Maybe it was the fact that the nexus hallway was a narrower space than the lunchroom or the venues for the dances I’d been to, and less formal a gathering than the classes I attended… but then, I hadn’t felt this way when Hazel’d had her community potluck on Sunday. I’d been aware of a spirit of togetherness, but it had felt like something external to me… something I could see and maybe touch, but not something I could be included in.

Even when a good number of other students had come together in protest or whatever they’d been feeling when I got banished to the labyrinth, I’d felt more surprised and overwhelmed by the surge of support than I’d felt any real kind of connection to those who’d turned out.

Maybe that had been a mistake… maybe if I’d reached back out more, followed up on that a little bit, I might have been able to carve out more of a place for myself.

“You go to a human university, you can’t expect everything to be your size unless you’re a human,” Oru was saying as we approached.

“Actually…” Pala began, a little bit hesitantly. She seemed eager to speak up, but uncertain of her right to do so… it was easy to see how less invested she was in the topic than the two principal combatants.

“Is it a human university?” Shiel replied. “I mean, it’s definitely human-owned and human-ran, and naturally it’s very humanocentric…”

I could understand Pala’s hanging back from the conversation and her look of mild amusement. The problems of the shorter races might interest her in the abstract, as she had her own version of the same issues to deal with, but she’d have less reason to be emotionally involved than the goblin or kobold.

“Well, naturally. So what are you even arguing for?” Oru asked.

“I didn’t expect… hi, Two!” Pala said, seeing us.

“Hi, Pala. Hi, Hazel,” Two said.

“Hello, Two,” Hazel said. “Pull up a floor and join the, er, fun.”

“As I was…” Pala started to say as we sat down, but Oru and Shiel were too engrossed in their debate to notice.

“Well, the fact that it remains a de facto human institution doesn’t matter,” Shiel said. “The moment they started accepting enrollment from other races, they’ve defined themselves as a university for all of those races, but by not making their facilities and services equally accessible they’ve done so poorly.”

“To hear you speak, I’d think you don’t want them to let anyone in at all,” Oru said.

“No, explicitly excluding other races is its own failing,” Shiel said. “The most that could be said for it is that it’s honest. Here, they’re saying that all races are equal, but they’re rating our needs differently. Their actions have proven…”

“I didn’t expect things to be my size, is what I was saying,” Pala said. “I just said that I would like for them to be so.”

“Well, there you go,” Oru said.

“Wait a second,” I said, adjusting my position… sitting on the floor could be uncomfortable enough, but the sloped floor in the nexus made it even more awkward. “You’re all talking about how big Pala is?”

“I was talking about how small the buildings are,” Pala said.

“Not specifically about her, no,” Shiel said. “She’s merely serving as a convenient example of how humans have prized their own accessibility over others.”

“When I mentioned it, I thought I was talking specifically about me,” Pala said. “Did I say it wrongly?”

“You said it fine, love,” Hazel said. “Goblin-type ears just have a lot of room for words to echo around in.”

“Oh, don’t you start,” Shiel said.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Hazel said.

“I know what you meant, Pala,” Oru said. “And I’ve been inconvenienced for my size, too. But like I said, there’s got to be a practical limit on the amount of special accommodations they can make.”

“I think it’s more of a special accommodation when everything around you,” Shiel said, “the buildings, the doorways, the furniture, the lifts, the bathroom facilities… literally everything is designed specifically to accommodate you and people like you.”

“Isn’t that what you’re asking for?” Oru asked.

“Not for buildings made for any one type of person, no,” Shiel said. “For everyone. If they made a building that was truly accessible to everyone, each accommodation that was made to achieve that goal would be less ‘special’ and more routine.”

“Wouldn’t that get really expensive really fast?” I said.

“Buildings are really expensive to make, I would imagine,” Shiel said. “But people come up with the funds for it if a building needs to be built. That kind of money on a building is considered reasonable, right? Normal. But who defines what’s normal?”

“The people who live there,” Oru said.

“Okay, so if any of you tall folk came back to my warren, or Oru’s village, or the shire of Logfallen, you wouldn’t be able to get around very well,” Shiel said. “You wouldn’t be able to walk through any of the portals, or fit in furniture… well, we don’t really use ‘furniture’… but you wouldn’t be able to stand up in our tunnels. And it wouldn’t be because we did anything to exclude you. We just constructed them the way we normally do. Our definition of normal excludes non-kobolds.”

“Well, again, there you go,” Oru said. “It’s not on purpose, it’s not to keep anyone out… it’s just doing what you’d do normally. Can we ask for more?”

“If we don’t, we deserve what we get,” Shiel said. “My point is that what’s ‘normal’ is entirely up to the people making the definition, so there’s no reason it can’t be defined more broadly.”

“So why not start at home?” Oru asked. “Why not start digging bigger warrens?”

“If I had any input on warren construction… or much of anything else… maybe I would. But our warrens are inaccessible for reasons of self-protection, and self-determination,” Shiel said.

“And humans don’t get to self-determine?” Oru asked.

“‘Human society’, by nature of their imperialistic impulses, is intrinsically pluralistic,” Shiel said. “Their culture touches and envelops a lot of other races. What we do in our mining communities by ourselves is different than what humans do. If we went so far as to put up a sign that said ‘No humans allowed!’, would it make a difference to anyone? Humans don’t have to pass through our tunnels to get anywhere. Humans aren’t surrounded by our warrens. And as a race they’ve shown a tendency to go into other peoples’ lands and do whatever they want anyway.”

“Well, if you’re talking about what’s fair, why does it matter how many humans need to pass through your mines?” Oru asked. “If it’s the principle of the thing you ought to make sure humans and giants and orcs and gelatinous thingies can fit comfortably in your tunnels anyway.”

“If we were inviting humans and ogres and ‘thingies’ into our warrens and these warrens were the only source of certain advantages they would need to get along in a kobold-dominated world, then yes, it would be horribly unfair of us not to accommodate them,” Shiel said.

“Aren’t you maybe overstating the case?” I said. “I mean, I think in general I’d agree with your side over Oru’s, but humans control something like less than twenty percent of the land on the surface of the world, and most of that’s split between two empires that haven’t exactly gotten along that well, historically.”

“Okay, a human-dominated continent,” Shiel said. “Or sphere of influence. The Imperium surrounds or borders every kobold warren known to us in this part of the world. It would take about ten percent of the Imperial military forces to wipe out every one of those communities in under a year.”

“Oh, you’re making that up,” Oru said.

“No… it is just an estimate, obviously, but it’s based on the actual strength of the imperial armed forces, the typical defenses of a kobold warren, and historical engagements between human and kobold forces on kobold turf,” Shiel said. “We don’t have the same capabilities as dwarves. We don’t have their same investment in and knowledge of shielding and secrecy runes, in traps, or fortifications. No matter how much we dig in, we could be dug out. All of which means that humans will never have to worry about us the way we have to worry about them.”

“Why would you ever sit down and figure out something like that in the first place?” Honey asked. “It’s so… morbid.”

“I think about it because they think about it,” Shiel said. “You don’t think the imperial government has done studies and war games and divinations to figure out how to permanently pacify or eliminate the other races that share its domain?”

“You’re looking well, Honey,” I interjected. Up closer, she was noticeably down a little weight and a little sleep, but she seemed relaxed, almost relieved. In fact, it was hard to say how exactly but now that she’d drawn attention to herself she was practically radiating an almost tangible sense of relief.

“Oh, I’m just glad the whole thing… well, it’s nice to know it was just a monster attack, you know?” Honey said. She hiccuped, or giggled. “Not a murder after all.”

Any guilt I might have felt from not immediately divulging the truth was wiped out by seeing how much calm the idea gave her. Perhaps that was a good sign for the campus mood. After contemplating the implications of a horrible murder, “just a monster attack” didn’t seem so bad.

“Look, the thing we’re overlooking is that this was an all-human university,” Oru said. “They made the choice to open it up to all races. Doesn’t that say something? About their willingness to accommodate? About their intentions?”

“I think inviting members of every race to come to your university but not making it fully accessible to them says something, alright,” Shiel said. “It says that it’s all still yours. I mean, apart from the university’s actual owners, who do you think has the greatest sense of ownership, of belonging: the human students, or the non-humans?”

“Is that a real question?” Oru asked. “This university was built and founded and run by humans, and it’s in the middle of a human empire. Obviously humans are going to feel more at home. Not that I feel particularly unwelcome… I mean, I can be made to feel unwelcome in a room with no humans in it as easily as one that’s full of humans. I just think it’s more a matter of… economics, I guess you’d say. I think a lot of it is.”

“A lot of what is?” Sheil asked.

“The stuff you talk about,” Oru said. “All the racism you think is everywhere. Doesn’t it really come down to money and power?”

“Well, yes… it comes down to power, and money is a form of that,” Shiel said. “Racism without power would just be prejudice. Ugly, but irrelevant.”

“Except I don’t think it’s about race,” Oru said. “I mean, okay, yes… some people don’t like goblins. I call that racism. You’d probably call it prejudice. But it’s not like I care what some hairy, round-faced breast ape thinks I look like, right?”

“But human attitudes matter because they’ve got the power,” Shiel said. “Including most of the money.”

“Okay, yeah, right now there’s a lot of money in human hands, but they’ve got a lot more hands than we do, and they’ve been collecting money for longer,” Oru said. “As a race, I mean. But a rich goblin who didn’t want to live in the lowlands could go and buy a house on a hilltop, or a townhouse in the city…”

“Or a cityhouse in the town,” Hazel added.

“…or whatever… and there are poor humans, who are way worse off than anyone in my village,” Oru said. “I mean, everybody there has a house. I doubt the humans treat them any better than they treat us.”

“So there’s classism and racism,” Shiel said. “I don’t know why you think this is better than just racism.”

“I don’t think it’s racism and… classism,” Oru said. “I don’t even think there’s that much classism, unless that’s a fancy word for ‘some people have more money than you do’. But I also just don’t think there’s as much racism as you think there is.”

“Um… didn’t you tell me that you didn’t like going out at night because you were afraid of being attacked by fighter students?” I asked her. I had to wonder how much her current stance was being informed by her desire to disagree with the extremity of Shiel’s position. I had a hunch that left to her own devices she’d be less sanguine about the general state of human race relations and on-campus equality… but when Shiel said something too extreme for her to support, she ended up arguing against the whole thing.

“Yes, but… that’s just people being stupid,” Oru said. “Thinking ‘goblin equals monster equals kill it!‘ But it’s not like I walk into a sweet shop and the shopkeeper says, ‘Oh, you’re a monster. I can’t take your coppers because monsters are for killing.’”

“So you’re fine with the idea that you might get randomly killed for your race as long as you can buy sweets?” Shiel said.

“I’m not ‘fine’ with being killed, but it’s dangerous outside for everyone,” Oru said. “More humans get killed by ghouls, so I suppose that ghouls are racist against humans?”

“Hold on, now,” Hazel said, in a surprisingly serious voice. I could almost feel something shifting inside her, like a card had been flipped over or a puzzle piece had locked into place. “I think you’ve got a point, Oru, but I don’t think it’s the one you mean to make.”

“What do you mean?” Oru asked.

“Oh, this should be good,” Shiel said.

“I mean, we’ve the same sorts of problems in my shire, only we’re sort of an insular lot, so it’s all one race, see? But there are definitely what you’d call ‘class divisions’, and you see the same sorts of things you’re talking about across the classes.”

“Not really,” Honey said. “I think our society’s really very… egalitarian. I mean, we did away with most noble titles before the Imperium did, and peasantry before that. I think it’s like Oru said: some people just have more money. You have to expect that, unless you do away with money entirely… but it’s not like money plays favorites.”

“Just because we stopped naming the classes doesn’t mean they went away, Honey,” Hazel said. “Or that people don’t know them. Look at your family. Look at mine.”

“We’re cousins, Hazel. We are family.”

