“The first thing that you need to understand is that nominalism is finished as a principle of magic. It has been as utterly exploded as Lehane’s Delayed Fireball Conjecture… or Lehane himself, for that matter. The only adherents it has today are people who adhered to it two, three hundred years ago, these being mainly a few elves and the greatest human practitioners of that era, such as Girault.

“If I say that nominalism works for them because they believe it works for them, I’m afraid I might be giving some of you the wrong idea. So instead I’ll say that it works for them because nothing about the belief it works interferes with the ability to perform magic. Okay, I can see some of you about to raise your hands, so let me try to explain better. I’m not saying that some beliefs have the power to interfere with magic. I’m talking about practicalities.

“For instance, if I believed that holding a sword in my hand made me a better wizard, then I would do more magic with a sword in my hand than I did without one. If I believed that holding a sword in my guts made me a better wizard, I would do less magic, period.

“The former is an example of a belief that does not interfere with magic. The latter is an example of one that, under ordinary circumstances, does.

“Girault is a powerful wizard and deserves respect for his power, but we know today that the reason his fire trick works is because he himself is reaching for different kinds of fire based on what he thinks each of the names of fire means. If we were to invent a word and we wrote it down with a definition of ‘fire with jagged pink flames’ and convinced him it was an ancient word meaning ‘fire with towering blue flames’, he might thereafter use that name to call up towering blue flames… but it would not be because of any power the word has, or any ability of his impressive mind to reshape meaning or reality to fit his belief.

“And of course, it goes without saying that we would all die horribly, because you do not ‘punk’ a centuries-old archwizard with gibberish words. The point is that things like belief and names only have the power to shape reality to the extent that if I believe your name is Bob, then in reality I will call you that even if your name is Alice.”

I had a sense of… not exactly grumbling, but some kind of minor discontentment around the room. Not everybody seemed satisfied with the professor’s answer. In high school I’d noticed that a lot of my fellow students had strange ideas about how magic worked, and that hadn’t really surprised me… the workings of magic were, by their very nature, arcane.

It seemed strange to me that people would cling to these ideas even when they went off to college… or maybe what seemed strange was that people who had these ideas would be taking college-level thaumatology courses.

I had to admit that this was a slightly snobbish viewpoint, and I felt slightly guilty as soon as I thought about it. It wasn’t like I knew everything that could be known about magic… and where else would people get rid of their basic misconceptions, if not for 100 level courses? Requiring someone to know the basics of thaumatology before they could take a class in it would be pointlessly exclusionary.

“Now, using the idea of nominalism as a tool, as a focus, that works fine,” Goldman continued. “It works well enough that you can be an archmage, so long as you have the talent and drive and ambition to be one anyway. But there’s nothing you can’t accomplish with names that you can’t accomplish by skipping the middleman and going straight for what the name means. If you want a particular type of fire, knowing a word for it won’t make it any easier to bring about, except maybe on a purely mental level. But even then it doesn’t become easier to bring fire with a name… it just becomes harder to do it without. I hope that clear things up. Now, does anyone have a question on a different topic to get things rolling?”

He looked around the room, and pointed to a student near the front but off to the side of the auditorium.

“Yes, you over there?” Goldman said. I knew he had a seating chart, but he was nowhere near his desk or podium.

“Professor… does the law of scarcity apply to wishes?” the student asked.

“See, now, that’s a good one,” the professor said. “Nice to see that you’re taking the different things we cover and integrating them into a higher understanding of magic, rather than treating them as a bunch of isolated bits of trivia. Scarcity and wishcraft…

“Well, the first thing you need to understand is that it’s hard to talk about wishes compared to conjuration or teleportation or enchantment, because there are so few examples. If you want to know what invoking an element is like… and you have any aptitude for magic at all… you can learn how to do it for yourself. You can find people to talk to about it. You can read books about it. Comparatively fewer people ever find themselves in a position to make a wish, and a lot of them don’t talk about it afterwards. So it’s harder to talk about general principles and wishes.

“But of course, we do anyway… and generally speaking, it doesn’t seem as though true wishes respect such limits. It isn’t like it’s harder to wish for a ton of diamonds than a ton of coal… it takes more syllables, but the person doing the wishing isn’t taxed for the effort. If there is some agency that has to work to provide the wished-for ton, we don’t know if it works any harder to get the diamonds than the coal.

“On the other hand, it seems as though the harder it is to fit the results of a true wish into the universe as we know it, the more likely it is fizzle out spectacularly or blow up in the wisher’s face. In other words, it’s better to be greedy with a wish than careless or unreasonable. Next?”

He pointed to another student, near the center, who stood up.

“I guess my question is about thaumatalogy itself, if that’s okay.”

“Sure! Hit me with it,” the professor said.

“It seems like everything you teach us is so… vague and unsure,” the student said. “The only thing you seem certain about is that looking for certainty is going to end badly. Professor Goldman, how can we make improvements in a discipline that’s so unpredictable at its heart?”

“Unpredictably,” Goldman said. He paused for polite chuckles. “Really, you’ve put your finger on the reason that thaumatology is not the single most respected course of study anywhere. Advances in thaumatalogy serve to advance all practical magic disciplines, but even those who work magic don’t always give the field its due. Those who do are among the most skilled and powerful practitioners in their fields, though they’re often dismissed as ‘mere metamagicians’ by their more, ah, superstitious colleagues.

“Forgive me if this comparison seems insensitive in light of recent events, but the metaphor I keep coming back to is the pamphlets you get when you enroll here. They’re full of advice on keeping yourself safe, keeping your academic career on track, and fitting in with dorm life. These things can all be phrased as rules, and many of them are, but none of them deal with absolutes.

“You carry a weapon, stay on the paths, and avoid going out after dark because doing so makes you more safe. Ignoring any of these rules makes you less safe. Can we ever say that anyone is completely safe? Can we say that someone who leaves their weapon up in their dorm or takes a shortcut across West Campus at night will necessarily come to harm? No and no.

“If we were to evaluate everything the same way some people judge thaumatalogy, we’d conclude that these safety rules are pointless,” Professor Goldman said. “And indeed, many students in their second and third years, having never once had to draw a weapon outside of class, conclude that the rules are something a bull might leave behind. If this were a PSA, I’d go on to tell you about all the horrible things that happened to each and every one of them, but the fact is that the vast majority of students survive to graduation.

“So to bring this back around to your question: thaumatalogy might never succeed in telling us how to achieve all of our goals as magicians or how to remain completely safe while doing so, but that doesn’t mean we can’t refine our ideas and make them better, more effective at what we need them to do.

“If nobody minds a small digression: sometimes, some of my colleagues buy into the notion that thaumatology is a flawed discipline because of the imprecise nature of our knowledge. They express a wish that we had something more concrete to work with. But if I were to try to imagine a universe that revealed its workings to us in an orderly and consistent fashion, and while that might seem like it would be to our benefit, I think an honest analysis would have to include everything we’d be giving up, in comparison to the universe we have… for instance, my job. The study of thaumatology… or whatever it might be called in such a universe… would be so simple and straightforward that I doubt it would exist at a university level. People who ‘specialized’ in it would no doubt be looked upon as we might look at someone who devotes his life to mastering a game like tic-tac-toe, where simple rules produce predictable results time and time again.

“From an egalitarian point of view, such a world might be ideal… no specialized knowledge or devotion would be needed to understand the secrets of the universe, so the fruits of progress would belong to everyone equally instead of the powerful and the comfortable. We would have the means to completely end hunger, end deprivation, everywhere, and when I say ‘we’ I don’t just mean those of us privileged enough to live under the protection of a power like the Imperium.

“This might sound like an ideal world, but it has two flaws: we can’t get there, and I wouldn’t have a job if we did. Next question?”

“Yes, Professor,” another student said. “I’m not entirely clear on exclusionary comparison: is it a refinement of the principle of comparison, or is it a separate principle entirely?”

“Well, now,” Goldman said. “First we should be clear that ‘principle’, as far as I know, is not an actual thing… whether we call it a completely separate principle or a refinement is among the more pointless things that thaumatologists tend to argue about. And in the field of all things that thaumatalogists argue about, that’s a high honor.

“I prefer to think of it as a special case of comparison, if anything,” he said. “It’s the same principle but applied differently. Think about the phrase ‘comparing apples and oranges’. This is, in fact, possible to do. The fact that one is sort of yellowish-red and the other is an apple color is, in fact, a point of comparison. It is not often that the best point of reference you can find for something is how unlike it is to other things, but when it happens, that’s when you use exclusionary comparison. Next?”

“On the subject of comparison and metaphor?” another student said.

“Yes?” Professor Goldman said.

“If I was trying to give a friend the speed of a deer, which ‘deer’ would he be as fast as? I mean, is it the Universe’s idea of ‘deer’, or mine, or his? And could that encompass a buck, doe or fawn? I mean, as a joke, could I give someone the ‘sight of a hawk’… but use a blind hawk as a reference?”

“There is a principle that might apply here,” Goldman said. “It’s been phrased in many different formulations, but it comes down to this: nature abhors a wiseguy. When you invoke a metaphor, you are not referring to any specific iteration of an idea but the idea itself. If you took a literal deer and took some trait from it and gave it to a friend, you wouldn’t be doing anything metaphorical… in fact, you’d be doing something potentially illegal. Now, nothing stops a northern shaman from blessing a hunter with the sight of a metaphorical blind hawk, but what is being invoked here is blindness, not hawkness. The effectiveness of the invocation would be weakened by the fact that effort is being made to encompass a superfluous concept. You might as well invoke the sight of a blind hawk with green feathers and a horn. Do the feathers and horn affect how blind the hawk is? No, but neither does the fact that it’s a hawk.”

There were a few more questions from people feeling their way around metaphor and other forms of comparison-as-magic, many of which made me think once again that a surprising number of my fellow students were hung up on the idea of magic as this totally subjective thing. Which it could be… but it was just arrogant to assume that the thing it was subject to was us.

I blamed bad TV and movies, mostly… a lot of really terrible mag-fi out there took the idea of uncertainty in magic and ran wild with it.

“Professor, how does a crafted object’s functions become part of ‘the way things are’?” a student asked.

“For instance?”

“Well, before carts were invented, you couldn’t use a box with wheels on it as the subject of transportation enchantments…”

“You couldn’t because nobody had boxes with wheels on them,” Goldman said. “There were thousands of years of history before industrial enchantment became widespread… it’s still not likely to be very widespread outside the great empires. Do you think if we went to any of those places where they have been making do without enchanted vehicles for thousands of years that we would find some great improvement over the basic ‘box with wheels’ design? It’s fundamentally true that a cart or wagon or other such conveyance is good for transporting things over land. This was true before anybody knew it, and it remains true even as the changing tides of fashion and the lower cost of enchantment makes less practical vehicles possible. Does that make sense?”

