“Actually, we’re going to do our best to put the recent past behind us and put our focus where it should be, on the less recent past,” he was saying. He sounded weary, or worn down in some way. He looked it, too… like something had happened to diminish him somehow in the time between Wednesday and today. “I know recent events have left a somewhat unsettled feeling in many people’s minds, and that even after the press conference… well, it may have been unsatisfying in some ways. But we’re going to do our best to soldier on.”

“I don’t understand,” La Belle said.

“What part?” he asked. Maybe it was just the prospect of one more day teaching a La Belle that had got to him.

“Are we going to get to watch TV again?” she asked “That’s all I wanted to know.”

“No,” Hart said. “We’re going to be continuing with the class as scheduled.”

“But we could watch the school channel again,” she said. “That’s, like, official. It should count for the class.”

“If you want to watch the university station, you can do it on your own time,” Hart said. “It doesn’t actually have anything to do with early Republican history, so no, it doesn’t ‘count’ for the class.”

“But it did last week.”

“That wasn’t actually part of the class, it was an unavoidable interruption,” he said.

“Then can we do the thing with miniatures again?” she asked. “That’s all historical and stuff.”

“If you really want to see more miniature war re-enactments, you could join my club,” Hart said.

“Would that get me out of class? Like, to go to meetings or games or whatever you have?”

“I actually try to schedule activities for outside normal class hours,” he said. “If there were a conflict, you’d have to take it up with your professor, who would certainly have his own policies for dealing with absences. Extracurricular activities don’t give you carte blanche to miss classes.”

“But you’re my professor,” she said.

“I mean the professor who’s class you’d be missing.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“You’re asking me if you could skip my class to go to meetings for a club that I run?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “That seems fair. I mean, it’s your class and your club, so… same difference, right?”

“I can’t hold a meeting at the same time I’m teaching class,” he said. As La Belle started to voice her next objection, he quickly added, “And it looks like our last few stragglers are here, so we’re going to go ahead and begin.”

She turned around to look at Steff and me, coming down the aisle towards our usual seats.

“Y’all should have taken your time,” she said.

“It’s actually time to begin the class regardless,” Hart said. “They’re just lucky to have happened to have made it right in time. Hurry up and take your seats, we’re a day behind now so we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. I want to start by talking about the subject of religion in the colonies. The old empire was officially Khersian, with the Unnameable Emperor acting as Pontifex Maximus of the Mother Temple. The establishment of a state religion separate from the Universal Temple was controversial at the time, but within the empire it was seen as a necessary bulwark against the Kharolinian influence from Merovia. The Merovians, of course, had a well-established presence to the west and south of the colonies founded by…”

It seemed that Hart was serious about making up for lost time. He was spitting all this information out at a much faster clip and with fewer pauses for reactions and interactions than normal. Once he got going, he did a better than usual job of shutting down La Belle’s interruptions than usual, if only because she seemed to have exhausted his patience… but the emphasis really was on “exhausted”. For all that he was keeping things rolling, he really did seem to be quite tired.

I knew in an abstract sort of way that professors had to have lives outside of the classroom, and that some of them even had families. It was possible that Hart was married, though he’d never worn a wedding ring that I’d noticed… okay, the most I could really say was that he wasn’t wearing a ring at that particular moment. I’d never looked before, and wouldn’t have noticed without specifically checking.

But married men weren’t the only ones with families or personal lives. I really didn’t know anything about my instructors beyond the personalities they put forward in their classrooms. If it came right down to it, I probably knew Callahan better than any of the others, because she was so open and in-your-face about everything, and because I knew at least a little bit about her personal life via Steff, even if I really strongly preferred not to think about it. Bohd had offered us a glimpse of what was undoubtedly private information, but could hardly be called part of her private life.

“Now, it would be a mistake to think of the Old Empire as being a monolith, religiously speaking,” Hart was continuing. “Or the environment of post-revolutionary Magisteria as being a promised land of religious tolerance. The real difference isn’t in the number of religions that were present, or even the specific faiths. Rather, it’s in the proportions. Approximately half of the human Magisterians were Metros. As many as a third were Universalists or Kharlonians. There was a small but significant population living in Druidic enclaves in the northeast. Unifying the newly-freed provinces into a single empire would have required either another, even more bloody war… one of conquest, rather than rebellion… or a different approach to religion and its relationship with the state. Obviously, the newly-minted emperor went with the latter. Let’s talk about the consequences of that.”

It was kind of an abrupt shift, from lecturing at a breakneck speed to calling for discussion, and I think it through a lot of us off because there was a pause where no one really did anything, and then there was a bit of shuffling all around the room.

Though I’d never thought of it in those particular terms, my mind went back to the conversation I’d had with Sooni, about the veneration of emperors. I recalled that it had actually been a hot topic of debate during the founding of the Imperium, whether people would accept an emperor who didn’t wield spiritual power and who wasn’t deified. Magisterion had ultimately decreed that no emperor could be deified until a century after his death, and then it would be up to the senate.

The senate governed under the consent of the living emperor, not the one who had died a hundred years before. When the hundredth anniversary of Magisterion I’s death came around, the once-alarming spectre of mortal rule had lost a lot of its impact and so while the senate decreed a day of celebration and remembrance in honor of the great general, there was no serious talk of deification.

No emperor since had been as universally well-regarded or respected as Magisterion I, and so while the senate still technically had the power to deify, the question never came up again.

It seemed to me like this all tied together… if there was no state-established temple, the living emperor couldn’t act as a spiritual leader, and if he wasn’t a spiritual leader in life, it was that much harder to expect him to intercede in prayer in death.

On the other hand, the most recent two Unnameable Emperors had really sort of blurred the lines there, and I wasn’t entirely clear on whether all the preceding ones had waited until death to have themselves declared divine.

I was trying to figure out how to frame this insight for the class when Hart’s gaze fell over me. I froze up, feeling utterly unprepared… but though he could obviously tell I had something on my mind, his eyes moved on.

“Well, then,” he said. “Let’s start with the Bill of Prohibitions. Obviously the Third Prohibition is a big one. ‘No Emperor nor Officer of the Imperium shall effect an establishment of religion.’”

“What actually stops emperors from ignoring the prohibitions?” La Belle asked.

“Nothing,” Hart said. “Or the weight of tradition and the fear of backlash. They haven’t all been followed perfectly by each and every emperor and senate throughout our history. But the establishment clause of the Third ranks is seen as pretty unassailable. There’s always going to be some argument about what does or does not constitute an imperial officer effecting an establishment, but in over two hundred years of Imperial Republican history, no one’s ever come close to actually declaring a state religion.”

“Could it have something to do with the fact that we don’t venerate or deify our emperors?” I found myself saying. “Or the other way around, I mean… could the diverse religions have led to that, or helped lead to it, in some way?”

“That’s a good point to raise,” Hart said. “There’s more going on there than the lack of a clear religious hegemony, of course. The popular story is that Magisterians wouldn’t accept an emperor who was even symbolically immortal, and I think it would be a mistake to dismiss that out of hand. As we’ve discussed before, it was some time before elves were allowed to serve openly in the higher offices, and there are still laws governing things like degree of dragonhood allowed for public servants.”

“And the mandatory retirement age of a hundred and eighty,” one of the students said.

“Yes, though I think you’ll find it’s gone up to one-ninety-six,” Hart said, nodding. “The point is that we don’t trust immortals to rule us, at least not down here on earth. But it’s perhaps too simple to say that this was the only factor in play. At the very least, we can see that conditions weren’t ripe for a god-emperor. If things had been otherwise, who can say how things might have turned out?”

“Are you sure this conversation’s not treasonous?” La Belle asked.

“It’s not,” Hart said. “Anybody who teaches imperial history at any level takes treason workshops as part of our certification.”

“It’s just, it sounds like you’re saying Magisterion would have declared himself a god, if he could have,” she said. “And that doesn’t sound right to me.”

“I’m saying I wouldn’t deign to put limits on what our illustrious founder might have done, had he the opportunity,” Hart said. “It’s a respectful position, and as Magisterion I is neither living, nor divine, nor the current emperor, it’s about as far from treason as I could get.”

“Oh,” La Belle said. “It still doesn’t seem right to me.”

“Well, by all means, don’t participate in the conversation if it bothers you,” Hart said.

“Don’t you grade on participation?”

“I also grade on grading,” he said. “If I could pass or fail students based entirely on their desire to learn, I’d do it.”

“That’s easy,” she said. “Everyone would want to learn.”

“Everybody would want to pass,” he said. “But only those who wanted to learn, would… look, this is the discussion we’re having. If you don’t want to be a part of it, you can leave.”

“No, I don’t care about it,” she said. “I just wasn’t sure.”

“Okay, well, then… moving on,” he said.

“It’s not like they can make an emperor into a real god anyway,” she said.

“Moving on,” Hart said again. “You can probably imagine that each of the different religions active in the westering lands brought their own influences to the shape and style of the early government. This was similar to the effects we’ve talked about before, of influences brought by our dwarven and elven allies. Again, the Old Empire was not a monolith, but we can see a difference between an empire build by humans that took on elements from other faces, and one built around these disparate elements from the beginning. The colonists who renounced the Old Empire and broke away from it considered themselves to be citizens of the world. This, of course, is what history books mean when they talk about the ‘cosmopolitan shift’. Magisterion or one of his advisors coined the term ‘Great Trial’ to refer to the new ways of thinking the newly formed state was supposed to embody… this is trial in the sense of a test, or even a test run.”

The subject of cosmopolitanism took up the rest of the day, with frequent callbacks to the original topic of religion. The discussion opened up a bit more, with debate as to the exact nature and extent of Magisterian cosmopolitanism. I had to confess to having mixed feelings on the subject.

It could hardly be denied that we were living in a tolerant age, compared to past ones… and the time and place covered by our class had been another relatively tolerant age, compared to what came before it. But there was also a ways to go before the dream of everyone simply being citizens of the world was realized.

People like Shiel and Dee… and for that matter, myself… were able to attend school and in theory had the protection of the law and could walk about unmolested. I mean, the present situation notwithstanding, I could usually walk from one place to another on campus without encountering obvious harassment.

But really, how much tolerance did someone need to encounter in the course of their usual day to make up for the times when people throw rocks at them instead? There were students in the classroom with me who took the opportunity to talk about how great the ideals of the Imperial Republic were and how far we’d come since, with a definite undercurrent suggesting that we were done, that we’d arrived at the end, we’d completed the Great Trial and there was nowhere left to go.

I didn’t think of myself as unpatriotic, but it was hard to listen to that kind of talk from people who wouldn’t have looked at all out of place in the halls of power of the Mother City.

On the other hand, if a society that was tolerant enough to let Iona walk around… but no, that argument was a tempting distraction from any real point. Single-racial enclaves with no traffic in or out would still have murderers. What Iona had done, she’d done in secrecy, and it was against the laws of the Imperium. There was no reflection on the amount or value of imperial tolerance in her action.

“Ms. Mackenzie, is something else on your mind?” Hart asked near the end of class.

“I guess so,” I said. “I just… I’m not sure I’m comfortable saying it.”

“Fair enough,” Hart said. “Nobody’s going to make you.”

“I’m just thinking that something that’s the best can still be made better,” I said. “And… to look at it from a different direction… even the best isn’t always necessary going to be good enough. You can be the best at something and still fail, right?”

“It seems natural,” he said. “So what are you getting at?”

“Even taking all of the stuff about cosmopolitanism and egalitarianism and Magisterian exceptionalism at face value… taking it as given that this is the greatest imperial power the world has ever seen and that people here are the most fairly treated subjects of any great power,” I said, “that doesn’t mean that we’re treated fairly enough. It doesn’t mean that we’re, you know… done.”

“So, in your opinion… the cosmpolitan experiment failed?” Hart prompted.

“In my opinion, it hasn’t succeeded yet,” I replied, and that sounded a little bit better to me. There were some rather indignant mutters from around the room, and I kind of regretted speaking up at all. I felt that rather proved my point, but I definitely wasn’t about to point that out.

“Some of you who seem unhappy with Ms. Mackenzie’s opinion were just talking about how wonderful it is that we’re equally entitled to speak our minds, as citizens of the Imperium,” Hart said. “I’d be interested to hear why your minds changed so quickly, but maybe we should save that for next week, when it happens that we’ll be covering a turbulent period during the early days of Republicanism, before the great balance was struck regarding free expression. We’ll be looking at under what circumstances Magisterion I and II saw fit to suspend the free exchange of ideas, during the scribal interdiction and the dissolution of the bardic college.”

Comparing my classmate’s disapproval to one of the least popular things our founder had done seemed a little heavy-handed, but subtlety wasn’t Hart’s strong point on his best days, and this didn’t seem to be a good one for him.

“Just as one small, final note for the day,” he added. “A sort of a heads up for anybody who’s interested, or curious… the history department is so very happy to welcome Professor Ariadne Einhorn back to the campus after a sabbatical that was far shorter than she deserves.”

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I supposed either was really possible.

“As most of you are probably aware,” he said, his eyes slipping over Keri La Belle as he said “most”, “Chancellor Davies is going to be holding a press conference at five P.M. tonight. We have been ‘asked’ to show the conference in class. Now, we don’t have a whole class period before the conference starts, I don’t know how long it will last, or what will be said in it. I don’t even know for certain what the subject of the conference will be.”

“I wasn’t aware, actually,” La Belle said.

“Yes, I knew that,” Hart said.

“You looked at me like you thought I did.”

“Anyway,” Hart said, “there’s not a lot that we can cover, under the circumstances… I’m not sure whether it’ll be worth trying to continue class after the conference ends, so I’d like to get…”

“Hey! Do you think it’s about the dead swan girl?” La Belle said. “Don’t you think it’s a bunch of crap that one non-human dies and it’s this whole big thing, with imperial agents and press conferences and things?”

“Don’t you think if any of the humans had been royalty from a politically sensitive area, they would have received the same attention?” Hart asked. “If not more?”

“Hell no,” La Belle said. “Humans don’t get shit… we don’t have special dorms, or special meals. Nobody organizes a protest when we go missing. If we had a group for the advancement of humans, people would say it was racist.”

“Or normal,” Ms. Carter said. “There are plenty of groups that advance humanity.”

“Yeah, but, we wouldn’t be allowed to say it right in the group’s name,” La Belle said. “If we had a human channel or a united human college fund or a… a… human league, everybody would jump on their ass and call them racist until they gave up.”

“An organization doesn’t have to say they’re for humanity,” Carter said. “It’s the default state in human-controlled society.”

“What human-controlled society? Like, Hart says it’s okay that she’s getting all this attention because she was a princess, but we humans don’t even have royalty,” she said. “We’re like all advanced past that, and stuff. Oh, unless you count the emperor and empress, but that’s not inherited… is it?”

“The imperial titles are not explicitly hereditary by law, but the emperor traditionally names his successor, and in most cases the person he’s named has been both a descendant or collateral relative of his and in a strong enough position to enforce their claim. Let’s call it semi-hereditary and move on,” Hart said. “But the empires are not the only human states in the world, and there are a number of feudal states and a few constitutional monarchies with human royal families at the head.”

“Whatever, none of them even go here,” La Belle said.

“Well, that would be a very good reason for their deaths to get less attention around campus,” Hart said. “Now, ladies… I wouldn’t mind giving up half of a class period to discussing this kind of topic if I thought it would lead anywhere interesting, but since we can’t do anything more than speculate about what the Chancellor will have to say…”

“We can do that, though,” La Belle said.

“Do what?” Hart asked.

“Speculate.”

“Not in an informed way,” Hart said. “And it seems pointless when we’re going to be find out for sure in… twenty-five minutes. So, let’s talk about Republican History until then.”

“But why do you think it took…”

Thankfully, he just started talking over her at that point. It ended up being more like twenty minutes, because he got the TV set up and attuned to the university’s news feed at a few minutes before five.

“Can we speculate now?” La Belle asked.

“It seems even more pointless to do so, which makes me think there’s less chance I’ll be able to stop you,” Hart said.

“I just want to know why they waited until now to say anything about this,” she said.

“I’m pretty sure the university’s been giving statements pretty non-stop for the last four days,” Hart said. “I imagine they didn’t hold a press conference until they had something worth holding one for.”

“Don’t you think it might just be because the royal family’s coming?” someone asked.

“Well, that would fit the definition of ‘worth holding a press conference over’,” Hart said. “Guys, seriously… I don’t know any more than you do what’s going to happen and what they’re going to say.”