“You know what I mean,” Hazel said. “Your folks. My folks. You could put them in a line, with you at the front, us at the back, and most any random folks from town falling somewhere in between us. That’s class.”

“If you think the folks in town looked down on you, Hazel, it might be because of the way you walked around like you had a chip on your shoulder all the time,” Honey said.

“Are you saying your folks didn’t look down on my dad and me?”

“Well, if you want to bring that up… but if that’s a matter of class, Hazel, it’s that your father didn’t have any class, of the other kind, and you didn’t have the chance to pick any up from him,” Honey said. “And that’s sad, but that sort of class is something a person of any station can acquire, not a… social… division… thingy.”

“Except…” Shiel said. “Except that it’s not really a different sort, is it? It still refers to social standing.”

“It is,” Honey said. “I meant class as in classy, as in… classiness.”

“Yes, but that means ‘having class’,” Shiel said. “You see, ‘classy manners’ are manners associated with people ‘of a certain class’. Anybody can learn them, but if your parents have them, you learn them growing up. If everybody else around you shows them, then that becomes like your idea of what normal default behavior is. The fact that it’s a special advantage you possess that others don’t doesn’t even occur to you.”

“Some advantage,” Honey said. “It’s just… one way of behaving. So what if Hazel learned other ways? Is she really worse off because she doesn’t know how to fold a napkin?”

“Hey now! I fold them better than you do,” Hazel said.

“She is pretty good at that,” Two added.

“Well, yeah, because you practiced it every day all summer long after my mum said something about it,” Honey said.

“After she snapped my head off, more like, ” Hazel said.

“The point is that you practiced it and you got better at it, and anybody could do that,” Honey said.

“The point is that your ‘classy’ behaviors act like a filter,” Shiel said. “Keeping the ‘right’ sort of people above the ‘wrong’ sorts… it can be used to sort out who gets dinner invitations, who’s allowed into the ‘respectable’ establishments… if the class stigma’s strong enough, that becomes self-policing as people who don’t know the etiquette end up staying away for fear of embarrassment…”

“Is it anybody else’s fault if they do?” Honey said.

“Yes. It’s the fault of people who would use social stigma as a weapon,” Shiel said. “These are just some examples of how people of a lower class end up with reduced opportunities.”

“Oh, yes, right,” Hazel said, nodding. “I could talk all day about ‘reduced opportunities’ compared to Honey.”

“That’s not ‘reduced opportunities’, that’s just being poor,” Honey said.

“Trust me, Honey, that reduces your opportunities,” Hazel said.

I found myself nodding along with Hazel. Growing up with less money than everyone else in your class was an almost daily lesson in “reduced opportunities”. I wasn’t sure how much of it came down to class… my grandmother was respected and “the right sort of people” in the eyes of most, and she owned her own home even if she’d never exactly rich, but her respectability hadn’t in any way been passed down onto her daughter the single mother.

“Alright, then, so it’s reduced opportunities to spend money,” Honey said. “If you’ve got one gold and I’ve got ten gold, then I can buy ten times as much. Stands to reason.”

“Yeah,” Oru said. “Stands to reason.”

“Yeah, only maybe there are more things in the world that will do you lasting good that and cost ten gold than cost one,” Hazel said. “Maybe we each need one gold for food to live on and here comes a thrilling investment opportunity that costs nine more. Or even one more. I couldn’t… if I couldn’t afford to come to university, you’d have an opportunity I don’t.”

“So? You can make a good living without a university education,” Honey said. “I was thinking about being a teacher, once. You just need to know your figures and your letters to teach the young ones.”

“You think anybody ‘proper’ would have let me teach their children?” Hazel said. “Assuming I could even live on what they give the schoolteachers.”

“Well, money’s not everything.”

“No, just food and shelter and decent clothing and anything else,” Hazel said.

“Miss Ruth told me the best things in life are free,” Two said.

“Yeah? Did she say that as she took money out of your pockets?” Hazel asked.

“No,” Two said. “She said ‘Best I hold onto that for you’ when she did that.”

“Is she keeping a lot of your money safe, then?” Hazel asked.

“Not anymore,” Two said. “I donated it to Hearts of Clay.”

“I’d ask another question but I don’t think I’d like the answer,” Hazel said. “Anyway… my point is that there’s class, and it’s real, and it doesn’t need race to make a mess of things. Though I’m pretty sure race is in there, too… tallfolk don’t even know about river people, and they still look at me like I’m not there.”

“It’s all real and it’s all related,” Shiel said. “Lower class correlates with less money, which is less power, and class tend to correlate strongly with races, even intraraces.”

“Whatra-races?” Oru said.

“Like hobgoblins and goblins,” Shiel said. “Or arguably, hobgoblins, kobolds, and goblins.”

“Oh, sub-races,” Oru said.

“I don’t like the connotations of that word,” Shiel said. “I am not sub-goblin.”

“I didn’t say you are,” Oru said. “It’s just a word… the proper one. Hobgoblins, kobolds, and goblins are all sub-races of the same race.”

“And what race is that?”

“Well… goblin, I guess,” Oru said. “That’s why we’re called ‘goblinoids’.”

“We’re called ‘goblinoids’ by humans because they met you first,” Shiel said.

“Yes, and so if they’d met you first we’d be koboldoids,” Oru said. “Do you think I’d be complaining?”

“Honestly? No.”

“Well, there you go!” Oru said. “And you don’t have anything to complain about. ‘Teeth and claws may rend my flesh’… is there a way to make that rhyme in Pax?”

A couple of human girls, one with sandy hair and freckled skin… and maybe just a trace of La Belle ancestry in her face, though that could have been my imagination… and the other with dark hair in long, tight braids… had wandered over and were standing a few feet away, listening to the conversation.

“Oh, hello, Irene,” Shiel said when she noticed them. She said the name with a long e audible on the end.

“Hello, Shiel,” the darker-toned girl said with a distinct Metropolitan accent. It was so weird hearing those vowels coming out of a person over three feet tall. “This is my friend I was telling you about, Jeanie?”

“Hi,” the other girl said.

“Oh, right, you wanted to trade soldiers,” Shiel said. It seemed like such a random thing to say, until I realized she was talking about her game.

“Well, yeah,” Jeanie said. She gave a nervous little laugh. “The only thing is, I don’t have any soldiers, yet…”

“Oh, well, I do sell them, but I’ve kind of got a backlog for that,” Shiel said. “I’ll do a trade if it gives me something I can use immediately, but otherwise I’d end up selling my way right out of the game, and I’m not prepared to do that for any price.”

“Oh, yeah, I can respect that. The thing is that I don’t have any soldiers,” Jeanie said, “but I’ve been making… landscapes, I guess… for Irene and she said you might like them?”

“What kind of landscapes? Do you mean battlefields?”

“They’re painted mats,” Jeanie said. “You can roll them up like a poster… I made the first one for a class. I use memory parchment, so you can switch it between two different pictures I made, one that’s more open and one that has a lot of trees, and if you touch two points with fingers on different hands it’ll show you the distance between them. The next one I got fancier… it does that, and you can also turn on a grid if you just want to be able to eyeball it.”

“Interesting,” Shiel said, and to my shame I almost agreed with her. Interactive maps were a lot more interesting than make-believe warfare. “Detailed maps are awesome, but the problem is that even if you can toggle between two of them, that’s two identical maps that you’re going to be fighting on again and again. It might be nice to be able to re-fight the same battle with different forces, but I like being able to change things up more.”

“Oh, well, that was just my first attempt,” Jeanie said. “My second one had three maps stored in it, and I copied the shape of a skirmish field for it… so you can rotate it and get six different starting positions. I had another brainwave while I was working on it… too late to work on it… but for my third map I cut the memory parchment into smaller sections and then attached them together, so you have a bunch of different sections that you can change independently of each other.”

“How long have you been working on these?” Shiel asked.

“Three days,” Jeanie said. “I get an idea in my head and it tends to take over, you know? I use the clone and stamp brushes a lot, but I have a good variety of trees and things because each one I have everything I’ve done before to draw on plus whatever new I make. Anyway, each section of my newest map has five different landscapes… I couldn’t make them too different because the edges have to match up or it looks all blocky.”

“Couldn’t you get around that by not permanently attaching the sections?” I asked. “Just leave the pieces separate and let people put them where they want. If you did it that way, you’d have an easier time trading, too… you wouldn’t have to finish a whole five-way map for each person you wanted to trade with.”

“I don’t know how thick this memory parchment is, but it seems like that might be messy,” Shiel said. “It seems like they’d be easy to move or scatter.”

“I guess I could attach them to cardstock or board or something,” Jeanie said. “I’m trying to find a way around the sectioning, though, because I’m looking at ways of putting more special effects in, like fires and poison clouds and things… that’s going to be hard enough if I’m not enchanting a hundred sheets individually for each map or whatever.”

“Well, then you either make a transparent overlay that you put over the whole map, or a baseboard enchanted to display the effects a short distance above it,” I said. “I don’t think I could do it, but I can see how it would be done. You’d just need a bunch of conditionals and tiny little illusions, or something. Illusions are generally pretty cheap. It would still be a lot more work than just storing paintings in memory parchment.”

“True,” she said. “And honestly, if I made all of them do that I’d never have any finished for trading. If I could figure out a way to copy them without losing the quality.”

“What about that clone brush you mentioned?” Shiel asked.

“Oh, it’s good for picking up a few inches from here and putting it there,” she said. “But I’d need something a lot more heavy-duty to retain a whole painting, even a square foot at a time, with the level of color and detail I use. The school’s autoscribes just aren’t set up for that kind of thing… I mean, nobody outside of publishing houses has that kind of equipment just lying around.”

“Or bored enchanters,” I said. “Hey, Two,” I said, right at the same time that Hazel did.

“I believe I could copy your paintings, Jeanie,” Two said.

“She wants twenty-five percent,” Hazel said. “Cash goes to her, any figures you get in trade you can give to me and I’ll pay her for them.”

“I’d have to see what you can do first,” Jeanie said.

“Yeah, that goes for me to you,” Shiel said. “But if they’re workable I think we could come to an arrangement.”

“They’re more than workable,” Irene said. “Believe me, she paints like you carve.”

“With a chisel?” Pala said.

“You two are in the apartments out on west campus?” Shiel asked, and they nodded.

“Yeah, in the senior housing. We’re crashing in Pelinor tonight, I think,” Irene said. “You could walk back with us with tomorrow morning if you want, or we could make a time to bring one of the maps over?”

“That’s a long walk for me, and I’ve got class in the morning,” Shiel said. “But I should be in my room from three on… it’s top floor, east side, last door on the right before the lounge.”

“Cool,” Irene said. “I also wanted to talk to you about this meeting that some of us are brewing up for a new campus group… we don’t have a faculty sponsor yet so it’s not official, but this is just kind of a planning thing…”

“Oh, there is Ian,” Pala said, pushing herself up and craning her neck uphill. I looked up and saw that Ian had indeed entered through the doors at the back of the hall. He was with Winnie, Puddy’s cousin with the annoying laugh. “Did I tell you he said he was coming?”

“No,” I said, trying not to scowl at his choice of company… or the fact that he had any. I wanted to talk to him about what had happened in the bathroom with Iona, which would necessitate going off alone with him. “It’s okay. Excuse me, I’ve got to go tell him… hi.”

I’d given up on trying to make up an excuse at the last moment, when it had occurred to me that I could just say I was going to say hi to him and it wouldn’t be suspicious at all. That information had arrived a few seconds too late to be useful, and I blushed at the awkward sentence that had fallen out of my mouth.

“Ah… young love,” Irene said, grinning. “Fresher, right? Were we ever that young?You go run and tell him ‘hi’, then.”

Apparently awkwardness was the perfect camouflage in some settings.

Soon: Ian and Mackenzie quibble over word meanings. And there’s sex. It’s almost like something that might happen in Tales of MU. Later: Puddy.

Discuss this story on the Livejournal community.

“No, it’s… kind of a front hallway, I guess,” I said. “It connects the dorms in this cluster together.”