“Sort of…but do items really have these qualities because they have them, or do we imbue objects with them?” the student asked. “Moving away from wagons and carriages: in a world without sentient creatures would, say, a staff still be a staff, or is it the creatures that impose the concept of staffness on the assemblage of physical and magical structure that is the staff?”

“We’d need a world without sentient creatures to test that hypothesis,” Goldman said. “And then we wouldn’t be able to because as soon as we looked at it we’d be ‘imposing our concepts’ on it, according to this line of thought. This is an idea that can never be proven or disproven. The best way I can think of to test it would be to have a group of skilled enchanters in one room and a group of really sincere people in the other. Each person would be faced with a blade that was to be swung at them. The enchanters would be tasked with removing the quality of sharpness from the blade. The other group would be tasked with sincerely believing that blades aren’t sharp.

“I actually got the funding for this experiment, and I have a bunch of volunteers to be in the first group. It’s finding test subjects for the second group that’s proven to be the sticking point.

“Things are what they are. Tautologies are tautological. Do you have a question on this subject?” he asked a student who had just raised a hand.

“Kind of related, I guess,” the student said. “If the properties of objects are fixed, I was wondering, is it possible to take a property from one thing and put it on another? Like taking the transparency of glass and putting it into a brick?”

“Very good question,” Goldman said. “The short answer is yes. This is a staple of enchantment. It is also arguably an application of metaphor, by which I mean it is definitely an application of metaphor but enchanters will argue it isn’t, because they’re all hip and modern and metaphor isn’t. But the brick becomes transparent like glass. Well, that’s technically a simile, but discussing metaphor-workings with metaphors makes you sound like you’re talking about transmutation. It is also possible for an enchanter to add entirely new traits to an object without using a source… whether or not this is done depends on how the two objects or substances lend themselves to comparison. For instance, a sheet of glass is often referenced when making sheets of steel transparent, but glass to brick is a bit more of a stretch. If you wanted to peer through mud, glass would be a hard sell but it would be easy enough to liken it to water.”

“Speaking of water, when we take water from the elemental plane, how is it replaced?” someone asked.

“The short answer is that it isn’t,” Goldman said.

“Then could we one day run out?”

“Nope,” the professor said. “The elemental planes are infinite expanses. An infinite amount of water spread out over an infinite area. Infinity divided by infinity. If we subtract a gallon from the numerator, we’re left with… oh, let’s see, hmmm… infinity, divided by infinity. Same as we started with.”

“But where does the new water come from?”

“It doesn’t come from anywhere,” Goldman said. “It’s the same infinite expanse it was before.”

“I’ve got a question,” another student said, “but it’s more about that last question than about anything we covered in class.”

“Go ahead,” Goldman said.

“Could somebody who’s never seen or experienced ice conjure it? Like, if someone lived in a very hot jungle and had only heard of ice, had an idea what it looked like and that it was cold, would they be able to bring it forth?”

“They would certainly have enough familiarity with heat to take the fire out of water until it froze,” Goldman said. “So there’s no reason they wouldn’t be able to invoke water in that state. In terms of being able to summon elemental ice as a thing in itself, I think our hypothetical jungle-dweller would be very hard-pressed to do so, at least until he did it the other way a few times.”

“Now, as far as questions that are a bit afield of our actual discussion topics… the ostensible point of this exercise is to make sure you’re ready for the quiz, which will be to make sure you’re ready for the midterm, which is to make sure you’re ready for the final, which is to make sure you’re to pass this class. But lest we lose sight of our actual goal, the point of passing this class is to provide a foundation for further studies. So don’t feel like you need to be strictly constrained by the subject matter of the class. If something we’ve dealt with inspired a question in you, feel free to ask that… maybe the answer will help you get a better handle on the general principle, or see how to apply the learning more broadly. So… anyone have anything they want to know?”

More hands went up all over the room. He picked one.

“Has anyone ever made a foolproof wish?”

“That depends on how you define ‘foolproof’,” Goldman said. “Plenty of people have made wishes that turned out exactly the way they meant for them to. These tend to be simple, straightforward things.”

“Is it possible for someone to become permanently invisible?”

“For certain values of ‘permanent’ and ‘invisible’, sure,” Goldman said. “Like any enchantment, it could be removed by someone of sufficient skill and power, and the subject would still be ‘visible’ to varying degrees to certain forms of supernatural sight. The most foolproof form of invisibility is that which is possessed by naturally invisible things: the utter lack of an appearance. Even divine true sight reveals nothing, because there’s nothing to be seen.”

“How exactly does infernal and divine energy affect thaumatological manipulation of energy?”

“However it wants to,” Goldman said. “Well, not literally… there are limits to what any form of energy can accomplish. But picture two people standing in the same room, and imagine all the different ways that they might affect, interfere with, or cooperate with one another on purpose. Now imagine that they have separate tasks to perform in the exact same area, but they can’t see or hear each other and you’ve got all the different ways they might affect each other completely by accident. The short answer is that life is messy and complicated.”

“Professor, are there other extra-dimensional energies besides infernal and divine, or are those two special somehow?”

“You ask two questions,” Goldman said. “And the answer to both of them is yes. Yes, there are other forms of extraplanar energy, and yes, divine and infernal energies are special somehow. Whether and how they might be ‘more special’ than other kinds is above my pay grade. They are tied together much more strongly in a relationship of opposition than the classical ‘elemental opposites’. Their origin planes are the ‘nearest’ ones, according to our current understanding of planar cosmology, to be alien enough to have a pronounced destructive effect upon contact with a natural mind… ‘natural’ here meaning ‘native to this plane’, but there are planes further out that are more alien and more destructive than even the infernal realms.”

“Professor Goldman, I’ve read that back in the era of attempted ’scientific magic’ that many wizards used physical components for their spells, was this purely a matter of primitive foci, or has there ever been evidence to support the use of spell components to mitigate the magical power required to cast?”

“Really, no evidence,” Goldman said. “In some cases there was some metaphorical transference involved, and we can imagine the ‘scientific’ magic-users noticed the heightened efficacy and attempted to generalize from it, but in other cases there was no clear relationship between the component and its intended effect, or the importance of one particular item was exaggerated. For instance, I mentioned the wizard Lehane before… he was known to have carried large quantities of bat guano with him, under the belief that this substance’s flammability properties made it more helpful than any other substance in the creation of fireballs. I used to have an interesting etymological anecdote about how this practice lent its name to a particular form of insanity, but I’m not allowed to tell it in class anymore.

“I think we’ve got time for maybe one more question… I hope somebody has something either horribly overwrought or optimistic, so we can end on a more dramatic note,” Goldman said. “You look likely.”

“Wizards have become more knowledgeable and proficient in the things they can do. I know you can’t predict the future, but do you think this sort of magical progress is likely to continue?” the likely student asked. “What sort of things do you think we might be able to do twenty or thirty years from now that we can’t do today?”

“That’s a good question,” Goldman said. “I think the most significant thing that will happen in the practice of magic in the next twenty years is that people who are right this moment babies will be sitting in the chairs you’re all sitting in now. Advancements in the field of magic… in what we can do with magic… come primarily from the presence of new minds looking at what we know we can do today and figuring out new ways to put it all together. As the example of our old friend Girault shows us, the most experienced wizards are not always the best at coming up with new ways to do things. He was quite the innovator at one point… that was the point where the things he’s been doing for the past two hundred years were fresh and new.

“I’m not as old as he is, but I’m not as young as you are. What advancements are we going to see in the next few decades? You tell me. Or better yet: show me. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.”

Next: A state visit.

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If you paid attention on Friday, you could probably at least pass the quiz the next week. Showing up on Wednesday would let you fill in a few more blanks. If you had a good grounding in thaumatology, it was probably possible to ace the class that way. I wasn’t going to throw stones about people who chose to slide through like that… it was a one hundred level class. I showed up almost every day, but it wasn’t like I always gave Goldman my undivided attention.

On that Monday, the classroom was even emptier than usual but not by nearly as much as I would have expected. It was also much quieter than I’d ever seen it before the lecture started. People were already in their seats, sitting up and facing the empty floor. Professor Goldman was the sort of teacher that I really admired, but he wasn’t the sort of professor who could command much respect in the “sit down and shut up” sense of the word.

The silence wasn’t respectful and it also wasn’t somber… it was expectant. I couldn’t see many faces from the back of the room, but the ones I could see looked almost hopeful. I couldn’t have guessed what exactly it was that they were hoping for, but it made a vague kind of sense. A teacher… especially a college professor… was an adult in a way that most college students weren’t yet. He was someone learned and, in a way, someone official. Professor Goldman might not have had the kind of respect that makes people sit quietly before he even arrived, but he knew how to get people to listen and the people in that classroom were ready to do so.

In light of what had happened and all the disruption that would likely continue to follow from it, I had been kind of surprised that there wasn’t some sort of assembly or gathering or something to address it. Of course there was always the possibility that Harlowe could be overlooked by the powers that were in charge of announcing such a thing , but that seemed unlikely in this case.

It might have been naive of me to assume the administration would work to make sure that we were included in their efforts to address a situation that had seen one of us murdered, our residents falling under suspicion, and our residence hall temporarily occupied by imperial agents, but there had been so many human students passing through Harlowe’s doors that it seemed unlikely that word wouldn’t have made it around the hallways.

Of course, none of that guaranteed that it would have reached me in particular, but Two hadn’t said anything about it. Considering how she’d appointed herself my “older” sister, it seemed unlikely that she would fall into the “but you didn’t ask” trap on this.

Something to quell rumors and reassure worried students, as well as address the extent to which the planned trajectory of the semester may have been altered would have been a good idea… judging by what I’d overheard in the halls the day before, some people were just assuming that in the wake of a bona fide tragedy then all coursework and exams were obviously canceled unless they heard otherwise. That seemed like wishful thinking to me, but then it might have been equally foolish on my part to assume that an official statement putting that to rest would make a difference. Probably the people who concluded this were people who’d already come to the conclusion that they weren’t going to get their stuff done anyway.

For my own part, I don’t know what I would have taken away from such a gathering. Whatever reassurances might be given to the human majority, I was a special case in a hall full of special cases. It was my good luck that there were better, less well-defended suspects standing between me and an imperial inquest… it was Steff’s bad luck that she was one of them.

It was Steff that my mind kept going to. She was okay physically… safe for the moment, unless the attempt by Dee’s handlers to throw her and Viktor under the carriage bore fruit. How was she doing emotionally? What did she look like? Would the potion have altered her face as well as her frame? I was sure she’d still be recognizable, and that underneath the changes she would still be Steff… but would it be a dramatic difference, or more subtle? And how was she taking it? Even while she vocally rejected her father’s society, she’d absorbed a fair bit of their aesthetics and values, values which did not come close to matching the gynocentric culture that had created the transformation potion.

Even if she had no issues with large breasts for herself, having any growth at all would make it even harder for her to enjoy elven-style gowns that had been designed to hang off of straight, slender frames.

It went without saying that I loved Steff no matter what body she wore. I certainly wasn’t going to complain if she had a more traditionally feminine chest, but what was really important to me was that she was happy and comfortable in her own skin.