“Would it be the university holding the conference if they actually have something to say about the case?” some guy sitting on the end of the second row asked. “I mean, I’d think it would be the imps announcing if they’d solved anything.”

“That could be,” Hart said. “I really don’t know.”

“That’s a bunch of crap,” La Belle said. “Like you wouldn’t ask what it’s about when they told you to show it in class.”

“Who said I didn’t?”

“And they didn’t tell you?”

“No, even though the folder the dean was carrying was stamped ‘top secret and confidential unless anyone asks’,” Hart said. “One more time: I really don’t know anything. Now, let’s all be quiet… I think this is it.”

The image in the box had just dissolved from a static image of the university… one unfortunately highlighting the fountain… overlaid with floating announcements to a fixed shot of a raised platform in front of the administration building. A large number of people, students and others, were gathered in front of it. The view was pulled too far back to make out a lot of details about the people on the stage, but it looked like a lot of guys in suits. There were a large number of campus guards and provincial officers in between the crowd and the stage.

A man stepped up towards the podium and the image zoomed in on him. He looked a bit like a lawyer, and a lot like he hadn’t slept all week. His short, dark hair was neat in an air-puffed sort of way and his suit looked well-made. He cleared his throat a couple of times before he began.

“Good evening, students, members of the press, and esteemed representatives of the Lebedev family of Mariinsky Lake,” he said, and the view swung around and zoomed in on a group of people sitting in chairs near the stage. The cordon of security around them made it impossible to see much more than a mass of fur hats and coats. “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Mitch McSmeagol, director of public relations for the university here. In regards to the ongoing investigation into the death of Her Royal Highness, the Princess Lidiya Petrovna Lebedeva… a matter which concerns us all very deeply… we have been informed by the Imperial Bureau of Finding of this Republic, appointed by the grace of His Excellency Magisterion XIII, that the case has been brought to a close. Chancellor Bethany Davies will be reading a statement, after which we’ll be taking a number of questions.”

There was a tiny amount of scattered clapping. He stepped back from the podium and put his hand on Chancellor Davies’s back and said something to her as she stepped up to take his place. She nodded and waved him away.

“Good evening. After a thorough inquest, the Imperial Bureau of Finding has determined that the death of Princess Lidiya was due to natural causes, relating to a monster or monsters who were able to strike due to a previously unconsidered aspect of the university’s protective spells,” the chancellor read. “We stress that there is no reason to worry about the integrity of our protective spells, which are the strongest and most comprehensive in the province. There was more than one casualty of Veil Night frivolities, and in each and every case the victim was found outside the lighted areas protected by our paths. This was also true in Miss Lidiya’s case. While no doubt she felt safe being surrounded by the protective sidewalk that ringed the fountain, the fountain itself was not so protected.”

This was about the last thing I’d expected to hear, though it was all arguably true. If the fountain didn’t have its own separate protective spells woven into it, a ghoul could drop down into the middle of it and be perfectly safe. How it would have got there was the question, and the obvious hole in the story… unless they were claiming that a flying creature had gone after Leda?

Of course, they weren’t actually claiming anything had… just there had been an unspecified “monster or monsters”. That could be a ghoul, it could be a winged terror… it could be a transformed mermaid whom the safety spells didn’t even recognize as a monster and who could just as easily walk up to the fountain and step in as Leda herself had.

Were they trying to fob this story off on the family as a quicker alternative to actually solving the case? That was a better outcome than picking a scapegoat, but only marginally so… what would stop her killer from restraining her appetite after she’d literally got away with murder?

“The death of Princess Lidiya was as tragic as it was unforeseeable, but there is a lesson in it for all of us: be careful. None of us could have guessed a person would be so vulnerable in the fountain after dark…”

“I could have,” Steff whispered.

“…but that’s all a part of why we urge students not to linger out of doors after sunset. When you have to go somewhere, travel with friends and stick to the paths. There has never been a monster attack on a student within the network of sidewalks and footpaths since it was put in back in 198. We extend our deepest sympathies to the family of the victim, the ruling Lebedev family of Mariinsky Lake, and are pleased to be able to offer them our hospitality during these trying times. We hope they will join with us in looking for a way forward, a way to prevent such future tragedies before they happen. Agent Greer from the Imperial Bureau’s field office in Enwich will now discuss his team’s findings.”

I didn’t recognize the man who stepped forward. The fact that they were using someone other than Mike Gregory to deliver the “findings” screamed cover-up to me… maybe he simply wasn’t available, but from what Lee had said it seemed like he’d be unlikely to go along with a story that served political expediency over justice. Greer mumbled his way through a statement that said nothing more than what Davies had already said, which was almost nothing.

I wondered what it would do to the official story when my information reached the authorities, but then I realized that unless Lee had been unable to get a hold of Mr. Embries completely then it was unlikely that he wouldn’t have spoken up before this plan was put into motion. Even if he was only the Vice-Chancellor, he was probably among the people on the stage, and he would probably have been in on the plan.

If they knew but were doing this anyway, what did that mean? Would they rather blame things on some unknown flying creature or mysterious hopping ghouls than go after the mermaids? What exactly would stop them?

“Did you hear Davies? ‘We hope the family will join us in not suing our asses for using their daughter as ghoul chum’,” someone said, to general snickering.

“Hey, it’s not their fault she couldn’t stay on the paths,” La Belle said. “If they sue, I hope they lose… because any money the school pays will just come out of our pockets. Why should I pay for someone else’s stupidity? I pay my fair share already.”

“No argument here,” Hart said.

“If she wanted to swim, we do have a swimming pool,” La Belle said. “Though I don’t think animals should be allowed in it.”

“She wasn’t an animal,” I said, my frustration at the situation boiling over. “She was a person.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t want people-feathers and people-poop in my pool, either,” La Belle said.

“Do you even go to the pool?” one of the other girls in the front row asked her.

“I haven’t yet, but I’m paying for it with my fees,” La Belle said.

“Well, so was she,” someone else said.

“Shh,” Hart said. Mitch McSmeagol had rejoined Davies and Greer at the podium and they were getting into the question-and-answer part of it. Whoever was working the camera for the university’s news channel was having a hard time getting the view and audio pickup focused on the person asking the question. He zoomed way in past the head of the man who was speaking, getting a close up of the lip of the stage. The view jerked upwards as he pulled back, giving us a glimpse of the row of men backing the Chancellor up. They were other high-ranking university officials, probably. Vice-Chancellor Embries was indeed among them. After whizzing past him, the camera came back and focused on him, like he was the most interesting thing the cameraman could see.

The Vice-Chancellor looked entirely too pleased with himself… I meant that both in the general sense that he looked more pleased with himself than was probably altogether healthy for an individual, and in the specific sense that he looked way too happy about the idea that the institution he helped to head up was likely to be facing a lawsuit from the family of a slain student, especially since it seemed really unlikely he’d be able to claim any reward from the family in that case.

“Yes. We have already been meeting and working with the royal family, today, to come to a private solution to… any lingering… issues they may have,” Chancellor Davies was saying, as the view continued to hold on Embries. It was a little muffled, but it was easy enough to make out now that the classroom had fallen completely silent. “They are our guests in the Imperium, and we’ve extended every courtesy and cooperation to them, trying to come to terms with… with what has happened.”

“We would ask that everybody please try to respect their privacy in this time of grief,” the PR head added, quickly and smoothly cutting her off. “Thank you.”

I gathered that the “good question” she was avoiding answering had been about the possibility of a lawsuit… the mention of meeting with the family in private made me wonder just how much pull Embries could have. Enough to all but own a law firm, it seemed. Enough to broker a “private resolution” between Leda’s family and the Imperium that kept the university insulated from the worst fallout?

Pinning it on a totally random wandering monster encounter didn’t exactly make the school look blameless, but it would probably be better than the panic and outrage when it was proven that one of the school’s non-human students had done it. Back towards the coast there would probably be a panic and furor over mermaids, but here in the midst of the woods and plains of Prax there wouldn’t be any targets for people’s worst instincts except for the other residents of Harlowe and the university itself.

But what would become of Iona and Feejee, if neither were officially implicated in Leda’s death? I doubted her family would go along with any plan that didn’t involve bringing the killer or killers to justice, but I wasn’t sure that it could be called “justice” when a representative of the Imperium stood up and read a bit of creative writing and then a “private resolution” took care of the killer.

I didn’t know whether I wanted to be right about all this or not… I supposed it would be better if the panic could be avoided and the threat of mermaid attacks ended at the same time, but for all that this might be a nice, neat solution, it didn’t feel like a clean one. If I was right, then I was really glad I’d kept my name out of things.

I turned to ask Steff what she thought of it all, only to find her staring at the TV with a look that could only be called slack-jawed wonder. Like, her jaw was literally hanging over. There was even a bit of drool in the corner of it. The image in the box was still the same close-up of Mr. Embries… I would have suspected the cameraman had wandered away, but the focus stayed on him too perfectly even when he shifted slightly.

He was really kind of handsome, in a silver fox kind of way. Kind of dashing, kind of stately, with an odd sort of presence that you could feel even through the TV… he didn’t exactly seem like Steff’s type, though.

“Steff?” I said quietly.

“Shh,” she said.

“Steff, come on, what’s the big deal? You’re drooling over this guy,” I said.

“Shh!” several other people said. I looked up and saw that everyone in the room was as transfixed by the image in the TV as Steff… and apparently the cameraman… were. I stared at Embries, wondering exactly what it was about him that demanded this much attention, but I still didn’t see it. I mean, he was handsome and well-dressed, but he was also… old.

He’d been looking slightly to the side… focusing on the podium, probably, but then his gaze slowly turned and focused on the camera, like he’d just noticed it was pointing at him. As he stared out from the screen, there were a few gasps, sighs, and even a moan from around the room. A look of irritation flashed across his face, and the image in the box flickered away, then became the static image of the fountain again.

“Uh… looks.. looks like they’re having some mystical difficulties there,” Hart said, sounding like he was just waking up. “Well, I guess we have all heard the important parts. Class… um… dis… let’s pick it up on Friday, okay?”

“Dude, who was that old guy?” La Belle said. “I kind of think I want him to eat me.”

“Oh, shut up, Keri,” one of the other front row girls said.

Next: Everybody goes to dinner like nothing happens. Or else something happens. You’ll just have to find out, won’t you?

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“Wait… I thought class didn’t start for another couple of minutes,” Keri La Belle said from her seat in the front row.

“It doesn’t,” Professor Hart replied. “Today’s lesson involved a lot of set-up, though, so I got here early.”

“But why are you talking to us if class hasn’t started yet?” she asked.

“You don’t have to pay attention until then,” he said, placing a few more goblins and then adjusting their positions.

“How do I know when I have to start paying attention?”

“When class starts,” Hart said, continuing to pull out more goblins and placing them on the relief map.

“How do I know when that is, then?” La Belle asked.

“How do you normally know?”

“When you come in and start talking,” she said. “That’s why it’s not fair for you to do that before class starts. Because then how are we supposed to know when class actually begins?”

“For point of reference, assume it starts now,” he said. He stopped placing goblins on the desk… they now outnumbered the red-clad soldiers by more than two-to-one… and gestured for the guys who were crowded around his desk to take their seats.

“But what if someone’s not…”

“If they’re not paying attention, that’s their own fault,” he said. “Now…”

“But you said…”

“Class has begun, Ms. La Belle,” Hart said. “Kindly keep your mouth in the closed position until you’ve figured out what the discussion topic is and have something to contribute on it.”

“It’s war, right?”

“Yes, war,” he said. “When you look at the history of a family, a lineage, you’re talking about a series of marriages and births, mostly. The ‘begats’, to use a classical term. Individuals contribute other accomplishments to the family legacy, but with rare exceptions we don’t divide our family history up into epochs based on when Uncle Mortimer perfected his barbecue sauce. The most compact timelines list nothing more than births, marriages, and deaths.”

For once, I hoped that La Belle would interrupt the class with an irrelevant side-note… from what I could tell, her family did mark its history from the deeds of one ancestor. I would have loved to get more detail or even just confirmation from a stray remark, but Keri appeared to have spent her annoyance charges already. She remained perversely silent.

“But when you talk about the history of a larger people, what you end up talking about most is the wars,” Hart continued. “Advances in culture, art, transportation, crafting… these things are important, yes. We characterize periods by them. But what defines those periods? How do we tell when one ends and another begins? If there’s a war, it’s easy… if there isn’t, there might not be any clear consensus on when exactly something rose or fell.”

He paused to finish laying out the goblin troops. With the caped centurions squaring off against goblins rather than human rebels, it was more apparent that he was looking backwards a bit from the time period we’d been dealing with, back before Magisterion had even arrived in the westering world.

It was an interesting choice, because Hart had bristled at administration requirements to teach material that he saw as outside the stated scope of his class. The decades leading up to the foundation of the Imperial Republic were important background for Early Republican History, but that’s what he’d always treated it as: background. The idea that he’d suddenly break out visual aids to illustrate a fight that had happened long before there was any talk of republic was a little odd.

“So, getting back to the point… a rapidly growing town conquers some of its neighbors in order to feed its expansion… a city begets a city-state,” he said. “Further conquest becomes necessary to secure resources and trade routes, as well as defense. City-state begets an empire, the empire begets colonies, and in some occasions, the colonies eventually beget their own empires. Ms. Carter, is my metaphor too sexual for your tastes?”

“Uh, no, sir,” she replied. “Too martial. What about diplomacy? Most alliances are entered into voluntarily, trade routes can be secured by treaties, weaker neighbors can choose to be absorbed by a stronger one to gain the benefits of its power… colonies can be granted independence after growing into a self-governing state. It doesn’t always have to be war.”

“You have a point, Ms. Carter,” Hart said. “But the hand of war can be felt in those interactions even when it’s not seen. War is costly and disruptive to the point that it can bring about the end of an era. The avoidance of war is a powerful motivator for weaker states and an attractive incentive for strong ones. Any negotiation between distant powers is going to be tinged by the knowledge of who is likely to win if the matter comes to blows. Any consideration made by a neighbor about the benefits of voluntary annexation is going to give weight to the cost of resistance.”

“I’ll grant that this is a useful filter for viewing history,” Carter said. “But I don’t think it’s the only one. War isn’t some elemental force that shapes everything. If anything, it’s the other way around. There are pressures… social, economic, political, cultural pressures… that cause wars.”

“Sure,” Hart said. “And marriages and births don’t just happen, either. They’re a natural culmination of a lot of other, smaller events. But they’re what gets recorded in the Family Librum and, as single events go, they have a disproportionately large impact on everything that follows them. In a way, talking about them is a way of talking about all those other, smaller events.

“History is, broadly speaking, the study of what came before. But it can’t be the study of everything that happened, for three reasons: one, not everything that’s ever happened is equally significant. Something that doesn’t have much impact on what comes next is not going to be anything more than trivia, if we even know about it at all. That brings me to point two: we don’t know and will never know all of what happened. Finally, even if we did, it would take as long to recount it as it did to happen. So when we look at history, what we are looking at is a scale model of the past: it’s reduced in size to something easier to handle, some details are lost while others become more prominent.”

He held up one of the scarlet-clad soldiers, armed with a tiny spear thing.

“Like this,” he said. “This figure stands for a pikeman… several of them, in fact… who fought under General Clayborn in the first Battle of Seven Hills, during the first Dwarf and Goblin War. All of the foot soldiers who fought in the actual Battle of Seven Hills were individuals with faces and lives . Most of them had names. We know who some of them were, in general terms. We have a few letters, at least one surviving diary. These are important primary sources. They help give us a picture of the world in which the battle took place.

“If we wanted another ‘filter’ to look through besides war, we could go personal. We could say with some certainty that this might have been one Antony Kearns, whose letters to his wife are one of the most frequently-narrated pieces of historical correspondence from the pre-Republican era. We know that he was at Seven Hills, though we don’t have his account of it… which means we don’t have even the smallest idea where he was positioned. Dwarven historians gave us extremely accurate charts of the human and goblin troop positions, but they neglected to identify which of them was the one who would eventually become noted for the correspondence he left for posterity.

“Similarly, we know that Mr. Kearns lived much of his life before his military career in Dunmere Keep, and thanks to him we have some idea what a typical day for a merchant’s son living in Dunmere was like. We don’t know enough about him to write a definitive biography… the story of his life… but we have something like the story of a typical day in his life.