“Oh,” Pala said. “It looks more like a sitting room to me.”

She had a point… there were the most people than I’d ever seen in the nexus since after the first day when people had been moving in and getting to know the area. Now there were people sitting all over the gently sloped floor. Some of them were eating dinner from the corner store, or fast food from the student union.

There were more human-only groups than otherwise, but it was a relief to see that they were sharing the space with a good number of Harlowe students, some even in mixed groups. Even in the absence of stupidity-fueled violence, I had figured the press conference’s “revelation” would have kept everybody buttoned down inside their dorms… instead it looked like a good number of people had decided to split the difference to obey the letter of the safety guidelines and the spirit of camaraderie.

Hazel’s little “community outreach” initiative on the day of the killing hadn’t lost all of its momentum in the following days, it seemed. I looked around to see if I could spot her… I saw Oru and Shiel, and as soon as I saw them I realized that Honey was with them, looking better and more relaxed than she had in recent days. She actually waved at me when she saw me looking at her. After a second of being stunned, I waved back.

“Well, this is nice,” Pala said. “Everybody seems so friendly. It makes me wish I lived on campus.”

“Not everyone in the dorms are friendly, but yeah, it is nice to see.”

“And the ceiling is so high!” she said. I’d never thought about it, but it really was… especially at the southern end of the hallway. The floor followed the general contours of the sloping ground, but the ceiling was flat. “I hope that the rest of it is like this, because this and the student union atrium and the gymnasium center are the only places on the campus where I don’t have to stoop.”

“Oh, well… it’s not quite as spacious inside the actual dorms, no,” I said, trying to picture it in my head. I’d never given that much thought to headroom in the hallways. Harlowe Hall seemed like one of the bigger dorms, in terms of its proportions. There were larger dorms, and dorms that housed more students, but Harlowe had been built during a period when the fashion for institutional building designs called for broad hallways and high ceilings. The towers were similar, though their layout was a little more… involved. “Did you do much exploring of the dorm where the Veil party was?”

She shook her head.

“The party room was nice and big but the hallways leading out of it looked very… cramped,” she said. “And I was not sure where I was allowed to go.”

“Well, you’ll probably be able to get around in Harlowe,” I said. “But it won’t be like this.”

“Oh,” she said. “Then I believe I will just.. hang out… in here for a while, if you think that’s okay. I mean if you think you will be safe. You won’t be attacked in your own dorm, do you think?”

It had happened before, but I didn’t want to say anything that would make Pala feel guilty about staying behind when she was clearly enjoying being able to stand upright with a roof over head. She’d been “hired” by Ian to protect me from out-of-control human vigilantes, not the random assaults of my dormmates.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. I looked around the gathered groups of students… some of whom were looking at us, but more eyes were drawn towards Pala than me… and made a decision. “I’ll come back down and hang out, too, once I’ve dumped my stuff off in my room and found out what everyone else is up to.”

“Oh, okay,” she said. “I should mirror to Ian to let him know you are safe.”

That made me realize that I should probably do the same thing, since he was worried enough about me to engage a student bodyguard… but I didn’t want to step on Pala’s toes. She was doing this for a grade, and I didn’t know what all affected her score.

“Okay, would you please tell him where we are so that he can come hang out with us if he wants?” I asked. I thought about adding that I love him, but asking Pala to tell him that seemed weird… so then I considered asking her to tell him that I’d said hi, but that sounded weird for different reasons. “Tell him I said thanks for the escort.”

“Okie dokie,” Pala said, nodding. I watched her mouth mumble over the words as she committed them to memory.

“Oh, um… and thank you, Pala, for doing it.”

“You are welcome,” she said. “I think I am more likely to get full points for guarding your body than anyone else I could have. Because of the danger, you see? Many of my classmates have been marked down for assignments where there was no real threat.”

“Are you going to be penalized because I wasn’t actually attacked?”

“No,” she said. “Our battle effectiveness is graded separately. Even for non-threatening assignments we can be graded on procedure and form.”

“How do they grade that?”

“We write up the assignment afterwards,” she said.

“How do they know you actually did the procedures, then?” I asked.

“The grade is for knowing, I suppose,” she said. “And you have to know it to write it up. Also, we are shadowed sometimes.”

“Do they tell you when?” I asked.

“No. But if you do not note the shadow in your write-up, you fail.”

“How are you supposed to… oh,” I said, grasping the point of the exercise. “I guess that makes sense. Anyway, I’ll be back.”

I headed into Harlowe, climbed the stairs up to the fifth floor with minimal trippage… my shoes had picked up a little moisture outside and a sole slipped off one of the steps on the last flight, jarring me… and headed to my room. Two was sitting at her desk eating a muffin and working on her homework. I’d been hoping to see Amaranth, but she seemed to be alone.

“Hi, Mack! Amaranth and Steff said to tell you that they’re in Steff’s room,” Two said. “They’re in Steff’s room. Sooni left a note for you on the markerboard in permanent markers. I cleaned it off, but I copied it down for you first. Also, you left the door unlocked. You shouldn’t do that when nobody’s in the room.”

“”Hi, Two… I didn’t leave the door unlocked,” I said.

“It wasn’t me,” she said. “Be more careful.”

That would have been more than a little troubling even if I didn’t know that my floormates had been trying to spy on me… I always locked it reflexively, and I knew Two would do so with a conscientiousness that was better than a reflex.

Trina was a minor subtle artist. Dee could take a door off its hinges with her power. I doubted Trina was anywhere near as strong or skilled as she was, but it wouldn’t take much power or skilled at all to pop the lock since it was easy as turning the knob on the inside of the door. Puddy had shown some facility with getting doors open, and would have even had the opportunity to make a copy of the key when she had been my roommate. Any number of students might have learned a form of magic sufficient to get the door open… again, the locks weren’t exactly the most rigorously protected things in the world.

And that was only considering my floormates… my father had managed to physically enter my room at least once.

Suddenly, my dorm room felt a lot less secure to me than it had before. I’d have to investigate options for warding it… something to keep out demons would be problematic for obvious reasons, but something to make the lock a little more robust and maybe let us know when somebody was in the room and we weren’t would be nice. It would have to be a dorm-legal solution, of course, or else Two would object.

“Did Amaranth and Steff say how long they’d be?” I asked. No sense dwelling on something I couldn’t immediately address.

“No, they said we shouldn’t wait for them for dinner,” Two said. “Here is the message.”

She handed me a sheaf of notebook paper on which she’d drawn a brightly colored rainbow background surrounding a heart-shaped white space, with the message, “Hello, Miss Mackenzie! Reflecked Me Please!” written in big curly letters, surrounded by bizarre smiley faces. The misspelled word had been crossed out with a writing pen, and “_^^reflect” written by it. At the bottom, there was a line of characters in the Yokano language, and then a big loopy signature saying “Sooni” in the Draconized script of Pax.

“You didn’t do all this by hand, did you?” I asked.

“No, I scribed it,” she said, which made sense. Two had begun her life, essentially, as a piece of intelligent office equipment.

“Well… I suppose I’d better see what she wants,” I said. I got my mirror out and flipped it open. “Suzune Hoshinotama, Prax,” I told it. I didn’t know if she’d be on campus or not, but she had such a distinctive name that even the province should be enough to identify her.

The swirling mist that usually preceded a reflection had barely started to form when it disappeared. At first I wondered if there was some kind of interference, or if Lee had put a block on outgoing reflections that weren’t to him… but then I heard Sooni’s voice.

“Hello? Hello, Mackenzie?” she said.

“Sooni?” I said. It was weird to be talking to her and seeing my own face reflected back. Watching my lips move as I spoke was weirdly disconcerting.

“Hello!” she said.

“Something’s wrong with the image, Sooni,” I said. “I can’t see you.”

“Oh, well… I turned it off,” she said.

“Why would you do that?”

“Because… because… because I was looking forward to the sound of your voice and I did not want anything to distract me!” she said. Sooni was such a terrible liar, it was a wonder she could even fool herself as often as she did. “Anyway, something is wrong with your mirror because I could not reflect to you!”

“Yeah, well, it’s not actually my mirror,” I said. “It’s really for keeping in touch with my lawyer.”

“Lawyers!” she said. I heard the sound of her heavy wooden sandal hitting a hard surface as she said that. “I am so tired of lawyers… my father’s lawyers have been all around me all week. I am being strangled to death by lawyers! But they say I can have my room back soon.”

“Well, that’s good,” I said.

“But they say my father says I need more ‘supervision’,” she said.

Well, that’s good, I thought.

“Anyway… I’m just so glad that you got my message!” she said.

“Yeah, Two gave it to me,” I said. “Um… so… what’s up?”

“I needed to talk to you because I wanted to apologize to you for trying to drag you into my investigation,” she said. “I see now that I was not being fair to either one of us. I am sorry. I hope you can forgive me.”

No matter how curious I was about the chain of thoughts running through Sooni’s head, had to be safer to graciously accept her heartfelt apology than to ask her to elaborate on the reason behind it. She was making a considerate gesture and I was making one in return. Asking her how she’d arrived at the conclusion that such a gesture was warranted was the conversational equivalent of saying, “Please, sir, I enjoy this sausage… would you show me how it’s made?”

These were the thoughts that went through my head mere moments after I asked her, “What do you mean?”

“Well, I was expecting too much of you,” she said. “You are my dear friend, but you are not a trained investigator with trained investigative skills. I should not have placed such a heavy burden on someone with your meager abilities.”

“…that’s… nice of you to say,” I said.

“Especially since I did not need your help after all!” she said. “Don’t you see, Mackenzie? I had the power to solve the case of the… dead… bird… girl… princess all the time!”

“I… what?” I said. The thought that she might have stumbled over the actual killer didn’t even occur to me… I just didn’t want anybody else to have to put up with being arbitrarily made the villain of Sooni’s story, for their sake and hers. Many people wouldn’t put up with random accusations, magical assaults, and shoe-flingings. “Sooni… they said it was a monster attack.”

“Yes!” Sooni said, with such triumphal joy in her voice that I could just see her beetle-black eyes sparkling. “And just the other day I was saying, I was saying aloud, that I did not see how any person could possibly have done such a thing to poor Lydia.”

“Leda,” I said.

“It might have seemed like a chance remark at the time, but in my experience investigations often turn on such remarks,” she said. “Obviously my intuitive powers of intuition had already grasped what the so-called ‘imperial’ investigators had missed.”

“Obviously,” I said.

“Of course it is for the best that my involvement remain secret,” she said. “There is no sense embarrassing the authorities by letting everyone know they have been shown up by a plucky and spirited girl detective.”

“Well, that goes without saying,” I said, fighting the urge to roll my eyes. I didn’t know if she could see me.

“So anyway… all that I really need from you is to keep your eyes and ears open for my next case,” she said. “I don’t need you to help me solve it.”

She seemed to have forgotten her plans to design and sell clothing as quickly and completely as she’d forgotten about representing Harlowe on the student senate. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing… it was something she had a genuine talent for, but she had seemed to think that the real money was in dressing up like characters from her favorite TV shows, and also that all that was needed was for me to somehow put together an a-commerce ready weavesite for her.

“I’ll let you know if anything comes up,” almost seemed like a neutral, non-committal enough response… except that Sooni’s definition of a binding promise roamed a bit far afield of most people’s.

“Sooni, I don’t think I’m the one to…”

“Nonsense! I believe in you!” she said. “Oh, I have to… bye!”

From the abrupt cut-off, it sounded like she’d been interrupted. Perhaps some of the supervision that she had mentioned had just walked into the room.

I sighed and snapped the mirror shut.

“There’s a bunch of people hanging out downstairs in the nexus,” I said. “Including Pala and Hazel’s cousin Honey. Do you want to go join them?”

“Hallways are supposed to be kept clear,” Two said, her nose wrinkling as if she found the violation distasteful.

“Well, it’s not really a hallway,” I said. “It’s more like a courtyard that got a roof and floor put on.”

