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

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

This means she’s dreaming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you try what I said?”

“No,” Two says. “I did not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That isn’t very funny,” Two says.

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

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

“And who told you to sweep?”

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

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

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

“Miss Ruth says that practice makes perfect.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How will you know when you’re done?”

“When I’ve swept the whole place.”

“But it’s endless.”

“Yes,” Two says, and she smiles.

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

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

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

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

“You aren’t supposed to hate anybody.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah,” Moeli said. “I did.”

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

“I do, too,” Moeli says.

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

“No shit?” Moeli says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hello, Two,” he says.

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

“Sweeping? I thought you were dreaming.”

“I can do both,” Two says.

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

“I know,” she says.

“I’m a teddy bear,” he adds.

“Yes.”

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

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

And onward she sweeps.

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

Nobody else sees. Nobody else knows.

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

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

How much longer can this go on?

How long before the school’s overrun?

Something must be done.

Something must be done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some dreams are simpler than others.

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

Feejee dreams of blood in the water.

Iona dreams of blood.

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

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

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

“Hey, hey Two!”

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

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

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

“You never dream about them here, either.”

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

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

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

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

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

“But have you considered the ramifications of that?”

“No,” she says.

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

“Yes,” she says.

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

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

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

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

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

No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her mother is a nekoyokai.

“Mother… you’re…?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But you are.”

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

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

It’s the war again.

The bridge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about The?”

“She bugs out, too.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Need to know basis.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She knows what’s coming next.

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

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

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

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

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

And so the dream went.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” Two repeats decisively.

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

“You are mistaken.”

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

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

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

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

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

“This is not rare,” Scylla said, shaking her head in disdain. “I knew they would fuck it up. I knew it. This thing is fucking burned beyond all recognition.”

“That looks pretty fucking rare to me,” her boyfriend said, before swallowing the bite of chicken sandwich he’d just taken. “I mean, what do you consider rare? Bleeding?”

“Twitching,” she said. “Of course, I’ll make an exception if the meat’s high enough quality… there was this great little steakhouse down the road from the aerie, right across the border, you know? Catered to more ogres and folk than humans. They did hand-cut steaks, aged for six months…”

“That’s, uh, a little riper than I like my meat,” he said.

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t believe how tender they were.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Jimmy said.

Scylla pushed her plate away.

“So, what, now you’re not going to eat it?” Jimmy asked.

“I didn’t even want hamburger,” she said.

“Then what did you order it for?”

“They don’t cook chicken to order.”

“So you ordered it but you don’t want it,” Jimmy said.

“I’ll pay for it,” Scylla said.

“No, I’ll pay for it,” Jimmy said. “I’m just trying to wrap my head around this, the logic of ordering something you don’t like… knowing you’re not going to eat it…”

“I would have eaten it if they’d cooked it right!”

“But you said you knew they’d fuck it up,” Jimmy said. “Listen, I’m not just bitching at you, I’m trying to show you a pattern. You do this all the time. You set yourself up…”

“I do not set myself up, I’m an omen of ill fortune,” Scylla said. “I’m already set up. I am a living breathing set-up.”

“It’s not some shitty destiny that made you order something you were confident would suck,” Jimmy said.

“Yours came out okay.”

“Like you said, they only cook chicken one way.”

“Right, and that happens to be the way that you like it,” Scylla said.

“Yeah. Fully. But that’s not because I’m lucky or you’re not,” Jimmy said. “It’s because I’m a human and we’re right the fuck in the middle of Humansville, population me. I can walk into any store and get a shirt that looks good on me and I can walk into any restaurant and get food that won’t turn my stomach or eat my face off. That’s just the way it is.”

“So, it isn’t lucky for you that you were born into a huge empire that dominates most of the continent while I got stuck out in the badland boonies?”

“Well, not particularly lucky,” Jimmy said. “There’s a whole bunch of us. Anyway, it’s all situational. Here and now, you can’t get a burger you like, but if I went back home with you for the Feast of Plentitude, I’d probably be starved before we got back.”

“No, I’m pretty sure you’d be stuffed before I got back,” Scylla said. Her mouth, with its protuberant and slightly hooked upper jaw, didn’t have the flexibility and animation of a human’s, but she smiled with her eyes.