“But a typical day in the life of Antony Kearns of Dunmere Keep, as fascinating as it is as part of the historical record, pales in significance in comparison to this day,” Hart said, gesturing at the desktop display with the figurine still in his hand. “This day, more than two decades before the first skirmish of what we now call Magisterion’s War, when the fight was not yet Republican versus Imperial, colonial versus colonizers… Antony Kearns was born on the other side of the ocean. The son of a loyal subject of the Unnamable One, had always counted himself such a subject. He was no militiaman… he served in the scarlet capes in his father’s stead. Antony was a young man when he fought the goblins. He was nearing forty when revolution broke out. So, what changed?

“We know almost nothing about his life in between those two points, for the simple reason that he didn’t have anyone to write to about it. He fought for the Old Empire in one war and against it in the next, serving with distinction under General Clayborn in one and against him in the other. We have some ideas as to how this came to be, we can make some broad inferences as to the rest based on what we know about the merchant class and how their grievances helped lead to the revolution,” Hart said. He put the figure down, back on the battlefield with the other pikemen. “But at this point, we’re moving away from history and into the realm of storytelling… taking what we know about an era and making up something that might have happened to an individual. The personal view is one way of looking at things, but it has its limits. History is found more often in the aggregate, in big mass movements involving lots of people… and what do you call it when you’ve got a great big mass of people all marching in the same direction?”

“A parade?” La Belle guessed.

“An army,” Hart said.

“Armies have parades. Don’t they?”

“So here we go,” he said, ignoring her. “The Battle of Seven Hils. Background: two legions, under General Clayborn, were sent into the northwest in order to help put down a goblin warband that had been massing in the region. Imperial forces were completely unprepared for the scope of the threat, as they had all but exterminated the goblins in that region less than one generation ago… one human generation. Here again you see the human inexperience with goblinoids rearing its face. Human-style reproduction can’t produce an army from a devastated population in a quarter of a century. With goblins, though, there’s no such thing as ‘almost exterminated’. If they don’t care about social niceties, education, or the survival of the mother, the population can increase tenfold in ten years.

“The goblin warriors weren’t much like the armored soldiers you see here,” Hart said, gesturing at the figurines. “Their weapons would have been cruder, their armor practically non-existent. This isn’t to say they weren’t dangerous… they were born and reared for one reason only, to fight. Their lives meant nothing to them, so death meant nothing. Their elders, the survivors of the earlier massacres, were prepared to raise a whole new generation up after them, once the threat to their survival had been dealt with.

“Here is where the goblin unfamiliarity with humans came into play. The goblins had dealt with invaders before, but they had never dealt with anything on the scale of the empire before. They had never fought a foe they couldn’t outlast with a massive band like the one they’d raised. They couldn’t conceive of armies like those of the empire, they couldn’t imagine a foe with the means and the will to carry men and material from half a world away… soldiers birthed from the womb of the empire in equal numbers to those they’d spawned.”

His whole reel about goblins sounded at least borderline offensive… I really wasn’t sure that “spawn” was the right word, given that goblinoids had sex and carried their young in much the same way that mammals did, however much the messier details differed. I also thought he was probably oversimplifying the math… from what I understood about goblin reproduction, the upper limit on multiple births wasn’t firm but was restricted by practicalities. Even dispensing with the safety of the mother it didn’t seem likely that they could get twenty or so surviving children in a brood, which is what it would take to get a tenfold increase with each mother giving birth only once.

On the other hand, if he didn’t mean each woman carrying a fatally large litter to term every time, just showing no particular regard for their health and breeding as often as possible. That could probably mean triplets or quadruplets, maybe as often as once a year. That still didn’t work out to a tenfold increase in ten years… if anything, it could be much higher. I supposed that the number of times a goblin could reproduce and survive on average would also have some impact.

It was possible that I was simply overthinking what was a convenient phrase meaning “the goblins built up their population really quickly”. A tenfold increase over a decade was doubtlessly possible, but it seemed unlikely that anybody had done an exact survey of the goblins to the northwest of the colonies before the build-up or after it.

“I’ve placed miniatures on the battlefield to represent the placement of groups of men and goblins,” Hart said. “If each human figure represents, say, about five warriors, then each goblin on the board represents fifty. The human soldiers are a detachment of the Nineteenth Legion. Though this was one of the most important engagements of what we call the Dwarf and Goblin Wars, at this point the dwarves were detached observers. They only got into the fight when the goblins entered into an alliance with kobolds. Most other engagements would also have included a number of militia men… I chose this battle in particular because it involved fewer distinct armies than most important fights from this general era. But for the Battle at Seven Hills, Clayborn took what he thought would be enough of his men to be an impressive show of force into the valley where his wizards’ familiars had seen goblins massing. Birds make for decent reconnaissance agents, but they have one weakness: they’re not so good with numbers. When they reported ’many’ goblins, Clayborn and his advisers took it to mean ’this is where the remaining goblins have gathered’.”

He pointed to a mounted figure in scarlet armor, surrounded by imperial knights and riding at the forefront of the imperial forces.

“Clayborn was no coward,” he said. “He positioned himself in battle at the frontlines when it was necessary, and behind them when it was necessary. When directing a battle, he preferred to be somewhere that he could watch things unfolding and issue orders clearly and efficiently to any part of his forces, but when leading what was a relatively small force in what was meant to be an overwhelming display of military strength and bravery, he knew the importance of sticking out his own neck.”

Hart’s eyes were on his miniatures as he spoke instead of the faces of his class, and it occurred to me that there was far less discussion than normal… he usually prompted anyone who looked like they might have something to say, whether they volunteered or not. But even those like Keri La Belle, who would speak without prompting, were watching the battlefield like they expected the metal miniatures to enact the battle for them.

“Clayborn had misjudged the situation, but he was considered one of the best military minds of the empire… hence his posting to the furthest corner of it. He adjusted quickly. He had the wizards send up signals immediately to alert the rest of the army, half a day‘s march behind them. While the general marshaled his troops into more defensive formations,” Hart said, moving the figures around to reflect this, “his aide-de-camp worked with the magicians to get reinforcements and open a line of rapid retreat. They had made no provisions for a mass teleport or gate spell… their battlefield mages were prepared more for showy spells of mass destruction, fireballs and lightning strikes… but the wizards back at the encampment had everything they needed to open a planar rift, once the battle mages relayed the message to them.

“It’s a ritual that takes hours in the best of circumstances, and they finished it in one. After the rift was open, they had a link to the rest of the army. They were able to evacuate their wounded, bring in field healers, and most importantly get the rest of their soldiers onto the field. At that point the fighting wasn’t over, but only because the goblin war band had no concept of surrender. It’s the hour between the first engagement and the opening of the rift that the events we think of as the Battle of Seven Hills took place.

“If General Clayborn had lost that day, if his men had been wiped out or he’d been slain, then history would probably remember him as an arrogant fool who marched an inferior force into an impossible situation. But because he not only survived, but held out long enough to turn disaster into victory… or into what would have happened if he’d marched his whole army across the river and into the goblin encampment… he was considered the hero of the day.”

I was reminded of Hart’s earlier insistence that history couldn’t be the study of everything in perfect detail because it would take as much time to recount as it had to happen. If he spent an entire hour long class period telling us about an hour-long battle… well, he was kind of proving his point there in a bad way.

“Clayborn did have advantages. His men were armed and they were trained. The goblins of the war band weren’t tacticians. They’d dug in in a valley ringed with hills, feeling safer in the lowlands and out of sight. Clayborn and his men had the high ground from the beginning,” Hart said, shifting the goblins around to surround the hills where the imperial soldiers were. “The war band was numerous enough to encircle the bases hills, cutting off mundane escape routes, but their best hope of victory… a suicidal mass charge… was hampered by the terrain.”

He didn’t spend the rest of the hour describing the Battle of Seven Hills, thankfully, though it seemed like there were a surprising number of “pivotal moments” in an hour-long skirmish. None of it was that interesting to me… war might have been a perfectly valid “filter” for viewing history, but it wasn’t what appealed to me. Really, I thought more credit should go to the wizards than to the fighters who asked the wizards to save their asses, after having led everybody into a fight where they were outnumbered twenty to one in the first place.

“And that’s the Battle of Seven Hills, visually speaking,” Hart said, after reaching the part where the rest of the Nineteenth Legion started pouring out of a rift. “Now, to get back to my rhetorical question from before class started: what is war good for? For historians, it’s useful for marking off eras… and for getting everybody to sit up and pay attention every once in a while. We only just touched on some of its other uses, though: securing resources, securing borders, and so on. The Dwarf and Goblin Wars were about securing the colonies from the threat of goblin attacks, and securing resources that would otherwise have been in goblin-controlled lands. The causes of Magisterion’s War have been one of our recurring topics. Here we come to the fun part. Each of you needs to pick a partner. You’ll pick a battle of the pre-Republican period, from the Goblin Wars on through Magisterion’s War. You need to make a graphic representation of that battle… it can be as simple as a detailed map, or you can go all-out with terrain and miniatures, but either way you’ll be expected to present the battle to the class and to do so in an interesting and engaging way. You’ll need to show not only the events of the battle, but also how it fits in with what happened around it… its immediate causes and its effects.

“In the case of Seven Hills, it made Clayborn’s reputation all the stronger. It made him more ruthless in dealing with goblinoids, but also more cautious. He never allowed himself to be baited after that. This proved to be frustrating to his later opponents, though it also caused him to miss several important opportunities in Magisterion’s War. I won’t be going into those now, though… I’ll be doing someone’s work for them if I do.

“You’ll have a few weeks to work on this… I’ll have the exact requirements for the assignment posted on the bulletin board in the hall before class on Wednesday,” Hart concluded, glancing at the timepiece at the back of the room. “It’ll be right next to the sign-up information for the new miniature battle club.”

Next: Another few thousand words of interior monologue as Mackenzie walks to her next class… wait, this is her last class? I guess it must be time for sex, then.

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Also, the smug sneer faltered a little bit when she saw my face… I wondered what kind of response she’d been expecting. Mild confusion apparently wasn’t it.

Sooni put her stuff down neatly on her desk and then came swishing back to talk to me, as she so often did… she looked so very pleased with herself that I felt a resurgence of dread. Maybe Maliko’s seeming disappointment had been premature.

“Hello, Sooni,” I said,

“Hello, Miss Mackenzie,” she said, beaming. “You know… the Veil Ball is tonight.”

“Uh huh,” I said.

“I understand it is a masquerade,” she said.

“Yeah…”

“I was wondering if you had a costume prepared for it.”

Oh, here we go, I thought. It was obvious that she’d decided that I had to go to the party with her and she’s come up with some ridiculous, borderline festishy outfit she expects me to wear.

“Actually… um… I’m going with Ian, and he’s working on a costume for me,” I said, bracing myself for the temper tantrum.

“Oh, I’m glad to hear that,” she said. “I put the finishing touches on mine this morning and thought I would see if you needed any help with alterations or anything for yours. Are you going as Annie?”

“Uh… actually, I thought about doing a Mecknights costume, but I wasn’t sure how to do it,” I said.

“Oh. Well, you should have asked me,” she said, but she sounded hardly even reproachful. “I would have been happy to help you.”

“Uh huh,” I said, still not at all sure where she was going with this… was she going to ask me a favor?

“I guess I’ll see you at the dance!” she said as the professor came into the room. She turned and hurried back to her desk, where the whipping of her fox tail and forth caused the girl behind her to scoot way back.

“Settle down,” the professor said in response to the legs of the chair squeaking against the tiles. “Now, will everybody who looked up the extra credit questions please pass them forward and we’ll be moving on.”

Extra credit questions? What extra credit questions? Maliko threw a glance over her shoulder at me as she handed a paper forward, and I dimly remembered having been in a momentary panic after the last class, when I’d realized I’d missed a good deal of the lecture. Maliko had tried to taunt me by telling me I’d missed hearing about a huge, grade-critical assignment… well, I’d showed her by forgetting all about it.

Two wrongs might not make a right, but under certain circumstances two absentmindednesses could.

On the other hand, though, I had missed out on some extra credit. Even if Maliko hadn’t manage to drive me into a blind panic for the past two days, I’d still managed to screw myself a bit. I paid close attention throughout the remainder of the period, even though it wasn’t particularly interesting material… we were just dealing with conditional statements, and the inverses, converses, and contrapositives thereof. It was important to have a firm grasp on those things when dealing with certain kinds of magic… and more particularly certain kinds of beings… but it didn’t have a lot of direct application for an enchanter.

Unless I was going to put a lot of limiting effects on my work, I probably wouldn’t use it that much, and the essence of applied enchantment was making things that were useful, not bound up by a lot of arbitrary conditions. The bottom line was that there just wasn’t much of a market for televisions that only worked if a thrice-married virgin laid a golden egg in a month with seven Sundays, or whatever. In olden times, being able to sort your way through those kinds of riddles had been an important skill for enchanters, because almost nobody had the kind of power and understanding you needed to make a truly permanent enchantment, so they’d done the best they could.

When class ended, I reminded myself that Ian had told me to look at the name of the history building. I knew of at least one current professor who was a Smith, in the delving program, but it was such a common name there was no reason to think he was any relation to the one who the building was named for. But if he wasn’t, why had Ian thought I’d find the name significant?

I started to get irritated with him, that he hadn’t just told me what he was getting at… but not so irritated that I forgot to look. Almost that irritated, but not quite. I stopped at the last moment before walking underneath the arch and looked up. In the moment before the person behind me slammed into my back and pushed me forward, I read the name: Ian H. Smith Hall.

Oh.

“Learn how to walk,” the girl who’d shoved into me said, blowing past me as I started forward again.

Either Ian just thought it was really super neat that a building had the same first name as he did, or there was a story there.

I kind of wondered if Hart was going to say something about Steff’s continued absence, but he didn’t… he just jumped right into the lesson.

“Last time we were talking about the goblin situation, in the wetlands north of Ravenport,” he said. “The first direct contact between the Empire and goblinoids, and it seemed to be going great: the locals went nuts over relatively cheap trinkets and common foodstuffs that they’d never seen before, and the envoys of the Unnamable One were making all kinds of impressive diplomatic breakthroughs. Of course, the whole thing was predicated on the kind of misconceptions that we outlined on Wednesday…”

“What kind of misconceptions?” Ms. La Belle asked. I heard Ms. Carter swearing not quite under her breath.

“The ones we went over last class,” Hart said.

“But what do you mean, ‘the kind of misconceptions’?”

“Misunderstandings about how goblin society is arranged, confusion about the level of political organization, a tendency to draw inferences from the very unrelated orcish society…”

“No, I remember all that… but what kind of misconceptions were they?” Ms. La Belle asked.

“Chocolate,” Hart said. “The breaking point came when, in order to secure the driest route for the emperor’s new highway, they ‘purchased’ the land being occupied by several disparate family groups from an unrelated goblin village they had established good relations with. Some people say that goblins had no concept of property before humans came. That’s probably not quite true, but they certainly didn’t have this kind of commerce, where land changes hands based on the movement of metal coins and papers. What happened from the point of view of the empire’s allies is their friends offered to evict some of their enemies from the region and pay them for it, and that seemed like a good deal. Those whose land had been ‘sold’ had no say in the deal, and probably weren’t even aware of it until the legionnaires showed up to evict them… and that was the end of any peace between humans and goblins in the region of Ravenport. Two more legions had to be sent south to defend the colony, with its valuable diamond mines… a small but significant weakening of the imperial forces in the north.”

“Wait, that doesn’t make any sense,” La Belle said. “Chocolate misconceptions?”

“Now, in the northern colonies, the settlers on what was then the western frontier had already had their own clashes with goblins, and in some cases they had even learned how to get along peacefully,” Hart said. “The dwarves of the Westering Lands had also been dealing with goblins… they weren’t fond of each other, but at the very least the dwarves were a potential source of information for relatively new arrivals. The Empire’s experience with dwarves back in the motherlands was that they were politically neutral unless threatened… the conventional wisdom was that the only way to get a military alliance with them was to hope your enemies got stupid and attacked them first. So, the official position was to avoid, avoid, avoid. If you’ve been paying attention, you might have noticed a possible option that the empire had overlooked, a bit of leverage they had that they could have used to gain favorable relations with the dwarves. Can anybody guess what that is?”

A few people raised their hands, including myself and Ms. Carter. Hart called on me.

“Diamonds,” I said. “Ravenport’s not near any dwarven kingdoms, so they probably didn’t even know about the deposits.”