“Which made it a hallway.”

“It’s big enough that you can still walk through it when people are sitting in it,” I said. “That’s a pretty good definition of clear.”

“Maybe,” Two said doubtfully.

“Would you rather argue about this or go down and hang out?” I asked, and then watched while she thought it over.

“I would rather go down and hang out,” she decided. “Then stay up here and argue about it. But I would like it best if the hanging out were somewhere else.”

“Well, yes, but we’re not going to be able to make that happen.”

“I know,” she said. “I will be ready to go down with you very shortly.”

She cleaned up her muffin crumbs, put away her homework, and then checked her face in the mirror. I didn’t know what she was checking. Two didn’t wear makeup regularly… she didn’t need it to look like most women did with makeup in understated natural colors… and her hair seemed to fall into place like it had been designed to.

It probably had.

“Pala said you guys are friends now,” I said as we headed downstairs.

“Yes,” Two said. “She is also friends with Suzi.”

“Is Suzi really your friend?” I asked.

“Yes,” Two said.

“Are you sure she doesn’t just like you for your baking?”

“No,” Two said. “But I do not think it matters why she likes me as long as she does and is nice to me and is happy to see me. That is being friendly, and being friendly is like being a friend, and if she is always perfectly friendly to me then she is exactly like a friend.”

“Is she really always perfectly friendly?” I asked.

“No,” Two said. “But my friends Hazel and Dee both agree that you can’t expect people to be perfect. You have to make allowances.”

“Well, just don’t make too many allowances,” I said.

“I won’t,” she said, then gave me a hug and said, “I only make so many allowances for you because you’re like a sister to me.”

“That’s nice of you,” I said.

As much as I loved Two, it was very possible that for the sake of our friendship we’d need to find a different roommate arrangement before too long. She was making friends fast enough that she had other options. For that matter, she’d probably get along fine with her original roommate, Dee, now that she was sleeping better.

We headed back down to the hallway, where Pala had lain down on her side next to the small folk, who had also been joined by Hazel. As she had been in the tunnels around the arena, Pala was lying with her head pointed downhill. Oru and Shiel seemed to be having an argument. I wasn’t exactly too fond of either one of them… Shiel was argumentative and into war games, and Oru… well, she was a biter. And goblin bites hurt.

Pala seemed to be a participant, too, but she had the same emptily pleasant smile on her face as usual, like there was no disagreement happening at all… or at least none worth getting upset about. Whatever the argument was, she probably had less stake in it personally than the others.

Soon: The unpolished dialogue that’s been carried over from my last two draft chapters is withheld again. Why? Clearly just to annoy you.

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Hazel loaded Ian and Two up with canvas shopping bags of cooking supplies she selected from her room, and then we all filed out of the room so that Honey could get her sleep. I hadn’t really noticed until she said something, but she did look to be in pretty bad shape. I couldn’t imagine how things must have unfolded for those in Harlowe when the murder was discovered… had everyone been roused out of their beds? But Honey had looked like she was suffering from more than a night of interrupted sleep.

“Is your cousin okay, Hazel?” Amaranth asked her once we were out in the hall.

“Don’t know,” Hazel said. “I really don’t. I hope so, though… I don’t know if I could stay on here if something happened to her.”

Oru and Shiel excused themselves and headed back to their own room. It still felt like we were the only ones on the floor… that was probably a fallacious assumption since it had felt that way when the three of us came upstairs, even though the gnomes’ room at the end of the hall had been full of people. It was just so quiet.

“It’s so still,” Amaranth said. “It’s never this quiet.”

“It is after midnight sometimes,” Two said. “And before the sun comes up.”

“Sunday mornings, maybe,” Ian said.

“There are kinds and kinds of quiet,” Hazel said. “This is the kind that ought to be filled, if respectfully.” She gestured to me. “Come along, then.”

“I’ll see you guys later,” Amaranth said. She gave me a quick kiss and a pat on the rear and then headed back for our room.

“Bye, Amaranth!” Two said as we headed towards the lounge.

“Bye, honey,” Amaranth replied.

“I suppose it wouldn’t suit her to mess about with butter and eggs,” Hazel said as Ian put his stuff down on the table. “Put that on the counter, if you please,” she said. “We’re going to need that space to work.”

“Oh, okay,” Ian said, and he moved it to alongside where Two had already put hers.

“I’m kind of surprised she’s gazing the ethernet,” I said. “She’s got to have books she could read if she’s bored… I mean, if nothing else I’ve got a bunch of history books out on my desk.”

“They’re not likely to have anything about your grandmother in them,” Ian said.

“What?” I said. “You really think she’s going to be looking up more stuff on my grandmother after I made it clear…”

“That you aren’t interested?” Ian said. “That’s probably why she wants to do it alone… she’s got to be curious.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s pretty damned interesting,” Ian said. “Hell, I’m interested… and not just because she’s your grandmother. It’s interesting.”

“What’s so interesting about her gran, then?” Hazel asked.

I would have told her “nothing, really,” but I was too slow.

Ian said, “She’s a famous… or once-famous, maybe… paladin, I guess.”

“I think ‘famous’ is maybe pushing it,” I said.

“She has a fan site,” Ian said.

“That means she has fans,” I said. “I mean, none of us had heard of her… I’ve only ever run into one person who has.”

“Then how did you not know?” Ian said.

“Have you met her?” Hazel asked. “She’s kind of oblivious.”

“Yes,” Two said, nodding. “Kind of oblivious.”

“Two, you don’t have to agree with everything your friend Hazel says,” I said.

“I don’t!” she said. “Only the things that are true.”

“What exactly is a paladin, anyway?” Hazel asked. “I’ve seen one, one time… we were going to dock on an island in the middle of the river but had to wait because there were some men there, one with a great big white horse and silver-white armor. I asked my mum if he was a knight and she said he was a paladin, and I asked her what that meant and she said she thought it was like a priest who blesses with his sword. They were checking the island for ghosts, if you can credit that… apparently the locals had reported odd lights and sounds, faint figures that vanished and reappeared. Daft, really. We stayed there all the time and never saw anything the like of that.”

“Yeah, basically they’re knights,” Ian said.

“They’re more than just knights… there are a lot more orders of knighthood than there are ones for paladins,” I said. “Paladins are supposed to be to Khersis… well, any god that wants armed champions, maybe… what knights were originally to lords. But even knightly orders that are devoted to a temple aren’t the same as paladins.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m not saying you don’t have to be pretty badass to be one,” Ian said. “And it seems like your grandmother was way more than qualified.”

“Oh? Bit of a scrapper?” Hazel said.

“Little bit,” Ian said.

“I really, really am getting sick of this topic,” I said.

“I come from some fairly impressive stock myself,” Hazel said. “My ancestors fought in wars in every shire they were driven out of.”

“They sound like real, uh, winners,” Ian said.

“Hey, they specialized in guerrilla tactics,” Hazel said. “Those don’t work if you’re fighting from a position of strength. They had to lose to win.”

“So, they won eventually?” Ian asked.

“Er, not as such, no,” Hazel said.

“The thing that’s really strange to me about her being a paladin,” I said, “is that she always made it pretty clear what she thought of the Imperium’s influence on religious affairs. She was just fine with the other way around, but she’d border on treason any time there was something in the news about official action involving a temple.”

“Are there any paladin orders left that aren’t under the Emperor?” Ian asked. “I thought Magisterion III pretty much consolidated all of them.”

“I think there might be some smaller holdouts… I know they didn’t all fold, he was satisfied to get the biggest ones,” I said. “But if any of the independent orders survived, I’m actually pretty sure the Imperial Dragons aren’t among them.”

“I thought you were sick of the topic,” Hazel said.

“I am!” I said. “I just… this is part of why it bothers me. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“Well…” Hazel said. “Granted that I don’t know your grandmother all that well, but I’d guess that she was a paladin before she was your grandmother.”

“Well, yeah,” I said.

“It seems just possible that a human might change her mind about something, given enough decades,” Hazel said.

“She was so passionate about it,” I said. “It was the only time I can remember her getting heated up about something… I mean, I saw her angry, but not like this. I can’t imagine she ever felt differently.”

“Well, maybe things are different for the tallfolk,” Hazel said. Her voice kind of quirked up on the first word, like a verbal shrug.

“What do you mean, different?” I asked.

“We’ve a saying: ‘there’s none more righteous than a reformed sinner’,” Hazel said. “It could be she’s done something she regrets.”

“She didn’t sound regretful… just angry,” I said.

“Maybe being angry at everyone else who are still in the wrong hurts less than admitting that she was one of them,” Hazel said.

“My grandmother can be pretty scary, but I have a hard time imagining her doing something she’d regret that much,” I said. “I mean, know she doesn’t regret the scary things she does now.”

“Uh… remember all that stuff about doing blackguard work in the Shift?” Ian asked.

“Ian, I know this probably just sounds like the same denials I’ve been giving, but… she really wasn’t there then,” I said. “The timeline doesn’t work out.”

“Maybe what you know is her cover story,” Ian said.

“Unless she coached my mother to lie about her childhood, I really don’t think so,” I said. “And I really can’t see that happening.”

“It seems to me that you can’t see any of this happening,” Hazel said.

“Trust me when I say that I know my own mother,” I said.

“Oh, well… of course,” Hazel said. “I didn’t mean to imply… sorry. Anyway, enough idle talk… we’ve got work to do.”

With that, she seemed to undergo a sort of transformation. I’d never seen her as business-like, as determined… grim, even… as she was once she decided that cooking was the thing to do. She told Two to take an inventory of anything she had on hand that would be useful. I expected Two to look confused or ask for clarification, but she just said “Okay!” and went off towards our room.

“Now, first thing we’re going to do is a pie,” Hazel said, climbing up on a chair. “I want to make more than one pie of course, but we’ve only the one oven up here, and one pie will be better than no pie for the purposes of drawing people in. Bring me the green bag, Ian, love?”

“Uh, okay,” Ian said. He grabbed it off the counter and swung it over to the table.

“Thank you. Alright, now,” she said, turning to me. She reached into the bag and pulled out a tube of soda crackers, a bag, a rolling pin, and a measuring cup. “We’ll start with the easy and fun part… I need you to crumble me up about two cups of these.”

“What, for the crust?” I asked, taking the crackers from her.

“No, I’ve got a pastry crust already made,” Hazel said. “I’ll show you how to make it sometime if you’d like, but one thing at a time. The crackers are the filling.”

“We’re making cracker pie?” I asked.

“Well, it’d be apple pie but we don’t have any apples,” she said.

“Yeah, but… surely you can come up with something better than crackers,” I said.

“Not if we want to make apple pie.”

“What?” I said. Ian snickered. I whirled around to face him. “What’s so funny?”

“Come on, Mackenzie,” he said. “A country girl like you has never heard of mock apple pie?”

“I’m not ‘country’,” I said. “I’m small town… and yeah, I’ve heard of it. I didn’t think it was made from crackers, though. I always figured it was made from… um…”

“What?” Ian said, smirking a little.

“Nothing,” I said, blushing.

“What were you going to say?”

“Fake apples,” I said. I looked at Hazel. “I told you I never really had anyone cook with me before.”

“I’m not laughing,” she said. “Anyway, I picked this because it’s a human recipe, something your mum might have known. We picked it up traveling the waterways. Break the crackers up a bit before you open them, then dump them directly into the bag and you can work on them with the rolling pin.”

I complied. It was kind of satisfying to squeeze the tube a little and feel the square crackers breaking beneath my fingers even as I felt awkward doing it. I tried sticking the end in the plastic bag before opening it, but I tore it too much and lost some of the contents, and then more when I tried to shake the rest out.

“It’s fine,” Hazel said. “I have more. I don’t know how many of these make a cup, anyway. Now, don’t powder them… we want it kind of coarse, for the texture.”

The rolling pin crumbled the remainder pretty quickly.

“So, what, do you flavor it with apple sauce or apple juice or something?” I asked.