“Ha fricking ha,” Jimmy said. “And that’s exactly why we’re not going to your place for the holidays.”

“I guess that makes it your place,” Scylla said.

“Yeah, I actually thought I’d wait until they finish paying for my classes before I tell my parents I’m with a harpy.”

“So you expect us being together in four years?”

“I don’t expect anything,” Jimmy said. “That’s why nothing ever surprises me.”

“Huh? Wouldn’t that mean everything always surprises you?”

“No, surprise is what you feel when your expectations are shattered,” he said. “For instance, my mother expects that I’m going to come home one day with a beautiful red-headed human girl. Because she expects this, if I showed up with a black-plumed harpy or a human boy, she’d go completely orcshit. If she didn’t have those expectations, her reaction would be more like, ‘oh’.”

“Why a red-head?”

“Because guys are supposed to end up with girls like their mothers,” Jimmy said.

“Your mother has red hair?”

“So did I.”

“Did you dye it?”

“No, that was a side-effect of soul-leeching,” Jimmy said. “But I let my mom think I dyed it. Same reason I’m not telling her about you. You don’t volunteer unpleasant information to somebody in a position of power over you.”

“You’re so smart, Jimmy,” Scylla said.

“Well, yeah… but, I mean, I just stop and think about these things,” Jimmy said. “Some kids write home to tell their parents to tell them they’re gay, or they’re becoming an Arkhanite, or they want to major in Illusions and then act like some terrible fate’s befallen them when they get an earful. What did they think would happen? Life’s unpredictable and dangerous enough as it is… you never just stand back and hand it a weapon.”

“See, you’re lucky you’re so smart,” Scylla said, hitting the table with her hand. “I would never have stopped to think like that before I ordered that stupid burger.”

Jimmy sighed.

“Babe, all you have to do to ‘be smart’ is quit thinking that way,” he said.

“But it doesn’t matter whether I’m smart or not because my luck…”

“You know, never mind,” Jimmy said. “Forget it.”

“Fine,” Scylla said. “So where do you want to go to get holed?”

“Pierced,” Jimmy corrected.

“Yeah, that. How about The Ring?”

“Nah, they’ve got some sweet pieces but I wouldn’t want to get pierced there,” Jimmy said. “And most places won’t sell you body jewelry unless you get it done right there, so their rep doesn’t get hit for somebody else’s bad service.”

“So what, don’t you want Caron to pierce you?” Scylla asked. “She looks like she does it a lot.”

“Have you ever heard the saying ‘When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail?’” Jimmy asked. Scylla stared at him blankly. “Okay, well, it’s a saying. And I think whoever invented it was talking about a dwarf… a dwarf with a great, big, heavy hammer the size of my head.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “We’ll poke around the bazaar until we find some place.”

“Where’d you get the rest of your stuff done?”

“Back home. But I had to work my ass off this summer and it was easier to find a job without any more metal in my face.”

“Why did you have to work so much if your parents are paying for everything?”

“They pay for everything essential,” Jimmy said. “But I won’t get to take my work home at the end of the year unless I pay the cost of the materials to the school.”

“So… you don’t think showing up at home with a zombie wouldn’t shock your mother’s sensibilities?”

“I won’t be sleeping with it,” Jimmy said.

“You don’t sleep with me.”

“That’s because you sleep standing up. In a tree. A hundred feet in the air. But you know what I mean.”

“You really think your mother will let you keep a zombie?”

“Why? You don’t even know my mother,” Jimmy said.

“No, but we just had this whole little conversation about you tip-toeing around her…”

“I don’t ‘tip-toe’! I manage the distribution of information.”

“Oh, you know that freak storm that was on the news?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “I kind of wish we’d been there for it.”

“I don’t,” Scylla said. “I sleep up in a tree, remember?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Well, anyway… you remember that dwarf storm giant who tried to go out for the team and when the coaches told her they couldn’t take her because she’d bankrupt their point pool she started crying?”

“Yeah, you’re going to have to narrow it down for me some more,” Jimmy said.

“Oh, shut up. Anyway, that was her, having another little tantrum.”

“Shit,” Jimmy said. “What about?”