I had a moment of discomfort when I realized that I was thinking about that when everyone else was thinking about the murder… that I was thinking about Steff’s boobies when she might be under suspicion or the target of a scapegoat campaign… but then I realized that I was far from the only person thinking of selfish or personal interests. It wasn’t that the whole campus suddenly cared about Leda as a person. They were scared and upset because of where she’d died, how she’d died, and because of the magnitude of the official response.

If someone died in a dungeoneering exercise, or because they went wandering around off the paths after dark, people could tell themselves that death had been foreseeable, preventable… that if they were smart and careful and followed the right rules then death would pass them by unmolested.

It was a lie, but a comforting one. Leda’s death shook that up. True, she’d been outside… but she’d been in one of the most well-lit and best warded parts of the campus. The fountain was probably safer than most of the dormitories… not that the dorms were dangerous, but the message of Leda’s death was that nowhere was safe, not safe enough… not so safe that you could actually count on living forever.

Her death was not a unique event in that regard, to be sure… not in a big picture sort of way… but to all the young and sheltered students, it was the one that couldn’t be ignored. If Leda hadn’t been someone important in a political sense, her killing might have been lumped with all the other random and pointless deaths that Veil weekend had brought… but she’d been singled out. The official attention made the circumstances of her death impossible to ignore, hammered the point home and gave everyone new things to fear as well. None but the most stalwart imperial partisans could find the presence of the investigators on campus reassuring.

The Imperium brought order, and that was a good thing, but that didn’t make order the same thing as good.

Everybody in the room was thinking of themselves, in other words… themselves and their own close friends, probably… because everybody was worried about what had happened and what might happen next.

I did not envy Goldman. Whether he tried to address what was going on or not… and it would be hard for him to not pick up what was registering on the faces of so many of his students, even in a large auditorium-style room… his students were likely to be disappointed and frustrated. He was a good instructor and probably a skilled metamagician… though so far he’d dealt only with theory and not any practical demonstrations… but it seemed unlikely he’d be able to find any magic words that would make everything okay.

He came into the room wearing a brown suit that looked slightly more respectable than his usual attire, which was pure academic shabby chic. He glanced up and around the room as he was setting his briefcase down on his desk, wearing a smile that looked as warm as it looked weary. He didn’t look terribly surprised.

“Good morning,” he said in a tone that was both more conversational and somehow more formal than his usual mode of address. His usual affected goofiness was very much part of his lecturing style, and thus it was unmistakably a lecture, no matter how affable he came off. This was different.

Nobody replied. For a moment I thought he was going to say something like, “Let’s try that again”, but he just paused for a moment and kept going.

“I’m used to seeing something different in people’s eyes after Veil… especially in my morning section. My lectures are almost exclusively first year students, this one especially. For many of you, this is your first class of the day. My position as a lecturer on thaumatology is not quite the same thing as being a moral authority or mental healer. But it is exactly the same thing as being a teacher. So, I usually take a few minutes away from the ordered syllabus and try to do a little teaching. I don’t know that it will be adequate to the situation this year, but then, I don’t know if it ever is.

“Tragedy is not a simple thing. People die… it’s a condition to which most mortals and many petty immortals succumb. Some deaths are preventable. Some deaths are predictable. Some aren’t either. The ones that aren’t can come like a slap in the face, but it’s the ones that could have been foreseen and averted but weren’t that really hit people were they live. If you know someone who went out partying on Veil and didn’t come back, if you were friends with them or shared a dorm or classroom with any of them, then you know what I’m talking about.

“Usually, this is the part where I remind students that the mental healing center is open to everyone and there are no fees for using it. I’m still going to do that, though I’m not going to mention how badly underutilized it is because I imagine right now they’re probably not able to take walk-ins like they can most of the time. Don’t let that stop you from using them if you need them, though. Don’t feel guilty, don’t worry about whether or not you ‘really’ need help, if your problems are big enough… they have trained professionals ready to tell you how much help you need.

“And don’t be afraid to talk to us, to your professors… I mean, the ones you weren’t already afraid to talk to. There are probably good reasons for fear in some cases. The worst that will happen, though, is that someone refers you to the healing center anyway. But most of us have been around a long time. We’ve seen a lot of things. My office door is always open when I’m inside it, even if it’s outside my posted hours. Talk to each other, too… if you’ve got friends, open up to them. If you’re doing okay, ask them how they’re doing. If you’re all doing fine, look around for someone who doesn’t look like they’ve got anyone to talk to and ask them how they’re doing. Solidarity, people. It’s a wonderful thing.”

With that, he sat down behind the desk, something he’d rarely done during classes except when we were taking our quizzes.

“Today, we’re not going to be going over anything new,” he said. “Your midterm’s a few weeks off. This Friday we’re going to have a comprehensive quiz to gauge what has been retained what has been forgotten. This quiz is not important to your grade but it can be important to your learning. For the rest of the hour today and on Wednesday I’ll be reviewing some of the material we’ve already covered, and answering any questions anyone has about rough spots. If there is somewhere else you need to be, please feel free to go there.”

When he put it like that… it wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in the review, or the chance for a little more interaction than his lectures normally afforded, but there was a friend I needed to be with and offer my support to, if I could find her. I’d have my chance on Wednesday, after all. Under the circumstances, Goldman would probably hold off on anything really interesting or crucial until then. Maybe it wasn’t quite what he’d intended, but like he’d said, there was no way of measuring or prioritizing the need for help and support.

Next: OMKhSTEFF.

Author’s Note:

Sorry it’s late. Sorry it’s short. I had some things I needed to work out in my head. The next few chapters should be interesting to many people, and I know many readers will enjoy the next thaumatology class.

Discuss this chapter on the Livejournal feed.

“I’ve got your bathrobe tucked away,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s contaminated, but I figure it should go through the wash.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Go wash your hand,” Dee said, giving me a mental push towards the door. “Before you do anything else.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. Amaranth giggled and stepped back from the door, and I headed out into the hall and towards the lounge.

The twins’ door was open. I didn’t stop to peer in or listen, but I couldn’t help hearing the clinking of glass bottles. Of course… the dumbasses didn’t think they had any reason to get rid of their empties or even hide them. Not when the resident advisor was their drinking buddy. If nothing else good came out of it, the Leightons were having a worse day than I was. That was almost worth losing all my bath stuff.

It seemed like nobody was in the lounge, though I realized Honey and Hazel were sharing one of the easy chairs when Honey gave me a stiff hello as I walked past.

“Hi,” I said.

Hazel was red-faced and silent, and I gathered from the way that neither of them said anything else while I washed up that they had been speaking about something before I arrived and were waiting to be alone again before they resumed. I had a pretty good guess what the topic was… it had to be getting harder for Hazel to deny that Amaranth was right.

I skipped showering and other stuff that would take me into the bathroom… not only was the morning rush being somewhat compacted, but it seemed like people were hanging out there just to be near ground zero or something.

Breakfast was kind of hurried and awkward. Dee seemed to be feeling some lingering embarrassment over her conduct under the influence of the fumes. I couldn’t blame her for feeling the way she did, and I also sympathized with her embarrassment for something that wasn’t her fault, but I didn’t know how to address either thing without making her feel more embarrassed.

Two was very forthright in stating that the people on the fourth floor were nicer and that their bathroom and hallway were cleaner than the ones on our floor.

Steff had already heard the gist of what happened through the rumor mill. She seemed to think the whole thing had been a wacky misadventure and not something that was in turns terrifying and humiliating, continually expressing her wish to have been there.

It was only through sheer chance and overheard classroom chatter in the minutes before my thaumatology class started that I remembered Professor Goldman’s two-part extra credit assignment, where the first part of it was to write out a wish. I’d settled on a motorcycle, but then had become distracted imagining the possibilities… or impossibilities. I took out a piece of paper and wrote out “I wish I had a vehicle that functioned exactly like a motorcycle.” then looked at it. Was that good enough?

The point of the assignment was to show how a wish could be purposefully misinterpreted or subverted, so no matter how I wrote it, I was going to get back something that was pointedly ironic or double-edged or something… and even if I worded it in a perfectly one hundred percent ironclad fashion, it wasn’t like I’d actually get it. By that light, “I wish…” was all it really needed. But I added “except for never needing any external fuel or science-based maintenance or repairs.” to it, because that would be the obvious way of foiling the original wish. There was no sense making things too easy for whoever my wish partner ended up being.

Even though it wasn’t a very serious assignment to begin with, I still felt like it was a really half-assed way to go about it, and I almost didn’t hand my paper forward when Professor Goldman called for them at the start of class. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who’d left it until the last minute, though, as other people were scrambling to write things out and he said he’d accept them at the end of class.

“So,” he said after accepting the papers, “as you no doubt recall, we’ve been talking about comparison and metaphor. Before we get to the quiz, we’re going to wrap that up today with a little bit of discussion about nominalism, the magic of names. What’s in a name? Not much, as it turns out. Nominalism is not used very often, which sometimes leads people to think it’s a discredited or outdated viewpoint… and they’re kind of right. It used to be widely accepted that names were at the root of all magic, or all real magic… that anything else used to establish a comparison or relate to a subject was just bits of trickery.

“The first codified definition of a ‘wizard’ as opposed to other less formal and implicitly inferior magic-users was someone who did ‘name-workings’. Nowadays, the formal definition of ‘wizard’ is somebody who uses spells, whether they invoke true names or not, as opposed to sorcerers, who throw around raw techniques… but of course, nowadays, few people exclusively do one or the other and the two words are usually used as synonyms.

“But once upon a time, wizardry was held to be rooted in names. To name a thing was to know it, the elven wizards said, and to know it was to have power over it. It only made sense to them. The elves learned their first magic from the sidhe, over whom names are power. When they began moving away from faerie magic, they brought a number of assumptions with them, which shaped how they viewed things. And of course, the name of something, whether it’s a person, object, or concept, is a tremendously useful symbol for the thing in and of itself. That’s why it worked, to a point: because a name is a symbol.”

I followed what Professor Goldman was saying, but I began to feel a little uneasy. I felt like I’d missed something, earlier in the week… in point of fact, I didn’t recall talking about comparison and metaphor. It wasn’t that I hadn’t been paying attention in class… okay, maybe it was, a bit. I’d got a bit distracted thinking about the wishes on Wednesday. That was just one day, though. On Monday I’d… well, actually, I’d probably been a bit distracted by my plans for the afternoon.

“So, while it’s a discredited viewpoint, it isn’t so much that nominalism has been abandoned as a technique,” Goldman said, and I realized I’d spaced out again while castigating myself for not paying attention. “If you’re trying to do a remote casting on somebody and you have nothing else to establish a relationship to them, no other symbol to invoke, a name can work. If you’re trying to address the whole of a being and not some aspect or quality of it, you can invoke the name and thereby invoke the whole of itself. Some pretty powerful magic has been performed this way… but when you deal with things in their entirety, it sort of limits your flexibilities. This is why there is a whole era of history from which most of the surviving magical objects seem pretty unimaginative. If your idea of enchanting a sword is to say ‘SWORD!’ really loud, you’re going to end up with a sword that is swordier than other swords, but it’s harder to break things down and specialize them, or add effects that aren’t encompassed under the heading of ‘SWORD!’