“This might be hard to understand when you can get anything canned at the market, but this was invented because folks who didn’t have apples couldn’t get things made from apples, either,” Hazel said.

“So how do you make it taste like apples?” I asked.

“The power of suggestion,” Hazel said. “Don’t get ahead of yourself… we’ll get to it. That’s fine enough, dear, let’s see how much it is.”

I had to crush up more crackers to get the required amount, but I didn’t mind. It was satisfying, if slightly messy work.

“I think it’s a little under two cups,” I said, lifting up the cup towards my face to see for sure. “Should I do more?”

“You want to lower yourself towards the flat surface, not lift the cup off it,” Hazel said. “More accurate… and safer… that way.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Anyway, a little under’s fine,” she said. “This isn’t alchemy we’re doing. Some ratios are important… other ones you can fudge a little, at least when Two’s busy elsewhere. Not another word about the amount, now.”

I looked up automatically, out the glass wall. Two was heading back down the hallway.

“Okay,” I said. “Now what?”

“Now it’s time for a little alchemy,” Hazel said. “We brew up the magic apple potion.”

She had Ian get her out a saucepan from another of the bags, and bring a blue one with a bag of sugar sticking out of it over to the table.

“Hello again,” Two said. She held up a notepad. “I have the inventory.”

“Good,” Hazel said. “Could you get me your own cups of water, love?”

“Okay!” Two said. She took another measuring cup over to the sink, and very quickly filled it up exactly to the two cup line, twisting the knob to slow the water as it approached the level and then cut it off when it reached it. She then set the cup down on the counter and lined her eyes up with it, scrutinizing it for a second before nodding.

“Right,” Hazel said. “Two’s the magic number,” she said to me. “That’s why this recipe’s so easy. Two cups water, two cups sugar, two tablespoons of lemon juice, two teaspoons of cream of tartar, a bit of zest from the lemon rind…”

“Where were people able to get lemons from if they couldn’t get apples?” I asked.

“That’s a modern innovation,” Hazel said. “Makes it taste a bit more fruity.”

“So why not just use apples?” I asked.

“More work to cut and peel apples than it is to cut and peal crackers,” Hazel said. “And I’m apt to eat apples that are sitting around. Not so with lemons.”

“I can tell who peeled the crackers,” Two said, wrinkling her nose at the crumbs on the table and floor.

“Be nice, love, it’s her first time,” Hazel said.

“It’s not her first time making a mess,” Two said.

“Well, my mother always said that if the gods give you a talent, you should use it,” Hazel said.

“I don’t think your mother was talking about messes,” Two said.

“In point of fact, she was,” Hazel said. “I was a fair bit of a hellion in the kitchen when I was younger. My first pie was a crime against nature.”

Hazel got to work assembling her “potion” in the saucepan, mixing the sugar and water and the powdery stuff she called cream.

“You bring it to a boil and then simmer to reduce it a bit, then flavor it with the lemon and let it cool down and get syrupy,” she said to me, handing it off to Two who put it on the stove.

I could see why Hazel preferred cooking with a partner in a human sized kitchen. I wondered how well the two of them would be able to work together in a gnomish-sized one. It seemed like no matter where they went, their efficiency would suffer… the thought made me sad.

“Is this really going to taste like apple, or is it going to taste like lemon-flavored crackers?” I asked.

“Well, you don’t put a lot of lemon in it,” Hazel said. “Just enough to give it a tart little bite. The cream of tartar reacts with the sugar, making it… fruitier, somehow, and the texture of it, once it’s had a chance to set, is very close. You put cinnamon, a little nutmeg, maybe a little brown sugar in it… those things don’t taste much like apples, mind you, but apple pie tastes like them. About ready there, Two?”

“Almost,” Two said.

“How long do you have to cook the syrup for?” I asked.

“Longer than she does,” Hazel said. “That girl’s magic in the kitchen.”

“Two is the magic number,” Two said. She lifted the pan off the stove, holding her hand over it. The steam coming from it disappeared.

“If you can’t do what she does, it’s about fifteen minutes to simmer and half an hour to cool,” Hazel said.

Hazel put some melted butter along with a brownish seasoning mix in the bottom of a pie crust and then had me dump the crackers on top. Two poured the mixture over the top of that, then Hazel sprinkled more of the butter and spices over it.

“That should do it,” Hazel said. “Now we cover it up to hide the shame of our counterfeiting and stick it where no one can see it for half an hour, and that’s all there is to it.”

“And it’s really going to be like eating an apple pie?” I asked.

“You’ve probably eaten it before and didn’t know it,” she told me.

“I doubt it, unless I was very young,” I said. “I don’t even really like apple pie.”

“Well, then, you’re in luck,” Hazel said. “Because it really isn’t apple pie.”

Next: Hazel squeezes soup from a stone.

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“Two,” I croaked, turning towards her. “Where did you even get that idea?”

“Steff told me,” Two said. “She said she had to tell someone. I’m someone.”

Now that she’d said it, I realized it made a kind of sense… Steff had been really rattled the day after her encounter with Leda, but she’d been unwilling to talk about it. If Dee hadn’t said something, I wouldn’t have known anything about it.

Steff had insisted it was “just sex”… I’d been afraid at the time that she might have done something to Leda rather than the other way around. I felt awful, thinking about that. I tried to remember exactly what I’d said, how I’d reacted… had I sounded as accusatory to Steff as I did in my own head?

How had she taken that? What must it have felt like?

Steff really was pretty vulnerable, emotionally… she had sharp edges because she was so brittle and had been broken so many times. I hated to think that I had made things worse. But then, I’d never been the most sensitive or observant person.

I looked at Amaranth, hoping to see something in her face that would make me feel better… surely she’d have some words of wisdom, or at least kindness. But she looked a lot like I felt: stricken, guilty, horror-struck.

“Two, love, are you sure you want to be telling tales outside of school like that?” Hazel said quietly.

“I’m not outside of school,” Two said. “I am outside of class, but I think the area of the school encompasses the entire campus.”

“I just mean that you ought to respect it when someone tells you something in confidence,” Hazel said.

“Hazel, I agree with that in general,” Amaranth said, “but don’t you think we maybe need to know this?”

“Do we?” Ian said. “Okay, yeah, I was playing amateur detective a little bit ago, but I don’t see how this helps us or Steff. Granted she’s not my favorite person in the world, but you guys like her. Is it really in her interest to talk about her private stuff behind her back?”

“I just feel… I feel like I should have known,” Amaranth said. “I should have seen it. Sex is what I do, what I am. How did I miss that?”

Ian put his hand on her shoulder. I didn’t feel jealous, exactly, but something about seeing the physical contact made me realize how much I was craving a little myself. I stepped up next to Ian and he put his other arm around me.

“In my sex ed class, the school counselor said that rape wasn’t sex. Me being the thirteen-year-old philosopher that I was, I argued with her for half an hour,” he said to Amaranth. “I was an idiot. Anyway, you try pretty hard not to see the bad… that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it means you can’t be blamed for missing things like this.”

“I guess,” Amaranth said. “I’m just… I’m not sure what it says about me, as a friend.”

“That you’re not a mind reader,” Ian said. “You didn’t know, Mackenzie didn’t know… I’d bet nobody knew. Probably her own boyfriend didn’t know, or else he’d probably… uh, well. You know.”

“I really don’t think it was Viktor,” I said. “If he was going to do something about it, he wouldn’t wait until Steff was helpless and under life-endangering physical stress to sneak out and take care of it. And it’s not likely he just now found out.”

“Maybe Steff said something, in a delirium or in her sleep?” Ian said. “Or Dee could have picked something up and relayed it without thinking about it… um, I’m going to stop speculating. I doubt he did anything. You know, with the teeth thing, it probably was a wandering monster of some kind, somehow. I don’t know if that’s more disturbing or less.”

“If they have some evidence of that, I wish they’d put it out,” Amaranth said. “Think about how many people around campus right now are speculating about who did it.”

“I wish she would have told us what happened,” I said. “I know she’s been in a lot of pain… maybe we could have helped her.”

“She is getting help,” Amaranth said. “I mean, we can offer her support, but she’s getting professional help. I’m sure she’s talked about this with her healer.”

“Um,” Oru said. “Maybe this isn’t my place, but… are we sure it wasn’t the other way around? I mean, I’m no expert on mammal, um, anatomy, but that seems… logistically unlikely?”

“You know,” Shiel said, “my first impulse is to deny the possibility of a physical male being raped by a woman, but… I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the kind of assumption that would underlie that. In kobold society, evidence of physical arousal on the victim’s part is considered enough to dismiss rape claims. The ‘logic’ being that if you enjoy it, you obviously wanted it. I’ve never heard considered it being reversed, with an erect penis being… well, you don’t hear about many female-on-male rape cases. But it’s the same principle: if you’re ‘turned on’, physically, then it can’t be rape. As backwards as humans are in so many ways, I like to think they’re more progressive about that sort of thing than we are.”

“I can’t imagine being aroused if I was actually being raped,” Oru said. “I think you’d have to be sick in the head.”

“Well, I hope you never have the opportunity to learn otherwise,” Shiel said.

“Like you know anything about it,” Oru said.

“I know enough not to make assumptions that second-guess a victim’s experience,” Shiel said.

“I don’t know about girls, but getting, uh, you know… it’s a physical response,” Ian said. “Not like you make a choice, ‘oh, I guess I’ll get hard now’. Anyway, being turned on isn’t the same thing as saying yes, for anybody.”

“Do we really have to talk about this?” Honey asked. “It’s bad enough how the poor girl died… we don’t need to be leveling accusations…”

“Accusations?” I repeated. “Are you saying Steff is a liar?”

“No, I’m saying she’s an accuser… maybe. We don’t even have Steff’s word right now,” Honey said. “And it hardly matters now, does it? Unless, of course, she did have something to do with it. Though I don’t see how she could have.” She shivered. “Those teeth… eyes…”

“What eyes, now?” Hazel said. Her voice was surprisingly sharp. I wondered what Honey was talking about, too, but I hadn’t heard that much suspicion in Hazel’s voice since the time she thought I was making Two cook for me. “What are you on about?”

“Nothing!” Honey said. “I just keep seeing her in my head, I guess. Because of my imagination. The poor girl…”

“You keep saying that, but she wasn’t any kind of poor that I could see,” Hazel said. “No disrespect meant.”

“She was so lonely,” Honey said. “Out there every night…”

“She was never alone any of the times I saw her out there,” Hazel said.

“I said lonely, not alone, Miss Hazel,” Honey said. “A person can be surrounded by hangers-on and well-wishers and still be lonely as the moon.”

“Oh, yeah, I bet you were real lonely in your big hole in the high hill,” Hazel said. “How do you think I felt, after we sold the boat and I had to leave all my friends behind?”

“You know what freaks me out about all this?” Oru said. “I mean, on top of everything else.” She looked at Honey. “How much this is like your dream.”

“What?” Hazel said. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” Honey said. “I had a bad dream. It was nothing, though. Just a jumble.”

“That’s not what you…” Oru said.

“It was just a random bad dream, it could have been about anything,” Honey said. “They scare us with talk of the monsters outside, and I knew Leda was out all night sometimes. The dream probably wasn’t even about her. I just put a spin on it because I was worried about her.”

“Are you sure?” Oru said. “Because…”

“Look, I don’t want to talk about it,” Honey said. “The last thing I need is for a rumor to get around that I know something about all this. If I get nicked, even if it’s just for questioning, I’d… well, my family could be disappointed.”

The end of the sentence really didn’t sound like it went with the beginning. She’d sounded worried about something far worse than family disappointment. I wondered briefly if Honey was a fugitive of some sort… it would hardly be stranger than anything else that was going on.

“This is obviously a very stressful time for everybody,” Amaranth said. “We’re all worried for ourselves and our friends, we’re all sad about what happened, we’re all scared about what’s going to happen next. We shouldn’t be fighting. It’s natural that tempers might fray around the edges… we’ll just have to try harder to get along.”

