want to get a feel for her,” she said. “So I can see where you’re coming from… so I can tell if there is something more going on than what I’m seeing.”

“Okay,” I said, and I started gazing through the ball back to the university’s site. “I guess that’s fine… I just can’t help feeling it’s going to come around and bite me on the ass.”

“Well, you should enjoy it, then,” Amaranth said, ruffling my rain-matted hair.

“Here it is,” I said, skimming over it and reading the pertinent information aloud. “Office located in the fitness complex, lower levels. Office hours for Thursday are eleven to one… can usually be found near office or in the area of the arena when not teaching. No appointment necessary for those who don’t mind being stabbed.”

“Oh, great, I was worried I’d need an appointment,” Amaranth said. “Scribe out a copy out of that, and the map to the club, and then we’ll head… actually, maybe we should find another empty room. Two’s probably either sleeping or doing homework.”

“Homework,” I said. “Ugh, I haven’t even looked at the notes Bohd gave me on our written assignment… um, not because I’m not going to,” I added quickly. “It’s not due for another week. I was going to do it this weekend.”

“Well, make sure that you don’t forget,” Amaranth said. “Because we have got one and only one priority for Saturday now. Don’t go making anybody any promises, or setting up any dates… and especially don’t go signing anything else.”

“I won’t!” I said.

I made copies of the information from Callahan’s page and from the club’s. Amaranth put the papers away, took me by the hand, and led me out of the ballroom back into the lobby.

“Let’s just go back to the room we used this morning,” she said. “It should definitely be empty now.”

I wasn’t a big fan of that idea, since it meant wending our way through the throng of people around the bottom of the stairs, but I figured I’d used up my pointless argument points for the day. It wasn’t like Leda was going to magically start liking me if I didn’t cross through her field of vision again that night, anyway.

We went into the meeting room and Amaranth locked the door.

“Take off your clothes,” she said, and she turned around while I did. It was a little odd, not having her watch me while I got undressed. I didn’t know what to make of it, until she turned back around and was holding the little bottle and jar that Caron had given us. “I figured we’d give you your first treatments while we’re here.” She looked at the jar of depilating oil. “It says it vanishes along with the hair, without any mess. Hopefully it’ll be easy to use… it doesn’t look quite as thick as the unguent Celia uses.” She set the bottle of piercing elixir on the table so she could unscrew the lid of the jar. “Oh, but it smells nicer. Kind of like cloves.”

“Yeah, that’s just what I need: a little seasoning for my pussy,” I said. “That’ll do wonders for keeping Feejee off me.”

“I don’t think it will linger that strongly,” Amaranth said. She twirled her finger around. “Turn around.”

I obeyed, turning away from her. She came up behind me and pressed herself against my back, reaching around with her hands. I felt a bare, empty hand cupping my crotch, tracing lightly upwards with two fingers around the sides of my slit until she found the bushiness above it.

“You really don’t have a lot of hair,” she said, feeling. “More than me, but not a lot. I think bare will be a good look on you, but we’ll see if we want to keep it up after we give Caron her show.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. She hadn’t asked me anything or told me to do anything, but it seemed like a “yes, ma’am” moment.

I felt the jar… the cold glass jar… brush past my thigh, and then Amaranth was fumbling around right in front of my pussy. Two fingertips coated in viscous, icy goop buried themselves in the curly tangled nest. She moved them around, and there was some resistance as the hair stuck to them… but it disappeared quickly.

“You did some good things today,” she said, massaging around the top of my mound. The oil was so chilly to the touch, but it really did disappear without a trace, leaving only the impression of having been cold. “Like reaching out to Feejee, and submitting to the piercings. You did some bad things today. You did some things that weren’t very smart. You know what all those things were, don’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I could feel the change down below… I didn’t go around thinking man, I can totally feel my pubic hair, but as it vanished, I could feel the difference. It was… weird. Not bad… not sure it was good… but weird. Different.

“It was very touching, the way you submitted yourself while I was picking out your jewelry,” Amaranth said. She recoated her fingers very lightly and then started smearing them around the inside of my thighs and across the whole area down there, picking up whatever stray hairs there were. There was a slight pulling sensation as the oil made contact with each one, and then it was gone. “I want you to know that I do appreciate that… but every time I think about it, what should be a beautiful moment in our relationship, I’m going to have to think about what else you did. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, as she worked her hand lower, sticking it literally between my legs. “Hey!” I squealed as she started to work her way back, away from what could legitimately be considered the region in question.

“Baby, you just have a few hairs in your butt crack that are going to look really obvious with the rest of you bare,” she said.

“It’s amazing how less sexy this just became,” I said.

“I’m trying to do a good job,” she said.

“Yeah… we don’t want to disappoint Caron,” I said, rolling my eyes.

“We really don’t,” Amaranth said. “But ignoring that, think about what a nice surprise it’ll be for Steff. She’s never liked your body hair.”

“She never said anything to me…”

“Nor to me, or anybody else, as far as I know,” Amaranth said. “But it’s true.” She patted on the butt with a finger that was mostly dry and warm. “You just got a whole lot sexier in her eyes… so if nothing truly bad comes of this, you can’t say that nothing good did. Now let’s do your breasts.”

She took the bottle and administered the clear, slightly acrid-smelling liquid inside it to my nipples and the area around, in much the same way as she had done the oil. Getting an around-the-front breast massage might have sounded like a better idea if it wasn’t for the, you know, open wounds on the most sensitive parts of them… but she worked her way into it so gradually and so gently that it felt more like good pain than bad. Whatever was in the elixir dulled the sharp pain of the raw piercing, leaving only the duller ache behind it.

“There, that should help keep the piercing nice and clean,” Amaranth said when she finished. “And now… punishment. I’m going to give you a spanking for your disrespect of Callahan and your disregard for your class, but not for anything else. If everything works out on Saturday, then I’ll start thinking of a punishment that’s suitable for what you did. If… somehow… it doesn’t… there is no punishment I can give you that’s worse than the one you’ll be facing. Do you understand?”

“So… my ‘performance’ on Saturday’s not going to be punishment enough?” I asked.

“That’s payment for the piercings,” Amaranth said. “You agreed to it. So… no. Also, I asked you a question… do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Good,” Amaranth said. “You’ve had your tenderness for the night, and your attitude towards Callahan is not something to be rewarded, so this is going to be raw punishment.” She pointed to my clothes, thrown on one of the chairs. “Bring me your paddle.”

I gulped, and went to retrieve it. Amaranth put me into position. I braced myself for the onslaught. She slipped her hand… warm and clean now… between my legs and felt her handiwork, now completely dry. The sensation of her fingers on my smooth skin was shudder-worthy in the best possible way, and I relaxed a little.

“Hmm… it’s almost a shame I already decided to just punish you,” Amaranth said. “But there will be other times and other nights.”