“When the nominalists started branching out and started addressing the properties of their subjects , they still thought of what they were doing in terms of naming… they’d mentally contort any techniques they used into being ‘parts of the name’, and so they spent more time exploring techniques that could be fit into this scheme and ignoring those that couldn’t. And of course, this one-size-fits-all approach limited the accessibility of magic because like any other technique, nominalism does not work equally well for everybody. Some people just don’t relate to names. Some people don’t see a fundamental connection between the name for an object and that object. In fact, there was an interesting survey done about practicing nominalists and their linguistic knowledge. Most nominalists, of course, are elves, and so their first language is elvish. Not surprising. What was interesting was it seems that the more languages a wizard speaks, the less likely he is to be an effective nominalist. There are counter-examples, of course… the Merovian archmage Girault, who came to power during a revival of nominalism two centuries before the current era, collects languages because the names they have for the same concepts have slightly different connotations which he is able to employ for different effects.”

Nominalism wasn’t that interesting to me, because as Goldman had said, it was mostly associated with an outdated viewpoint, and was mostly useful for big displays of power rather than precision. I engaged in a bit of nominalist thinking by giving a name to what I was trying to invoke or enhance, but only because it was easier to think “fire, fire, fire” than to focus purely on the intangible quality. The name was literally a handle to hang onto.

I listened, though, as Goldman described a lecture he’d seen the venerable Girault give during his own post-graduate studies, wherein the ancient archmage had called fire into being using various tongues, revealing differing conceptions of it. Elvish-conjured fire was dangerous and spread easily. Dwarvish was smoky but short-lived, if not tended carefully. Merovian and Pax rendered something that was more tractable and usable than either of the two. The Merovian fire was prettier than the Pax one, but that might have reflected his own bias.

It was kind of interesting, though not really terribly applicable. Not relying on the names of things let you achieve those kinds of effects without having to hunt for the right language.

The lecture portion of the class was brief, because of course we had to get to the quiz… and except for the few questions about nominalism, it was all about stuff I hadn’t paid attention to. The multiple choice questions were easy… even if I didn’t remember them being talked about in class, I could still reason them through from my basic knowledge of thaumatology, and by ruling out the obvious gag choices.

It was the fill-in-the-blanks that left me stumped. I didn’t know the name of the thaumatologist who’d first articulated the principle of exclusionary comparison. I didn’t even know what it was. I was used to being able to just go down the line answering them in order, and then having some time to sit there while the slowpokes wracked their brains… this time, I was the slowpoke.

The embarrassment at realizing this only deepened my frustration, which only made me go slower. The fact that Goldman chose to use this opportunity to make some editorial comments towards the class didn’t make things any easier.

“I see a lot of head scratching and blank stares out there,” he said. “Well, more than usual… and not just from the usual suspects, either.” It should have been hard to believe that he was singling me out, considering it was an auditorium-style lecture hall and I wasn’t anywhere near the front, but that’s what it felt like. “You might recall I said on Monday that we’re going to be picking up the pace now that we’ve covered all the foundations.’”

I didn’t recall that… in fact, I couldn’t clearly recall anything he’d said on Monday, or anything more than the wish assignment on Wednesday.

I didn’t even really understand what he meant by “comparison”. It seemed like he was talking about symbolism, sympathetic magic, but I didn’t know if something more specific was meant by the term.

“Remember, we do one of these every week,” Goldman said… still talking to the class, though he might as well have been using elven voice magic to dump it right in my ear. “The main point of the quiz is not the grades, which are just easy points, but letting you know where you stand and if you need to tighten things up a little in some areas.”

Easy points. Yeah, that was so not helping. At the end of the class, I had the fill-in-the-blanks empty, except for the one that was practically a gimme: “What five-hundred-year-old archmage is still noted for his use of nominalist wizardry?”

Well, there was still the wish assignment. Maybe that would make up for the missed questions.

Discuss this chapter.

It was one of my favorite classes, but being in an auditorium-style room, it had the most absolutely uncomfortable seats I had ever encountered.

On the other hand, I had a good handle on everything we’d gone over and most of the grade consisted of Friday quizzes, so it wasn’t like I couldn’t skip out and go soak my lower regions in the bathtub or something.

But then, it felt like I’d missed a lot of classes and I was the one who kept stressing the importance of having some school in my school life.

I kept going over the pros and cons in my head the whole time I trudged towards the class, long after it had become a foregone conclusion that I was in fact going. One little class… one little lecture, and then I’d be off until my logic class and I could spend hours in the bathtub or face down in my bed or whatever worked out.

Anyway, Amaranth was right… walking did help a bit, at least compared to sitting down or standing up straight. The worst of the pain distracted me from the rest of it.

The good news was that even as slow as I was moving, I still got to my thaumatology classroom plenty early… the benefit of starting my schedule later in the day than any of my friends. I waited until the previous class had emptied out and then I slunk into my seat, thankful that I didn’t have to scoot past anybody. Not that anyone would have necessarily been able to tell why I was walking funny, but I was still smarting so badly that part of my brain couldn’t accept that it wouldn’t be as obvious to everybody else what was going on as it was to me.

I folded my ridiculously large coat up into a sort of cushion and smooshed it down on the hard plastic chair that had been contoured to perfectly fit a race that didn’t exist, then gingerly sat down on it to wait for class to begin.

Professor Goldman came in sniffling and sneezing, and when he first tried to address the class, he broke down coughing for half a minute.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going on with campus health, but with how long it takes to get a simple potion now, I just haven’t had the time… one sec,” he said, and then started hacking into his handkerchief again.

My face burned bright and I tried to slouch down. What a day to decide to sit on a furry booster seat… not that he had any idea I had anything to do with the added bureaucratic delays… not that this made a difference to my brain or my cheeks.

“Anyway,” Goldman said, “I’ve been compiling grades and I have to say that some of you could be doing better. No one’s failing, people, but I’d like to see some more effort. I know you all think that this is just a fluff class that gets you three more credit hours without requiring a lot of papers and research and, you know, work… but it’s so much more than that. It’s also an easy ‘A’. Don’t you realize that courses like this exist to balance out the lousy grades you get in the harder classes that you actually need?”

He paused, cleared his throat, took a drink of water, and then went on.

“But all hope is not lost, for I come bearing optional credit,” he said. “Yes, it’s optional, which means if you decide that you don’t want free points added onto your grade, it’s your decision. The subject of the extra credit assignment is going to be wishes. Yes, yes, I know we haven’t covered wishes in this class,” he said in response to the classroom-murmurs, but there was as much excitement as anything else. “But wishes are fun and exciting to think about, and wish theory encapsulates so much of thaumatological study. Besides, my goal is to get you to think outside the box.” He paused for another coughing fit. “Or inside the box. Or around the box. Or on it. I’m an educator. I can’t afford to be too choosy when I set my goals.

“This assignment will be in two parts. The first part is easy: make a wish. Write it down. Use as many or as few words as is necessary to convey whatever the heck it is you wish for. That’s just the raw materials for the second part of the assignment, where I’ll be taking all the participants’ wish papers and handing them out to another participating student to play cosmic adjudicator with. That’s right. You’ll play the role of a personified wishmaster, and your goal will be to take your classmate’s wish and turn it on its head. Subvert it. Pervert it. While acting in strict accordance with the letter of the wish as written, find a way to give them something completely unforeseen and/or unwanted. This is the part of the assignment you’ll be credited for… not for designing the perfect foolproof wish, because of course that’s not possible… but for demonstrating the awareness that no wish is foolproof.

“If you wish to participate, write your wish out for Friday. I’ll mix them up and pass them back on Monday, and you’ll have until next Friday to answer them.”

While he started the lecture proper, I started turning the assignment over in my head. It was an interesting idea. I probably didn’t need extra credit for this class, but he had a point about balancing about other grades. If I could ace thaumatology completely, that might cushion the blow if Professor Hart gave me a lower grade in history.

Of course, that wasn’t even getting into what Callahan would assign… I just had a hard time thinking of her as a teacher, though, which made it harder to factor in the idea of a grade. To be honest, it seemed ridiculous to think that a score on how well I could beat people up with an imaginary stick would be averaged together with my academic achievements.

That reminded me… I was supposed to get a staff or something to spar with. I’d have to try to remember that.

In real life, I knew exactly what I would use a wish for, if one ever fell into my possession. Cautionary tales aside, wishing somebody back from the dead was not the most pitfall-fraught thing you could do.

You just had to word it correctly: you couldn’t just wish somebody “back” or “here”, because that didn’t specify that they were alive, and you couldn’t just wish somebody to be alive, because that didn’t dictate where they would be, and most peoples’ final resting places weren’t anywhere that was conducive to continued life.

Other than that… the universe would react badly to people who tried to get too complicated or reach too far, but resurrection was possible through other means, all of which were more common than being handed a blank check by cosmic forces. Goldman was right in saying that there was no such thing as a perfectly worded wish, but wishing for something that could be reliably attained through other means was generally counted as safe.

I couldn’t use that for the assignment, though. It was too personal, and somebody else in the class would have to turn around and twist it. That would hurt too much for me if my blind partner happened to be a cruel asshole, and would possibly hurt too much for them if they weren’t. I’d leave my mother out of it.

What, then? Wishing to not be a half-demon would be handing fate (or its stand-in in the class) too big a hammer to hit me with. Wishing to be human… that was tempting, but it would feel like I was betraying everybody else in Harlowe. I could wish to be sustained by human food instead of blood, but that was exactly the sort of thing that would earn a serious smiting if pulled in real life. It went against the nature of what I was. It would be like wishing for dry water… not for water to dry up, but for water itself to be dry.

The student writing up the response wouldn’t necessarily realize that, but I knew it, and it stopped me from considering it to be a viable wish.

Also, I wasn’t sure it would be a good idea to put anything in mine that would single myself out as the half-demon. We weren’t grading each other or anything, but I didn’t want to cause another scene if my paper ended up on the desk of somebody who refused to have anything to do with me.

Anyway, the point of the assignment wasn’t actually “what would you do if you had a wish?” As Goldman had explained it, the first part of the exercise seemed like it was supposed to be something fun and frivolous. With that in mind, I decided I would wish for a working motorcycle… or rather, a motorcycle replica enchanted to work as though it were real. I knew that the wish would go horribly wrong on paper, but there was no sense wishing for something impossible right off the bat. I didn’t want to make it too easy on anybody.

I spent the rest of the class daydreaming about racing over the school grounds on a motorcycle. In my head, I’d given Amaranth a lift to her stupid Mechan group, and when she ran off after the argument caused by the jealousy the Mechans had for my cycle, I went roaring across the hills to save her from the pack of ghouls with style and panache.