“Well, that’s sensible,” Hazel said, though she was still looking at her cousin sort of sideways. “Speaking of sensible, you know what we should do is figure out how much food we’ve got and if we can get a proper meal going with it.”

“I don’t know if I have that much,” Two said. “I was going to go shopping today.”

“We’ll do soup,” Hazel said. “Soup’s easy to stretch. I’ve got potatoes, I know you’ve got celery and carrots. We’ve both got a little leftover chicken, and I’ve some stock cubes.” She hopped up onto her feet. “Come on, we’ll go and see what everyone else has, and let them know what we’re up to.”

“Okay,” Two said.

“You want to make soup, now?” I said.

“Well, that’s what you do when something like this happens,” Hazel said. “It’s what my mum would do. Well, not exactly like this… but a crisis happens, people need to pull together. They need a little bit of comfort and a little bit of camaraderie. Didn’t your mum ever do anything like that?”

“Not really,” I said. “Well, I guess she baked some pies when these kids got lost in the woods. My grandmother did stuff like that, too. I think… I’m not sure. I kind of avoided the kitchen. There wasn’t anything for me there, anyway.”

“Well, you should pitch in, then,” Hazel said. “We could use a couple of pies, I should think.”

“Yeah, um, I don’t know really how to cook,” I said. “Or bake, or whatever.”

“Your mum didn’t give you her recipes?”

“No,” I said. “She didn’t give me anything, really.”

“Oh, baby, don’t say that,” Amaranth said. “I think she gave you a lot of your better qualities.”

“I mean, physical,” I said. “It’s just the truth… it’s not like I’m resenting her for it or anything. We didn’t have a lot to begin with, and I was never very good in the kitchen.”

“Well, you were young,” Hazel said. “It’s a bit of a shame to let an important part of your heritage just slip away, though… is there anyone else in the family who might have copies of her recipes?”

“I thought you said that recipes weren’t that important,” Two said.

“They’re important for having even if they’re not important for using,” Hazel said. “Family recipes in particular.”

“Um… if they are family recipes, then wouldn’t she have received them from her own mother?” Amaranth said.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “After everything else, I’m going to go talk to my grandmother so I can ask her to teach me how to bake a pie.”

“Well, you could look at it as a way to re-connect with your mother,” Amaranth said. “And it could be a sort of neutral topic with your grandmother.”

“Um, I’m not sure the topic of ‘neutral’ applies to that woman,” Ian said. He glanced at me as he said this, but I couldn’t really reproach him for it. I didn’t think he was wrong, for one thing.

“Yeah,” I said. “She called neutrality ‘the lesser of two evils’ when a couple of druidic evangelists came knocking on her door. It was the only time I ever heard her being clever.”

“Well, why don’t you come along with us?” Hazel said. “I’ll show you a thing or two.”

“She’ll make a mess,” Two said.

“She’ll help clean it up,” Hazel said.

“That’s okay, I’m really… I’m good,” I said.

“Come on, it’ll take your mind off things,” she said.

I looked at Amaranth.

“Don’t you think it might be fun?” she said. “And I’m sure Two would enjoy sharing her hobby with you.”

“We’re all sitting here under virtual house arrest, we just found out our best friend’s been raped by a murder victim… is now the best time to be making a pie?” I asked.

“Well… what else are we going to do?” Amaranth said. “I’d kind of like to do a little more research, just to keep my mind occupied, but with your mirror that’s kind of a one-person thing.”

“Oh, so what am I supposed to do?” Ian asked.

“You can help carry,” Hazel said.

“You really want to make pies and soup, right now?” I asked.

“You’re a bit quicker on the uptake than normal today,” Hazel said.

“I’m just… it seems…”

“How do you feel right now?” she asked me.

I had to think about it… I couldn’t immediately name what I was feeling. In fact, I couldn’t immediately feel it.

“Numb,” I said. “Spellshocked. It seems like it’s been one thing on top of another since I got here, but this… this is all beyond the pale. I don’t know what to feel. I don’t know how to feel it.”

“Well, your roomie can tell you that the best thing for when you don’t know what to feel is to do instead,” Hazel said. When I didn’t respond, she looked at me and said, “Either that or you can sit around and wait for your feelings to sort themselves out. That might work out okay in the end, but it has one pretty substantial drawback.”

“What’s that, exactly?” I asked.

“No pie,” Hazel said.

I sighed.

“Okay,” I said. “I can’t say how much help I’ll be, or how much I’ll actually learn.”

“Yeah, she is pretty bad at that,” Ian said.

“You coming along?” Hazel asked Honey.

“No,” she said. “I think I’m just going to make some tea and lie down.”

“Well, alright, then,” Hazel said. “But you make sure you let me know if anything, you know, funny happens.”

“Nothing’s going to happen while I’m asleep,” Honey said.

“Something usually happens when Mack is asleep,” Two said. “But it’s not very funny.”

Author’s note: Sorry this one has gone up so late… it’s been a ~*fun*~ couple of days at Chez AE, as readers of my blog know. I’m closing the Q&A post so that I can finish compiling the answerable questions for the weekend. Thanks to everyone who participated. If the results are well-received, we’ll probably do it again.

A note to commenters: the characters in this story are fictitious. They have no feelings and cannot hear anything you say about them. Other people reading the comments section are real, as is rape. Please display a little sensitivity in comments, particularly if you feel the need to dissect what is and isn’t rape. What might be an intellectual exercise for you could be an emotional minefield for others.

Discuss this story on the Livejournal community.

Next: No, it’s not going to be a whole chapter about making pie. It’s going to be several of them. Stuff happens.

My grandmother was a paladin. She’d apparently fought demons bodily before becoming the steely-willed village exorcist I knew and feared. Those things I could sort of grasp, in the abstract… it was a little harder to wrap my head around the idea that she had a fan site.

That’s exactly what I was looking at, though… an ethernet shrine to “Brimstone” Blaise, who was apparently “the last true paladin of the second century.”

Stunned, I made no move to take the mirror from Amaranth. She started to withdraw it, but Ian came over and held out his hand.

“Can I see?” he said.

“Sure, go ahead,” Amaranth said and handed it to him.

“Whoa,” he said. “She doesn’t look that different… does that mean she aged well, or youthed poorly?”

“Ian,” Amaranth said warningly.

“Sorry,” he said, flicking his finger over the reflection. “Man… Mackenzie, your grandmother’s like a superhero.”

“So she apparently had a career before she settled down,” I said. “Let’s not make too big a deal out of this.”

“Too big a deal?” Ian said. “Khersis, she fought demons… she dueled a dragon. This site makes it sound like she won the Chaos Wars single-handedly.”

“Yeah, that site,” I said. “Somebody on the ethernet with too much time on their hands. Let me see that.”

He handed me the mirror. He’d unfurled the page down to a timeline that I could tell at a glance was mostly guesswork and exaggeration.

“Look,” I said, pointing to some of the later deeds that were attributed to her. “A lot of these dates don’t add up. They’ve got her fighting overseas when my mother would have been a child. My grandmother’s always been big on family duty and a woman knowing her place.”

“Always?” Ian repeated. “Or could this be something she came up with later in life. I mean, she was obviously married already when she had the bulk of her career… or whatever part of it made her famous enough to merit an alliterative nickname.”

“Actually,” Amaranth said, “if you had read the bio at the top instead of skipping to the factoids, you’d know that she got that name during her training… and that she married Royal Blaise, a distant cousin with whom she already shared a surname.”

“That’s… gross,” Ian said.

“Not really,” Amaranth said. “First of all, cousin marriage used to be fairly commonplace.”

“Maybe down in the wetlands,” Ian said.

“Hey, I think it’s gross, too,” I said. “But thanks for the stereotyping.”

“Oh, you two,” Amaranth said indignantly. “If they didn’t happen to have the same last name, they probably wouldn’t have even realized they were related unless someone went to update a really complete family tree. Any time someone in a small town marries someone whose family lived in the same area for generations, they’re probably marrying closer kin than this.”

“Yeah, and every time you drink water from a stream someone’s peed in it,” Ian said. “You know that abstractly and it doesn’t stop you. But if someone pointed out that they just peed in it a minute ago, I’d expect you to stop and go find somewhere else to drink. Well, a generalized ‘you’, I mean.”

“So, two people who fell in love with each other forty years ago should have stopped and reconsidered based on the possibility that one day a couple of giggling teenagers would find their union icky?” Amaranth said.

“You know,” Ian said, “when you put it that way… no, it’s still gross.”

“In fairness, it’s my grandmother,” I said. “I think any level of detail about her personal relationships… relationship… is going to be gross to me.”

“You know, baby, I think a lot of people would find stories about how their grandparents met to be cute and sweet,” Amaranth said.

“My grandmother’s not cute or sweet,” I said.

“I’m sure you have some fond memories of her.”

“I’m sure I did when I was much younger,” I said. “Holidays and stuff… but that’s because I was too young to realize how much scorn she had for my mother, and it’s from before she started treating me like a thing that had invaded her world.”

“Oh, baby,” Amaranth said. She pulled me close, enveloping me in her warmth and the scent of her hair and skin. “I’m sorry. You haven’t had an easy life and I shouldn’t judge how you deal with it today. But, the basic point that it’s not that unusual for people related at some removal to marry each other.”

“I won’t argue that,” Ian said. “As long as we don’t have to have a big involved conversation about how beautiful and special and magical it is. Especially when there’s so much going on, and so many other things we could be talking about. Like, Mackenzie’s grandmother dueling a dragon.”

“Where do you even see that?” I asked, turning my attention back to the mirror.

“See, there?” Ian said, pointing to one of the items on the list. “ME 179, she dueled Fysaskerath the Red to a standstill.”

“It doesn’t say that’s a dragon,” I said. “It could be a red wizard.”

“No, dude, Fysaskerath is a greater red dragon,” Ian said.

“Don’t call me ‘dude’,” I said. “And great, or greater? There’s a big difference there.”

“Greater,” Ian said. “He came up in my lore class.”

“You take a lore class?” I asked.

“It was either that or history, and history sounded boring,” he said.

“Plus lore will be more useful if you become a bard,” Amaranth said. Ian just kind of laughed.

“History’s not boring,” I said.

“Mackenzie, let’s not get sidetracked with another stupid argument,” Ian said. “Do you not understand how huge that is? A greater dragon. She fought a greater dragon and won.”

“More like tied,” I said.

“She survived,” Ian said. “That’s winning.”

“We don’t even know if that’s true,” I said.

“Actually, I know that the Imperial White Dragons sent a contingent of paladins to parlay with Fysaskerath the Red in the late 70s,” Amaranth said. “And after the group was beaten badly in an ambush, the youngest one of them challenged him to single combat for the right to depart in peace. The story was in a book I read.”

“Did the story have the name of the paladin?” I asked.

“Well… no,” Amaranth said. “It was a second-hand account.”

“See, I’d bet a lot of the things on this site are from second-hand accounts where the paladin or hero in question wasn’t even named,” I said. “This was all during the Chaos Wars… a lot of this stuff would have been really hush-hush if it even happened at all. I’ve seen conspiracy theories that were based on the same slim clues. In either case, it’s just someone filling in the blanks with what they want the answer to be.”

“Okay, so even if this is hero-worship run amok… your ‘Brimstone’ was enough of a hero to inspire it,” Ian said. “Some of this stuff has got to be true.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I don’t see the point in picking over it and trying to figure out what. I know who my grandmother is today. I’m not fond of her.”

“Well, it still might be interesting to find out where she came from,” Amaranth said. “If only because that’s part of where you came from.”

“Yeah, and the other part is a demon who escaped from hell long enough to impregnate my mother,” I said. “What fun it is to explore my roots.”

“Hey,” Ian said, in a very I just had an awesome idea kind of tone. I didn’t like it at all. I cringed for whatever was going to follow it. “If your mother was the child of an ass-kicking demon hunter… and your father was a demon… does it seem a little crazy to think that might not have been a coincidence?”