“That is correct,” Hart said. “And the mines of Ravenport are some of the richest diamond mines in the Westering Lands. The dwarves in the north and the west mine iron and precious metals extensively, but they’ve always had to trade for most of their precious stones. Before humans established a transoceanic trade, this meant using treacherous trade routes through the northern ice reaches or with underground kingdoms, with frequent interference from kobolds. Selling diamonds to the dwarves… or even selling a share in the mines outright… would have been a very canny move for the empire. Would anybody care to speculate about why the Unnamable Emperor wouldn’t have explored that option?”

“He didn’t like dwarves?” La Belle said, without waiting to be called on.

“Astonishingly enough, that’s almost correct… the emperor might not have had any particular antipathy towards dwarves, but he was accustomed to signing trade agreements that were more like treaties, where smaller groups agreed to become his subjects, de facto or otherwise, in exchange for his beneficence. He did not like to deal with other races who could deal with him from a position of strength, who would not cede their own rights in exchange for the comfort and security of the Pax, who could not be assimilated into the empire. He would not deal with dwarven kings as kings, and he knew better than to expect them to deal with him as anything else. What else? Ms. Carter?”

“He was keeping with his policy of exporting all the wealth from the colonies,” she said. “Or importing it, from his point of view. But he wasn’t viewing the situation in the Westering Lands as being an actual economy so much as one big extended workhouse where citizens of the empire could toil for his benefit.”

“Ouch. Are you writing a pamphlet, Ms. Carter? I almost hate to tell you we already won that war,” Hart said. “But, yes, essentially. The output of the Ravenport mines was already accounted for in the emperor’s plans… whether he even considered the option of dealing with the dwarves and rejected it, or it never even crossed his mind, we don’t know.”

“Then why are we talking about it?” La Belle asked.

“Because, Ms. La Belle, to understand why things ended up the way they did, it can be instructive to look at how they might have gone instead,” Hart said. “There has been some interesting supposition about how differently things might have turned out if he had made that decision… the colonists had been trading with the dwarves on a limited basis from the beginning, but they wouldn’t have been able to match his offer. It’s doubtful that Magisterion could have won as many dwarves to his cause if the emperor was careful to spread the wealth around equally. The legions wouldn’t have been as hard-pressed in dealing with the goblins. The dwarves might have viewed any uprising that interfered with the diamond trade as a hostile action against themselves. It’s hard to imagine the revolution going the way it did, under those circumstances.”

The brief exploration of alternate history interested me on the usual geeky level, but the whole thing actually piqued my interest in another way… it was, as Hart had said, hard to imagine the old empire losing control of the colonies if they hadn’t so badly misjudged the situation with the races that were native to the area. The Unnamable Emperor probably could have mistreated his own people all he’d wanted if he’d sounded out the dwarves a little better, or sent people who displayed a little more intellectual curiosity about the funny green people in the south… really, there was no benefit to not doing a little homework when it came to those sorts of things.

Was it just laziness? Or xenophobia?

Goblins could certainly come off as creepy to mammalian races… though it was probably mutual… and dwarven secrecy had to be off-putting to someone who was trying to make up their own mind about how far to trust them. But were those things any kind of real excuse for someone who was trying to oversee an ocean-straddling empire made of many cultures and multiple races? Did “creepiness” really explain a bunch of career politicians and tacticians botching things so badly?

Or maybe the underlying lesson wasn’t one about racial tolerance at all… maybe it had just been the same arrogance that had made the emperor think the human colonists would just roll over for him, too.

Or maybe it was both… maybe it took that kind of arrogance to look at a continent populated with diverse peoples and think you could treat it as a blank slate, with only the people you’d placed there yourself counting for anything.

“Ms. Mackenzie, I’m losing you again, aren’t I?” Hart said. “Or have you been overcome with some kind of brilliant revelation?”

“I… I was just thinking about what you said,” I said.

“About the rum excise?”

“Um… before that,” I said. “About the dwarves and the goblins.”

“I’m all ears,” he said.

“I… um… there’s no benefit in ignoring another race that’s living somewhere you have interests,” I said.

“Yes, that was kind of the point.”

“Well, no, you were talking about all the benefits the emperor could have gained from dealing with the dwarves,” I said. “What I’m saying is that not only did he ignore those, but he did it for nothing… there was no rational benefit to ignoring them, there was no rational benefit to not taking the time to figure out the goblins, especially when the imperial legions started out on good terms with them. Their road north wasn’t going to be finished any time soon no matter what they did, so they had every opportunity to learn about the goblin culture, to sit down and ask the goblins about their culture, but they didn’t. It’s senseless… stupid and senseless.”

“Everybody write that down,” Hart said. “Humans did something stupid and senseless.”

“How man S-es are in ‘senseless’?” La Belle asked.

“Just the one, but it gets reused,” Hart said. “In all seriousness, though, you’re right, Ms. Mackenzie: it was downright boneheaded. It was one in a series of boneheaded moves that the empire made at its peak. This might seem counterintuitive, but there’s a reason the peak of any civilization is the peak, and it’s not because of the build up that comes before it… it’s the sharp decline that happens afterwards. Of course, no world power got to be where it is by being stupid… but once it gets there, it’s big enough and powerful enough that it can survive a few mistakes. This almost always results in making more mistakes. Why not? The first few weren’t so terrible. The damage from them may not even show up as damage immediately, but they start to stack up, and sooner or later the effects are going to be felt… the emperor might have been able to quash the rebellion with the help of the dwarves and with cooperation from the goblins, but the rebellion was a historical inevitability long before that point, because of his earlier missteps in dealing with the provincials… missteps that were still ongoing even as the open revolt spread. Which brings us back to the rum excise, which was an attempt to levy funds to suppress the northern rebellion by further taxes on the island holdings…”

I tried not to get too lost in the chain of thought as the class went on, but it was hard for me not to see the mistakes of the Unnamable Emperor being repeated in modern society, at both personal and institutional levels. The IRM in general and Magisterius University in particular both prided themselves on being racially inclusive, but in both cases the actual level of inclusiveness was very dependent on the other races’ willingness to assimilate in certain ways and to stay in their places in others. We were all thrown into the same holding area, even though we didn’t necessarily have any more in common than the old world orcs had with goblins.

It was stupid and senseless… and it wasn’t a huge stretch to imagine it ending as badly for the university as the policies of the emperor had ended for the old empire.

Discuss this story.

There was a resource annex attached near the entrance of the building, so I decided to gaze and see if there was anything like a lesson plan available on the ethernet. I didn’t see an autoscribe… just three old, small, and not particularly clear-looking crystal balls… but I figured that if I knew I could get the assignment details off the ethernet then I wouldn’t have to go around begging Sooni for them.

The good news was that it didn’t take me long to explore the entire weave presence of the logic program. The bad news was that was because there wasn’t much of one. The only thing for my class was a copy of the syllabus that had been dropped into the ether. To my immense irritation, it didn’t say one word about this giant project the professor had just dumped on us. That seemed really, really irresponsible of him…

But of course, I was being hypocritical. I was the irresponsible one… or at least, if I’d been paying attention, it wouldn’t matter how irresponsible he was.

Well, there was nothing to do but suck it up and ask Sooni. We were still friends, as much as we ever had been. She probably wouldn’t make it difficult on purpose.

Of course, when you were as good at something as Sooni was at being difficult, you could do it pretty effortlessly, even without trying.

It was either go to Sooni or admit to the teacher that I’d spaced off his entire class, though… and I had enough enemies among the faculty. Even Professor Hart, who didn’t appear to have anything against my heritage, had treated me like some kind of troublemaker in our last class.

Luckily, paying attention to him was no chore… he didn’t exactly command attention so much as demand it, but it got the job done, and the subject matter was engrossing. Steff’s absence was a little distracting because it was a reminder of her condition, but it wasn’t a surprise and so I wasn’t too worried.

“So far, we’ve been confining our attention to the upper half of the eastern seaboard,” the professor said to kick things off. “That is where the Imperial Republic was born. To get the full scope of the political landscape, we need to have an understanding of what was going on in the rest of the provinces. If Magisterion was the father of our Imperium, Rufus Vale, governor of Ravenport, was the alcoholic uncle. Ravenport, unlike Phalen, was a penal colony…”

He stopped and looked at La Belle, who just stared back at him for several seconds before saying, “I know what it means.”

“Okay,” he said. “It was a penal colony…”

“But it’s funny because it sounds like penis, right?” she added.

“Yes. Thank you, Ms. La Belle,” he said. “Ravenport was a penal colony. We sometimes call this a prison colony, but back in those days, ‘prison’ was just where they kept you until they figured out what to do with you. You either paid for what you’d done, you were executed, or you were transported… exiled for life to do a term of hard labor in a foreign province and then live out the rest of your life in obscurity, far from the illumination cast by the Mother City. Penal transportation…”

La Belle snerked. Hart glared.

“It gets funnier the more you say it,” she said.

“Transportation was used to a limited degree in Phalen and the other provinces, with persons convicted of minor offenses sent to work as domestic servants in the houses of the good and the great. Hardened criminals and political radicals were sent to harsher locales, where they could do such dangerous and/or back-breaking labor as mining, draining swamps, and working plantation-style farms. Ravenport was one such place. Swampy, sub-tropical, infested with giant lizards and mosquitoes and stirges, surrounded by goblins… yes, Ms. La Belle?”

“Are we going to learn about the goblins?” she asked.

“I’m going to teach about goblins,” Hart said. “Whether or not you learn about them is your own prerogative.”

“Okay, but if I do learn about them, can I use them for my stupid paper thing?”

“Your ‘stupid paper thing’ is about goblins of the plains,” Hart said. “Ravenport is, as I described, a swampy, low-lying region on the eastern seaboard.”

“But the goblins are going to basically be the same,” La Belle said. “I mean, I can just say ‘the goblins around Prax’ instead of ‘the goblins around Ravenport’ and it would be basically right, right?”

“I’ll make you a deal,” the professor said. “You go explain to the dean how Ravenport is basically the same thing as Prax and so I’ve already basically done my unit on local history, basically, and you can write your paper about anything you want.”

“So… that’s a no?” she asked.

“That is a no.”

“Then I don’t think I’m going to learn that much,” she said.

“In my idle moments, Ms. La Belle, I calculate how much of my monthly salary comes from your tuition,” he said. “Invariably, I conclude that both of us are being ripped off.”

“Not me, I have a scholarship,” she said.

“Archons and aspects of fate defend us,” he said. “Now, Rufus Vale was the governor of Ravenport and that meant he was the first, last, and only authority over the province. Unlike the situation in Phalen and the other northern territories that were settled by willing immigrants, including some educated and important people, the residents of Ravenport could not take an appeal to the Unnameable Emperor on their own. They had to go through Rufus. If it seems like the provincials’ complaints often fell on deaf ears, try to imagine how often the transportees’ petitions even made it to those ears.

“In theory, every man sent to Ravenport owed the crown a certain number of years of work, after which they were granted some limited freedoms and allowed to make a life for themselves. In practice, only the governor himself could sign the certificate of permission required for a release from the work camps. With no court of appeals to turn to, the colonists were effectively slaves, and he squeezed as much work out of each of them as he could before he cut them loose. Those who were released had to agree to pay special ‘taxes’ directly to him.

“Rufus also pinched every penny that came into the colony, enriching himself by shorting the convicts on their rations of such things as imported grain, potions, blankets, and other ‘luxuries’. This sort of thing was quietly tolerated… expected even… though few men did it with such aplomb as Governor Rufus Vale did. Where he really went above and beyond, though, was in skimming off the top of the income the colony generated. At about the same time the Unnameable Emperor was trying to siphon every last bit of gold and silver from the economies of the northern colonies with the Coin Act, Rufus was overseeing three enormously profitable diamond mines and pocketing most of the profits.

“The Unnameable One would have got around to dealing with him eventually, but he regarded the situation in the north as far graver. One noble vassal stealing millions wasn’t as dangerous as a bunch of riffraff who asserted their rights as individuals. The former was simply someone who had overreached himself… the latter were something new and dangerous. The empire could withstand many crimes, but not open defiance. Rufus was canny enough to know that when the northern provinces had been thoroughly re-subjugated, he’d be next. His crimes were far past the point where he could have offered any sort of penance, so he did the next most logical thing: he became a patriot.”

This was mostly new material to me. Prior to high school, all talk of Magisterion’s War and of the Westering Colonies before the new Imperium had been confined to the northeast. In high school, there’d been maybe a paragraph or two on each of the provinces and a mention that funding for the war effort and material support had come from Ravenport. The textbook had called it a “prison colony” and left it at that.

Professor Hart went into a lot more detail about what that aid had entailed… from quiet, deniable words of encouragement to keep the revolutionary spirit alive to eventual shipments of money, and then arms the governor confiscated from the legion garrison when it became impossible to hide his complicity in the growing uprising.

He eventually came to a messy ending, Hart told us, when he tried to get the colony’s inmates to fight in his defense as Imperial troops landed on the shores.

“He told them to remember how terribly they’d suffered under the Unnameable One’s yoke,” he said. “And some of them listened, but enough of them remembered the Emperor’s men promising them a fair deal in the new lands and then suffering under his yoke. He was executed on the scaffold where he himself had overseen many executions, and the province was presented to the Imperial Legion as a gift by transportees eager to affirm their loyalty to the Mother Isles.

“Here’s where the Imperial Command proved itself to be as stupid as Rufus. Rather than accepting and rewarding this show of loyalty by granting the bondsmen their freedom, or even just re-establishing the garrison and letting them return to their state of toil under a new Governor who could hardly have failed to be accepted as an improvement, they subjected the ‘rebels’ to decimation and then put them to work fortifying the province and building roads north. Ravenport was over a thousand miles away from the hotbed of revolutionary activity around Phalen… a thousand miles of swamp and forest and mountain… but they treated it as though it was a foothold from which they could launch campaigns.

“This was what you did with a rebellious population, in the old empire: you executed a bunch of them and then you worked them so hard that they didn’t have the energy to rebel any more. It didn’t hurt that the commanders were able to send word home that they’d scored a decisive victory and subjugated a rebel colony instead of one saying that the problem was resolved before their feet were even on the ground. The problem was that however hard they were working the enslaved colonists, Rufus had worked them harder. Where before they’d held out hope that somebody in the Empire would hear of his abuses somehow and grant them relief, now they had no hope. As a result, the 8th, the 11th, and the 27th Legions all ended up permanently stationed in Ravenport, to help maintain order, and played no further part in the struggles to the north.”

Here was where he got back to the goblins that La Belle had been so very briefly interested in. They had clashed with the garrison, and there had been raids back and forth, but no lasting conflict until three legions were settled there with no mission but to maintain control.

“A bunch of strange little creatures lurking in the woods, all sharp-toothed and green-skinned, was judged to be an obstacle to control,” Hart said. “The goblins were judged to be intelligent, and fortunately for them, the policy of the empire was to annex rather than exterminate. The legionnaires began a campaign of pacifying and civilizing the goblins. This, I remind you, while a thousand miles up the coast, their empire was at war.

“There were some missteps in this campaign. The range of races we call ‘goblinoids’ were unknown in the old lands. Imperial Command based its policy on dealing with the goblins on its experience with orcs, assuming the newly discovered creatures to simply be a new variety of orc. The orcs were known to have a sharply defined division of labor among the sexes. The men are warriors and hunters, but the women are in charge of domestic affairs. That’s not just an atrocious pun… women make all the important decisions at the family level since they remained with the camp while the men are away, and political power for each village is vested in its oldest citizens, most of whom are female.

“The goblins kept their women at home while the men fought, but that’s where the similarities to orcs ends. They were territorial and entrenched, rather than nomadic. Goblin women held little power. They certainly didn’t live to be respected elders very often. Before modern healing magic became commonly available to them, carrying a litter of little goblins to term carried a fifty percent mortality rate. The rate for the infants’ first year of life was close to eighty or ninety. The only old goblin women were old maids.”

“Why did so many of them die?” La Belle asked.

“That’s beyond the scope of our discussion,” Hart said. “But I look forward to hearing about it when you give your presentation. The point is that when the legions tried diplomacy, they went about it all wrong… they gave tribute and sought audience with the goblin women, thinking that they would then counsel their husbands towards peace. If hobgoblins were present, the envoys deferred to them as they would have to an unusually big and strong orc warrior, not realizing the low position hobgoblins occupied in goblin society.

“They assumed bonds of tribal loyalty existed that went beyond the immediate family groups. If they saw similar markings outside two villages, they thought that meant that they were affiliated… never dreaming that the goblins had a written script, and that seeing one identical squiggle in the midst of other squiggles signified no more of a relationship than I have to Ms. Carter since we both have an ‘a’ in our last names.”

“I have an ‘a’ in my last name, too,” La Belle pointed out.