Really, there weren’t any situations that couldn’t be improved by a judicious application of hot, noisy science.

Dee being harassed by campus guards? Not on my watch… I didn’t have anything to go after the part where I came flying out of nowhere and skidded to a stop between her and them, so I went over it a few more times to get the pose just right.

Poor Sooni spent all her pocket money and doesn’t have coach fare?

Don’t worry, foxy lady…

Okay. Hot, noisy science didn’t mean I had to pull out cheeseball lines like that.

But it was kind of a compelling visual.

“Excuse me,” someone said. I turned and looked up at a chestnut-haired girl with a kind of round face.

“Huh?”

“Get out of the way!” she said, and I realized that class was over and people were filing out.

Oops.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. Standing up reacquainted me with the forgotten soreness, and I winced as I gathered up my coat and my bag and then hurried away from the scowling girl, catching my foot on three separate bolted chair legs in my haste to make way.

Back at Harlowe, I promised Two that I would take the time to eat a meal later in the afternoon, grabbed my bath stuff, and headed for the bathroom. By that point the major pain in my netherest of regions was nothing but a dull memory of an ache and my ass was more tingly than anything else, but it had been thoughts of a warm soak that had kept me moving earlier that morning and to deny it to myself now would make it seem like I’d been lying to myself.

Besides, there was no sign of Feejee. That was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.

I drew the curtain and realized that there was a hook on the wall inside it where I could put my robe. With my bottle of bubble bath up on the ledge, there was nothing outside the curtain that could identify me to anyone sharp enough to recognize it and I doubted that even Trina or the Leightons would be nosy enough to stick their heads in to see who it was.

It wasn’t quite perfect privacy… I heard the door opening and closing and toilets flushing and sinks running multiple times while the tub filled… but nobody disturbed me as I floated in a peppermint fog, and that was a tiny piece of heaven.

By the time the tub was filled, it seemed like most people had gone on to their next class or gone to lunch because the bathroom remained deserted beyond me. Then the door opened, and I heard the sound of large bare feet slapping on the tile.

I heard the other tub’s curtain rings rattling just as Feejee said, “Hi, Mack!”

“Hey,” I replied.

“Can barely smell you over all that mint,” she said as she started running her water. “Do you really need to use so much?”

“I like it,” I said and made a mental note to use more next time.

“It’s kind of overpowering,” she said. “Do they make bubbles that smell like honey?”

“Probably,” I said. “They seem to have every other kind. Thinking of getting some?”

“Oh, I meant for you.”

Of course she did.

“Iona’s trying to talk me into renting a house together next year,” Feejee said.

“Yeah?” I said. Housing situation. Plans for next year. That was a better topic.

“Yeah. She’s been looking into it and she says I should have the money for it,” Feejee said. “Who knows if that’s right or not? I can’t make any sense of that kind of thing.”

“Maybe you should get like an accountant or someone to manage your finances,” I said.

“Maybe,” she said. “Do people ever have water in their houses? Like, a pond or a pool or something?”

“Um… some people have pools,” I said, tensing up beneath my protective cloud of bubbles. I felt like we were inching back to Feejee’s favorite topic. “That’s more expensive, though to be honest, if a house like that is on the rental market, you could probably afford it.”

“I’m just so sick of sleeping in these tiny tubs,” she said. “I barely fit in them unless I’m in legs, and you try sleeping… well, I guess you’re used to it. It’s weird, for me, though… having two bottom halves flopping around independent of each other. I’ll start drifting off and then one of my legs will brush the other and I’m awake again.”

“You could probably get a place with a big whirlpool tub or a sunken bath,” I said. “That would give you more room to stretch out without stretching your budget too much, and would be easier to find than an indoor pool.”

“How big are those?”

“I think they come in different sizes. There are hot tubs that are big enough for a bunch of people to sit in,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “Because to be honest, it’s not just the sleeping… I’m also thinking about how much more private it would be.”

Of course.

“But we don’t have to talk about that,” she said. “I know we have… differences… there.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“But you’d be welcome!” she added quickly. “I mean, if you wanted to… I know that you like… or that you need, anyway…”

“What, you’ve given up on getting me?” I asked, not sure I believed it.

“Until we figure out what to do with Amaranth,” Feejee said. “If she were cool with it, you know, it wouldn’t be a problem, but it seems like she might have some issues… you know more about nymphs than I do. Do you have any ideas there?”

“Do I have any ideas about taking out my immortal girlfriend so she couldn’t turn you in if you killed me?”

“Yeah,” Feejee said. I could picture her nodding enthusiastically “Uh huh. Do you?”

“If I come up with anything, you’ll be the first person I tell,” I said. It was almost an eyeroll moment. Almost. It was definitely very surreal.

“Awesome,” she said. “I’m glad you’re being more reasonable about this.”

“Feejee… you know you’re going to screw more people than yourself if you do something stupid and get caught, right?” I said. “Like, every other merperson walking around on dry land or living in sight of shore?”

“Yeah, I tell Io that all the time,” Feejee said. “But she says that’s why you’re perfect. If we get caught… demon. Other than Amaranth, who would care?”

“I have other friends,” I said.

“They don’t know, though… do they?”

“They could,” I said.

“Oh,” Feejee said, very serious.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know we have ‘differences’, as you put it, about this kind of thing, but you’ve got to understand I’m going to do what I have to, to stay alive.”

“Well, then,” Feejee said. “You’ve got to understand that if we thought you were going to tell more people, we’d take our chances and make up a story to tell Amaranth or just play dumb about where you’ve gone.”

“Oh,” I said.

“And I’m pretty sure if I put my eyes on you and pinned you down and asked you, I’d be able to smell if you were lying, because you’re not very good at that,” Feejee said, very casually. It was a chilling reminder that however oblivious to some things Feejee might seem, that was due to cultural differences. She wasn’t stupid. She was smart enough to be accepted to an imperial university, from a culture that probably didn’t have schools in any sense but the collective noun.

“So, anyway,” she said. “Renting. That’s more like paying board in the dorms than buying, isn’t it?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. My legs were shaking. The bathwater felt tepid, all of a sudden.

“I guess I could try it for the summer to see how I like it,” she said. “Though I’d miss the chance to go home and, you know, everything that goes with that.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“How about you?”

“What?”

“What are your plans for the summer?”

“Very ill-defined,” I said. “But I’m probably going to get a job and stick around. I don’t really have anywhere else to go.”

“Oh,” Feejee said. “Is everybody doing that? Or are most people going home?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think it’s the usual thing to go back home for the summer, but I think a lot of the people here in Harlowe would have a long trip if they did that every year. I know Dee isn’t going home until she’s got her degree.”

“You know, she has so little scent that I didn’t know she was her the first time I saw her without her cloak,” Feejee said.

“She had her hood down at the floor meeting where we all introduced ourselves,” I said.

“Yeah, I didn’t pay a lot of attention then,” Feejee said. “It was mostly the humans and the semihumans that caught my attention… that’s kind of how I ended up hanging out with that bunch in the first place.”

I snorted, in spite of myself. Feejee had only ended up in the Leightons’ clique because they smelled the most like lunch? It was horrible to think about, but also funny.

“And they kept inviting me to do stuff, of course,” Feejee said. “That party was nice, by the way. What else have you guys got planned?”

“Um… nothing I can think of,” I said. “We’re all going to the Veil Ball, I think, though I’ve got no idea where I’m going to come up with a costume… um, it’s a costume party, obviously. That’s a party where people wear costumes. Do I have to explain what a costume is?”

“No, Rick told me about it. He talked about me dressing up as a sexy healer, for some reason,” she said. “I don’t see what’s sexy about healers, but whatever. I don’t even know if we’re still going to it together. He’s so weird about stuff, and Io doesn’t like him, so I’ve had to split my time. We’re doing a whole ‘date night’ thing tonight. When you go to the movies, does everybody have their own TV, or how does it work?”

“No, there’s a big stage at the front of the room and the illusions play out on it,” I said.

“Oh,” Feejee said. “That sounds kind of… wouldn’t individual TVs make more sense?”

“Why would they?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never been to the movies,” she said. “It just seems like only the people in front would be able to see.”

“It’s a big stage, and I think the floor’s usually sloped,” I said. “I haven’t been to the movies since I was like seven or eight, so…”

“You should come with us!”

“Feejee, it’s a date,” I said. “That’s not how they work.”

“You don’t go on dates with more than one person?”

“I might,” I said. “But only because I’m dating more than one person. You and I aren’t dating.”

“We could.”

“What happened to ‘I don’t want people to think I’m gay’?” I asked.

“I don’t!” she said. “But… I thought that meant sex!”

“Dating means sex,” I said. “Usually. Sometimes. It’s assumed to, I guess. Straight women don’t date each other.”

“Oh. What would you call it when two women go out?”

“Going out,” I said. “Only… not ‘going out’. Hanging out,” I said quickly. “It’s hanging out.”

“Even if you go somewhere and do stuff?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“But when Rick and I just stay in the dorms, that’s hanging out, too.”

“Yep,” I agreed.

There was silence while she processed all this.

“Your language kind of sucks, you know that?”

“Tell me about it,” I said, and I sat up to let the water out. I was getting a headache, and I figured it was time to end the conversation before I managed to confuse Feejee even further. “I’ll talk to you later,” I said. “I’ve got to go find something to eat.”

“Oh, that sounds like a good idea,” she said. “Mind if I tag along?”

I was actually booked solid with dates three nights in a row. I was looking forward to two out of three of these, and they were with people who were looking forward to them, too.

I was just too much of a nerd to ignore a thaumatology lecture, though.

We spent the period on the second principle of balance. As Professor Goldman explained, the precise formulation of this principle varied depending on who you asked, but many thaumatologists referred to it as the “no fair cheating” principle… especially those who’d been asked by department heads not to refer to it as the “nobody likes a smart ass” principle in class.

“It’s perhaps most commonly called the ‘principle of equivalency’,” he admitted. “The canonical example of this principle is traveling a very long distance, such as a thousand miles. Assuming no obstacles, even terrain, and that you can walk at a steady pace of five miles an hour indefinitely, this would take you two hundred hours and you would be a very impressive specimen living in a very boring plane.

“Assuming you don’t want to spend all that time, there are various ways you can cut corners to save time. You can ride a horse, for instance. If you are more magically inclined, though, you can use a spell of teleportation to shift your location directly, you can get involved with trickery involving hopping through dimensions and traveling a shorter distance then hopping back, you can fly through various means and contrivances… but no matter how you choose to do it, there are limits.

“A spell which provides self-directed levitation is perhaps the safest and most reliable means of transport. You will yourself up, you will yourself forward, you will yourself to turn or move to the side, and it happens. You simply move at up to a set velocity with very little delay in accelerating, stopping, or changing directions. A crash is next to impossible, and even if you are distracted or temporarily incapacitated, you’ll simply hover there… at least until the spell wears off. It’s very handy… however, while often faster than walking, a spell like this is rarely much faster than a galloping horse and requires tremendous amounts of power to sustain over long distances.