“What, you think it was some stupid teenage rebellion thing?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Ian said. “Or maybe it was a way for some old enemy to thumb its nose at ‘Brimstone’.”

“Will you quit calling her that?” I asked.

“Okay, but think about it: it’s supposed to be really hard to kill a demon for real, right?” Ian said. “I mean, I’m no expert, but unless they’re bound to a mortal or something they just wind up back where they came from and have to start working their way back again. So no matter how badass she was, she could have had old enemies coming back all the time.”

“You know, I think Lee’s advice about speculation could probably apply here, too,” I said.

“Well, while your grandmother’s in town anyway…” Amaranth said.

“I’m not going to ask her about her history or my birth,” I said.

“I understand how you feel, baby…”

“Do you really?” I asked.

“Well, I think I do,” Amaranth said. “I’m trying. But I also don’t see how you can’t be curious about this. I mean, if nothing else, it seems to me like you still might have some questions about what happened to your mother…”

“She died,” I said. “It wasn’t my fault.”

“You say that and I do believe you,” Amaranth said. “But what I’m not really sure of is how much you know about what really happened.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” I said, and she was. “I know what happened.”

Of course I knew. Of course I did.

“Would you like to talk about it?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “She died. It wasn’t my fault. That’s all I know.”

“Um…” Ian said. He and Amaranth looked at each other in a way that made me really uncomfortable, in a way that was hard to articulate.

“Let’s talk about something else,” I said. “I don’t care what. Let’s talk about my grandmother the famous paladin.”

“Okay,” Ian said, but then he didn’t say anything else for several seconds. “Um… I wonder what’s actually tougher, a greater dragon or a demon?”

“Well, I think in general the greater dragon would be,” Amaranth said. “The demon’s immortality is a bit more literal, as long as they’re free on this plane, but that wouldn’t stop the dragon from obliterating its body. But in terms of actually having to fight one? Well, I wouldn’t want to fight either. But there are probably some advantages to going after a dragon, which is big and obvious and generally lairs in a fixed spot, compared to fighting demons in general, who are less obvious and can move unnoticed through human society.”

“It’s getting harder to do that, though,” I said. “With enchantment getting cheaper, and wards and magic weapons everywhere… I have to imagine that full demons are getting squeezed back into the margins, into the deep woods and the remote villages again.”

“Maybe that’s why your grandmother retired?” Ian suggested. “Maybe the demons were getting harder to find.”

“Or maybe she wanted to start a family,” Amaranth said. “We won’t know unless…”

“We’re not asking,” I said.

“…she tells us,” Amaranth finished. “Anyway, I suppose in terms of their relative power levels… comparing a greater dragon to a generic unspecified demon is going to be a little lopsided. Demons don’t really come in neat little classes like that, but I’m sure there are weaker ones and stronger ones.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I don’t think even the strongest ones are equal to a greater dragon… they’re kind of just short of a physical avatar of a god.”

“I think I’d want to see one fighting an avatar before I made that judgment,” Ian said. “You know… from a distance.”

“Another story in the book of dragon tales had a dragon having to outsmart a djinni to get its lair back,” Amaranth said. “I think it was supposed to be a greater dragon. You know, most of the ones who end up in storybooks are, or were.”

“My mother used to tell me stories about a pair of green dragons who supposedly lived in the swamps to the south,” I said. “I don’t think they were greater dragons. But then, that was more of a local thing. Blackwater is kind of lousy with dragons, actually. It’s named after one. Actually, that’s how my mother started telling me about the greens… when I first heard about our black dragon, I was scared she was going to come after us. So my mother told me about the dragons to the south that she quarreled with, and how that kept her busy.”

“Is that actually true, though, or is that just like a story she told you?” Ian asked.

I gave him an irritated look and started to reply, then I realized that I didn’t know.

“I’m not really sure,” I said.

“Well… we could look that up,” Amaranth said. “That might be, I don’t know, a fun way to pass the time? Looking up stuff about dragons? I mean, we’d usually go to the library on a Sunday, but… hmm. Do you think it would be alright if we just… no, on second thought, I’m pretty sure that the library’s open to the public, and even if it’s not, it’s not like there are guards outside to keep reporters and other non-students out. We’ll just stay here.”

“Didn’t we want to go check Hazel’s room for Two, anyway?” Ian said. Amaranth and I looked at each other guiltily. “Hey, it’s okay,” Ian said. “We’ve all been distracted. It’s a distracting kind of day.”

We headed out. I was careful to lock our door behind me. The floor seemed deserted and a lot of the rooms were still standing open, but I’d had enough people messing around inside my room even with the door locked that I didn’t want to tempt fate. Hazel’s door was also closed. Amaranth went up and knocked on it, gently.

“It’s open,” a voice that I was almost sure was Hazel’s said. It seemed like I could tell her and her cousin apart on sight now, though that may just have been because one of them was usually with Two… their voices were a little iffier, though Honey seemed to have a greater tendency to get kind of shrill.

Amaranth opened the door. Two was in there, to my relief, though the distressed look that was fixed on her face was not very reassuring. Both the gnome girls were there, and so were Shiel and Oru. Two didn’t even greet us when we came in.

“Hello, Two,” Ian said, kind of lamely. She just nodded at him.

“‘lo, all,” Hazel said. “Our girl Two’s got a bit of a problem, it seems.”

“I’m surprised they’re letting you run free,” Shiel said to me.

“Hey, she didn’t do anything,” Ian said. “We can prove it.”

“I didn’t say anything about who did what, or proof,” Shiel said. “I’m just honestly surprised they’re letting her run free.”

“It’s okay, I know what you mean,” I said. “Did they pull you in?”

“They got us out of bed and made us give bite marks in soft iron,” Oru said.

“I wanted to refuse out of principle,” Shiel said. “But… I’m not a citizen. I have to pick my battles. I value my education… now, if the university itself had subjected me to something so humiliating I wouldn’t deign to continue my schooling here in the first place, but I’m not going to get myself kicked out for unrelated reasons.”

“They got excited when they saw the impressions,” Oru said. “Whatever did it had a big mouth… but then they must have realized that it didn’t match, somehow.”

I looked at her. In comparison to the gnomes, the goblinoids had large heads, relative to their bodies, and their mouths were wider than a typical human-sized race. That pretty much ruled out Steff, any way that I could figure. Viktor had a very large mouth, but aside from the tusky ones ogre teeth seemed more like hammers than knives. I couldn’t imagine anybody mistaking an ogre’s bite for a goblin’s. Actually, the tusky fangs would probably be distinctive enough on their own to rule out a lot of possibilities.

“So it’s probably not Steff then, after all,” Ian said. I might have been mad, but he didn’t sound either disappointed or relieved… he hadn’t really thought it was her, for better or for worse.

“What’s wrong with Two?” I asked Hazel.

“Ask her yourself,” Hazel said.

“Two, what’s wrong?” I asked. She looked at me and a tremble passed over her face, but she didn’t say anything. “Did they order you not to talk to anyone?” She twitched like she wanted to at least nod, but she didn’t respond otherwise.

“Damn, that’s cold,” Ian said.

“Mack, baby,” Amaranth said. “Remember what we told her about your orders?”

“Ugh,” I said. “Nobody can counter my orders, but if she’s following an ongoing order to disregard any orders that counter the order not to talk to anyone…”

“Doesn’t… doesn’t she not have to follow orders any more?” Honey asked a little uncertainly. “I mean, it seems like she’s been more like a normal person for a while.”

“She never had to follow orders, not since she was freed,” I said. “But she’s… strongly inclined to. The more other interests she’s developed, the less she’s seemed to need to indulge in her original desire. But if an imperial agent waved a badge in her face… well, I can see that triggering a strong relapse.”

“Baby, can you try to help her?” Amaranth suggested.

“Wouldn’t that be, I don’t know, interfering in an imperial investigation?” Ian asked.

“Two’s a free person. I don’t think imperial agents give people literal ‘don’t talk to anyone’ orders with any legal force behind them,” Amaranth said. “Somebody just either didn’t realize how deeply ingrained this is for her, or they did realize and they took advantage of it. Either way, it’s horrible and we should do something.”

“Two, speak normally,” I said. That didn’t produce a response. “Disregard the order that’s causing you not to speak.”

“Maybe she’s geased?” Oru said.

“Could you tell that, baby?” Amaranth asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “It is a form of enchantment.”

I held out my hands a small distance from her head, and tried to sense magic. I realized as I did so that this was kind of pointless… Two was quite literally a bundle of enchantments. I could never hope to sort them out.

“There’s too much in her,” I said, shaking my head.

“Hey, Two,” Ian said, and her face turned towards him. “Pretend that I’m the person who ordered you to be quiet. Act as though I’m that person.”

Her face contorted as it did when she was thinking her way past a thorny stumbling block, but then it cleared as she said, “Okay, Mr. McAvoy.”

“Disregard my orders not to speak to anyone else,” Ian said.

“Okay,” Two said. “I’m going to stop pretending you’re not Ian. Thank you, Ian.”

I went to hug Ian, and we were both all but bowled over as Amaranth threw her arms around him, too.

“Well, I’ll be darned,” Hazel said. “Of course, I would have thought of that eventually.”

“So it was Del McAvoy who did that to you,” Shiel said.

“Yes,” Two said. “After I got done telling him about when Leda raped Steff.”

Discuss this chapter on the Livejournal feed.

Next: Two’s testimony.

“Our topic today is privilege,” Professor Lars Davison said at the beginning of the civics class. “Specifically, classical privilege, or formal privilege. As distinct from informal privilege, classical privilege is a legal concept. Who can tell me what ‘privilege’ means, literally?”

A few hands went up. Davison nodded at a young human woman in the third row.

“Private law?” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Private law… a separate law for an individual or group, as opposed to the general law that governs all. The abolishment of privilege was seriously debated as a revolutionary goal. The debate didn’t last long. Most of the revolutionaries agreed on two basic points: that the empire they were fighting against had too many privileged groups, to its ultimate detriment… and that a society could not effectively be ordered with one law for everyone.”

“Did they ever think to try?” a kobold woman sitting in a modified desk at the end of the front row asked.

“Whether they thought to or not is immaterial, Miss Shiel,” Davison said. “They didn’t try, though, as they saw only one shot at forming the best society they could. Fewer privileged groups was the goal they settled upon. The aristocracy was all but abolished… land, wealth, and in many cases titles were kept intact, and many of the aristocrats found positions of power within the new imperial republic, but idea of the aristocracy as a separate class with separate rules was set aside.”

“That doesn’t seem like a substantial difference to me,” Shiel said.

“It wouldn’t have at the time, but then, the idea wouldn’t have gained the traction it needed if it had led to a violent reordering of society,” the professor said. “But today the majority of senators are from less-than-aristocratic families, and this is the culmination of a trend that began from the first Imperial Republican Senate. Who can name another group whose formal privilege was eliminated?”

“The clergy?” someone said.

“Yes, good, the clergy,” Davison said. “The Universal Temple had always been a power unto itself. With the Unnamable Emperor as pontifex of the Mother Temple, it had less power to interfere with politics, but it still operated under its own laws, complete with separate courts. In the new order, temples would be subject to the same laws as everyone else, though they were granted some protection under the Bill of Prohibitions. The philosophy was to inscribe a warding circle between temple and state. Anybody have any thoughts about why a group that had wielded so much influence traditionally would voluntarily give it up in the new society?”

“I don’t think they were giving up much of anything at all,” Shiel said. “Religion still has a lot of influence over how the government runs, but the government can’t return the favor. They’re still in a privileged position, ‘formal privilege’ or no.”

“Yeah, but they aren’t part of a larger hierarchy any more,” another student said. “I mean, clerics do wield influence, but it’s not like there’s a class of clerics that acts together.”