“Cherish it,” Hart said. “It may be the only one you ever get.”

“Professor,” Ms. Carter said, raising her hand slightly. “I have a question.”

“Yes?”

“Didn’t they notice that the female goblins were slaves?” she asked.

I wondered where she was getting that from… Hart hadn’t mentioned it, and while Shiel had made it clear that women were an underclass in kobold society at least, the sad truth was that most races had a history of giving women the short end of the stick.

“Well, that’s a bit of a controversial point,” he said, sounding like he knew exactly what she was talking about. “It’s true that goblin women… married goblin women, and sometimes unmarried ones depending on whether their parents considered them ‘on the market’… wore chains, but this is arguably a symbolic submission. It’s been said to symbolize a connection rather than bondage.”

I remembered Oru’s weird necklace that she had worn to the dance, a heavy chain with a fake lock on it. Was that what they were talking about? If so, it seemed like I’d misjudged her… if she had that kind of a pre-existing commitment with Moeli, than he was kind of a jerk for blowing her off and it was really no wonder she was so angry with me. Not that it was my fault, exactly, but I could see how…

“Ms. Mackenzie,” Hart said.

“What?”

“Your insights are sometimes interesting,” he said. “Would you like to share whatever’s so engrossing with the rest of the class?”

“Um… it’s not really an insight,” I said. “But… so,” I stumbled on, acutely aware of how air-headed and La Belle-like I must have sounded, “if a goblin is wearing a chain around her neck, that’s a symbol of commitment?”

I might as well get confirmation before taking this particular sin of the world upon my shoulders, I figured.

“I’m not a professor of goblinoid studies,” Hart said. “But I believe in modern goblin life, that would be analogous to a promise ring or an engagement ring. However, I’ll stress that again: modern goblin life. Not Early Republican Historical goblin life. At that time, goblin women were chained by their husbands in a variety of different fashions, some of them quite elaborate. This is completely outside the scope of our material, but if you’re really interested, I’m sure you can find pictures of the various configurations online. Some of them won’t even ask you for a charged card to view them.”

“But I can’t imagine the legion’s envoys stopped to ask about the symbolism,” Ms. Carter said.

“Here we see the awful power of a preconceived notion. Having identified the goblins as being ’small orcs’, I wouldn’t imagine they stopped to inquire about much,” Hart said. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have made so many mistakes.”

“Didn‘t they find it odd that the domestic decision-makers were chained up?” Carter asked.

“According to a contemporary account, at the first meeting between a presumed goblin dignitary and a legion envoy, the envoy asked the goblin what the chains around the torso of the goblin serving them meant,” Hart explained. “When he was informed that it meant she was the goblin’s wife, he immediately started paying attention to her. His side misunderstood the mirth this produced in the assembled goblins, and thought they’d simply made a smashing diplomatic success.

“It didn’t take long for word to spread that the way to get neat presents and a funny show out of the tall pink things was to trot out your wife or your burliest houseboy, and the Imperial Legions gained a reputation as being soft-headed, harmless buffoons… it was a comedy of errors that would end very tragically for the goblins of Ravenport Province. Yes, Ms. Carter?”

“Didn’t you say that the goblins had been sparring with the imperial garrison for years?” she asked.

“I did,” he said, nodding. “They had. But the garrison soldiers were considered untrustworthy and had all been sent to less sensitive postings or discharged and returned home, taking their valuable experience in dealing with the natives with them. The goblins had never seen anything like the regalia of the Legion before, and if the humans made the mistake of thinking they were dealing with a familiar kind of creature, the goblins assumed this was some new sort of being that had come on their domain, trounced their former enemies, and then proceeded to give them gifts of clothing and herbs and alcohol while putting on hilarious entertainments. The goblins had no fear of the Legion.

And that’s where we’re going to leave off for next time.”

Discuss this story.

Of course, even if she found them, looked at them, and then stacked them neatly on my desk, I doubted it would change her reaction to later being presented with them as presents. It wouldn’t occur to her that they might be intended for her. Still, I had a very Two-like urge to do the thing properly… it would ruin the surprise for me if she saw them first.

Sooni didn’t have anything to say to me in Logic class for once, though she seemed to be in a good mood judging from the smile on her face and the way her fox tail was bouncing around. It kept moving around even after she sat down. I could hear it slapping the knees of the girl behind her, who tried to get her attention a few times.

“Hey, do you mind?” she said when Sooni finally turned around.

“Um… no?” Sooni said, confused but still smiling. “I don’t mind a bit.”

The girl scooted her desk back several inches.

The next period, I thought Steff was going to skip again… it seemed to me like if she did show up for history, she got there ahead of me. She came in a few minutes after I’d sat down, though.

“Here you go, my dear,” she said, laying an envelope in front of me with a theatrical bit of flourish. My name was written on it in ornately flowing silver letters.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Your pass into the most exclusive event of the school year,” she said. “Don’t tell me you forgot about Two’s Day?”

“Oh! I didn’t… I forgot you were doing invitations for it.”

I opened it up to see she’d hand-lettered the whole thing on some fancy card-stock, with letters that looked vaguely runic. The whole thing was way better than I could have done with an autoscribe.

“Yeah, I know we had also talked about you doing them, too,” Steff said. “I hope you didn’t go to a lot of trouble… I don’t think they turned out so well, but Amaranth kind of arm-wrestled me into doing them.” She grinned. “Only we didn’t use our arms so much and I kind of lost on purpose.”

“So what did you get her?” I asked.

“Well… I didn’t know how much money we were spending,” she said. “And I didn’t have a lot anyway, so… I kind of made her something.”

“What?” I asked.

She reached into her bag and pulled out a box of cards. On the front she’d drawn a logo that said “TWO’s Deck of Many Orders”.

“You know, we haven’t had to give her many orders lately, which is good, I guess… but I thought, what if she misses it?” Steff said. “So if she gets bored or wants a quick fix, she can pull these out and draw one.”

I pulled a few cards out. They each had an instruction on it, along with a beautifully and realistically rendered pen-and-ink illustration of Two undertaking them. The top one said “Eat A Pickle*” The next two read “Count To Ten*” and “Hug A Friend*”. They each had a little coda in a box under the picture that read, “*If you cannot do this right now, draw another card.”

“The drawings aren’t any… um… well, they get the idea across, anyway, and I tried to make sure the instructions were things that would be easy to do,” Steff said. “But I put the fine print since, you know, she might not have a pickle or a friend handy.”

“That’s creative,” I said. “I got her activity books, kind of for the same reason… but this is a lot more personal. Oh, and a cookbook.”

The cookbook was actually the biggest part of it, in terms of price, but it had been a last-minute impulse.

“Yeah, I’m sure she’ll enjoy that,” Steff said. Her entire body went rigid as she suddenly arched her back and stamped her feet rapidly on the floor. I would have been alarmed if she hadn’t been smiling… okay, I was actually still a little alarmed. But I figured it was the same impulse that made Sooni’s tail wag, absent a tail to properly express it. “Oh, I’m so excited! I don’t want to wait until tomorrow.”

“Well, you’ll have to,” I said, smiling. “You already put it in my planner.”

“Yeah, and passed out invitations,” Steff said. “Oh, well… hey, Keridwen! How’s it going?” she yelled as Keri La Belle came in with the cluster of people who sat around her. They all looked over at Steff, bemused, while La Belle tried to pretend she hadn’t heard.

They were some of the last students to arrive before Hart came in, looking like the storm that had hit campus on Saturday.

“Good afternoon, class,” he said. “I would like to share with you an amusing joke.” Strangely, he didn’t sound terribly amused. “It was told to me by my colleague Phyllis Dorman. Do any of you know Professor Dorman? She teaches History 109. ‘History of the Enias Valley’. She received this funny, funny message in her inbox this morning from the Dean of the College of History and Lore. It goes like this… because the university gets a grant from the province to encourage an interest in all things relating to the province of Prax, all history classes are required to designate a day for the teaching of local history as it relates to their subject matter. All history courses. Now, the funny part: this notice was left in her slot because it has come to the Dean’s attention that she’s not fulfilling the requirement, and she should take steps to rectify this immediately.”

“Um… isn’t her whole class local history?” La Belle asked.

“Ah, see? Do you see there?” Hart said. He sounded like he was on the verge of hysterical screaming. “Ms. La Belle gets the joke! Points for you, Ms. La Belle!”

“How many p…”

“Stop talking,” Hart said. “It gets funnier. She shared the joke with me this morning when we bumped into each other at the coffee maker, but when I got to my office and checked my mail slot, the dean had left the same funny message for me. Isn’t that hilarious?”

It was obvious Professor Hart resented the dean directing him on what to do with his class even for a single day, but I thought his reaction was a little overblown. A local history teacher being told she needs to devote a day to local history was enough to make anybody introduce their forehead to their desk. But even if Prax hadn’t joined the Imperial Republic until the mid-second century, that didn’t mean it didn’t have history… and if the surviving structures in and beneath downtown Enwich were any indication, that history was interesting.

Anyway, it seemed kind of petty to not want to give up even a single hour of class time for something that was so closely related to what you were already teaching.

Hart’s eyes were sweeping over the room. They locked on my face and from the way they narrowed I knew my expression was saying too much, as usual.

“Yes, Ms. Mackenzie,” he said. “You have a thought about the dean’s amusing joke?”

“Um… doesn’t the town at Enwich actually predate the revolutionary period?” I asked. That seemed like a safer choice than ”Don’t you think you’re being petty?”

“Yes,” he said. “Very good. It does. That settlement was not, however, part of the Imperial Colonies and thus not a part of the early republic. As the subject of this class is Early Republican History, the goings-on of the Enias River Valley at the time of the revolution fall as far outside our scope as those of Chung or the Argentus.”

“But it eventually became part of the republic,” I said. “So…”

“But in doing so it did not retroactively affect the course of the revolution and those events which followed from it,” Hart said. “It remains as irrelevant to our subject as the history of Chung would if tomorrow they joined the empire.”

“But even still, it might be interesting…” I started to say.

“Don’t,” Steff whispered. “Just don’t.”

Too late.

“Very well,” Professor Hart said. “Since you find the subject so interesting, you can prepare a ten minute presentation on the settlement of Fort Prax, circa the year 0 of our current calendar, which you will give before the class on our official Local History Day, to be designated later.”

“What?” I said. “That’s not fair.”

“You have an interest in local history,” he said. “I’ve encouraged it.”

The entire class was silent as he stared at me stony-faced, daring me to say something else. I shrank down in my seat.

“Ha!” Keri La Belle said. She didn’t laugh. She said “ha!”

“And you, Ms. La Belle, can do a ten minute presentation on the… fuck, let’s say the indigenous goblin tribes,” he said.

“Goblins?” she repeated. “Gross.”

“You’ll want to consult the school’s policies on racial tolerance and discrimination before you add any adjectives to your paper. That’s twenty minutes down. I’m sure we’ll have a whole hour filled before the day itself arrives,” Hart said. “Now, if we can move on to something that has even a little bit to do with my actual subject, I want you to open your books to the map on page eighty-one.”

Hart was a good teacher and an interesting lecturer, but neither of those traits precluded his being a monumental dick sometimes. I tried to take solace in the fact that looking up stuff about the old town was something I probably would have done eventually anyway, while having to learn ten minutes’ worth of information about icky goblin tribes would probably kill La Belle stone dead.

I tried to, but couldn’t… the fact that I’d have to stand up in front of the class—La Belle included—and give a speech was what made it punishment. Hell, as pissed as she was now, by the time it came time to give our speeches the whole thing would probably be funny to her. Even if she completely bungled hers, she’d still sit there and laugh at mine every time I fidgeted or stumbled over something.

“Ten minutes,” Steff said, when class was over. “That’s harsh. Thank nobody in particular you’re such a nerd, huh?”

“I wish I were a nerd,” I said. “Nerds love giving presentations. Attention makes us geeks melt.”

“Just imagine we’re all naked,” she said. “For some of us, it’ll be mutual.”

I hated stuffing the beautifully decorated invitation into my coat pocket, since that would mean bending it, but I knew it would get crushed worse in my book bag and carrying it would mean having my hands out the end of my sleeves… I wasn’t yet completely in the habit of making sure I had my gloves when I left the dorm, unfortunately. I finally ended up putting it inside my history book. That would keep it nice and flat and also completely out of sight from Two.

She was at her desk sorting a big mound of jelly beans by color when I went back to the room to drop off my bag after class.

“Ooh, where’d you get those?” I asked.

“My friend Hazel gave them to me for counting,” she said.

“For what?”

“She told me that she needed her jelly beans counted and if I did it properly I could have them,” she said.

“What?” I repeated. I was no master of estimating jelly bean numbers by sight, but there couldn’t be less than a couple hundred in the pile. Apart from the part where Two got a bunch of candy for her trouble, telling her to go count them sounded like the sort of cruel trick a nasty person would play on a recently-freed golem.

“In our cooking class she told me she had left a jar of jelly beans back by the lockers and if I went and counted them while she talked to our friends I could have them,” Two said.

“Oh,” I said. That cleared it up a little… it had been a distraction. Her friend Hazel had needed time to talk to their class-friends without Two there, and so had engineered a situation that would keep her occupied out of earshot.

Not that this was hard to do. Hazel could have said, “Two, go stand over there until I come get you,” and she would have done so. The fact that Hazel had figured out a way to give her something to do while she waited and make it worth her time, though, was kind of inspired.

“Anyway, Two,” I said, ”I don’t want to make this an order, but… I need you to do something for me, okay?”

“Okay, Mack,” she said, looking up from her sorting. “What is it?”

“You probably wouldn’t anyway, but in case you’re cleaning, or whatever… well, I kind of need you to just not look under my bed for a while,” I said. It was strange but kind of encouraging how unused to giving her orders I was getting.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m good at not looking under your bed. For how long?”

“Until after tomorrow night… it shouldn’t matter then.”

“Mack, I can’t just not look under your bed until tomorrow night!” Two said, exasperated. “I have other things that I need to do. I have jelly beans to sort and homework to do and I have to go to dinner and I have to go to class tomorrow…”

“Uh… I guess what I meant was don’t look under my bed,” I said. “In addition to whatever else you’re doing. Not exclusively.”

“Oh,” she said. She blinked and reprocessed, then smiled. “Okay.”

I smiled back. Two’s Day was going to be awesome.

“It’s an emergency,” I told her. “We shouldn’t go out in weather like this.”

“We shouldn’t,” she agreed, and her face grew calmer with that decided.

Another thunderbolt lit up the sky and rattled the glass.

“Come on, let’s get away from the windows,” Amaranth said. “Are you on the second floor, Ian?”

“Yeah,” he said. “My roommate’s out, so we can just hang in my room if it comes down to it. Though people might still be up… it is Saturday.”

“I don’t know how anybody could sleep through this,” Amaranth said, as the wind continued to howl.

“Aren’t you used to sleeping outdoors?” Ian asked.

“Well, yeah, kinda… but when I’m in my field, I can… stop being separate from it,” she said. “And rain doesn’t really bother me.”

We headed down the hall, past an empty reception area and into the lift. Weyland Hall didn’t seem to have a big downstairs common area; there were dorm rooms on the ground floor.

“Baby, let me see your mirror,” Amaranth said as the doors slid closed. “I need to let Viktor know we’re okay, and make sure it’s… I mean, tell him we’re not going to be back to Harlowe for a while.”

“Okay,” I said, pulling out my mirror and handing it to her.

“I should talk to him,” Steff said, reaching for it. Amaranth held her off.

“Wait, let me talk to him first,” Amaranth said. She gave his name and room address as the doors were sliding open for the second floor, then stepped off the lift and headed down the hall a ways. I could just hear her side of the conversation. “Hello… no, we’re at Ian’s dorm. We got caught in the… yeah, we were going to stay here. I thought it made sense… yeah. You want to talk to her?” She turned around and held the mirror out. “Steff?”

“Yeah,” Steff said, grabbing the mirror and hurrying past Amaranth, down the hallway and out of earshot. I looked at Amaranth expectantly.

“Viktor says it’s fine, as long as Steff’s safe,” Amaranth said. “He says the weather people are saying the storm came up out of nowhere.”

“Do they have any idea when it’s going to die down?”

“I don’t know,” Amaranth said. “I think we should probably find a TV. If it settles down in an hour or two, I guess we could head back to Harlowe?”

“If it doesn’t, what are we going to do about sleeping arrangements?” I asked.

“Do we have to do anything?” Steff called from down the hall. “I mean, it is Saturday night.”