“A spell which gives some form of powered flight is likely to give you a much higher top speed for the same expenditure of power. However, you now have to deal with accelerating and deccelerating, forward momentum, turning, keeping level to the horizon, and all sorts of other fun things. A moment’s lapse of concentration can have you skimming the treetops or plowing into the ground. If you try traveling for, say, a thousand miles in that fashion, the odds of having an accident stack up considerably.

“Some of these factors can be mitigated by enchanting the spells into a device, but the expenditure in time, energy, and expensive components is considerable.

“Teleporting in its most basic form, simply shifting something from one location to another, is relatively complex even when it involves moving something a foot to the left. The amount of energy required and the chance for mishap increases with the magnitude of change effected, so while in one sense teleporting a thousand miles is instantaneous, you might as well have flown the distance in the time it can take for you to arrange it.

“There are people… archwizards and the like… who can zip around the continent on a fairly casual basis, but in the amount of time they’ve spent honing their abilities to that level, they might have walked anywhere in the world twenty times over.

“The various forms of cross-dimensional transit vary in terms of precision, time and energy required, chance of failure, and incidental hazards, but speaking very broadly: it all comes out in the wash. Their differing features might make one better for some situations than another, but you’re not going to find one that lets you blip out of existence here and safely and reliably reappear somewhere on the coast, no more drained than if you’d just lit up a room.

“Not that people don’t try. Some of the most interesting entries in the annals of weird mystical misfires have come from people trying to find some way to completely circumvent the inherent difficulties of overland travel. Research into enchanting a free-standing permanent dimensional gate, for instance, is completely banned within the Imperium, due to the nasty history of demon incursions which have resulted from it in the past.

“This is the principle of equivalency in action. There may be many magical routes to the same goal, but you’re not going to find one super secret special way of doing it that’s a whole lot better than the others, on the balance. You might find a way that avoids a problem that’s particularly pressing in one context, but it will most likely prove to have problems of its own.

“And if it doesn’t? That’s when you need to be very afraid. Remember on Monday, when I mentioned the difference between prescriptive and descriptive? Here’s where things start to get a little bit muddy. Remember how I didn’t call this the ‘nobody likes a smart ass’ principle? Here’s why.

“Every once in a great long while, somebody thinks they’ve found a solution to one of the great dilemmas in life. They’ve worked out a combination of spells or exploitable phenomena which should, it seems, grant instantaneous travel, or limitless power, or food for the whole world, or infinite wealth. They try it on a small scale, or in a version with limited applications, or as a one-time thing, and it seems to work… so then they try it again, full speed ahead and damn the ballistae.

“If they are very, very lucky, their miracle process will simply refuse to work. If they’re slightly less lucky, they’ll watch their work be destroyed and maybe walk away with a permanent disfigurement and a story to tell.

“If they are very, very unlucky… well, this is where a lot of the unique undead, cursed artifacts, and tainted lands come from. This is how magical abominations are created. People who reach too far, too fast.

“For the quiz on Friday, I’m going to give you some examples of different types of spells being used for similar purposes, and you’re going to have to list the factors which make them equivalent. We’ll go over some more examples, and talk about the ways in which innovative enchanters and wizards can tiptoe right up to the line and be fairly confident they’re not stepping over it. The nutshell version is: don’t be arrogant. Nobody likes a smart ass.”

The class remained one of my favorites. It was large enough that it seemed like it should have been impossible for there to be any real personal interaction between the students and the teacher, but Professor Goldman managed to make it feel as though his lecture was a conversation. He’d probably said the exact same things dozens of times before to other classes, but it sounded fresh and off-the-cuff.

I tried checking in with Ian at lunch time, but got no answer. Well, that wasn’t too surprising. At first, it was just Amaranth, Steff, Two, and I, but then Dee came and joined us. It was obvious that she was upset. She didn’t have a tray or any food, her lips were drawn thin, her hands were trembling, and maybe most tellingly, as soon as she sat down, all of our silverware bent in half.

“Is… uh… something wrong, Dee?” Amaranth asked, calmly straightening out her salad fork.

“Not only did I sleep through half of my first class,” Dee said, “but I found a copy of today’s Gazetteer had been slid under my door while I slumbered.”

“Oh, did they print your letter?” Amaranth asked. It was the same thing I was thinking, though she was very nonchalant about it. My mind was trying to come up with the worst things they could have done. Other than taking parts of it out of context or editing it to make it seem like she said something she hadn’t, I couldn’t come up with anything that would account for Dee’s spoon-bending rage.

“They did,” Dee said bitterly. “Inset on the front page, as part of an article with a banner proclaiming ‘Political Correctness Gone Berserk’. Apparently the idea that I be accorded basic respect is such an extraordinary proposition as to be worthy of a front page editorial about how even the ‘noble campus newspaper’, which is supposedly ‘the advance guard and last bastion of free speech’, must live in fear of the unreasonable demands of ‘small groups with loud voices’.”

“How does this garbage keep ending up on the front page?” I asked.

“Well, being a daily newspaper, they probably have a hard time coming up with cover stories,” Amaranth said. “That doesn’t really excuse anything, but it might explain it?”

“Yeah, the screaming headlines started about halfway through last year,” Steff said. “Nobody was reading the damned thing, because they’d fill it up with a whole lot of stuff that nobody cared about. Minutes of the senate meetings, results from Bingo Night… stuff like that.”

“I care about Bingo Night,” Two said.

“We know you do, sweetie,” Amaranth said.

“I don’t know how you can say that nobody cares about Bingo Night when I care about it,” Two said. “My friend Hazel does, too. She wants to be a caller.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry, Two,” Steff said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“That’s okay, I forgive you.”

“Well, anyway, they did a poll to see why nobody was reading and people said it was boring, so they started slapping up whatever struck them as interesting on the front page,” Steff said. “I don’t think it was quite what you’d call ‘tabloid-style’, but there was a lot of bitching about whatever bugged the editors, you know? Since hardly anybody started paying attention, though, they got away with it.”

“How do you know about that?” I asked. “Were you paying attention?”

“Not on purpose,” Steff said. “I was banging a scribal communications major and she wouldn’t shut up about it, how they were ruining the paper.”

“What are you going to do, Dee?” I asked.

“At the moment, I am far too angry to do anything,” Dee said. “I am instead weighing my options, which is why I came here instead of going back to the office or seeking out a crystal ball. It seems likely that another attempt to get my point across in writing will only provide another opportunity for my words to be misused and misconstrued.”

“How did they get a whole article out of one letter?” I asked.

“The actual subject of the article was an alleged ‘onslaught’ of backlash they received as a result of the article on Monday,” Dee said. “They held my concern up as an example of how even, and I quote, ‘the most trivial aspects of an article about life in Harlowe Hall are to be pulled apart and made grist for the mill of political correctness’. My request that they write my name according to the accepted conventions of my people was said to be ‘demanding special treatment’. My suggestion that a failure to respect the diverse cultures which are present on the campus might result in a breakdown of normal functioning was deemed ‘vague threats of chaos and disorder’.”

“Oh, shit,” I said, a horrible thought running through my head. “My lawyer sent them a letter to get them to lay off of me. I wonder if that was the rest of the ‘onslaught’?”

“That was just last night, though,” Amaranth said. “Would they have had time to come up with a whole new front page first thing in the morning?”

“I only gave them my letter early last evening,” Dee said. “And the whole article seemed to have been rather hastily contrived.”

“It really wouldn’t surprise me if the lawyer thing did have something to do with it,” Steff said. “Freedom of the scribes is serious business, you know. They don’t have the balls to go against a lawyer, but they can’t let it pass, so they just get pissy as hell. Last year, they spent a month labeling everything else—including the new vendor in the food court—a travesty of justice after they were told to lay off the buffing scandal.”

“I’m sorry, Dee,” I said. “I didn’t mean to get them all stirred up against you.”

“You should not apologize for protecting your own interests,” Dee said. “In any event, I think it is clear in retrospect that they never intended to give my concerns a fair hearing. You may have simply added fuel to the fire.” She rose to her feet and gathered her cloak about her. She had the folds of it wrapped so tightly she might have been wearing a dress. “I believe I shall head to the newspaper office immediately, while the lunch hour is still upon us. It seems more likely that I will find somebody there to speak with now than if I waited until the cessation of classes.”

“Why don’t you try explaining to them how worried you were about your mother?” Amaranth said. “Let them know how far you are from home, and how that affects you. Maybe if they understood why it was so upsetting, they might be more inclined to see things from your point of view?”

“Yes. I suppose that is possible,” Dee said. She relaxed a little bit as she considered this.

“Oh, and maybe instead of demanding to speak to an editor, you could ask if a reporter would like to hear your point of view?” Amaranth added. “That way, instead of coming across as telling somebody how to do their job, you’re giving them a chance to actually do it.”

“That suggestion is not without merit,” Dee said. “I suppose I should give them a chance to descend to my level before I lose my temper.”

“If they’re still a pack of assholes after you give them that chance, though, give them hell,” Steff said. “We’ll all be behind you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Definitely.”

“Do you not think it would be wiser to stay out of others’ battles while you are fighting your own?” Dee asked me.

“She asked her lawyer and he said it should be fine,” Amaranth said. “Anyway, you gave yourself sunburn coming out to support Mack. I don’t see how we could do any less.”

“I… thank you,” Dee said. She bowed very low, and held the bow. I think she might have actually been blushing, though it had mostly faded by the time she straightened up. “In any event, if it should come to that extremity again, I think I will be making my vigil indoors. Goodbye, my friends, and wish me luck.”

“Goodbye, Dee!” Two said. “Good luck!”

“Good luck,” Amaranth said.

Dee swept away. As soon as she was out of the lunch room, though, Steff started snickering and then burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?” I asked, more than a little annoyed.

“Sorry, mental image,” Steff said. “It’s just, she might want to think twice about taking off her clothes inside the newspaper office.”

Still, I liked my thaumatology class, I’d missed a bunch of classes already, and it would be hypocritical of me not to go after telling Steff off for trying to get me to ditch classes with her before. Also, even if Steff couldn’t see her education as a path to a future career, my degree featured heavily in my life plans.

“Ah! Welcome back, Miss Mackenzie,” Professor Goldman called as I was making my way to the seat. “There was a quiz on Friday, which you may choose to make up, or you may use your remaining free pass on it. Since you weren’t here Wednesday, I wouldn’t make you take it today… just get the notes from somebody and then see me during my office hours any time this week.”

“Thank you,” I said, nodding. I would definitely take him up on that. There was no sense blowing my free one hundred percent on a regular quiz this early in the semester. I might actually need it later.

I could also tell him about my prefered form of address. I didn’t really feel like shouting it out in the lecture hall. Not with a teacher I liked and respected.