“Well, I heard from Gladys, who heard from Trina, who heard…”

“Okay, here’s another patented Jimmy Jurgens Life Tip,” Jimmy said. “Anytime you say the phrase ‘heard from’ three times in the same sentence, you’re about to say something that nobody actually needs to hear.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Scylla said. She pulled her rapidly cooling burger back towards her and started picking it apart.

“So…?” Jimmy asked after a minute of silence.

“So what?”

“You were saying something about the giant girl. Giantess. Whatever.”

“’Whatever’ is right. You didn’t want to hear so I’m not going to say.”

“I was just poking a little fun at how you said it. I didn’t say I didn’t want to hear.”

“Okay, well, apparently she signed up for the arena…”

“Of course,” Jimmy said. “That’s where everybody goes when they can’t hack the field.”

“Listen to you,” she said. “When we got conscripted you were all, ‘this is bullshit’.”

“It is bullshit,” Jimmy said. “But it’s bullshit I can hack.”

“Well, anyway Trina heard from one of the other gladiators that she—the giant girl—bumped into a friend of yours wandering around the arena cellars.”

“That’s ridiculous slander,” Jimmy said. “I’m a practitioner of the darkest arts. I don’t have friends… only pawns, and enemies… who will become pawns once their pitiful little lives have been ended. How’d that sound?”

“You shouldn’t use passive voice when you’re talking about killing people. It kind of ruins the menace.”

“Uh… plausible deniability?” Jimmy said. “Anyway, back to the story.”

“Okay, the giant girl…”

“Are we going to keep calling her that?”

“Do you remember her name?” Scylla asked. “I mean, what are we supposed to call her? ‘Tiny’?”

Jimmy laughed.

“Heh,” he said. “We almost should.”

“Anyway, I guess she bumped into your enemy,” Scylla said. “Though… considering how much you talk about her…”

“Oh, quit being so coy and spit it out,” Jimmy said. “Who was it?”

“Steff Johnson,” Scylla said.

“Fucking Steff. Last time I talked to her alone in the lab, she had her daggers out and she was twirling them. Like, balancing the points on her fingers and shit. She was trying to act all casual like she didn’t even know she was doing it, but she was totally trying to intimidate me. People do that all the time when they know you’re a skirmish caster, you know… they won’t pick a fight with the warriors but if you use magic they think they can score Big Dog points for pushing around someone on the team.”

“Were you intimidated?”

“Not a bit,” Jimmy said. “She likes to think she’s some bad ass mistress of evil or something, but take away her half-ogre boyfriend and her pet demon and she’s just another elfblood bastard coasting through life.”

“Okay, well, anyway, she came on to little whats-her-face, who didn’t realize what she was saying until she went back into the locker rooms and started telling the other fighters about it.”

“If it was Steff, she probably was being weird,” Jimmy said. “I don’t think it really reflects all that poorly on somebody if they don’t recognize what Steff considers flirting.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Scylla said. “But back in the badlands, we say that thunder means somebody told a giant a joke three days ago.”

“Dude, not funny,” Jimmy said.

“What?”

“Racial jokes.”

“Oh, shut up,” she said. “You’re a human.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means when you act all sensitive about race, it’s comes off as an act even if it’s not,” Scylla said. “Which it is. You even said you don’t feel bad about being born into the dominant whatever.”

“I don’t,” Jimmy said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m racist. Okay, well, the next time you see our weepy would-be warrior woman, why don’t you try sharing your ‘humor’ with her and see if she thinks it’s funny.”

“I would, but I don’t have that kind of time,” Scylla said, and Jimmy cracked up. “See? You think it’s funny.”

“A little, but that doesn’t make it right.”

“Let’s not talk about this.”

“Okay,” Jimmy said. “So when she found out she’d been hit on by a dick girl, she… what? Got pissed off about it?”

“No, it was when the locker room burst out laughing when she said ‘All I did was explain how I love to polish my spear…’, or something like that,” Scylla said. “She, uh, stormed out after that, and the next thing anybody knew the campus was getting hammered.”

“Shit… well, there’s another reason not to make fun of a storm giant for you.”

“At least not in front of anybody who’ll explain it to them.”