I didn’t have time to re-brace myself before the studs came down low across my backside. There was nothing particularly erotic in her technique. It was ten swift whacks with the metal side, with no time to adjust or react, no chance for the pain to build into pleasure until she finished and the stinging began to subside.

The afterglow of the pain, as it were, was arousing, but there was no more contact forthcoming, nothing to build on that foundation and bring me to a release. Amaranth went over to the chair, picked up my panties and handed them to me. When I had put them on, she handed my bra, and then my socks. When she handed my shoes next, I had a feeling about where she was going.

“Underwear isn’t naked,” she said. “You’ve gone through the student union in your panties before.”

“But Leda’s out…”

“Leda is not going to think any less of you for what you are or aren’t wearing,” Amaranth said. “And you shouldn’t care if she does. I’ll give your coat when we get the door and you can cover yourself up for the walk back to Harlowe. This is punishment. If you don’t like it, remember that the next time you feel like smarting off about Coach Callahan.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, ducking my head.

“And if you’re not going to go see her outside of class, I want you to apologize to her during it.”

“I don’t think she cares if students don’t come see her,” I said. “Considering that she threatens to stab ones who do.”

“I want you to apologize for not taking her class seriously,” Amaranth said. “And by extension, not taking her seriously. She probably gets enough of that from her colleagues.”

“Maybe she should stop dressing like a barbarian hooker, then,” I said.

“Baby… you know the binding spell means those piercings can’t come loose accidentally, and you being invulnerable means I don’t have to worry about them tearing anything,” Amaranth said. “So please remember that your strap can be used other places than your cute little boy butt.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“And I think I’ll hold onto your coat until we get back to Harlowe.”

“What?”

“Or until we get up to your room,” Amaranth said.

“It’s freezing out,” I said.

“And as I said before, cold won’t kill you… and it does seem to be something you respect more than you do your teachers,” Amaranth said. “Come along. You walk in front of me down to the front door.”

With the top floor deserted and silent, I had very little doubt that my yelps of pain had been audible to those on the stairs. I kept my eyes on my shoes as I headed down, past the snickers of Leda’s new friends. The burning in my face only seemed to accentuate the red hot strip across my butt and the two points of heat on my nipples.

Even while Amaranth had insisted that this was a punishment, it was horribly arousing… of course, the horribly might have been because she’d already declared tonight a work night, meaning I’d be alone in the bedroom with Two and no chance of a release.

In many ways, though, the march through the crowd of rain-refugees was like taking a step backwards to the beginning of the school year, when everything sexy had been fresh and new and more than a little bit dangerous. I supposed in some ways that was like a sneak preview of what I’d likely experience at the club on Saturday.

Realistically, parading around in my underwear didn’t give anybody a look at anything they couldn’t see with more normal forms of streetwear… except, of course, my underwear. That was more than enough… but somehow, it wasn’t quite too much. I reflected how lucky I was to have Amaranth, who could take my straightforward expressions of my limits and understand where the fine details actually fell.

I stopped when I got to the door, not sure how far behind me she was. I felt her hand on the small of my back almost immediately.

“Keep going, missy,” she said. No chance for a reprieve, then.

She took me by the hand and kept me walking at a leisurely pace through the icy rain, shushing me verbally when I cursed the cold. My new piercings were burning cold nipcicles by the time we got back to Harlowe, where Amaranth took pity and… possibly in deference to the transparency of my waterlogged panties… gave me back my coat.

At least it wasn’t dripping wet.

We parted company my room, Amaranth giving me a kiss and sticking her hand down the front of my panties to once again rub smoothly against the hair that wasn’t there.

“If you don’t want to take another walk like that again, remember: apologize to Callahan, and start treating her class like it is a class. I’ll be asking you about your behavior, if Steff’s not… able to observe it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and she gave me another kiss, this time on the cheek. “Um…”

“Yes, baby?”

“Could you make sure that you tell anybody whose staff you borrow, that you’re borrowing it for me?” I asked. “The way my life goes, chances are I’d end up fighting them in class tomorrow and have to explain why I have it.”

“Of course, baby… I wouldn’t borrow something on somebody else’s behalf and not tell the owner,” Amaranth said. “But I’m glad you thought of that. Go take a hot bath before you go to bed.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, blushing. “Thank you, ma’am.

“Goodnight, baby.”

“Goodnight, ma’am,” I said, and then I watched her walk down to the end of the hall and through the stairwell door.

She didn’t look back, but she walked very slowly.

Yeah, a bath seemed like just what I needed.

Discuss this story.

My nipples were aching… I wanted to get home and look at them in the mirror so I could convince myself they weren’t that heavy. I was strong enough that I could have flipped the carriage over with one hand… I ought to have been able to lift some little steel and pewter adornments with my breasts.

Actually, I wanted to lie down on my back so they wouldn’t be pulling. I didn’t think a bath would be a good idea… definitely not with bubbles and salts.

I felt a little sick in my stomach, too. I didn’t know if that was from the piercing, or…

What the fuck had I done?

It seemed so simple: get free stuff, show up at some club. The consequences for failure had seemed like no big deal because I wasn’t being asked to do much to avoid them. But considering the way my weekends had gone so far…

At least it wasn’t my feeding time for another week.

Wasn’t it?

Shit.

I was so fucked, I might have been pregnant.

Amaranth was saying nothing, just standing there in the pouring rain that couldn’t seem to quite drench her hair… pale and trembling, even though the chill air couldn’t have touched her like it did me. The carriage arrived and we climbed in.

“I want you to sit on the bench this time, Mack,” she said, pointing to the back-facing one as she sat on the other. I obeyed, after taking off my dripping coat and putting it down on the floor. My seat was going to be pretty wet no matter what, but there was no sense soaking it. Amaranth let out a sigh. “Did you not hear me trying to get your attention?”

“Yeah, but it was my decision,” I said. My terrible decision, my potentially catastrophic decision… my decision that I had been ruing the whole time we were waiting at the coach stop, but she tried to call me on it and my reaction was to defend it.

“You couldn’t have talked about it first?” she asked. “I would have been happy to just pay for the piercings.”

“You could have ordered me,” I said.

“I was trying… I might have been more forceful but I couldn’t believe you would actually do it,” Amaranth said. “You hate slavers. You hate slavery. Of everything you hate, that’s the one thing I really can’t disagree with… the hating the institution, I mean. Why, Mack… why would you sign that paper?”

“I felt like Caron was counting on me being stupid,” I said.

“And what… you didn’t want to let her down?” she asked, then immediately blanched. “Sorry. But… you should have let it go.”

“I… it was insulting,” I said. “Like when you thought I was calling you stupid, you know?”

“Don’t you dare compare that to this,” she said.

“You ran away from campus into the night,” I said. “Blindly… literally blindly… and right into the arms of ghouls.”