“I don’t know if I’ve ever stayed up all night in my life, on purpose,” I said. “Anyway, I’ve got stuff to do tomorrow.”

“Well, I definitely need some sleep, and I’m definitely not leaving you to fend for yourselves,” Ian said. “My roommate’s out of town for the skirmish match… I don’t think he’d mind if a nymph slept on top of his covers.”

“Why wouldn’t she just sleep with us?” I asked. “We’ve piled three in a bed before.”

“You think Two’s going to sleep on somebody’s bed who isn’t there to give her permission?” Ian asked. “You and her get my bed. I’ll sleep on the floor, or on the couch in the lounge.”

“What about Steff?” I asked.

“It’s a big enough floor,” Ian said.

“I’ll just stay up and watch TV if you all are going to bed,” Steff called. “I’ll be fine.”

“We’ll stay up with you,” I said, not liking the thought of Steff alone in a dorm full of unfamiliar human men on a Saturday night… particularly in wet, clingy garments, but even if she had been one hundred percent presentable as physically female, there were still too many ways for that to go horribly wrong.

“Mackenzie, I’m going to need to get some sleep before too long,” Ian said to me quietly. “I don’t want to leave you alone here.”

“We’ll be fine,” I said. “We aren’t alone, we’re together.”

“A nymph, a golem, a half-demon, and a cross-dresser,” Ian said. “Take a minute and think about all the ways this could go south. Tell her,” he said to Amaranth, who was listening carefully and chewing on her lip.

Even without Amaranth weighing in, I had to admit that he had a large number of points.

“Viktor says I’m answerable to you for the duration, Amy-kins,” Steff said, rejoining us and handing me back my mirror. She snapped off a salute. “And don’t think I didn’t hear that whole conversation.”

“Mackenzie, you’ve met some of the sages who live on this floor,” Ian said. “Tell me I’m not right.”

I sighed.

“You’re right,” I said. “We should stick together.”

“Well, before we do anything else we need to find out what’s going on with the weather,” Amaranth said. “Ian, honey, you don’t mind if we settle down in the lounge first?”

“Long as I can get off my feet,” he said.

“Sounds like it’s already occupied,” Steff said. By dint of not being half-dead on her feet, she ended up leading the way instead of Ian. We followed.

If there was any doubt that we weren’t in the non-human dorm, the Khersian iconography on a lot of the doors was a pretty big giveaway. The fliers and posters and such didn’t bother me so much, but I felt pressure from the sides as we passed actual holy symbols. At one point I had to squeeze sideways down the middle of the hall, as two opposite doors were warded with Khersians eggs.

“We should have just gone back to Harlowe,” Amaranth said. “It was closer, anyway.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “There shouldn’t be any symbols in the lounge.”

We weren’t the only distaff refugees in Weyland that night… three guys and two girls were in the lounge when we got there, watching TV. One of the guys was sitting alone on a chair, and the other four were on a couch, which was quite a bit larger than the ones in our dorm. I realized when I saw them that I’d been expecting to see some combination of Mike, Tyler, and/or Gabe, the three guys I’d met on my previous visit to Weyland. Of course, it was a pretty big dorm.

“Uh, hey, everyone,” Ian said. “These are… my friends who got caught in the rain.”

“Hi!” Amaranth said when nobody responded. “Does anybody mind if we put on the weather?”

The way everybody stared, you might have thought that a naked six foot blonde nymph had just walked in and asked if she could put on the weather. Nobody said anything.

“Oh, hey, it’s already on,” she said, looking at the TV. “Great!” She sat down in the middle of an empty couch. “Come here, baby,” she said, patting her lap. All eyes went from her to me and I blushed as I crept over towards her and tried to climb into her embrace in a casual, nonchalant sort of way… you know, the sort of way that doesn’t exist.

Ian, too tired for self-consciousness, simply plopped down next to us.

“Oh, wow… look at their TV!” Steff said, running up to it and looking around the back of the flat frame. “It’s so skinny!” She stuck her arm through the front, feeling around. “Bigger on the inside… that’s so weird. Do you think I could fit in here?”

“Steff, hon, we’re trying to watch it,” Amaranth said. “Could you turn up the sound?”

“Oh, sure,” she said.

The scene inside the TV was that of the campus viewed from above, from somewhere behind the student union. It was hard to make out the details through the driving rain, but I could make out the shape of the pent at the top of the image.

“…storm with divine and extraplanar characteristics, which is making scrying difficult. We do have a fix, as you can see, this is the scene from a dedicated orb on top of one of the tower dorms, looking out over the campus. Again, the storm is localized entirely over the Magisterius University grounds… here in Enwich, the sky’s clear as can be.”

“So, is this a student prank, then?” another voice asked.

“I tell you, we’re not sure who or what kicked it up. At this point, nobody’s taken credit for the alteration in the forecast.”

“Well, you know what they say, Bob: everybody does something about the weather but nobody talks about it.”

“On that subject, wizards from the Imperial Weather Service are on standby for deployment to the greater Enwich area if the storm has not dissipated by four a.m. Plains Time.”

“Why so long, Bob?”

“Well, as I mentioned, this storm has some divine features, and in cases like that, the IWS really tries to maintain a hands-off approach, unless intervention is absolutely necessary. The sorts of beings that can command this kind of response from the heavens, well… let’s just say you don’t want to get on their bad side.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Steff said, settling down onto the couch next to us. “Whoever did it, I’d hate to be the idiot who pissed them off.”

“We are getting word that a number of people who were on campus for the regularly scheduled gladiatorial matches have now taken refuge in the athletic center. Folks, students, if you’re watching, please stay indoors until the whole thing blows over. The IWS has issued a warning…”

“Well, now we know it’ll probably be over shortly after four, at the latest,” Amaranth said.

“Oh, shit,” I said. “I’m supposed to be getting together with Dee at six. I’m going to be sooo tired, even if we do go to bed.”

“Well, we’ll just tell her…”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “She’s going to be ready to go. I don’t want to keep putting this stuff off. I can go back to bed after that… anyway, if I put off Dee, I’d have to put off Sooni, too. I can go back to sleep after all that.”

“Okay, baby,” Amaranth said. “It’s your decision.”

We watched some more scenes of the storm, along with commentary from the unseen anchors. They cut to the night sky over Enwich, then a view over the town walls which swung around to the west and then focused on a churning black mass of clouds on the horizon.

“Oh, wow,” Steff said, awed. “I think I’m in the wrong major.”

“So… are you guys the Harlowe kids?” one of the girls asked. When I heard her voice, I realized that I knew her… her and her frizzy reddish-blonde hair. La Belle, from history class. Since I didn’t socialize with her outside of class I wasn’t used to seeing her face except at angles.

“We’re from Harlowe, yes,” Amaranth said.

“What are you doing here?” La Belle asked.

“Well, we were walking Ian home,” Amaranth said, nodding towards him, “and the storm was worse than we expected. So… here we are. I’m Amaranth, by the way, and this is Mack, and Steff, and Two.”

“Yeah, we have WP together,” the other girl said. “Steff Johnson, right?” She rolled her eyes, and La Belle giggled. All three guys, including the two who were sitting with the girls, kept their eyes fixed on the TV and their mouths shut.

“What are your names?” Amaranth asked.

“I’m Keri… K-E-R-I,” La Belle said. “Nobody spells it right.”

“I’m Jody,” the other one said.

“Yeah, Callahan calls you Elbows,” Steff said.

“Shut up!” Jody said.

“Two, hon, come on and have a seat,” Amaranth said. She gave Steff a little push, and Steff scooted down a cushion. “There’s room for you, too.”

“Okay,” Two said, and she took the vacated seat.

“They let you have a golem?” Jody asked.

“Two is…” Amaranth started to say, but Two was already speaking for herself.

“I am a student,” she said. “Nobody has me. I belong to nobody.”

“But you’re still a golem,” Keri La Belle said.

“I’m a golem and I’m a person,” Two said.

“But you’re still a golem.”

“Yes, I am,” Two agreed.

“Well, there you go,” Keri said, smirking in a “I just proved something big and important” way. It was a very self-satisfied smirk, and a very familiar one.

“Yes, there I do go,” Two said.

“Excuse me… is ‘Keri’ short for something?” I asked her.

“Excuse me, but I wasn’t talking to you,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “I… I’m just asking.”

“Don’t be a bitch, Ker,” the guy I assumed was her boyfriend said.

“I’m not being a bitch, she’s being nosey,” Keri said. “My shitty first name isn’t any of her business. Anyway, she obviously already knows or she wouldn’t be asking. At least it’s a girl’s name. What kind of a name is Mack for a girl, anyway?”

“It’s short for Mackenzie,” I said.

“Still a boy’s name,” she said. “Did your parents know you were going to be a dyke when they named you that? Oh, that’s right. Your mom’s a demon and she ate your dad.”

“My mother was not a demon,” I said.

“The whole school knows,” she said. “You’ve been on the news and shit.”

“My mother was human, my father was a demon,” I said.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “He would have just eaten her when they were done fucking. It only works if the chick’s a demon.”

“Ignore her, baby,” Amaranth said, stroking my hair. “She doesn’t know.”

“Whatever, I do know,” Keri said. “I’m not stupid. I worked it out.”

“Keridwen,” I said. “You’re related to Puddy, aren’t you?”

Keri turned white and opened her mouth in a circle. Jody looked just as shocked.

“You told me you didn’t know her!” Jody said. “You said it was a coincidence!”

“Oh, shut up!” Keri said. “I don’t know her. She’s just my stupid cousin. That doesn’t mean I know her.” She grabbed her boyfriend’s hand and stood up, tugging on his arm. “Come on! Let’s go to bed.” He let himself be led out of the room, and a few moments later, Jody and her guy followed. Then the last guy, who looked like he was about ready to burst out laughing, left as well.

“I’m going to have to start whispering her name at her in history class,” Steff said.

“You know, since you’re the one who lives in this dorm, ” I said, turning around on Amaranth’s lap to face Ian as I spoke, “you might have said something… oh.”

He’d fallen asleep sitting up.

“Sooni, I just wanted to let you know… whatever you want need from me… whatever you want… I’m here for you,” I said. “Completely.”

“Well, yes,” she said, with an air of “Why are you telling me this?” in her voice. “Obviously. Now, I can’t be seen on television with you, so that’s why the carriage is going to pick me up first. Suzi and Kai will escort you downstairs. They will stop you if you try to get away.”

“Why would I try to get away?”

“I don’t know. Why do you do anything?” she asked. “You’ve been trying to get out of a date with me since before you agreed to it.”

“Where’s Maliko in all this?”

“In the healing center. Now, the carriage will be at Harlowe at seven, and you need to be ready to go right when it gets here,” Sooni said. “If it’s sitting around in front of the building, people will be curious about it. Are you done with classes for the day?”

“I’ve got one more,” I said.

“Kai is going to be escorting you to and from it,” Sooni said. “She’s going to be with you at all times until you get into the carriage. I want you to obey her like you’d obey me.”

“Yeah, that really won’t be a problem,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Sooni, I’m not going to try to get out of this. Really.”

“You’d better not,” she said. “Kai will hurt you if she has to.”

Kai was waiting out in the hallway. I caught a glimpse of her tucking something small and rectangular away in her bag almost as deftly as Amaranth could disappear an object. If Sooni had any clue that she hadn’t been standing at attention waiting for us, she didn’t show it.

“Kai-Kai, Miss Mackenzie is all ready to go to her next class, now,” Sooni said. Her eyes had gone big and bright… and so had her voice. “I want you to take extra-extra special good care of her while I’m away, okay? Okay! I love you so much, Kai-Kai!”

In the classroom she’d been talking as if Kai were part of her crack squad of highly trained commandos. Now… well, I couldn’t help picturing Kai strapped in the highchair, wearing a diaper and bib.

One look past Sooni at Kai, and I knew my thought was written all over my face. She kept her expression neutral, but the look in the tiny cat girl’s eyes was scary. Knowing what she had to put up with, though, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she thought of nothing but murder all day.

Sooni gave Kai a kiss on the forehead and then a painful-looking hug, and then she skipped off down the corridor, her sandals clunking loudly on the floor.

Kai watched her go around the corner, then stood staring after her. Her jaw was moving. I realized she was counting. When she’d evidently judged that Sooni was well and truly gone, she turned to me.

“Kai, I’m sorry you’re stuck…”

“I’m going to the bathroom,” she said. “You are staying right here.”

“Um, okay.”

She dashed for the restrooms, and was back in just over a minute.

“If Sooni asks, I didn’t leave you,” she said. “I’m going to sit out in the corridor and read my book during your class. If Sooni asks, I went into the classroom with you. The same applies to when you take a shower, when you’re changing your clothes, and any other time you’re naked.”

“Kai, I’m sorry for putting you through this,” I said, “and I don’t really want to be naked around you, either, but… the thing is, I don’t lie for anybody.”

She stared at me, her cat eyes unblinking. She didn’t say anything.

“It’s not just that it’s wrong,” I said, shifting uncomfortably under her lantern gaze. “I’m… I’m not any good at it, you see, and Sooni doesn’t trust me to begin with, obviously, so she’d figure it out if I tried.”

“I see,” Kai said. “What is your handedness, please?”

“What?”

“Are you right-handed or left-handed?”

“Uh, I’m right handed.”

She jabbed a pair of clawed fingers into a point on my left shoulder, and my arm went completely numb on one side, with shooting pains going up and down the other. I gasped.

“If Sooni asks, I was with you the whole time,” she said.

“Ow, shit!” I said. I tried to raise my arm, but I couldn’t. I could barely wiggle my fingers. “What the hell did you do?”

“It’ll wear off in half an hour or so,” she said. “But I know other ones that last longer and hurt more. If you get me in trouble with Sooni, I am going to set every joint in your body on fire and then paralyze your breathing. Then I’m going to take the butt of my sword and start smashing your fingers. Understand?”

The pain was growing worse. It was like the time I’d smashed my foot, but spread out over my entire arm.

“Quit sniveling. Let’s go, if you’re going,” Kai said. She gave me a shove.

“You’re lucky I don’t want to hurt you, Kai,” I said.

“You’re lucky I’m not Maliko.”

The burning pain was giving way to numbness all over by the time we got to the history building. My arm hung at my side like a dead thing. It was like a corpse arm had been grafted to my shoulder. It was a horrifying feeling, like something alien had attached itself to my body.

“You’re sure this is going to wear off?” I asked Kai outside the classroom.

“I can immobilize your jaw, too,” she said. She pulled out a slim paperback with elvish writing on the cover. “Have fun in class.”
Steff was not in the classroom when I got there, and she hadn’t shown up by the time it started. I was a little disappointed, but I wasn’t terribly surprised.

“Good afternoon, class,” Professor Hart said. “We’re going to be starting something different today… Current Events Fridays. Every Friday, we will spend a little time… maybe the whole period, maybe half of it… discussing some relevant social happening in the here and now. These sessions will be fairly free wheeling, and you will not be tested on anything that comes up during them, but you will receive a grade for participating in the discussion.”

“Why are we studying current events in a history class?” the La Belle girl asked.

“Why do we study history?” Hart countered.

“Because it’s a history class.”

“But why do we have history classes, Ms. La Belle?” he asked.

“I have it because it’s required for bardic studies,” she said.

“Please sit down, Ms. La Belle.”

“I… I am sitting down.”

“Sit down further,” he said. “You’ve earned your participation grade for the day for raising an excellent question. What do current events have to do with history? For that matter, what does history have to do with current events? On the obvious level, in two hundred years, our current events will be history… and two hundred years ago, history was current events. Taking that to a deeper level, by looking at the patterns of historical events we can make sense of ongoing conditions today… and by looking at those conditions, we can deepen our understanding of history.

“One of the hardest things for us to grasp as humans has always been the continuity of existence. We’re born, we live a handful of decades, we die. Consequently, we imagine the past as if it were a whole separate world from us, an entirely different plane of existence. There are very few humans born before the revolution who are alive today, and few of them are what you would call a people person. But it happened a scant twenty-two decades ago… three human lifetimes, if you think about it. Some things may have changed in that time, but we’re still living in the same world as Magisterion I did. It’s not as obvious here in a middle-of-nowhere province like Prax, but in Phale, you can’t go out for a cup of coffee without stumbling over a battle site or a historical marker.