“This week, we’re going to be talking about a couple of rules called the Principles of Balance,” Goldman said, beginning his lecture. “Well, three rules. It’s a very modern sort of couple.” He paused for laughter that didn’t really come. “But before we get too far into that, we need to take a moment to talk about the difference between prescriptive and descriptive. A lot of people don’t really grasp this, and they come out of classes like this one knowing the rules and theories but not actually knowing their proper application.

“The point is easiest to illustrate with an example. Imagine you’re a big, strong, fierce warrior type—imagine hard—living in a small village and one of the villagers looks at you and says, ‘Nobody in this village can defeat you.’ That proclamation is descriptive. There is nobody in the village, at that point in time, who is able to defeat you. With me so far?”

He paused and looked around the room to see if his words were sinking in.

“Ah! The blank stare, the universally recognized symbol for ‘yes’,” he said. “Now, on the other hand, if the skies should part and a divinity should come to earth and say, ‘I, a divinity, proclaim that from this day forward, nobody in this village can defeat you,’ that is prescriptive. The same words: ‘Nobody in this village can defeat you.’ Different meaning. You don’t have to be a divine being to make that sort of proclamation… but it helps. The death curse of a dwarven king, faerie folk gathered in sufficient numbers… well, this is actually getting a bit off topic. My point in illuminating the difference between prescriptive and descriptive is to emphasize that the ‘rules’ under discussion are descriptive in nature… at least, most of the time. Got it? Blank stare. Good.”

He went to the board and scrawled the word “Scarcity” on it, with two slanted lines beneath it pointing to “General” and “Relative.”

“The first Principle of Balance, which we will be discussing today, is called the Principle of Scarcity,” he said. “Though, this one principle actually comprises two related ideas: General Scarcity and Relative Scarcity. General Scarcity is fairly simple: it’s easier to ‘magic up’ a rock than a diamond, or copper than silver or gold. This is mostly a descriptive observation. There are usually reasons why the rarer, more valuable substances are more difficult to acquire through magic. If you don’t care what kind of rock you’re getting, it’s pretty easy to make or get a hold of one through mystic means. If you’re looking for something specific, it gets more complicated and harder… especially if you want something like flawless quartz or strong granite. By the time you work your way up to decent quality diamonds, you’re almost better off mining the suckers. Similarly, silver and gold are both more mystically potent and elementally complex than copper, so of course they’re more difficult to manage. That, ladies and gentlemen, is General Scarcity.

“For Relative Scarcity, let’s use the example of water. Logically, it’s not a particularly scarce substance. It’s one of the four fundamental elements of the world, after all. So, let’s use the example of creating water to illustrate Relative Scarcity. Of course, ‘create’ is imprecise. You can conjure water from another location. You can invoke water that is present in other matter. You can summon water from the plane of such. You can transmute another substance into water. There’s probably other things you could do, but those are the most obvious.

“Now, let’s imagine two different wizards with sufficiently broad repertoires that they could each manage all of those feats and more. One lives on a houseboat in the middle of a giant lake, and the other lives in a sandstone hut in the middle of an arid desert.

“If the lake-dwelling wizard, for some reason, felt the need to conjure up a bucket of water, his spell wouldn’t have to go far to find it. If he wanted to invoke water out of the air, there’s plenty to go around. If he wants to summon it, the elemental affinity of the place will work strongly in his favor. Likewise if he’s going to start transmuting things: many objects in the environment will be sufficiently ‘watery’ to begin with to make this difficult task slightly easier.

“On the other hand, our friend in the desert is not so fortunate. His conjuration attempt is likely to fail unless he spends considerable time and energy maintaining the spell so it can locate some water in the first place. If he tries to invoke water from the air or the ground, he’ll have to push harder to gather up the minute quantities of water present. The affinities would be against summoning water, and transmuting something as un-watery as desert sand into water would be complex and time consuming.

“The practical effect of this should be obvious: those who have lots of water to begin with can get more by magic. Those who don’t, can’t. However, I have to stress again: descriptive, not prescriptive. If you give our floating friend a not-particularly-watery rock and ask him to invoke water from it, he’ll not have any easier a time doing that than the hermit in the hut… and if the hermit happens to spy a cloud floating overhead and decides to call rain from it, no heavenly force will intervene and go ‘Oops, sorry. No water magic in the desert.’ It’s the difficulty of finding an opportunity for water-making in the desert that the principle describes.”

The Principle of Scarcity was particularly interesting to me because of Dee’s talk about the harshness of life in the underlands. She’d first commented on the comparative ‘bounty’ of the surface during Two’s little dinner party, and her mention of the luxury of bathing sort of dovetailed with the professor’s example. The subterranean caverns and passageways which the underground elves roamed were a desert of sorts. With food and water hard to come by in the first place, magic would not be a cure-all.

It really wasn’t that surprising that Dee’s people were so devoutly religious, under the circumstances. Divine magic had its own inscrutable limitations, but apart from matters like sanctity, I don’t think they had as much to do with the immediate environment. During the early years of their exile beneath the ground, divine magic had probably been the only thing keeping the race alive many times.

While I mused on that, the professor was moving on to other examples of the Principle of Scarcity and its ramifications. It was, he mentioned, one of the reasons why experiments in using cheaper materials to mint money were doomed to fail… a subject that had been touched on in my history class. Gold was valuable in and of itself and was hard to produce by any means. A piece of junk metal with a picture of a king or emperor on it was just junk, and no harder to reproduce than any other scrap.

“There is a school of thought,” he said, “that if you had a completely non-magical society, you could use anything as money, even pieces of paper that would either represent a certain amount of gold or would simply have a set value by government fiat. As long as the design was complex enough to make copying by hand impossible, your ‘money’ could be treated as a valuable commodity in and of itself. I see you shaking your heads out there.”

Indeed, there was a lot of mumbled disagreement and incredulous looks around the room. I understood why… it was a ridiculous idea. Even if it couldn’t be duplicated, why would people accept scraps of paper in place of actual gold?

“It’s really not that far-fetched an idea,” the professor insisted. “Right now, a large amount of our ‘money’ exists as marks in a ledger book or in the form of promisory notes with a magically-verifiable seal or signature on them. That’s to say nothing of charged cards. Metalless money is all over the place. The only thing that stops it from being completely ubiquitous is the ubiquity of magic… magic and the Principle of Scarcity.”

He had some points, though I didn’t think it necessarily followed that people would accept these things outright as a replacement for gold instead of just a proxy for it, but since it was a hypothetical aside it didn’t bother me that much.

All in all, it was an interesting class, as always. He probably could have just stood up and said, “These are the Principles of Balance, and these are their definitions. They’ll be on the test.” There were probably teachers who did just that. He spent an entire class going through variations on one principle to make sure we actually understood it.

Steff didn’t join us for lunch, just as she’d sort of hinted. Neither did Two. I was worried, but Amaranth told me her class was having a party. The presentation she’d mentioned was apparently part of it.

“When did she say that?” I asked her as we headed over to the student union.

“While we were decorating yesterday,” Amaranth said. “We talked about a lot of things, actually.” She shook her head sadly. “Do you know, she told me she doesn’t care if she never has sex again. Can you imagine?”

“Given her history? I think I can,” I said.

“Oh, look, it’s Dee!” Amaranth said, waving at the cloaked figure waiting in the shade of the overhang in front of the union. “I guess she’s joining us again. That’s nice.”

It was hard to tell if Dee felt any embarrassment over the breakfast conversation, even once we got inside and she lowered her cowl. Her face was pretty impassive.

“It still feels odd, not blessing my food before I eat it,” she remarked once we’d all sat down with our trays.

“You could always say a quick prayer over it before coming back to the table,” Amaranth said.

“That strikes me an ideal prelude to an unfortunate accident,” Dee said. “I think I shall simply continue to adjust. I believe this is one of the blessings of the college environment: it allows us to experience new situations which we would not otherwise be likely to encounter. If my background makes me doubly blessed in this regard, I shall simply accept it.”

“I think you’re right,” I said.

“Oh?” Dee said.

“If new experiences weren’t a blessing, I wouldn’t find them so painful,” I said.

Dee almost smiled at this. Apparently, more open and expressive Dee was here to stay. Since she was in a good mood, and Steff wasn’t around to sidetrack the discussion, I decided to confirm what I thought I’d worked out that morning, and maybe get a little more context for it.

“Um, is it okay if I ask a question?” I said. “About what you said at breakfast?”

“So long as you are respectful and it does not directly involve my childhood eating habits, I do not mind,” Dee said.

“The Dehsah you mentioned… is that the same…”

“Dehsah is both my former nursemaid and my current lover, yes,” Dee said.

“Like I was saying before, I think it’s wonderful that you were able to parlay that sort of close relationship you must have had as a child into an even closer one when you became an adult,” Amaranth said.

“I would be inclined to agree,” Dee said.

“But… doesn’t anybody find that weird?” I asked. “I mean, is that kind of thing common in your culture?”

“The age difference does not mean as much in elven society,” Dee said. “If I were to show you an image of my mother and my great-great grandmother without their hoods, I doubt you would be able to tell which is which. With births sometimes spaced out over decades or centuries, the concept of ‘generations’ as something that has meaning across family lines does not exist.”

“Okay, I guess that makes sense,” I said. I thought about asking how old Dehsah was, but I figured that would be rude.

“Though my studies and temple duties often kept us apart for several shifts at a time, I cannot remember a time in my life when I was separated from Dehsah for this long,” Dee said. “I wonder if…”

“What?” Amaranth prompted when Dee trailed off.

Dee shook her head.

“It is nothing,” she said. “An idle speculation into the unknowable motivations of my goddess. In any event, I worry for my pretty Dehsah. I have other lovers… an other lover… but he is much more self-sufficient. Darek is like a hardy fungus, taking hold wherever he lands and thriving in any environment.”

“I don’t suppose there’s any chance you could have brought them with you?” Amaranth asked.

“They both have duties,” Dee said. “Darek especially. He’s in the house guard, and on track to the bottom of the pillar of command. We expect him to be chosen as captain in the next few cycles. Even if it were possible for him to take an extended leave now, it would not be prudent. He hand-picked my escorts to the surface, though.”

“That’s sweet,” Amaranth asked. “And Dehsah?”

“Dehsah was not made for arduous journeys,” Dee said. “The risks would be too great to be allowed.”

“What does she do?

“For the past two thousand some cycles, Dehsah’s reared the children of my family line,” Dee said. “In between and before that… various duties.”

“Two thousand?” I repeated.

“I told you, age differences are not as important,” Dee said.

“Yeah, and if you meant like where one person’s six hundred and the other’s eight hundred, I’d agree,” I said. “But, over a thousand years old and hooking up with a thirty-year-old?”

“Baby…” Amaranth said warningly.

“The only respect in which our ages are relevant is that we are both adults,” Dee said. “And that is all the more I will say on the subject.”

“That’s all anyone will say on the subject,” Amaranth said.