Infernal interference… what were the odds that this was a coincidence, when my pitchfork was on the loose? I decided it was probably pretty good… nothing Dee had said about the entity suggested that the thing was any kind of a long-term planner.

I’d asked Steff to come along because I wanted to give her some support, but I really would have appreciated some support from her when it was time to board the carriage into town. I knew that it was as simple as just climbing in… I’d never been challenged or repelled or ambushed by some authoritative person telling me I was doing everything wrong, but this would be my first time making the trip alone.

And joy of joys, it turned out I wasn’t making it alone. There were five people waiting for the eleven-thirty trip, and I was sort of on a schedule so I couldn’t wait for the next one. Not that the traffic was likely to decrease any as we approached noon.

I tried not to stand too close to the gaggle of girls who were waiting right on the painted line where the coach would pull up, but the conversations still died down as eyes flitted in my direction. I thought I recognized two of them from the lecture I’d just come from.

“You know, I’m going to talk to you later,” a girl said, her face towards her friend but her eyes on me. “I don’t feel like a ride into town right now.”

“Yeah, me, too,” another one said, and they and a third girl all peeled off from the group and dashed back towards the campus proper.

The girl they’d been talking to gave me a murderous look, like it was my fault, and I realized in shock that her hair was actually black and gray feathers, the arms hidden under the poncho-like coat she was wearing were actually wings, and she had taloned feet sticking out from the bottom of her ill-fitting black jeans. Apparently I was so socially toxic I could drive off a harpy’s friends. Nice. She wasn’t anybody I’d seen around Harlowe, though… maybe she was more integrated into human society.

“Well, anyway,” the other person standing with her said to her. At a glance, I’d taken him to be a slightly dyke-ish girl rather than a skinny guy with eyeliner and a lot of jewelry. “Like I was saying before, I didn’t get a good look… Steff was doing her work experience when they brought him in, and she said he was all fucked up.”

I bit back an urge to blurt out “Oh, you know Steff?” There was no doubt it was my Steff he was talking about… the guy looked like a necromancer, and he had to be talking about the unfortunate student who’d been killed on campus. It wasn’t the time to try to make friends, though… not when his girlfriend was still watching me like a vulture, not even reacting to his gruesome gossip.

Actually, that was probably racist.

The carriage arrived. I climbed into the opposite seat from the happy couple, slid all the way into the far corner and pulled out my mirror, looking forward to a long and awkward silence.

I was disappointed.

“So you’re the girl who lost us the first skirmish match,” the harpy said once we were underway.

“Oh, don’t start,” the guy said.

“I think the team had something to do with that, actually,” I said.

“Hey, fuck you!” she said, giving me a gesture that can only be described as “flipping the bird”. “We worked our pinfeathers off, but it hardly mattered since you gutted our squad.”

“Wait… you’re telling me you are on the skirmish team?” I asked. “You?”

“Death from above, bitch,” she said. “Only, without Belinda to draw their attention, the archers turned me into a shish kebab. And, just so you know… they can’t mock falling.”

What could I say to that? It sucked for her, but I wasn’t ready to apologize for the fact that she’d chosen to put herself in a position where people would be trying to blast her out of the real sky with illusionary weapons. Belinda or no Belinda, the risk was still there… I couldn’t imagine there were rules against putting a slow fall spell on flying fighters. In fact, since they couldn’t mock falling, it was surprising that they didn’t require it.

Maybe that was just more anthropocentrism, though. Humans couldn’t fly without magic. No wizard mastered flying spells without learning how to float and levitate themselves first, and they would tend to keep spells like those in place as a basic safety precaution as they set about learning to fly.

Hell, for all I knew, it was a requirement, but when the coaches or captains went around with a checklist of who was casting what, it just slipped their mind to take care of the natural flyer.

“Hey, did you hear me, dummy?” the harpy said. “Don’t go staring off into space when I’m talking to you. What do you have to say for yourself?”

“Ignore her, babe,” her boyfriend said. “She’s not worth your time. Everybody knows she’s an idiot.”

I decide to take his advice, even though it hadn’t been aimed at me. We only had to put up with each other’s presence for a little while and then we’d be going our separate ways. Hopefully we’d end up heading back to campus at different times, and then I’d never have to see either of them again.