“I was hurting,” she said. “I hurt, because you thought I was stupid… not some random shopkeeper who’s looking to strike it rich.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t apologize to me,” she said. “It’s not me that’s going to be hurt if… oh, you know what? It is going to hurt me. Maybe it’s horribly selfish to be thinking about how it would affect me if you were dragged off by slavers and made to serve a seriously misguided woman’s misplaced maternal instincts, but that’s all I can think about right now… which is silly, because I’d be no worse off than if we just broke up, but you’d be… but it’s true. Did you even think about how it would affect me? Or Steff? Or Two?”

“I… I wasn’t planning on getting enslaved,” I said. “And hey, you’re the one who wanted to go with piercings!”

“But we didn’t need a binding spell,” Amaranth said. “I had enough set aside that we could have gotten something nice and simple…”

“So, not the ones you really wanted,” I said. I lightly touched the front of my shirt, over where my nipples were. “Not these ones.”

“Well… no. The deal was for any set, so I got the ones I liked the most, but… you’d already signed,” Amaranth said.

“And if I hadn’t, you would have gone with, what? A couple barbells? Some little rings?” I asked. “I could have got those for myself.” I put my hand over my heart. “I wanted you to pick something out that would mean something. Because of Caron’s offer, you got the choice to really do that. ”

“What’s it going to matter what they mean if she sells you to Mercy?” Amaranth asked. “Do you think she’ll let you keep them? Or that she won’t find a way to use them against you? Don’t you get it, the point was to give you something you could keep with you forever, no matter how far apart we were… and now if we screw up on Saturday, not only will I lose you but we’ll lose that last tiny little bit of connection. And all that isn’t even getting into what you’re going to go through… but I can’t even face that.”

“I… I’m sorry,” I said. “It wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve done, okay?”

Amaranth laughed… a sharp, short, bitter laugh, not her usual golden tinkling.

“Not the smartest?” Amaranth asked. “You’ve only maybe thrown your whole future away, baby…”

“Yeah, well, as far as we know, we don’t have one,” I said.

“Not together,” Amaranth said. “And that… that kills me. It tears me up. It eats me out from the inside and it leaves me empty and cold. But… looking at it realistically… you have a future, and I have a future, and I like to think that those futures would be better because we met each other.”

“The thing is… lately… I’m not sure I do have a future,” I said. “I mean, my plan in high school was always get away, go to college, become an enchanter, make good money and live a quiet human life. I failed on the last part already, so I don’t know how I’d make the rest of it work. I can’t exactly go live in the mountains with Steff…”

“She’d be happy to have you,” Amaranth said. “She’s talked about it. I was going to suggest it, if… well, you know.”

“It wouldn’t work,” I said. “I don’t want to be Viktor’s pet any more than Mercy’s.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t be anything near a pet. Viktor doesn’t like you that… um,” she said. “Okay. So, Kilrest is out. That doesn’t mean you don’t have a future. As much as I hate to say it, a lot of freshmen relationships don’t work out in the long-term. You don’t have to think of your future in terms of the people who will be in it, because you never know… you could study hard and get your degree…”

“And spend the rest of my life bumping into people who saw my face on the news and know what I am,” I said. “That’s got to limit my options.”

“Why’s it got to?” Amaranth asked. “Half-demons scare people, but so do half-ogres, and they don’t have any chance to pass as human.”

“Yeah, how many half-ogres do you suppose run enchantment shops?” I asked.

“Maybe you would have failed no matter what you did, but you had a chance, anyway,” she said. “If this… if it happens, I’m going to spend the rest of my life knowing that chance is gone, and it probably wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t met.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “It was my decision.”

“I picked the piercings!” Amaranth shot back.

“Yeah, and I picked the store,” I said. “I don’t think Caron’s game with herself went as far as betting that we’d want piercings… you could have been like, ‘Okay, baby, go pick something out!’ and whatever it was, she would have dangled something shiny in front of me to get me to deal.”

“But you wouldn’t necessarily have fallen for it!” she said. Somehow we’d flipped around… in an effort to make each other feel better, we were still biting at each other, but now we were fighting for the blame. I didn’t like it any more than the other way, and I could tell it was tearing Amaranth apart, too.

“Yeah, um… have you not met me?” I asked. I made myself sound just as angry when I said this as the other things… snappish, like it was a real retort. After a few seconds, Amaranth laughed and so did I.

“The thing is… the thing is, baby,” she said, more calmly, “you were awfully eager to please, and maybe you wouldn’t have gone along with the deal if I hadn’t encouraged that in you.”

“Okay, yeah,” I said. “Seriously. I am eager to please… that didn’t need any encouragement. If it wasn’t for you, I’d be pleasing Puddy eagerly. Or maybe I would have bumped into Mercy and I’d be her little lapdog already.”

I wasn’t planning out what I was saying… I’d pretty much meant to stop after didn’t need any encouragement… but now that my mouth was open, it wouldn’t stop moving. I felt like I did when I went off at somebody, but it wasn’t anger that I was feeling.

“You didn’t make me who I am,” I continued. “If anybody did, it’s my grandmother, but maybe it wasn’t even her. Maybe I would have been like this if I’d had my mother my whole life and never met her. I don’t know. I don’t know why I’m like this. However it happened, it did, and my life is a lot better when I have someone loving and fairly fun to please instead of going around sick to my stomach with fear because I can’t figure out what people want from me and who I should be pleasing. You aren’t always perfect, you aren’t always… as smart as you could be… but I love you, and that means I… I crave your approval. I crave it like I crave the touch of your hand, the feel of your skin. It makes me feel warm and secure, and I don’t see how I can not be eager to get that.”

The torrent of words had caught Amaranth off guard, and that made two of us. I had tears running from the corners of my eyes, not because I was angry or sad but because I was passionate. It was passion that I was feeling, passion that was pouring out of my mouth like a hot spurting jet, splattering over Amaranth and leaving her…

You know, I’m going to leave that metaphor where it is.

She caught her breath and leaned forward, reaching out with both arms and beckoning me forward. I went into her arms willingly… eagerly, and she held me close.

“Fuck Caron,” she said, stroking my wet hair. “And fuck Mercy. I am not giving you up.”

“What about Mother Khaele?”

“Fudge her, too,” Amaranth said. A blinding flash of lightning struck so close the carriage-rattling crash of thunder arrived right on top of it. We both jumped, and Amaranth screamed. “Um… that was probably a coincidence,” she said, then laughed nervously. “I’ll listen to what she has to say, and then she will listen to what I have to say, because I am an adult being and however I am, she made me.”

There was another peal of thunder, more distant this time.