“And even here, we can see the effects of the events we read about. We have in this very classroom… occasionally… a student of elven extraction. There’s an elven professor in this very department who… on rare occasions… teaches classes. Would that be possible without the Council of Leibenstein? If the Diocletian Treaty had never been signed, would it be thinkable today that an imperial university could welcome both elven and dwarven students? The opening of such institutions to our allied races, and then to all humanbloods, led to the situation we currently enjoy, where our university is host to students of many races, including those with no ancestral ties to humanity. Do you see the line connecting the dots here? The events of the past resulting in the condition of the present, which is very relevant to our current situation?”

I saw it, obviously… and from the murmurs around the room, other people did, too.

“Ms. Carter, would you care to start our discussion?” Hart said.

“Are you talking about the Harlots and the naked dark elf?” La Belle asked. Hart ignored her.

“Well, I think it goes without saying that the Imperium has always been a bit of a crucible where different cultures come together, even going back to the revolutionary period,” Carter said. “But I’m not sure how well the university succeeds in that area.”

“How so?”

“It seems to me like there are actually four separate, unblended cultures,” she said. “There’s us, the elves, the dwarves, and everybody else over in Harlowe.”

There was some nodding and murmuring of agreement at this.

“Okay,” Hart said. “And to what do you attribute this… unblendedness?”

“Well, you can’t force assimilation…”

“Not that the Imperium hasn’t ever tried,” Hart interjected .”But, go on.”

“What I’m saying is if the other races want to stay aloof, that’s their prerogative,” she said. “And that being the case, we have to expect situations where one of them does something that seems, from our perspective, to be completely inappropriate or wrong. They’ve made no attempt to understand the mores and traditions of the larger culture around them.”

“But why is it their responsibility to learn our mores and not the other way around?” another girl asked.

“I might like to learn about dark elf culture, but I don’t have to obey their laws to go to a human university in a human civilization,” Carter said.

“Mi… Ms. Mackenzie, you’re twitching every time somebody says ‘dark elf’,” Professor Hart said. “Why?”

I thought maybe my twitchiness had more to do with the fact that I couldn’t sit comfortably on the bench with my arm immobilized. Every time I shifted, it bumped into the desk or the bench, and no matter where it touched, it was like hitting my funny bone. Still, he’d asked the question… it was an opportunity to raise the issue.

“Uh… they actually don’t like that term,” I said. “As far as De… Delia Daella’s concerned, she’s an elf.”

I didn’t want to use the nickname in front of the class. I hoped that if Dee had been present, she would have understood that I wasn’t renouncing her friendship… but I didn’t want people who had no knowledge of her person or the significance of the nickname to pick it up and start throwing it around in a conversation where her actions were going to be picked apart and debated.

The idea of La Belle inadvertently naming Dee a friend in the same breath she used to call us “Harlots” made me sick.

“Has she ever looked in a mirror?” La Belle asked, as if on cue.

“Well, they have their own beliefs about the origins of different kinds of elves,” I said. “But… doesn’t calling one group just ‘elves’ and giving the other group a modifier imply that they’re, I don’t know… less? Or less pure?”

“I think it’s just a description,” Carter said. “There isn’t any judgment in it. It isn’t derogatory.”

“But isn’t ‘dark’ kind of a negative word?” I asked.

“Not necessarily,” Carter said.

“But evil things are called ‘the forces of darkness’,” I said. “Black magic. Dark magic.”

“Well, I guess you’d know about that,” Carter said.

“Leave it, Ms. Carter,” Hart said. “Just to throw out a point of interest, though: one of the older draconian words for demons means ‘light bearer’… and a lot of the oldest artwork depicts demons bearing flaming brands or being wreathed in fire. But the same sources are just as likely to turn around and call them a ‘bringer of darkness.’”

“See?” I said. “Light is an aspect of fire, which is the strongest element in demons, but because demons are evil, the association is still ‘dark’.”

“Right, but the label for dark elves comes from their skin color, not their evilness,” Carter said. “It isn’t the same thing at all.”

“But once you call them ‘dark’, they get tied in with all the other ‘dark’ things,” I said. “Like those stupid news reports going on about demon worship.”

“I thought they were saying that dark elves don’t worship demons,” a guy said.

“But the association is there,” I said, aware that the longer I sat there talking about demons, the more it felt like the eyes of the people behind me were drilling holes through my back. “And it will be no matter how often they say it… in fact, I didn’t see a lot of the coverage myself, but I really wouldn’t be surprised if some of the stations were saying that so they could play off the association without actually saying ‘they worship demons.’”

“But wasn’t the girl who got arrested a priestess?” La Belle asked.

A bunch of people answered her in the positive.

“So who does she worship, if it’s not demons?”

“Uh, there are lots of gods that aren’t demons, Carrie,” somebody said.

“Well, yeah, but they don’t live… down there,” she said, pointing downwards and stage whispering the last two words.

“The underlands are not hell,” Carter said.

“But they’re pretty close together, right?”

This was met by a chorus of jeers and groans. I decided I’d earned my participation grade for the day and put my head down, only half-listening to the rest of the discussion. I don’t know what Professor Hart had originally had in mind, but it never seemed to get anywhere truly productive. Ms. Carter seemed like she was just trying to impress everybody with how clever she was, Carrie La Belle acted like she was trying to show everybody how dumb she was, and they dominated the discussion between themselves.

Kai had said her nerve thing would wear off in half an hour, but I was only starting to get the feeling back when the bell rung for the end of the period. She was sitting in the hall, still reading her book, and she didn’t look up when I approached her. I started to say hi, but she held up her hand before I could speak. She read three more pages, marked her place, and stuck her book back into her bag, which she handed to me without a word.

I thought about saying something, but then I decided that since she was being put out by Sooni’s crazy demands, I could be nice and carry her stuff.

There’d be no spazzing out over dirty hands, no freaking out over dietary requirements. Just me and my boyfriend… my musician boyfriend… dancing the night away.

With three hours to kill after lunch, I did the rest of the reading Callahan had assigned me, on purpose and without being told. I couldn’t say that it made much of an impression… my eyes kept sliding off the page, and I kept realizing that I’d just read three whole columns of text with nothing in my head but the image of Ian pressed up against me… pressed hard against me… but I did it all the same.

I would try to review it all before class on Thursday, but even if I didn’t, I could still look Callahan in the eye and tell her that I’d read the first five chapters of her stupid book.

Well, I couldn’t tell her it was stupid. I’m pretty sure she would kill me where I stood if I did that.

After I was done with the warrior book, I finished up my logic homework and then double-checked the whole thing.

I took my afternoon bath and was actually kind of disappointed that Feejee wasn’t around for it. I would have liked the distraction of even awkward conversation… and to be honest, I was so keyed up that I probably would have gone back to her room with her if she’d asked. I felt like I needed a release badly.

Finally, three-fifteen came around and then I just had to get through my afternoon classes and dinner. That included the seemingly obligatory pre-logic visit from Sooni. I was referring to the fact that she always came over to talk to me before the start of our logic class, but really, the label “pre-logic” could probably be applied to any interaction with her.

By that point, it seemed like there was nothing Sooni could walk up and say to me that would have shocked me. This time, she clunk-swish-clunk-swished on over to my desk without a word and put a long, flat clothing box on it. She stared down at me, grinning like her head was going to explode from joy, and said nothing.

“Sooni, what the hell is this?” I asked her.

“It’s for Friday,” she said. “Because I know you do not own anything nice enough to wear. Do not open it until you’re getting ready, though. I want it to be a surprise.”

“I’m not wearing something I’ve never seen before,” I said.

“You will see it before you wear it,” she said. “When you open it up to put it on.”

“It’s not a cat outfit, is it?” I asked. “Or a horse one?”

“No,” she said, giving me a withering, how-could-you-be-so-stupid look. “It’s a dress.”

“A grown-up dress?”

“Yes.”

“Without any ears or tails?” I asked.

“Yes, without any ears or tails.”

“Will it cover my underwear?”

“The underwear’s in there,” she said.

“Maybe I should have a look at this before I do anything else,” I said.

“No!” Sooni said. She covered the lid of the box with her hands. “You have to promise not to open it until it’s time to wear it!”

“I can promise not to look or I can promise to wear it,” I said. “I can’t promise to wear it if you don’t let me look at it.”

“You promised we could go out,” Sooni said. “They will not let you into the restaurant looking like a dirty lesbian, so therefore, you have already promised to wear it.”

I sighed. If it really was suitable for fine dining, then it should be fine. If it wasn’t… the date would be ruined before it had properly begun, and it wouldn’t even be my fault.

“What if it doesn’t fit?” I asked.

“It will,” Sooni said. “I took your sizes magically, and I measured everything three times.”

“You cast a measurement spell on me three times?”

“No, I mean, when I was making the dress.”

“You made the dress?” I suddenly felt a whole lot less sanguine about the whole thing. The “Baby Kai-Kai” outfits she made were impressive, as far as freaky cosplay things went, but I really didn’t trust Sooni to put together respectable eveningwear.

“Please take your seats, class,” the professor said at that moment, as he’d just entered the room, and that was the end of the conversation. When the class ended, I caught up with Sooni in the hall.

“Sooni, about this dress,” I said. “I think…”

“I know it will be so beautiful on you!” she said. “I can’t wait to see how it looks.”

“How about I try it on first, then?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t want to see you in it until it’s time for the date. That way, we both have a surprise to look forward to.”

“Sooni, honestly, do you really think it’s something I’d like to wear?”

“No, I think it is something nice,” Sooni said. Then, against all reason, she kissed me on the cheek, giggled, and hurried away, leaving me clutching the box that, in Sooni-land, I had no doubt promised not to open.

I really didn’t have time to run back to Harlowe and get the dress secured in my room before it was time for history class. Well, I probably could have made it, but the risk of taking a spill and revealing and/or damaging Sooni’s dress seemed unacceptably high.

When I wrecked one of Two’s things, I got a chiding lecture. If I ruined Sooni’s surprise, she would probably go firestorm.

“Oh, who’s that for?” Steff asked when I met her in the hall of the history building.

“Me,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. She sounded a little disappointed. “Who’s it from?”

“Sooni,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, more than a little ticked off.

“Sorry,” I said. “I guess it’s something she wants me to wear.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I just saw it and… I shouldn’t have assumed, really.” She smiled, and it didn’t seem too forced. “It’s not like I don’t have nice things of my own.”

“Do you know what you’re going to wear tomorrow?” I asked her.

She shook her head.

“Do you?” she asked.

“I have some idea,” I said, thinking of the spiderweb shirt and the skirt that Steff herself had picked out for me. That probably wouldn’t fly in the sort of place Sooni was thinking of, but there had to be places we could have a nice sit-down meal without being too dressy.

I just had to figure out where they were, before tomorrow night.

“How fancy should I go for?” Steff asked.

I thought about how to answer that, when I didn’t know where we were going or the first thing about fashion.

“Trust your instincts,” I said, finally. “They’re way better than mine… anything you come up with is going to be fine.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m looking forward to looking nice for you. I dress for myself, most of the time. Viktor’s not very particular about clothes. Most of the time that we’re together-together, we’re both completely naked.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed that he and Gwynedd both seem pretty clothing optional,” I said.

“Oh, Gwynedd said the sexiest thing about you today!” Steff said. “Oh, but, you probably wouldn’t find it sexy.”

“What?” I asked.

“Never mind,” Steff said. “Forget I mentioned it.”

“What did she say?”

“You know, class is going to start. We should get inside.”

I didn’t really have a defense against that tactic, since I was usually the one who was insistent on being present for class. We went in and took our seats, only a little bit before Professor Hart arrived and kicked off the class.

“On Monday, we left off with a brief discussion of Magisterion I’s letters to Diocles the Fair and the early relationship between the First Republican Senate and the elves of the eastern woodlands. Trade with the elves was as important as the military support of the dwarves, though securing one endangered the other. Ironically, this actually strengthened our standing with both races, because it necessitated the signing of additional treaties and declarations of non-aggression to reassure both sides that we were not looking to screw them over with the other one. This lead directly to the council of what… Ms. Mackenzie?”

“Leibenstein,” I said, putting my hand down.

“So, you did get the notes,” he said. Whoops. I hoped my guilt didn’t show on my face, but the only person I actually knew in the class was Steff, and she’d been there for less of the class than I had. “Good. Aside from being the first face-to-face meeting between representatives of all three races on this continent, this was the meeting where the Diocletian Treaty was ratified. This treaty said what, Miss Steff?”

“That… the elves and dwarves… wouldn’t fight each other?” Steff said.

“Ms. La Belle?”

“That they wouldn’t make war with each other?” she said.

“And I wondered where my thesaurus had gone to,” Hart said. “Anybody? This is review, people. We went over this Monday. Open your notes, people. Ms. Mackenzie, put your hand down.”

Even without notes, I knew from high school and my own reading that the Diocletian Treaty had actually made the newly declared human republic hostage to the behavior of both sides in the elven-dwarven conflict, by levying huge penalties if either race attacked the other. General Magisterion had pushed the senate to accept it, though, because the material aid both races were supplying was essential, and because he’d correctly gambled that the Unnamable One would see their support of his revolution as an act of war, thus giving them a common enemy to worry about.

He went over that more or less point by point when nobody managed to come up with it from their notes.

“Now, Magisterion is generally credited as being the one most responsible for the ratification of the Diocletian Treaty, but one of the other patricians is strongly associated with diplomacy to the elves, undertaking several missions to the elven forests during the time leading up to council. I’m talking, of course, about Richard Baxtry-Marthen, the fifth Lord Marthen.

“Lord Marthen’s supposed rapport with the elven peoples led to rumors that he himself had elven blood… rumors which he denied quite vehemently. Whatever the truth of the matter was, he was so respected by the elves that he served as ambassador to them for the first seventy years of the Imperial Republic. Let’s talk about Lord Marthen. Question, Ms. La Belle?”

I jumped a bit at the repetition of her name. For some reason, it had triggered an association in my mind… or at least it triggered the feeling that it should have done so. I couldn’t for the life of me place it, though.

“They let elfbloods in the government then?” she asked.

“They did not,” he said. “This would be why Mr. Baxtry-Marthen denied the rumors.”

“But… you said he was an ambassador for seventy years after the war,” the La Belle girl said.

She really caught on quickly, it seemed. It had been blatantly obvious where the professor had been going when she’d jumped in.

“Yes,” Hart said, with a visible eye-roll. “Then, at the age of one hundred and fifteen, he was made a minister without portfolio and essentially retired, living among his elven friends until his death in the year 113.”

“How did they not know he was an elfblood?”

“There was no proof that he was,” Hart said.

“But he must have been like a hundred and fifty when he died,” she said.

I was a little impressed that she’d managed to do a simple estimate in her head, assuming that she hadn’t just said “like a hundred and fifty” while really meaning “really very old.” Of course, she hadn’t grasped what he’d just said: it wasn’t that they hadn’t known, but there was no proof.

“By which point it was a bit late to do anything about it,” Hart said. “Lord Marthen was a very wealthy man. He was instrumental in rallying support among the noble classes, and then there was his work with the elves. To put it in very simple terms, he was too important and too useful a man for him to be allowed to be an elfblood. It would have been disastrous for the war effort if he had been.”

“Are you saying he wasn’t one, now?” La Belle asked.

“For purposes of your test, Ms. La Belle, the answer is ‘never proven’,” Hart said, with an air of strained patience. I sympathized with him, and really hoped she’d accept that and let him get on. This was interesting stuff. “For purposes of this discussion, maybe you should sit back and let other people talk for a while.”

“It just seems like, if Magisterion wanted his help, he could have just changed the rules instead of having some big lie about him being human,” La Belle said.

“First, I’ll point out that, whatever else he might have been, there’s no question that Baxtry-Marthen was human,” Hart said. “He identified as human. We know his father, the previous Lord Marthen, was fully human. We don’t know the exact ancestry of his mother, Diana Baxtry, but we have to assume that she was half-human, at least. If she had been pure elf, no pretense could have been possible.”

“But after Magisterion became emperor, he had supreme power,” La Belle said. “He could have said…”

“The Unnamable Emperor also had wielded supreme power over the law,” Professor Hart said. “And in him, Emperor Magisterion I had a rather vivid example of what happens when supreme power is used towards an end which the people find to be intolerable.”

“But how would that be intolerable? Elves are good.”

“Good? Good?” Hart repeated. “Ms. La Belle, elves aren’t ‘good’… they are better. These people can run twice as fast as you can without making a sound. They can see to the farthest horizon on a starless night and they can hear the heart beat of a mouse. They don’t sweat. If they fart, you’ll never hear about it. They can go into a human town and fuck everybody’s wives, sons, and daughters for fifteen hours straight, they are going to live forever… and can you imagine what would happen if the brand-new emperor had stood before his people and said, ‘Hey, these are the people who are going to be in charge of you.’ Do you think the people who had just thrown off one tyrant would have just rolled over and accepted that?”