He didn’t know me, and neither did the “everybody” who’d told him I was an idiot. As for his fine feathered friend, she was just some flying jock who had to find somebody to scapegoat for her starring turn as the Amazing Falling Pincushion.

This time, I was ready for the intrusive spells when we crossed the threshold, if only because I’d ended up staring fixedly out the carriage window. The anticipation was horrible, but it didn’t seem so bad when I was expecting it.

Also, my carriagemate jumped off the seat and squawked, which I had to admit was kind of funny. I might have been inclined to feel sympathy for her, since we were both subjected to the same unfair scrutiny, but she was such a bitch that I had to bury my mouth against my sleeve to keep from laughing.

The doors were only on one side of the carriage, so I let them get off first in order to avoid a log jam. The sky skirmisher threw a parting shot over her shoulder as she awkwardly descended.

“If that coat were lying in the road, I wouldn’t eat it,” she said.

I guess that was a harpy insult.

Once I stepped out of the carriage, I realized that I had badly overestimated the amount of free time my four hour block would give me. I had just over an hour to get to my appointment and only the vaguest memory of the route Amaranth had taken us down. There was no way I could shop for Two’s present and a Veil costume and still figure out how to get downtown, especially since I had no idea where to look for costumes. The bazaar would be a good bet, but it was out of my way and I wasn’t at all confident about my ability to get around the city in a timely fashion. I kind of wished Steff had come along, if only because she would know the transit system better than I did.

I did remember the way to the Borderlands, though. The costume could wait, but if I didn’t find something for Two in a hurry, I’d end up giving her something like a sweatshirt from the campus store or something stupid like that. I could spend forever and a half inside a bookstore, but the flipside of that was that I could also find something in a hurry there.

It took me a moment to spot the games and puzzles section. I passed on a book of brain teasers that seemed to hinge on the kind of intuitive leaps that she kept missing in her attempts at humor. The clues in a big book of crossword puzzles seemed to revolve around wordplay, too… it seemed like she’d either be really good or really terrible at them. I got a book of number puzzles instead, and a big omnibus activity book the size of a lore tome. It was obviously geared at children… the mazes and word searches wouldn’t challenge her at all… but I had a feeling she’d find it satisfying to complete the instructions.

I was heading to the front when a big hanging sign caught my eye: “Cooking”. How had I not thought of that? I couldn’t spend all day, but I thought that maybe something would jump out at me… maybe a book of banana recipes, or something with sweets. As it happened, the perfect solution was staring at me from a display at the end of the aisle: Barefoot In The Kitchen: A Treasury of Shire Cooking. It was more money than I’d planned on spending, but it was for Two.

After that I just needed a gift bag big enough for all three books… I had a feeling my surrogate sister’s sense of supposed-to-be-ness would just about break down completely in the face of my attempt at giftwrapping.

I was in and out of the store in about fifteen minutes. I felt a twinge that my first time visiting a bookstore on my own as a free adult had been so perfunctory, but then it hit me: I was a free adult. There were coaches back and forth and it was a short walk. There was no reason I had to keep treating the bookstore like it was some fabled promised land across the sea when I could come and visit it any time, as long as I didn’t let myself get hung up about the coaches.

On that subject, I needed to figure out what I was doing. The first step I knew… the coach stop was right near the bookstore. I knew I needed to be downtown, and that the place where we’d got off before was a great big transit center that a lot of coaches went through, so I hopped on a coach heading that way and hoped for the best. I recalled the ride to midtown not taking very long, so I’d know soon enough if I was on the right coach.

Once I was there, I could get directions from my mirror… it was just a matter of getting to a landmark within easy walking distance.

The city coach was a lot less crowded than it had been on the weekend. I tried to watch out the windows for familiar landmarks. A lot of the buildings in town looked similar, though, especially where they’d all been built squished together. When we started to get to the mid-town canyons, I had a pretty good feeling that we were going the right way. If not, I’d get off some place that seemed safe, find out where I was, and work things out from there. If I couldn’t work it out in my mirror, I was sure that Lee’s office could give me directions.

Okay, so maybe I should have just asked Amaranth for her detailed route notes or worked out the whole thing before leaving my dorm room in the morning, but I wasn’t completely lost. I was hoping for the best but I had a plan for the worst. That was one step better than what I usually did.