“Coincidence,” she murmured. “Just a storm. When we get home, we’re getting right on the ethernet and finding out where this club is. And how to get there. And if the invitations don’t arrive tomorrow, I’m going back to the shop and making a scene that Caron’s girlfriend will hear. And if something goes wrong on Saturday, I’ll… we’ll… I don’t know. Maybe her business wouldn’t survive if somebody made a big enough stink over her shoplifting penalties.”

“Amaranth… Mercy wants me in a name-your-price kind of way,” I said. “Caron won’t need her shop if she lands me.”

“The dwarven culture puts a pretty high premium on work,” Amaranth said. “A lot of them get pretty wealthy by human standards with a couple centuries of hard work and frugal living, but they don’t retire even when they have everything they could possibly need.”

“I’m not sure Caron was raised in the dwarven culture,” I said.

“I’m just thinking,” Amaranth said. “Maybe if she knew what Mercy wanted you for…”

“She thought Mercy wanted me for hamburger,” I said.

“Actually, she couldn’t sell you as hamburger, because under Imperial law, only one hundred percent beef can… okay, wrong time for fun facts,” Amaranth said. “But Caron seems pretty young. I doubt she’s much more than a hundred. If she knew that she was handing Mercy an unstoppable demonic army a century or two down the line, she might reconsider.”

“She seemed pretty good at rationalizing what she was doing,” I said. “Really, I don’t blame her… with the kind of money Mercy was talking about, I’m surprised she even tried to make it fair.”

“Oh? How much money would it take for you to sell Two?” Amaranth asked.

“That’s different,” I said. “Caron doesn’t know me. She doesn’t owe me anything.”

“What do you owe Two?”

“Probably about sixty silver in laundry and tailor services,” I said.

“Okay, what if you had Sara and Tara legally under your power,” Amaranth said. “How much money would someone like Mercy have to offer you before you’d sell them to her?”

“For breeding, or for… you know?”

“You don’t know,” Amaranth said. “That’s the thing. Once you sell them, they’re in Mercy’s hands. Even if she promises to do nothing worse to them then put them in a cute dress and make them dance, that’s not legally binding. How much money would it take?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “And it’s a pointless question because it would have to be a lot, whatever it was, and there would be no reason for Mercy to pay that much for a couple of humans with some pieces missing.”

“Assume she has a reason,” Amaranth said. “She’s crazy. She wants a two-headed girl.”

“Technically, they’re two one-bodied girls,” I said.

“You’re avoiding the question.”

“I don’t know, okay?”

“I don’t think you would,” Amaranth said. “You’re all ready to excuse Caron but you wouldn’t do the same in her place.”

“It’s a stupid hypothetical situation that would never happen,” I said. “And I’m not excusing Caron… I’m sure as hell not going to trust her any time soon… I’m just saying, I can see where she’s coming from. I understand her motivation for doing it more than I do her motivation for giving me so much wiggle room.”

“Well, don’t look a gift horse in the cock,” Amaranth said.

I searched the entire repository of the Pax language that was in my head for a reply to this, and found nothing, so we lapsed into silence. After a moment, Amaranth put her hand on my face and turned it up to face hers, and we were kissing.

The world fell away, and my shirt joined it. Before long I was naked, and we were making love in a way we hadn’t before. I don’t mean we were trying some new technique or position… it was a lot of kissing and holding and touching, and not a lot of words. The closest thing I could think of to it was our first time, in the shade of the tree, but that had been frantic and furtive and this was… it was passionate, but it was also deliciously deliberate. I knew her body now, not quite the same way that she instinctively knew mine, but I knew what I was doing. We knew what we were doing with each other.

She stayed away from my breasts, mostly, but they couldn’t help being stimulated… agitated, even… no matter how careful our ministrations were. I didn’t mind. The pain was in a better context now.

The carriage came to a stop before too long… before nearly long enough, but we stayed where we were and after a few minutes it headed back towards town. I felt a tingle of apprehension when I realized we were approaching the walls. There would be the probing spell, but there was also the possibility of a random stop.

“It’s okay,” Amaranth reminded me. “I’m a nymph.”

The second trip into town wasn’t the most productive or the longest, but it was memorable, and the ride back was as good as the ride out had been.

I got dressed before we made it back to school, throwing a lot of energy into waterproofing my mostly-dry clothes before I put the coat on. I looked at Amaranth. We were smiling shyly at each other, like we hadn’t known each other over a month now, like we’d just met and decided that maybe we kind of liked each other. It was a nice feeling.

“Well,” she said. “I don’t know if we’ll make a habit of it, but this was one way of getting some private time without displacing Two.”

Just like that, we had a future again. Maybe we were fooling ourselves, but I’d take it. It was hard to even have a present if you couldn’t pretend you had a future.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

The coaches were a lot nearer to the union than they were to Harlowe, so we ran for there after we got off. I had been expecting it to be empty, considering the relative lateness and the rain, but there were people sitting in the big open lobby and chatting. I guessed they were waiting out the storm, or maybe they just hung out there. I had to admit I didn’t know much about the habits of my fellow students.

“Hi, Leda!” Amaranth said. I looked to see where she was waving at, half expecting to see the big silver-white swan roosting somewhere indoors. But Leda was in her more human-like form, sitting with her legs out across the bottom step of the wide staircase leading upstairs. She was very wet, and very naked, her mane of feathers matted down like hair.

Predictably, she was surrounded by guys

She flipped Amaranth off.

“That’s a nice look on her,” Amaranth said, ignoring the rude gesture. She tugged on my hand and started walking. “Let’s go to the ballroom.”

“It doesn’t seem like the safest thing in the world,” I said.

“What, the ballroom?”

“Leda… out and about, naked and alone,” I said.

“She isn’t alone, she had friends.”

“That’s what I mean,” I said. “Though it does make me wonder why you don’t get more attention… I mean, I know it’s not scandalous and maybe people are just used to it by now, but you don’t get approached for work very often.”

“Oh, well… I do when I’m not with you,” Amaranth said. “I think maybe people realize now that we’re together-together?”

“Yeah, I’m sure that’s it,” I said.

“Don’t get mouthy, missy,” Amaranth said. “You’ve still got your paddle. I wonder if the food court is still open. We didn’t ever eat, did we?”

“I’m not actually hungry,” I said, though I did have some awareness of the emptiness in my stomach now that I was used to eating. I might have called it hunger, but it was nothing like the real thing as I experienced it.

“It’s a nice habit to have, all the same.” Amaranth said as we got to the ballroom. “You’re better at this stuff… it was called Tomb of Horrors.”

“Yeah, I remember,” I said.

It didn’t take long to find their weavesite, which had a “H18 Warning” on it, with a table listing other common races and their ages of legal majority, if they were different. They not only had the street address, they had a map and directions. I tugged on that thread and it came up. The location that was circled was on the other side of the river canal. “Whoa,” I said. “It’s in the high city? I would have expected the low quarter.”