Looking around the room, it seemed like a lot of people were genuinely stunned… and not just because Teacher had said a Dirty Word. Probably most of them had been abstractly aware that elves had once been widely discriminated against, but I doubted many of them had ever thought about the “why” behind it before Hart put it in perspective for them.

This was why I liked his class. Even if he was acerbic, Hart took the time to highlight things… like Lord Marthen’s contributions to Magisterion’s diplomatic coup at the Council of Leibeinstein… that otherwise tended to get glossed over, and he framed things in interesting terms to get people to think.

Of course, some people were more resistant to his techniques than others.

“Fifteen hours?” was La Belle’s only response to his diatribe.

“Ms. La Belle… grown ups are talking,” he said. “As an interesting side note to the rest of you, this anti-elven sentiment persisted long after the time period with which our class is concerned. Elves were frequently discriminated against in hiring, out of a perception that they had unfair advantages and that allowing them to take a job removed it from the marketplace indefinitely. Human beings die. They retire. They have children and train them in their trades. Not that elves don’t do all of these things including the first, but they do so on their schedules, not ours.”

“Also… they’re a bunch of fags,” a boy near the back said. This touched off a lot of snickering and a high-five from the guy next to him. The word grated on me, and I’m sure it must have grated on Steff even worse. I could feel her going tense beside me.

“That’s actually a very salient point, Mr. Geoffs,” Hart said. “Not only are they a race of ageless immortals, they are a race of ageless immortal faggots. Can you imagine anything that would have been more terrifying to the land-owning, temple-going ruling class than…”

“But when we were a republic, there wasn’t a ruling class,” La Belle said.

“Ms. La Belle, please be quiet,” Hart said. “The upshot of all this is, whatever advantages elven blood could have given to Lord Marthen, it would have been a disastrous political liability.”

The word still bugged me, but it seemed like Hart was using it to make a point, to point out the intolerance rather than condone it. He wasn’t exactly going out of his way to condemn it, but then, he was teaching a history class, not leading a parade. I bit my tongue. I’d already made an idiot out of myself in his class once this week.

No, I’d just sit back and keep my thoughts to myself, waiting out the end of the class.

“Ms. Mackenzie, you look like you’ve got something to say,” Hart said.

Crap.

“Um… no, sir,” I said. “Not really.”

“You don’t have anything to add to a discussion about a race, perceived as more powerful or otherwise advantaged, being made the subject of fear and discrimination?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I really don’t.”

When he put it that way, I definitely didn’t. People didn’t hate and fear demons because they thought demons would put them out of their jobs. They did it because they… we… fed on them. Demonic strength and invulnerability only made the already existing threat even worse. It sucked for me personally that I was the subject of fear and loathing, but there was no comparison between that and what elves and elfbloods had once faced.

He stared at me, though, and for several seconds it seemed like he wasn’t going to accept this answer.

“Well, alright then,” he said abruptly. “Moving back to Richard Baxtry-Marthen, then…”

He went on to explain, over Ms. La Belle’s slightly diminished interjections, the circumstances of Lord Marthen’s life and the probable facts of his parentage… she never quite seemed to grasp the difference, historically, between “everybody knows” and “anybody can prove”, though that distinction had been crucial for the diplomat.

Marthen was a genuinely interesting figure, probably one of the most important ones in the republic’s founding who’d never held a leadership post. The fact that he was rewarded for his service with a sinecure instead of being outed and exiled or imprisoned when he was no longer needed was probably more a testament to his personal charm than to any spirit of equality in the early Imperial Republic.

We didn’t spend the whole hour on him, though it sounded like Hart would have liked to. The main focus of the day was on the elves’ and dwarves’ entrance into the war, and how that changed the course of the fighting.

In any event, I was relieved that I managed to avoid Hart’s attention until the hour had passed. I thought about volunteering some answers once the topic had shifted from racial politics, but decided to keep my head down.

“I want you all to look over chapter seven before Friday, because we’re getting into the heavy fighting and there’s going to be a lot of places and dates to remember,” Hart said at the end of class. “Mr. Geoffs, please stick around.”

Okay, so it seemed as though maybe he wasn’t going to just let it go. That made me feel a little better.

I got the first real reaction when I stopped to open the doors to the hall where my logic class was held: a burst of stunned, sputtery laughter from two or three guys behind me. I didn’t turn around to count, but hurried on, cheeks burning. In the crowded hallway, I was treated to giggles, shrieks, whistles, and one shout of “Yeah, baby!”

I did my best to appear like I didn’t hear any of it. Of course, my best in this case wasn’t very good at all.

All eyes were on me as I entered the classroom for the first time since Monday. There were more gasps and titters from the people I had to walk past to get to my seat, and I heard one girl say “Shameless.”

I did get one pleasant surprise: Sooni appeared to have decided to join in the mass truancy that my ordeal had precipitated. Maliko, however, was present and accounted for… she sauntered over when she saw me sitting down, grinning like the cat girl who ate the canary girl.

“Have you telled Kiersta you are dropping out of the election?”

“No,” I said.

“And why not?” she asked.

“Because I’m not dropping out,” I said.

“Sooni isn’t going to be very happy.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t really give a shit what Sooni thinks,” I said.

“I could make you drop out,” she said.

“Yeah, good luck with that,” I said.

“I am a trained and deadly fighter,” she said.

I rolled my eyes.

“Whatever, Maliko,” I said. “You couldn’t even take Two… with help.”

“You are not Two.”

“No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m stronger and tougher, and probably a better fighter.”

“I do not care if you want to lose the election,” she said, her luminous eyes narrowing and her voice dropping dangerously. “But if you touch Sooni under her clothing, you will find out how good I fight.”

“Why would I…”

“Class has begun, Miss, please take your seat,” the professor said.

“Sorry… I was just telling Miss Mackenzie how very glad I am that she is back,” Maliko said in a sickly-sweet, simpering purr… the effect of which was totally ruined by the angry swishing of her tail.

“Yes, well, we’re all very relieved to see her back safe and sound, I’m sure,” the professor said. “But please take your seat.”

Touching Sooni? What had put that idea in her head? Unless it was more of the knee-jerk homophobia her mistress so often displayed… maybe she was afraid I’d turn Sooni gay. It was a ridiculous idea, but would probably seem possible to somebody with that kind of mindset.

We began the lesson with a cumulative quiz. The professor asked me if I felt I’d understood the homework from Wednesday before he handed me mine. I nodded, and accepted the paper.

When the class ended, I darted out with the intention of dashing to the history building and getting my butt in my seat as fast as half-humanly possible, in order to minimize the exposure Steff’s artistic efforts received.

If my intention was to avoid attention, the fact that I caught my foot on the leg of a desk and almost did a faceplant on my way out of the room didn’t help. I managed to weave my way through the crowd in the hallway without making a further fool of myself, but tripped on the sidewalk outside and went sprawling, banging the hell out of my knee and tearing a huge hole in my jeans there.

“Oh, shit, are you okay?” a guy said, running up to my side.

“I’m fine!” I said, not looking at him. I got to my feet and began limping away as fast as I could, but not fast enough to avoid hearing his disbelieving snicker when he got a look at whatever was on my rear.

Shit, shit, shit. I’d managed to make an even bigger spectacle of myself, and now I had another pseudoinjury to contend with. The surface of my knee burned, and beneath that was tingling pain. I kept my head down and pushed on, doing my best to ignore it all.

Even with my tumble and the subsequent slowing, I still made it to history class with plenty of time to spare. I would have looked around for a bathroom so I could get a good look at the seat of my jeans and maybe clean my knee up a bit, but Steff literally caught me in the hall outside our class, when I almost barreled into her.

“Hey, hon,” she said. “Short time, no see.”

“What the hell did you do to my ass?” I asked.

“Indoor voice, hon,” she said, putting her finger on my lips.

“Okay, but what did you draw?” I asked a little more quietly, when she unshushed me.

“I told you: a heart,” she said, grinning.

I glared at her.

She brushed aside her hair, which had fallen over her face, and leaned forward to kiss me on the lips. I melted a little on the inside, though I tried to keep my face angry.

“I want to draw like that all over you, all over your body,” she whispered, and I shivered. She let go of me, and I stumbled a bit, wincing and crying out when I forgot and straightened out my injured leg. “Oh, shit… what happened to you?”

“I just fell down,” I said, turning away. “It’s nothing.”

“Nothing? Honey, you’re bleeding!”

“What? That’s imposs…” Then I remembered: the paths were magical. I looked down, pulling the flap of denim aside to look at my knee.

It hurt a lot worse as soon as I saw it. Most people have probably skinned their knees a bunch of times, but it was kind of a new experience for me to look down and see twisted, abraded bits of skin hanging loosely around an angry pink surface dotted with sticky, dark red blood.

I felt vaguely sick.

“Come on, hon,” Steff said, putting my arm over her shoulder. “Let’s hobble on down to the healing center.”

“No!” I said. “I’m not missing this class for a lousy skinned knee.”

“Hon, you’re crying,” Steff said.

“It just stings a little, that’s all. Anyway, it’s almost stopped bleeding on its own,” I said. “Either help me into the classroom, or let go of me.”

“If you say so,” Steff said, and she led me into the classroom and to a bench.

“Welcome back, Miss Mackenzie,” Professor Hart said at the start of class. “And I see you’ve persuaded Miss Steff to rejoin us. There was no graded work on Wednesday, but make sure you ask questions if you think you’re missing something. Miss Steff, see me after class.”

“Um, Professor…” I said, a little nervously. I figured it would be best to do things consistently, but I hated to risk alienating somebody who didn’t appear to mind me.

“Yes, Miss Mackenzie?” he prompted.

“I… well… I actually prefer ‘Ms. Mackenzie’,” I said.

He stared at me for a second, then blinked and said, “As you like, Ms. Mackenzie.”

The strawberry blonde girl near the front snorted.

“Something to say, Ms. La Belle?”

“That’s not even a proper form of address,” she said. “It’s like.. like me asking you to call me ‘Mr. La Belle.’”

“Would you like me to?” Hart said.

“No.”

“Then let’s get on with class,” he said. “Last time, we talked about the formation of the Provincial Senate, and the Unnamable One’s reaction, or lack thereof. However, while the official imperial response to the newly-formed Senate’s edicts was silence, it’s safe to say that they had the emperor’s attention. Let’s talk about some of the immediate effects of his displeasure.”

Class went pretty well, though La Belle turned around and stared at me every time I was called on, and she wasn’t the only one. It hadn’t really been anything more than petulance that had first prompted me to make Lynette address me as Ms. Mackenzie, but the more I thought about it and the more I saw peoples’ reactions to it, the more convinced I became that it was a good idea.

The separate forms of address were an unnecessary division. They didn’t concretely benefit anyone, human or non-human, but it bugged some people to see them treated all the same. Did they resent being “lumped together” with the different races, or was it more a matter of just being so used to things being one way? I didn’t know.

Of course, when the school year first began, I had resented being marked as non-human. If I had any choice in the matter, I would have loved to pass as human for the entire school year. It was now obvious that this would not have been a feasible option even without the problematic address. It seemed like I might as well make the most of my visibility.

Meanwhile, the lecture was ongoing, and we were getting into the more interesting parts.

“Orcish mercenaries,” Professor Hart said, repeating a student’s answer. “Though we should be aware that the individual soldiers were in fact conscripts, most of whom drew no wages for their service… question, Mr. La Belle?”

“You aren’t funny,” she said. She hadn’t had her hand up. I imagine he must have seen a look on her face.

“Occupational hazard,” he replied. “Did you have a question?”

“I guess,” she said. “Who cares?”

“Given that we are a history class, the answer is ‘we do’,” Hart said.

“I mean, who cares what the orcs were paid?” she asked.

“See above,” he said.

“I mean, they were still orcs, they were still working for the old empire, and they were still fighting against us,” she said. “When you go out of your way to point out that ‘Oh no, they were unpaid conscripts!’ or whatever…”

She let the sentence trail off.

“Finish your thought, Ms. La Belle,” Hart said.

“I just don’t see why everybody has to re-write history to make the I.R.M. the bad guys,” she said.

“History is like an essay, Ms. La Belle” Hart said. “You keep re-writing it until you get it right. Though, wars don’t have ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’… they have winners and losers. We won this one. We won… by ignoring the accepted rules of engagement and outlasting the attention of an opponent who lived an ocean away.”

“That’s not fair,” La Belle said.

“I’m not going to waste time coming up with reasons why it was heroic and daring when Magisterion’s forces ambushed the enemy, and underhanded and evil when they did it to him,” Hart said. “This is a history class. The only thing I’m actually concerned with is the story of what happened. Now, propaganda forms an important part of any war effort, and this was no exception. The presence of orcish regiments—and the popular perception of them as mercenaries—was something the Senate immediately seized upon. Stories of atrocities were circulated among the populace, even while separate propaganda efforts targeted the orcs. Does anybody have any idea what those efforts might have included?”

My hand was in the air.

“Mi… Ms. Mackenzie,” Hart said.

“The orcs’ commanders were marching them into massacres because they were compensated with gold for every soldier they lost,” I said.

“Yes,” Hart said. “Excellent. This and other stories were designed to entreat the orcs to desert, or even defect. It’s doubtful they had much effect, because of the orcs’ famous military discipline. They may not have had any loyalty to the emperor, but… what, Ms. La Belle?”

“They’re orcs.”

“Yes,” Hart said. “That should probably go without saying.”

“But you’re talking about them like they’re… I don’t know,” she said. “But, like, ‘famous military discipline’? They’re barbarians.”

“You ever try to talk a barbarian into switching sides in the middle of a battle?” Hart said. “To put your objection in the context of our discussion of propaganda, orcs have been saddled with two simultaneous, conflicting images: ineffectual, lazy, stupid slobs… and deadly, efficient, merciless killers. During the time of Magisterion’s War, the latter image was drilled into the common populace while the former was used to pump up troops who would be going into battle against them.”

The class continued, and Hart did his best to roll over Ms. La Belle’s further objections and interjections. The war itself wasn’t the focus of the course, so he focused mostly on things like the political climate and popular sentiment rather than dates of battles, which made it interesting.

“Miss Steff, I’d like a word,” Hart said after dismissing the class.

“Sure thing,” she said. “I’d tell him to fuck off if you didn’t like this class,” she added quietly, to me.

“I’ll wait outside for you,” I told her.

“See you in a bit.”

“Ms. Mackenzie?” Hart called as I turned around and headed for the door.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“Don’t wear those in my class again,” he said. “And welcome back.”

“Sorry, sir,” I said, blushing. I didn’t have to ask what he meant.

Out in the hall, I waited for Steff with my back against the wall. She was in the classroom for about ten minutes.

“What did he want?” I asked.

“Blowjob,” she said.

“What?”

She burst out laughing.

“I’m just kidding,” she said. “It was actually a rimjob.”

“I don’t even know what that is,” I said.

“Ask Amy,” Steff said. “Seriously, though, he just wanted to bitch me out for skipping on Wednesday. I don’t know why. Like he said, there wasn’t even any work. He knows I’m your friend, so for all he knew, I could have been too distraught or something.”

“But you weren’t,” I said. “You just didn’t bother coming because you knew I wouldn’t be there.”

She shrugged.

“He doesn’t know that,” she said. “Though he acts like he does. Seriously, this isn’t high school. I shouldn’t get shit from the teachers because I decide not to show up for one day.”

I didn’t say anything. I don’t think she would have liked what I had to say on this subject.

We headed out. Without even thinking, I leaned into her for support. Without even thinking, she gave it.

“Um, do you want to go to the healing center?” she asked.

“Not really,” I said. “I just want to get back to the dorm and change my jeans.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, I’m not bleeding.”

“Guess I don’t blame you for not wanting to go back,” she said. She grinned wolfishly. “You want me to kiss it better?”

“Don’t be gross,” I said.

“Who’s being gross?” she asked.

“You want to lick my blood or something,” I said.

“Now you’re being gross,” she said, shaking her head. “Lick your blood. What kind of girl do you think I am?”

“The kind that licks blood.”

“Why would you think that?”

“I’ve been paying attention.”

We continued like that as we hobbled along. It was nice being pressed in so close to Steff, even if the reason wasn’t the best thing ever… and the amiable bickering gave me something to focus on besides the way each step jarred my knee or other peoples’ reactions.