Then the coach slowed as the road began to angle down into the under streets and the dungeon-turned-municipal-coach-exchange. I’d made it… at least halfway, anyway. The hard part was over. I would be able to make my appointment in plenty of time.

Spectators filled all six sections of stands which surrounded the battlefield a mile outside of town. For this game, the visitors had selected the heavily wooded side five for their home base, leaving the home team defending side two.

The visitors’ team was actually a coalition from two smaller school districts, one of which overlapped an elven forest. While all their fighters were ostensibly human, they had an unusually high concentration of skilled archers and lightly armored, highly mobile infantry.

They’d managed to hold their wooded turf with a small number of defenders using traps and hit-and-run tactics, freeing the rest of the coalition to concentrate on offense.

It seemed like a good strategy on the face of it, but two hours into the skirmish match it was becoming apparent that the coalition’s generals would have done better to reverse the starting positions, forcing their opponents to try to defend the wooded section against a force of highly-skilled elfbloods.

Instead, the home team had erected their standard on the largest hill on side two and massed their defenders around it. The two-school coalition had lost so many men in their assaults on the hill that they would lose handily by default once the five hour mark was passed.

As the tipping point had already been reached, they couldn’t wait the other side out… if they couldn’t win outright, they would have to inflict more casualties. They’d begun to get creative in their attacks.

Five different groups of archers launched volleys of arrows in waves, concentrating their aim near the top of the hill. Each flight of arrows was obviously smaller than a massed volley would have been, but by loosing their projectiles in turns they were able to keep a more or less constant stream going.

A wavery blue energy shell appeared in the sky seconds after this assault began. It was curved like a section of a dome, and it intercepted most of the arrows. They were ready this time, but the defenders’ wizards hadn’t always been so quick, and the side of the hill was dotted with shafts, and a handful of bodies lying motionless.

A figure stood near the top of the hill, dominating the scene in much the same way that the hill itself did the surrounding terrain.

She, too, was dotted with the red-fletched arrows of the opposing team. The arrows’ tips hadn’t quite penetrated through her tough hide, and while she could no doubt have just brushed them off of her arm like the irritants that they were, she instead left them in place so that anybody who charged up the hill would see them sticking out of her arm like the quills of a porcupine.

At the same time that the rain of arrows began, a magical wind rammed into the line of defenders who guarded the hillside in a ring halfway up its slope. One group of lightly armored fighters in red charged through the hole this made. The wind-battered soldiers picked themselves up and quickly closed the gap, fighting back the rest of the attackers and preventing any more from joining the charge up the hill.

However, the attackers started to lose momentum almost as soon as they were past that first obstacle. They slowed, their formation losing cohesiveness, and more than one of them actually glanced behind at the path of retreat through the enemy line.

Just as they’d known would happen, the massive figure gave a fierce bellow and swooped down in a counter-charge, sending the lead warrior flying with a swipe of her gauntleted arm, bowling several over, and breaking up the tight formation. The other hilltop defenders rushed in after her, slaughtering the scattered and distracted soldiers. The attack was quickly repelled with no casualties among the hilltop group, though two soldiers were sent down to replace those who’d fallen on the line.

The hulking fighter hadn’t even taken the sword off her back.

On a floating disk hovering high in the air ten yards outside the hexagonal boundary of the skirmish field, a representative from Magisterius University watched with an air of practiced skepticism.

“Let’s be honest,” he said to the head coach. “She’s not that great a solo fighter. She broke their formation with momentum and because they’re afraid to engage, but in a straight one-on-one fight I think a good swordsman could take her out.”

“That’s why she’s a skirmisher, not a gladiator,” the coach said. “Look, we’re seven and two so far this season and she wasn’t even playing for one of those losses.”

“Well, she holds the line well enough on a small field like this,” the man said. “But we have one of the largest skirmish fields in the Imperium.”

“That means you’ve got a lot of spaces to fill,” the coach said. “You can’t tell me that you don’t have room for an ogre among them.”

“Half-ogre,” the scout said. “Raised by a human parent. ‘Belinda’ doesn’t sound very imposing, does it?”