“Kinky doesn’t mean scuzzy,” Amaranth said. “You’re going to get a whack for that. If we make this work, I think you’ll probably enjoy this more if you can check your prejudices a little. Remember your little speech about this being who you are, too.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, dropping my head.

“Just to be sure, we’ll go into town again tomorrow and check it out,” Amaranth said. “Make sure it’s there. Your last class is mixed melee?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Fuck, don’t remind me.”

“Baby, that’s an important class.”

“I know it is,” I said. “But Callahan… she’s got no business teaching it. She just likes hurting people, and for no good reason. Watch, I’ll bet you anything she sends me to the healing center tomorrow when I show up without a quarterstaff.”

“You’re supposed to get a quarterstaff?” Amaranth asked.

“Yeah… nobody else, just me,” I said. “She says it’s going to make a big difference in my fighting, but I don’t see how. When I have my pitchfork back…”

“You… were… supposed to get a quarterstaff?” Amaranth asked.

“Uh… she said so, but I…”

“Your teacher told you to get a quarterstaff,” Amaranth said, “and then we went into town… twice… and you didn’t think to mention this?”

“I… don’t we have bigger things to worry about?” I asked. “The Tomb of…”

“Baby… how could you be so stupid?” Amaranth asked.

Discuss this story.

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

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

This means she’s dreaming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you try what I said?”

“No,” Two says. “I did not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That isn’t very funny,” Two says.

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

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

“And who told you to sweep?”

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

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

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

“Miss Ruth says that practice makes perfect.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How will you know when you’re done?”

“When I’ve swept the whole place.”

“But it’s endless.”

“Yes,” Two says, and she smiles.

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

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

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

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

“You aren’t supposed to hate anybody.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah,” Moeli said. “I did.”

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

“I do, too,” Moeli says.

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

“No shit?” Moeli says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hello, Two,” he says.

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

“Sweeping? I thought you were dreaming.”

“I can do both,” Two says.

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

“I know,” she says.

“I’m a teddy bear,” he adds.

“Yes.”

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

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

And onward she sweeps.

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

Nobody else sees. Nobody else knows.

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

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

How much longer can this go on?

How long before the school’s overrun?

Something must be done.

Something must be done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some dreams are simpler than others.

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

Feejee dreams of blood in the water.

Iona dreams of blood.

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

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

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

“Hey, hey Two!”

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

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

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

“You never dream about them here, either.”

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

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

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

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

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

“But have you considered the ramifications of that?”

“No,” she says.

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

“Yes,” she says.

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

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

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

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

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

No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her mother is a nekoyokai.

“Mother… you’re…?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But you are.”

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

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

It’s the war again.

The bridge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about The?”

“She bugs out, too.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Need to know basis.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She knows what’s coming next.

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

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

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

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

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

And so the dream went.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” Two repeats decisively.

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

“You are mistaken.”

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

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

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

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

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

Everybody hurried down towards him and just like that, the argument was forgotten for the moment. Two even abruptly stopped crying, though she kept hiccupping.

“Oh, how are you feeling, honey?” Amaranth asked him. He’d cleaned off all the blood and sweat, but he looked depleted, almost dead on his feet.

“Are you kidding?” he asked, his voice a little ragged and hoarse. “I’m on top of the freaking world. Anybody need a light?”

He held out a fist and opened it. A tiny flame appeared for a moment above it, then disappeared. At the same time, Ian swayed visibly.

“Whoa… kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel there, aren’t you?” Steff said.

“Probably,” Ian said. “Probably shouldn’t be pulling fire from air, but it’s kind of hard to get wood in a locker room.”

“Must not have tried very hard,” Steff said. Ian ignored this.

“So you got my message, I guess,” Ian said.

“Actually… no,” I said. “I had some mirror problems. But I figured out you were fighting anyway, so we all came to, you know, watch. I thought you did pretty well, considering.”

“Yeah, I did okay,” he said. “Could have done better… will do better… but I don’t really care right now.”

“Oh, you did fine,” Amaranth said, putting an arm around him and kissing him on the cheek.

“No, I mean it,” Ian said. Without even thinking about it, he put his arm around her and leaned into her… he looked like he needed the support, too. “I really don’t care.”

I didn’t begrudge him leaning on Amaranth… she made for better support. I had enough problems keeping one person upright.

“The fire thing kind of eclipses everything else right now?” I asked.

“Kind of,” he said. “But only because I don’t care about it.”

“About the fight?” I asked, confused.

“About the fire,” he said. “That’s why it’s so awesome.”

“The fire is awesome… because you don’t care about it?” Steff said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Does that make any sense?”

“No,” Two declared between hiccups. “It doesn’t.”

“Are you sure the healers got to your head, hon?” Steff asked.

“I was in the steamroom, trying to unwind and clear my head after some practice, and I just started sort of… fooling around, I guess,” he said.

“Oh, wait, I think I know this story,” Steff said.

“Hey, no more comments from the penis gallery, please,” Ian said. “Anyway, I just started trying to draw fire out of the heat stones… I didn’t expect to have any more success than I’ve ever had, but I wasn’t even really trying to succeed… just trying things out… and all of a sudden, there was a tiny flame on top of the stone.”

“Good for you!” Amaranth said.

“It disappeared as soon as I noticed it, but I got it back and then started pulling fire out of the steam,” he said. “Once I figured out what I was doing, it was… I want to say it was easy. It was but it wasn’t. Like pushing a rock up a hill: hard work, but there’s no secret you have to figure out to do it. You just push.”

“Yeah, and just how much ‘pushing’ did you do?” I asked, remembering Ian’s lethargic entrance into the arena and how quickly he’d worn himself out throwing punches.

“Too much,” he admitted, grinning sheepishly. “But it was fun. Once I got started… it was kind of a rush. You know, ‘fire… cool!’”

“I’m no elementalist, but fire’s not supposed to be cool,” Steff said. “Of course, they keep telling me that undead aren’t supposed to be hot…”

“You know, I probably wouldn’t mind it if you never said anything again,” Ian said.

“Yeah, they had a club for people like that, but university rules said they had to let me join and so they only ever had the one meeting,” Steff said.

“Anyway…” Ian said. “It was exhausting, especially since I’d been training so hard before, but the more I did it, the more I realized I didn’t give a shit whether I could do it or not, and the more exciting it became.”

“Yeah, uh, we’re still kind of waiting for an explanation on that one,” Steff said.

“Before, I felt like I had to get fire down because… this whole thing with my dad,” he said. “I should have been able to do it like it was nothing, and I couldn’t, and I’ve been falling behind in elemental invocation because of it. Bohd told me she wouldn’t assign me a grade if I wanted to drop it, even after the deadline, but I knew my dad would kill me if I did that. And then he’d cut me off. But now that I know I can do it… I don’t care so much about that.”

“You mean, your dad won’t care what you major in as long as you can do fire magic?” I asked.