“Sorry,” I said. “It just… it’s weird to me. I mean, if she’s been like a servant or whatever for so long, don’t you worry that she might just be using you? Or that other people might think that?”

“I would say the fact that Dehsah occupied her former position without complaint for so long is a strong indicator that no such motive exists,” Dee said. “My mother’s consort, Durilla, expressed such a concern early on in our relationship, but others, with more receptive mental gifts, have confirmed that her suspicions are groundless. Not that this stops her from pestering my mother and the matriarch with… I apologize. I should not be subjecting you to my family squabbles.”

“That’s okay,” Amaranth said. “It’s interesting. We’re all living so close together but we all know so little about each other, really. It’s nice to see the person under the hood sometimes.”

“Indeed,” Dee said.

After lunch, I had just enough time to tell Amaranth that Viktor had set the time for my punishment and receive a few vague reassurances and a reminder of her love before she had to run and get ready for her next class. I, on the other hand, didn’t have anything to do until after three.

It was going to be a long afternoon.

I awoke Wednesday morning feeling much more like one of my run-of-the-mill periods. A little cramped, but not as bad as the day before. Or maybe I was just getting used to it… that was kind of a depressing thought.

Breakfast was blessedly uneventful. Afterwards, I found myself not looking forward to my basic thaumatology lecture with Professor Goldman for the first time ever. How would the students who’d had to come in to take the test on Monday react?

As it turned out, none of them said anything to me… in fact, they didn’t even look at me. Some of the students who had originally sat near me were back in their proper seats. Some weren’t. I couldn’t be sure, but some might have been gone completely. They could have dropped the class on Friday.

The professor said nothing, but went into his lecture. Maybe he’d let them permanently change seats. I supposed he must have figured he’d disrupted his class as much as he could to make a point that had nothing to do with magical theory.

Thaumatology necessarily touched on many aspects of magical practice, overlapping with many fields of study. Today we were going over life magic, a subject that had never much caught my imagination before.

Now it interested me for three reasons. One, it was Amaranth’s chosen major. Two, it impacted Two’s existence. Three, from what Amaranth had said about periods and energy channeling, it was probably affecting me, too.

Two breathed, ate, drank, slept, and peed like a human being. She didn’t need to. Or rather, she could have been created without these needs.

In another example of the cruel irony of her existence, she had probably been made more human in order to serve her master as a better piece of equipment. A magical object which expends magical energy can be made to replenish its stores from ambient energy, but a living being can produce their own.

The fact that Two was alive in a broader sense than “animated” gave her (and thus, anybody who controlled her) more power than she could have accessed as an unliving golem.

This was life magic.

As Professor Goldman explained at the beginning of class, all life was magical, but that was like saying that all matter was elemental. In a strict sense, all matter was, but it was more useful to speak only of particularly pure examples of a single element as being “elemental.”

“Therefore,” he said, “when we speak of ‘magical life’, it must be understood that we are speaking only of life with the capacity for an excess of magical energy… life that can, in the common parlance, ‘do magic’ without recourse to an external energy source. In theory, all magical life is intelligent, but not all intelligent life is magical. Intelligence is a necessary component, but not the only one.

“Some of you are thinking ‘Why are we talking about life magic? It’s boring and lame.’ Frankly, as a thaumatology lecturer, those are high on my list of criteria for inclusion, but others of you are thinking ‘Why are we talking about life magic? Isn’t this class supposed to be about the origins and nature of magic in general?’ That’s a slightly better objection.

“Imagine for the moment that there were no wizards… no magical life of any kind. No enchanters making magical items. What would the world be like? Magical items can seem to tap into the background magical energy, but what if there were no magical items? It wouldn’t matter if there were any magical energy or not, in that case. We’d never know about it.

“This leads us into the biocentric theory of magic, which states that magical life does not take advantage of magic… it creates it,” Goldman said. “We create magic. Now, of course, we can talk about matters of degree, but the fact is that almost all people of almost all races have some excess magical capacity. Maybe not enough that they can actively use it, but they have some.

“Consider that as the world’s population of intelligent life has continued to grow to levels that have been unprecedented throughout history, the use of magic has also increased, at a proportionally higher rate than the population growth.”

He paused to let that sink in.

“Of course,” he said, “a lot of that can be explained by advances in the state of art, and the current booming population is more likely the effect of our level of magical advancement than the cause, but it’s still something to think about.”

I actually wasn’t that interested in biocentrism. It seemed to me like taking some things that seemed pretty obvious: the more people there were, the more wizards there would be… without enchanters, there’d be no magic items… and so on, and on the basis of this made a bunch of wild conclusions that probably vastly overestimated our own importance in the grand scheme of things.

Yeah, it wouldn’t matter so much whether there was ambient energy or not if we didn’t have magic items that used it, but not mattering wasn’t the same thing as not existing.

“It’s an interesting theory,” Goldman said. “Like most of the things we deal with in this class, it’s unproven and perhaps ultimately unprovable… it’s merely one perspective from which we may approach the study of magic. It’s not personally my favorite perspective, but it’s the only one that lets me stand next to the lectern and talk about pooping.”

He used this to launch into a description of various “life functions”, which were the hallmarks of living things. These ties to the cycle of life and death, this participation in the mortal world, were also an essential component, along with intelligence. They were the definition of “life” in the phrase “magical life.”

“Even elves, ‘those who ageth not’, untroubled by sickness or modesty, are as mortal as we are when it comes to eating and pooping,” Goldman said. I found myself catching on the word “we”, and had to remind myself that he wasn’t racist. He was simply addressing an audience of non-elves. “If this were not the case, they would be incapable of working arcane magic as we know it.”

Of course, I didn’t have to perform all of those functions, and Amaranth performed even less of them. Well, she ate, but her body didn’t use food the way a mortal’s did. I don’t think she actually needed to sleep, either, though she seemed to enjoy it. That might have had something to do with the fact that in her dreams there were no mother goddesses to tell her what she could and could not have sex with.

We had our own energy sources, but the professor was getting to that.

“Of course, some of the most powerful mystical beings you can think of are not mortal in this sense,” Professor Goldman said. “But invariably… or at least, as far as we know right now… all of these creatures get their energy from another source. It’s divine. It’s infernal. It’s elemental. In other words, extraplanar. The nymphs on campus may be able to do some pretty amazing things with their tongues, but they could not perform even the simplest feat of arcane magic. They are not ‘magical life’. Rumor has it that they’re intelligent, and they’re very intimately tied to the living world, but they lack the essential ‘livingness’ of more mortal creatures.”

Now this interested me. I knew Amaranth’s healing magic was divine. I’d assumed her connection to her goddess would make divine magic easier for her. But, being incapable of using arcane energy? That was news to me.

I knew nymphs came by their goddess’s divine power more directly than a mortal worshipper. Amaranth prayed simply to communicate with her goddess or as a matter of respect. She hadn’t needed to pray to heal Ian’s nose after I busted it. She’d simply… opened a gate.

Presumably, as long as the energy was hers to shape, she could channel it in nearly any way an arcanist could… it would just have a different “flavor”, the same way a full demon’s magic was irredeemably infernally tainted.

That was the one area where half-demons were “lucky”: being the actual product of a union between a demon and a human, a “mortal” race, we had the trait of being “magical life” even if we were missing some of the outward signs of it.

Though, if Professor Goldman was correct about nymphs–and I had no reason to think he wasn’t–Amaranth could never safely do magic around me. I didn’t know how I felt about that. Surely she knew it. She was studying life magic, after all.

The lecture gave me more to think about than I’d expected. Professor Goldman never did get around to talking about how magic use might be affected by the particularly feminine life cycle I was undergoing. It was probably outside his comfort zone.

“Is it true that you can’t do arcane magic?” I asked Amaranth at lunch. It was her, Two, me, Steff, and Celia… though Steff barely seemed to be there.

“Yes,” Amaranth said. “I’m not mortal enough.”

“Does that bother you?”

She shrugged.

“I’d like to be able to heal or protect you if you were in trouble,” she said. “But does it bother you that you can’t fly?”

“Why would I be able to fly?” I asked.

She nodded.

“See?” she said.

I didn’t.

“Can you fly?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“I just meant, I don’t miss doing things I couldn’t do in the first place,” she said.

It seemed to me like Amaranth frequently seemed to miss doing things she’d never been able to do… though maybe there was a difference between “capable of” and “being allowed to.” Amaranth knew she physically could perform certain acts her goddess had outlawed, and being told she couldn’t was maddening to her.

I pushed my plate away from me and put my head down. I was developing a headache and I didn’t want to be thinking this hard. I wanted to be on her lap.

“Are you taking your herbs?” Amaranth asked, stroking my hair.

“I’m feeling better today,” I said.

“Did you sleep well last night?”

“I slept okay,” I said.

“I like sleeping with Mack on her period,” Two said. “She doesn’t masturbate in her sleep when she’s wearing a pad.”

Celia snorted. She had a high-pitched snort. Something to do with her tiny nostrils and lack of a proper nose, I think.

I repressed the urge to lift my head and glare at Two. Well, she was still expressing preferences without prompting. That was a good thing, right?

“Now, Two,” Amaranth said, and from the way she paused after saying the name, I guessed I’d missed Two telling her she did not would like to be called Twoey. “There is nothing wrong with masturbating, whether awake, or asleep. It’s perfectly natural.”

“There is nothing wrong with it but I do not like it,” Two said. “And I am not supposed to touch my woman parts unl…”

“Can we please not talk about this?” I asked, lifting my head.

“Okay,” Two said.

“Well, baby,” Amaranth said, “maybe if you masturbated when you were awake, you wouldn’t disturb Two when you’re asleep? I know you know your way around down there, but I could give you tips or lessons or…”

“Amaranth,” I said. “Please.”

“Oh, sorry!” Amaranth said. “I just… I’m trying to listen, baby, I really am, but part of me keeps thinking if you were just more in tune with your body’s needs…”

“Come on, some of us are trying to eat,” Celia said, though she’d swallowed the contents of her plate within a minute of sitting down. “Or at least, keep down the squirrel we devoured on the way here.”

“You ate a squirrel?” I asked.

“You eat blood,” Celia said. “I was hungry, it was there, and I haven’t had a live meal in weeks. And unless you all want to see what it looks like, can we please stop the talk about playing with nasty mammal parts?”

“What, you mean like the nasty parts of the mammal you’ve got in your stomach?” Steff said.

I looked at her in mild surprise… it was the most words I’d heard her string together all day. She had half a smile, too. That made me smile.

Celia’s reaction was a bit different. Her throat spasmed, bulging weirdly, and she locked her jaw tight shut and ran for the bathroom.

“Steff,” Amaranth said reprovingly. “That wasn’t very nice.”

It wasn’t nice, but it was Steff, and that made me happy.

It was good to see that she was still there, under the potion fog. I knew it had only been a day… and I knew she was in counseling besides… but I hoped she would eventually adjust better to the potion, or that they’d adjust the potion for her. If this was somebody’s idea of treating her, it wasn’t enough.