“When she’s out on the field, the other team doesn’t know if she has a flower print comforter on her bed or if she has jam and toast with her tea,” the coach said. “And for somebody who’s never met a full one, she’s ogre enough.”

“Still, I can’t guarantee her a spot.”

“Are you telling me you’ve got other players on the hook that can hold a hundred and fifty yard radius all by their lonesomes?” the coach said. This was an exaggeration, of course, as the figure on the hill was hardly holding the entire field, but the scout was used to dealing with hyperbolic coaches. “Look, I know you’ve got a bigger operation than we do, but you give her a squad to lead and she’ll do the same thing for you that she’s done for us as team captain.”

“Being the captain of a small team isn’t anything like being squad leader on a big team,” the rep said. “Do you think she’d be able to handle that?”

“For a chance to play with the big boys?” the coach said. “We didn’t start her out as captain. She worked her way up. She knows how it goes. Anyway, why so many questions? You can see how she handles herself. You’ve met with her. We know you’re not going to have an answer for her immediately… but you know, of all the teams that have scouted us—and that’s a lot of teams this year—nobody’s seemed as, well, skeptical about our little Lindy as you are.”

“We’ve been burned before,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing I want to talk about, but let’s just say I’m going to be damned sure they’re really interested in college skirmish before I sign any more ogrebloods.”

“You won’t be burned by her,” the coach said. “Skirmish is her life… literally. Maybe I’m not doing her any favors by telling you this, but you have to understand, she’s got no prospects, nothing to look forward to. Her grades are shit right across the board. We help her out, but she just manages to scrape by with the minimum passing grades. She doesn’t have any interests or aptitudes except for fighting. I’d be worried about the kid, but we both know she’s got a future with some school’s program. I guess it’ll probably come down to who wants her the most.”

Monday, Astera 7th 222

“This is your squad’s room, Belinda,” the earnest young woman with the clipboard said as she led the half-ogress into a long, narrow room that looked more like a hallway with beds and footlockers. “As freshmen, we had to let the school assign you dorm rooms but you’re more than welcome to stay here.”

“What was that other room?” Belinda asked.

“What other room?”

“The barracks one,” she said. “The big open one.”

“Oh, those are the regular quarters,” the coach’s assistant said. “Since you guys in the seventh squad are kind of a special project, you get your own all to yourself.”

“We don’t get to be in the main room with everybody else?”

“Only the best squads get their own quarters. Oh, and see that door at the end? That leads to your personal quarters. It’s also your office. The joke around here is that the officers’ quarters are just broom closets with the signs painted over, but in actual fact, they are slightly larger. Now, if you’d like to meet some of your squadmates…”

“They told me I could pick my squad,” Belinda said.

“Who did?”

“The recruiters.”

“Oh, well,” the assistant said, flipping through the pages on her clipboard as though they had any information aside from room assignments and schedules on them, “of course squad leaders are allowed to have some input, but the final choice belongs to the general coach.”

Belinda glowered. While what the assistant said was technically true, everything she’d ever heard had led her to believe that skirmish team officers had a more active hand in things and that the coaches only moved people around after seeing how they fit together.

“But if I’ve already got squadmates, how can I have input?” Belinda asked.

“Well, again, the seventh squad is a special project this year, and in order to maximize the effectiveness of your unique contributions…”

“Whatever,” Belinda said. “Let’s meet them.”

“Go ahead and send them in, John!” the assistant called.

One of the doors opened and an extremely varied group of beings began to file awkwardly in: a half-orc, a woman made of rock, a big burly bear of a man with a bushy brown beard, a minotaur, a weedy-looking human boy dressed in black and wearing heavy eyeliner, a harpy, a muscular triclops, a ratman, and three lizardfolk… two in a pair and one who stood off alone. Some of them were freshmen, like Belinda, and they looked around the room and at each other. Others simply glared at the new squad leader. These were returning students who’d played on other squads and who now found themselves reassigned under a freshman.

“Belinda, these are the men and women of the seventh squad,” the assistant said. “Squad, this is Belinda. She’ll be leading you in battle.”

Nobody said anything.

“Well, I’ll leave you all to get acquainted with each other. You all are free until three, when you need to form up on the practice field for team orientation,” the assistant said. “And, if nobody else has said it yet, I’d just like to welcome the new fighters to Magisterius University.”