“No, he’d still hit the roof,” Ian said. “In his mind, that’s the only point to sending me here. But that doesn’t bother me… I told you before, Mackenzie, I wasn’t doing it for him. I just didn’t want to feel like a failure.”

“So why bring him up?” I asked.

For a moment, I thought I’d stumped him without meaning to, because he didn’t answer. He got a very Two-ish “I’m thinking, I’m thinking” look on his face.

“I guess… I guess because he’s the one who gave me my models of success and failure,” he said after a while. “Yeah, I’m probably not making a lot of sense right now. I feel awesome, but I really need to get some sleep.” He kissed me on the cheek. “Hope you don’t mind… I just want a bed underneath me the next time I pass out.”

“No, it’s fine… we’ve kind of got a thing,” I said. “But I wanted to at least watch you fight and… tell you that I watched you.”

“I can at least walk out with you,” Ian said. “Or walk you back to your dorm.”

“Uh… all things considered, maybe we should be walking you back to your dorm,” Steff said.

“Also, you might want to put some warmer clothes on,” Two said.

He blushed, and so did I. I’d seen Ian in his underwear enough times that I hadn’t totally processed his state of dress… though to be honest, his boxers covered more of his body than the fighting briefs had. It was a matter of context, though. That had been him dressed for fighting. This was him undressed, in a hallway, talking to a bunch of girls.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, and darted around the corner.

With Ian’s departure, the smile had fallen off of Steff’s face… she’d half-turned and was drifting vaguely away from us.

“I’m sorry… sorry I yelled at you,” I said to her.

“It’s fine,” Steff said, a little bit of prickly hurt creeping into her voice. “Though, for the record… I was going to say ‘I’m in lust.’”

“Oh,” I said, feeling profoundly stupid for the assumption I’d made… that was a very Steff thing to say, after all.

“I have to know somebody a bit longer than that to fall in love with them,” she added. “Usually.”

“Sorry,” I said again.

“It’s fine,” she said, and then we lapsed into silence. Amaranth pulled on her hair and chewed her lip while Steff kicked the floor tiles with the toe of her boot and I felt bad without really understanding why. After a while, Two started humming loudly and tunelessly.

“Please don’t do that right now, sweetie,” Amaranth said.

“Okay,” Two said, and she started singing loudly and tunelessly instead. “I’ll tell my ma when I get home the boys won’t leave the girls alone…”

It wasn’t a very long song, and mercifully, Ian arrived before she could think of another one. He was now dressed in his street clothes and a jacket.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “We just have to go get our coats.”

I wondered if we’d have a problem getting back into the arena proper with Ian, since he didn’t have a ticket, but nobody was even checking them at the interior doors any more. It seemed people sneaking in to watch the end of the fights wasn’t a huge priority. There was another sound audible over the background noise of the crowd: rain drops pinging off the arena’s domed roof.

“Oh, wonderful,” I said. “We’re going to get wet.”

“It was raining a little before, too,” Steff said. “But not like this… your owlbear costume will be ruined.”

“I like my coat,” I said.

“My friend Hazel says we should be nice to Mack’s coat,” Two said.

“Thank you,” I said.

“She says if it gets angry, it might try to eat us,” she continued. “I don’t think it will, though. That’s just what she says.”

“Remember, it’s the thought that counts, baby,” Amaranth said, draping her arms over my shoulders from behind and kissing the back of my head.

“I’m not sure that was a nice thought,” I replied.

“I think it’s a tie,” Two said. “Like the glass. Half nice and half not-nice.”

“Well, halves round up, so let’s appreciate the nice part,” Amaranth said.

“Doesn’t the not-nice part round up, too?” I asked.

“No,” Amaranth said.

We got our coats, and before I even put mine on I went over it with a double-strength version of insulation spell, trying to layer on the imperviousness to water really thick.

“What are you doing?” Ian asked.

“Just a temporary enhancement,” I said. “I don’t want my coat getting wet.”

“If you don’t water it, how will it grow?” Steff asked.

“Oh, lay off!” I said, pulling the big furry coat on. “I want to make it through the winter without freezing to death, is that such a crime?”

“Oh, relax,” Ian said, pulling me in close to him. “She’s just having fun the only way she knows how.”

“Anybody else want a boost?” I asked.

Steff shook her head, though she had a look on her face like she would have liked to accept… possibly she thought she’d feel like a jerk for accepting my spell right after making fun of me.

“Mine’s already pretty waterproof,” Ian said.

“No, thank you, baby,” Amaranth said, for obvious reasons.

Two was chanting over her coat.

“No, thank you,” she said when she finished.

“Wait, did you just copy my spell?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Is… is that okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s just… surprising. It usually takes some time to break down a spell and adapt it into something you can use for yourself.”

“It did take me time,” Two said. “Three and a half seconds. Learning my owner’s spells is… was… one of the things I was for.”

I couldn’t help but notice the sound of pride in her voice that lasted up through the word “is”, and which was replaced by a note of sadness when she corrected herself. I heard Steff mutter something dark and ugly. I seconded the sentiment, whatever she might have said. There was a crash of thunder from outside.

“Let’s get going, before it gets any worse out,” Amaranth said quietly, and we all nodded.

It was really coming down outside.

“Whoo!” Steff yelled, throwing back her head and letting the rain slam into her face. The sky lit up all over as spectacular chains of lightning chased each other across the dome of the world. “Your mom must be pissed, Amy!” Steff said as the thunder rolled in.

“No, she mostly lets the rain do what it wants,” Amaranth said.

Ian laughed and shook his head. I huddled inside my fuzzy fortress and tilted my head to try to keep the rain out of the opening in the hood, with limited success as I couldn’t really go around looking at the ground.

“Alright, I’ll see you guys later,” Ian said. “Thanks for coming out.”

“Hey, weren’t we going with you?” I asked.

“Yeah, but… rain,” Ian said. “It’s way out of your way.”

“If you go out after dark, you’re supposed to have a buddy,” Two said.

“You heard her,” Steff said. “The pseudowench has spoken.”

“Alright,” Ian said.

I would have expected the torrential downpour to drive everybody indoors… the handful of people who left the arena at around the same time we did all dashed madly up the path or around the building, many with jackets over their heads… but it seemed that the campus guards were the ones driven out of the rain; the unmistakable sound of drunken hollering carried through the rain. We passed the fountain at a distance, and saw about half a dozen guys shouting and jumping around.

One of them threw something, and there was a sound of breaking glass followed by more whooping.

“Hey, give me some breadcrumbs!” one of them yelled. I wondered what the hell that was slang for.

“Dude, I don’t have any breadcrumbs! Why would I have breadcrumbs?”

“Why do you want breadcrumbs?” another asked.

“I wanna feed the fucking bird!” the first one shouted, just as a big silver-white swan glided into view from the other side of the dragon statue.

“Oh, is that Leda?” Amaranth asked. “We should go over and say hi.”

“I don’t think so,” Ian said. “Those guys look pretty messed up.”

“Oh… alright,” Amaranth said, and we continued on to Weyland Hall.

The sloping paths had become fast-moving rivers and the greens in between them were marshes. I hadn’t thought to insulate my shoes, and my feet felt like icebergs adrift in the ocean. When we got there, the doors were locked for the night, so we had to stop and wait in the rain while Ian got it open. If it hadn’t been for the storm, we probably would have just said goodnight and been on our way, but we didn’t hesitate when he stepped aside and ushered us in ahead of him.

“Oh, wow,” Steff said. She laughed giddily. “I haven’t seen a storm like that since… ever.”

I took off my coat, and Steff laughed harder. My face, the top of my shirt and the bottom of my jeans were totally soaked. I didn’t know what she thought was so funny, since she was dripping wet.

“At least my coat is dry,” I said.

“I have a couple of towels, if anybody wants one,” Amaranth said, already toweling off her long golden hair. Though she’d walked through the same storm as the rest of us, her beautiful body was just dabbed with a few glistening drops here and there. Her glasses, though, were completely fogged over.

“Yes, please,” I said, and she handed me her hair towel, which was barely damp, and pulled out another one.

“I’ll take one,” Steff said, reaching for it.

The wind picked up outside, lashing the windows along the front of the building with rain. There was an echoing boom from somewhere nearby.

“You guys wanna hang out here and ride this thing out?” Ian asked.

“Uh, we’ve really got to go do this thing with Viktor,” I said. I looked at the others. “Right?”

Amaranth was sucking on her lip. Slowly, she shook her head.

“No,” she said. “It’s dark, it’s stormy, there are no guards in sight and I can’t see three feet out there. We’re not walking back to Harlowe like this. I’m going to tell him we’ll do it some other time.”

“Hey, Two,” I said as we left the union. “Would you like to help me deliver my campaign letters?”

“Okay,” Two said.

“That’s a wonderful idea… I’ll see you guys at dinner, then,” Amaranth said, giving me a kiss on the forehead and then on the lips while Two received her accustomed tokens of affection from Steff.

When we got back to our room, I was startled to find two more of my grandmother’s letters waiting on my desk, along with the unfinished campaign letters.

Well, startled probably wasn’t the word. There was a moment I thought I’d been petrified.

“What the hell?” I asked, staring at the letters.

“I brought the mail up,” Two said. “You can get it Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday and I will get it Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. That’s fair.”

“Okay,” I said, wishing my heart would start beating again. For a moment, I thought my grandmother had actually started delivering her letters in person. I held them up. “Two, if I get any more of these, just have whoever’s on the desk vanish them.”

“Okay,” she said. “But… I can vanish paper.”

“You can?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Would you like me to vanish those?”

“Yes, please,” I said, handing them to her. For a moment I had a crazy image of her tipping her head back, opening her mouth extra wide and swallowing them. Instead, she just waved her hand over them and they dissolved into smoke.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Why did you not would like to read them?” she asked.

“Because there’s not going to be anything good in them,” I said.

“I thought they were letters from yourself,” she said.

I shook my head.

“Just make sure you vanish any more that show up,” I said. “Anyway, let’s get to work.”

I started quickly signing the bottoms of the letters and then passed them to Two to address, until we finished enough for our side of the hall, then I let her go deliver them while I finished up the rest.

A short time later, a letter slid under our door. Smiling at Two’s relentless completism, I went over to pick it up and saw that she had addressed it to both herself (with her name written in runes) and me.

I was standing close enough to the door that I clearly heard the sound of the next door over opening, and one of the Leighton twins saying, “Hey, what are you doing, messing around with our door?”

“I am not messing around with your door,” Two said. “I am putting letters under it. Could you please close it again? I have two more letters that I need to…”

I opened my door just as the Leightons’ slammed closed. I hurried up to Two to give her support, but she simply said “Thank you!”, crouched down, and slid the other two letters under the door. They came sliding out almost immediately, followed by another one, which was crumpled up.

Two was already on to the next door, absolutely untroubled.

“That’s real mature, guys,” I said through the door, picking up the letters.

“Dork!” the two girls said, not quite in concert.

“Seriously, did you guys go straight from fifth grade to college?”

“Who is that?” one of the twins said. “I’m looking out through the peephole and I can’t see anybody there.”

“Maybe she’s standing too close.”

“Maybe it’s one of the gnomes.”

“Or the kobold.”

“I am not that short,” I said.

“Hey! I hope you know we wiped our ass on that letter!” one of them said.

“Tara did that, actually,” (apparently) Sara said. “That was all her.”

“Only because you’re such a prissy little wuss about everything.”

“I am not a wuss!”

That was followed by a sound of impact and simultaneous exclamations of pain, and then what sounded like a miniature brawl.

It was no wonder they were in counseling. I shook my head and headed after Two.

“I was going to pick those up after I finished with the letters,” Two said, pointing at the discarded letters. “We’re not supposed to leave trash in the hallway.”

“This is actually Twyla’s letter,” I said, looking at the one that the Twins had apparently defaced. I held it by the edges, though there was no obvious sign they’d actually put it to the use Tara had claimed. “I’d really like to get it… well, a clean copy of it… to her, but I don’t think the Leightons are going to make that easy.”

“I can fix this,” Two said, taking it from me.

She concentrated on it, moving her lips in the silent recitation of a spell. The crinkles in the paper smoothed themselves out as she stared down at it, her forehead furrowed.

“There,” she said when it was once again completely flat. “It’s restored.”

“Thanks, Two,” I said. “Um, would that have cleaned anything off it?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding.

“That’s good,” I said. “Now I just have to figure out how to give it to her. I hardly ever see her around the hall.”

“You could put it in her mailbox,” Two said.

“That’s a good idea,” I said. “Unless the twins check the mail first. I guess I could put it in an envelope, though. If I had an envelope.”

“I have envelopes,” Two said. “Would you like me to do that?”

“Sure… wait, no,” I said, remembering the copy I’d made of Twyla’s angel drawing. This would be a good chance to get it to her. “Let’s do it together, after we get the rest of these delivered.”

“Okay,” Two said. “I did all of these doors so it’s only fair if you do the others, but I do not mind keeping you company.”

I smiled.

We started at Hazel and Honey’s door. Two crouched down and took the marker board off and started writing on it while I slid the letter underneath. She bent down and reattached the board. I stepped back so I could see what she’d written.

Hi, Hazel. How are you? Mack’s delivering campaign letters and I’m helping. Goodbye.

-Two.

After that, it felt like I was going into hostile territory. The next door down was Hissy and Belinda’s. I strongly considered skipping them, given the letter’s references to the events of the weekend, but Two prompted me to act when I stood frozen in front of the door.