With that, she left. About half of the seventh squad did, too. Among those who remained, no one approached Belinda immediately.

“This is bullshit,” the dark-clad boy said to nobody in particular. He went to the one of the twelve beds that was furthest from the officer’s room and dumped the contents of his duffel bag out into the locker at the foot of it. “This is my bed. Nobody take the bed next to it. I want a buffer between me and all you freaks.”

“Watch who you’re calling freaks, corpsefucker,” the stony woman said.

“Watch who you’re calling corpsefucker, freak,” the boy said. “I am a necromancer, and I wouldn’t even be wasting my talents on this stupid game if the narrow-minded nitwits who run the university had given me any other choice. Honestly, they acted like I’d siphoned an entire soul… meanwhile, an actual corpsefucker just got a semester of community service… in the vaults. Three years, and I never had to lock my materials up before.”

Belinda watched the exchange, absolutely bemused. She hadn’t had any idea what to expect, but she’d had a vague idea that her squad would consist of squishy little full humans who would be intimidated by the sight of her. Nobody in the room seemed especially intimidated.

The woman rolled her eyes at the necromancy student, then strolled over towards Belinda.

“Hi,” she said, holding out a hand. “I’m, uh… well, just call me Rocky. I was a squad leader in high school… they usually had me lead charges and take point on difficult missions. I wondered what kind of strategies do you prefer to employ?”

“Uh… I like to make people come to me,” Belinda said. “But I like going on the attack, too.”

“Flexibility,” Rocky said. “I like that. They said you were captain, your junior and senior year?”

“I was,” Belinda said.

“What was it like leading an entire team?”

“I didn’t really do much leading, actually,” Belinda said. “I just went where the general told me to.”

“But you were the captain.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh,” Rocky said. “Okay. Well, good to meet you. I’m going to go stow my stuff. Are you planning on assigning bunks?”

“Um…”

“I’ll just go stow it, then,” Rocky said. “And if you need any help with strategy, or planning, or anything, let me know. I was a good officer.”

Friday, Astera 11th 222 (Morning)

“I think our squad’s really starting to shape up,” Rocky said as they watched the rest of the squads practicing coordinated maneuvers. “With Hissy coordinating our movements, you on point, Scylla doing air support, and Jimmy’s skeletons to do surprise flanking, I think we can be a real force to be reckoned with.”

“Yeah,” Belinda grunted.

“I think once they see us in action, they’ll start fitting us into the overall strategy instead of using us as a bunch of ‘scary monsters’ to spook the other side,” Rocky said. “I mean, we can fight. Even Jimmy can. It’s stupid for them not to make use of us. We are good for something besides holding a spot they don’t want to have to defend.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, there are two weeks of practice between now and the first match,” Rocky said. “I’ve been working on getting the coaches to put us on the field wherever we would most likely be during the actual match… supposedly so that the rest our team gets used to us, but hopefully everybody will see how well we do our things.”

“Hopefully.”

“I mean, you’re used to standing there and looking scary, but some of us are real fighters,” Rocky said.

Saturday, Astera 19th 222

“I have great news!” Rocky announced, after walking into Belinda’s private room without knocking. “I’ve been talking to Coach John and after seeing us beat squads one through three during practice maneuvers, he says they’re going to revise the battle plans for the game against Blackwater. Instead of just cutting off one chokepoint, we’re going to be working with one and three. Depending on which side BPC picks, we might actually be the ones capturing their standard.”

“Really?” Belinda said. “That’s… awesome.”

“Isn’t it?” Rocky said. “I’ve worked up some contingency plans based on the side they think Blackwater’s general will pick, and the rest of the squad is excited about them.”

“The rest of the squad?”

“Oh, yeah, I showed them to everybody,” Rocky said. “Actually, I wanted to get Knossos and Scylla’s opinions before I did anything, but I’ve got everything just about finalized now. If we can pull off what I’ve got in mind, we’ll never be relegated to static defense again. It’ll be tricky, but with Hissy coordinating and you soaking up their attacks, I think we can manage it.”

Friday, Astera 25th 222 (Final Practice Before The First Game)

“Where’s Belinda?”