“Mack, you’re supposed to be delivering letters,” she said.

“You’re right,” I said, taking a breath. I crouched and slid the letters under the door, quickly moving on to Sooni’s room, and then the nekos’.

I hadn’t even stooped down in front of the next door when it opened and Leda the swan maiden almost crashed into me on her way out of her darkened room. I stared at her, startled.

“What?” she said. She had bags under her eyes and her accent was thickened, making it sound like “vhat?”

I held out her and Rocky’s letters. She snatched them out of my hand without giving them a glance. Her eyes were fixed on me. She stood uncomfortably close, and it hurt my neck to look up at her.

Somehow, it didn’t occur to me until just that moment that I could step back.

“You are friends with Steff?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, remembering how Steff’s problems had seemed to start after the encounter Dee had told me about. “What happ…”

“I don’t remember,” she said. “Tell him, neither does he.”

She slammed the door in my face. I stared at the wood, a strange fury building up inside me.

Steff claimed not to care how people referred to her, but the way she latched onto me thinking of her as a girl said otherwise. I wondered how much of her current problems could be chalked up to a world full of people who’d treat her as a freak or a confused guy… it sure couldn’t have helped things.

“Steff’s a she!” I yelled. “And what do you mean, you don’t remember?” There was no response. “Hey! I’m talking to you!”

The continuing silence infuriated me. I knocked on the door. Well, I pounded on it… kind of gently, though.

“Come on out here and say she’s a she!” I said. “Hey, I’m talking to you, you…” Words escaped me. “Stupid!”

The door opened, and I opened my mouth to give Leda a further piece of my mind… and choked on my words when I saw it was Rocky, with her sword out.

“Give me an excuse,” she said. She had the campaign letter in her other hand. “You think anybody’s going to vote for you? You may have some people fooled with your helpless little nerd act, but I know what you are.”

“Do you have any idea what Sooni is?” I countered.

She shut the door. I let out a frustrated grunt through my closed mouth. I was getting the sick, shaky feeling I seemed to get after violence, even though nothing had actually happened.

“Come on, Two,” I said. “Let’s go get Twyla’s letter taken care of.”

“But you have two more letters to deliver,” Two said.

“No, I don’t really feel like tempting fate any more today,” I said, since those letters belonged to Puddy and Mariel. “Let’s just do Twyla’s and call it a day.”

“Okay,” Two said, though she sounded slightly disappointed at the thought of leaving the task uncompleted.

“Well, I guess we could put theirs in their mailbox, too,” I said.

“Okay,” Two said, more sincerely.

That was probably a better idea. My days of trying to please Puddy were over, but she might feel hurt if she thought I’d intentionally left her out, and that could lead to bad things. I wouldn’t kowtow to Puddy, but I wouldn’t do anything to provoke her if I could avoid it.

Two produced three envelopes when we got back to our room and started addressing them. I’d just planned on asking whoever was at the desk to put the letters in their mailbox, but she hummed as she filled them out so I let her do it.

“Don’t put a return address on Twyla’s,” I reminded her, after seeing her do the ones for Puddy and Mariel.

I scrawled a quick note on the bottom of Twyla’s campaign letter, explaining that I’d scribed off a copy of her picture in case she decided she wanted it later, then folded the picture and letter up and sealed them while Two did the other two.

We took them downstairs. Moeli the hobgoblin was on the desk again. Oru the goblin was sitting on the counter, picking cheese off a convenience store hamburger and talking to him when we approached. He put a hand almost as big as Oru’s head up to her when he saw me.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hi,” I said. “Um, I don’t mean to interrupt…”

“It’s okay,” he said. “You got some mail to go out? I can put postage on it for you.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “It’s actually intra-campus.”

I handed him the envelopes. He looked at them, then looked at me.

“These are all on your floor,” he said. “Can’t you just stick them under a door or something?”

“Could you please just take care of it for me?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll do it now.”

He lumbered off behind the row of mailboxes. I gave Oru a shy smile.

“Hi,” she said, a little snippily.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi!” Two said.

“You know,” Moeli said, returning to the counter, “if you ever do have any outgoing mail, if you make sure you come by when I’m on duty I can totally take care of the postage.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to do that,” Two said.

“Thanks, Moeli, really,” I said. “But there’s absolutely nobody I’d want to write to.”

“Not even your pen pal with the red envelopes?”

“Especially not her,” I said.

Oru was glaring at me.

“Come on, Two,” I said.

“Tonight is bingo night,” Two reminded me on the way back up the stairs. “My friend Hazel is going and her cousin Honey might, too. Do you think you will go?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We’ll have to see how I feel.”

“Do you mean because of your period or because you do not like bingo?”

I smiled.

“Bingo’s okay,” I said. “It’s just not my favorite thing. I’ll think about it. Ask me at dinner.”

“Okay,” Two said.

When we got back upstairs, I received yet another shock: Sooni was hammering furiously on my door.

“Um… can I help you?” I asked.

She turned on me, her face a snarling mask.

“Just what is the meaning of this?” she demanded, the letter clutched in her hand.

“It’s my campaign letter,” I said.

“Hi, Sooni,” Two said.

“How dare you insult me like this?”

“I gave one to everybody,” I said, thinking she must have thought I’d singled her out or something.

She stomped her sandaled foot. I jumped, feeling an odd tingle for some reason.

“Well,” she said, “you had best start getting them back before anybody else reads them!”

“When somebody says ‘hi’, you’re supposed to say ‘hi’, back,” Two said.

“What exactly do you object to in my letters?” I asked Sooni.

“I’m not giving you any more cookies if you won’t say ‘hi’.”

“You should probably let it go, Two,” I said.

“Listen to what you wrote!” Sooni said. She began to read, tossing her head back and forth and speaking in a mocking sing-song. “‘I hope that you all will vote for the candidate you think will do the best job, not the one who is the more socially acceptable race.’”

She finished and glared at me, a triumphant smirk on her face as if she dared me to deny I’d written such damning words.

“Uh, yeah?” I said. “So?”

“I am the more socially acceptable race!” Sooni raged.

Was that some kind of insult, to her?

“In a lot of people’s minds, yeah,” I said.

“That means you think people should think you are the best candidate!”

I stared at her, trying to figure out where she was going… and eventually figured out she’d already arrived.

“Well, that’s why I’m running, Sooni,” I said. “Because I think I can do a better job than you.”

“Ooh… you take that back!” Sooni said, stomping again. I stared at her foot. She had such tiny, delicate feet and she wore such big, clunky sandals. She said something else. I started to form a reply and then I realized I hadn’t quite caught exactly what she’d said.

Did she paint her own toenails, or did one of the cats do it?

“You… aren’t… even… listening!”

“What?” I said, looking up just in time to get smacked in the face with a wave of green energy.