“That’s a good point,” Davison said. “And a revealing one. The power the temple wielded was concentrated at the top. With the temples placed under general law, individual clerics can exist as private citizens, with all the cachet and prestige of their position but not being wedded to any hierarchy. Again, the full ramifications of this were not immediately seen… but today’s charismatic celebrity preachers could not exist if the clergy were still essentially a branch of the government. So, that’s two privileged groups that had were placed under general law. What groups retained classical privilege?”

“Bards,” someone said.

“Yes, the Bardic College was allowed to remain as a self-governing group,” Davison said. “Who else?”

“Guilds,” another student said.

“Yes,” Davison said, nodding. “The support of wealthy merchants was sorely needed during the revolution and shortly after. The fact that commerce had been so disadvantaged on this side of the ocean under the rule of the Old Empire helped things there. You folks are missing the big one.”

“The emperor,” someone said.

“Yes, exactly,” Davison said. “Though at the same time: no, not exactly. Nowhere else was the ambivalence towards private law shown more strongly than in the Magisterian model of emperor. The person of the emperor actually embodies two offices: executor and imperator. In the first capacity, the emperor carries out the laws of the Republic. In the second capacity, he can override or countermand them… ‘at need’, as it says in the Great Charter.”

“Or she,” Shiel said.

“Actually, the Great Charter specifically calls for a male emperor to carry out the duties of executor and imperator,” Davison said. “There is no provision for an empress at all. According to the laws of the republic, the emperor’s wife is simply the Imperial Consort, and the section dealing with her duties is even shorter and more to the point than the one dealing with the Consuls.”

“I was under the impression the empress wielded the majority of the power in the Imperium,” Shiel said.

“The key word there would be wield. The power that Empress Vera III wields is invested in her husband. She rules in his stead, by his consent. It’s only because Vera I’s husband didn’t object when she started calling herself ‘Empress’ instead of ‘Consort’ back in the hundred eighties that the title exists.”

“But if the imperator‘s word is greater than the laws of the Republic, then that means that the office of Empress is as real as anything in the Great Charter,” Shiel said.

“That’s one theory,” Davison said. “Another is that the title is simply an affectation and we’ve had three emperors in a row who humored their wives to an unusual degree. I expect both theories will be put to the test within the next few years.”

“What happens then?” Shiel asked.

“Well… we Imperials hope that our emperor lives forever, but we wouldn’t really tolerate it if he did,” Davison said. “We fought a war to get away from things like immortal overlords, after all. Magisterion XIII was not a young man when he took power, and he’s reaching the limit of what conventional healing can do.”

“What about dragons?” someone asked. “Are they private law?”

“Dragons… they’re an interesting case,” Davison said. “I assume you’re talking about the intelligent kind, as non-intelligent dragons are simply classed as beasts… protected beasts, but beasts nonetheless. Intelligent dragons, though… they don’t fall under the definition of classical privilege, though they might be seen as the epitome of ‘private law’. A contract with a dragon, for instance, has no legal force… an individual who enters into one is trusting in the dragon’s honor and in its desire to continue doing business with humans. Some dragons, particularly those who conduct a lot of business, have standing agreements about submitting to arbitration when there is a disagreement over terms.

“These agreements often go through mercantile guilds rather than the court system… the guilds being older than the Imperial Republic, dragons tend to be more familiar with their ins and outs. The guilds also have longstanding guidelines about dealing with dragons, to make sure they’re not getting fleeced. Many great dragons, and all greater ones, radiate an aura of majesty that makes it impossible for mortals to deal with them on an equal footing, physical disparities aside. Typically, those who seek a deal with a dragon will interact with a humanoid proxy or familiar rather than meeting with the dragon in person. The dragon’s familiar, or pendragon, would typically have been a wizard or scholar in centuries gone by. These days, it’s as likely to be a lawyer or accountant. The fact that the pendragon would be under the dragon’s thrall would be an obstacle in ordinary contract law, but since a draconic contract is an entirely private agreement between the two parties it isn’t an issue.”

“I don’t understand why someone would enter into a contract under those circumstances,” a student said. “If there are no real legal remedies.”

“Well, this is getting a bit afield of the subject,” Davison said, “but it’s proven to be very rare for a dragon to renege on a written contract. Because there are no legal remedies, no one will deal with a dragon that’s a proven cheat. For one to go back on a deal, it would basically have to decide that the opportunity it sees right in front of it is more valuable than all the deals it could make in the future. Then there’s a general perception that it’s better… more convenient and more lucrative… to seem like a useful and beneficial neighbor to humanity than a villain or rogue.”

“I can’t believe that someone as powerful as a greater dragon would curry favor from humans like that,” Shiel said. “Aren’t most greater dragons older than humanity?”

“Yes, and more greater dragons have died since the creation of humanity than any time before that, discounting the primordial eras,” Davison said. “It’s fairly simple mathematics… they can be earning fees and salaries or fighting off armies and heroes. We use similar calculations in deciding how we deal with them. The dragons whose existence is officially tolerated aren’t harmless… it’s unlikely any dragon truly is. Rather, we judge that making enemies of them would bring more harm than living with them would… and that’s just talking about the damage an individual dragon could do, without getting into any of the environmental or planar concerns involved with exterminating them en masse, which really would be beyond the scope of this class. To bring it back to the topic of discussion: an individual dragon, doing business within the Imperium, might be seen as an example of a classically privileged individual, though dragons as a whole are more outside or beyond the law than ruled by a separate law.”

“I don’t know, that sounds pretty classically privileged to me,” Shiel said.

It had to be one of the biggest and most crowded residence halls on campus, but it also seemed like it would be one of the most private. You could actually open your door up without worrying about the person across the hall looking in.

There was a good sized lounge in the middle of the floor, bisected diagonally by a hallway. The two halves were not quite completely separated, as the walls between them had big cutout windows and counters. The lounges were definitely in use… they had dimmer lights, which were low on one side where people were sitting and talking in quietly, and completely off in the other, where people weren’t talking as much but it was noisier.

No one was naked in the dark half, but the people who were in there weren’t letting that stop them from much… some of them were just making out, but a guy sitting on a weird solid block coffee table thing had a girl on his lap, riding up and down on his dick. Another girl was going down on a guy in a corner. I saw two guys getting handjobs. Some of the couples who were really involved with each other might have been doing more.

Even spread out in a big lounge, it seemed weird to me that everyone was so uninhibited… it was dark, but not so dark that anyone couldn’t see what they
were all doing. Were they all exhibitionists? Or just really, really drunk? Or was it something about it being Veil?

“Where’s the resident advisor?” I asked rhetorically.

“Nobody likes a tattletale, Mackenzie,” Ian said.

“I wasn’t going to tell, I was just wondering why nobody’s doing anything about all this,” I said.

“It’s Friday night, there’s a party downstairs,” Ian said. “There are probably like two of them on duty, and they’re probably making a point of not caring what happens with all the visitors in their dorm.” He put an arm around me and started to draw me into the lighter dorm. “Come on, let’s go sit down.”

There were people talking in private tones, and some people were making out in the light half of the lounge, though not with the same abandon as the pairs in the darkness. There were beer cans scattered around, and I saw no less than three cubes, one of which was empty.

“Looks like somebody got a confidence boost,” Ian said quietly, nudging me in the elbow. Semele, her skin kind of stained an ugly yellow, was in the corner, having a big sloppy face-eating contest with a kind of stout looking girl with chestnut hair. “Once you’ve conquered a nymph and a drunken skank in the same night, where do you go from there? What’s the trifecta?”

“Okay, now who’s being judgmental?” I asked him.

“Hey, I was getting on you for judging people by association,” he said. “I’m just saying what I see.”

“You’re not calling that girl a skank just because she’s making out with Semele?”

“No, I’m pretty sure it could be anyone,” he said. “That’s kind of the point.”

“I don’t think I like the idea of assuming that a girl kissing another girl is a ‘skank’,” I said.

“No, you’re right,” he said. “A girl who’s snowdrifted in with empty beer cans clumsily sucking face with a total stranger is definitely a lady of class.”

“You don’t know that they’re strangers,” I said.

“Right, they’re probably in a deeply committed relationship.”

“I’m just saying, you’re jumping to conclusions,” I said, and maybe I was a little too happy about it, but it was true. He was. “It’s not just me who does that. I’d think you’d know better, considering what happened when we first met.”

“Yeah, I was way off the mark there,” he said. “I mean, by at least a week.”

Before I could come up with what would probably have been a clever and biting retort, the human girl pushed Semele away hard enough that she fell off the edge of the sofa, leaving her with a look on her face like a kitten that just got shut out in the cold.

“Oh, my kosh, you’re kind of adorable but you’re also gross,” she said. “Your mouth tastes like lawn clippings and paint!” She laughed, then turned and looked at a really tan girl with really fake looking burgundy hair. “Oh my kosh, did you see that? I just totally made out with the elf-spazz.”

“I know, I saw!” her friend said. “That was hilarious!”

“You should make out with someone next,” the brunette said. She turned and looked around the lounge, her eyes stopping and focusing in my general direction. “Oh, it’s the demon spazz! You should go make out with her!”

“No way!”

“Tell her… tell her you think she’s pretty!” the brunette said, and they both laughed.

“You know, we can hear you,” I said.

“Oh my kosh, she can hear me!” the brunette said.

“Let’s go find somewhere… quieter,” Ian said.

“Hey, man, they’re playing some kind of games upstairs,” one of the spectators said. “If you’re looking for something a little tamer. Can’t take drinks up there, though, or we’ll all get busted.”

“Thanks,” Ian said.

“What was that?” I asked him as we left.

“What?”

“That guy just telling you that,” I said. “Did you know him?”

“Don’t think so,” Ian said. “Did you know that girl?”

“Never seen her before in my life,” I said. “Either one of them.”

“Well, I’d assume the guy was just trying to be helpful,” Ian said. “In a minimal, not-being-a-complete-dick kind of way. It happens.”

We found the stairs going up… none of the stairs in the tower seemed to run for more than a single floor… and found that the next floor up was similar to the first, in terms of being generally confusing. They didn’t seem to conform to the same specific plan, though.

The lounge seemed to be in the same general space, but instead of a rectangle cut into two long triangles, it was an oval with doors at either end.

Moeli had beaten us upstairs… he was sitting in a corner, surrounded by a small group of human girls who were listening to him drone on about fantasy stuff.

“…call it a ‘chained saw’, but that’s actually a misnomer,” he said. “It’s not saws that are chained together. It’s a chain that functions as a saw. The basic idea would work, but it would be hard to do with magic since a chain and a saw are fundamentally different items with different functions.”

He sounded like an obnoxious know-it-all… they were make believe. What did it matter if someone thought “chained saw” sounded cooler? I thought it did.

The furniture in this lounge was kind of mismatched. There were sectional couches along the curving walls, but even though they all fit the curvature, they looked like they’d come from different sets. The middle of one side of the room had a big kitchenette with counters and cupboards that also curved. There were more tables on that side, include a tall octagonal one with stools around it. Four people were sitting at it, playing a miniature-based war game like the one Shiel did… actually, it could have been the same game. Two guys were sitting at two sides that were at corners to each other. There was an empty space across from one of them where someone else was obviously playing, as it had cards and dice in front of it.

Opposite the other guy was a big… as in, really kind of hefty looking… girl wearing a hat that had cat ears, with whiskers drawn on her face in markers. That seemed to be the extent of her costume.

Sitting perched on a stool at the edge of her side was another girl dressed as an honest-to-goodness fairy princess, complete with a gossamer wings on her back and a kind of understated point to her ears. Her dress was very short and ruffled, kind of like what a pixie cocktail waitress might wear, if such things existed.

Her hair was kind of short, but wisped up in a cute way and with a silver tiara that set off her face kind of nicely. It went well with a strand of silver chain that she wore around her neck, decorated with some kind of jangly hoops. It was an interesting necklace… unconventional-looking, but kind of neat.

She was sitting a little uncomfortably on the stool, smoothing her skirt down to cover as much of her thighs as possible. I had to admit she had nice legs, for someone so skinny.

“How much longer do I have to wear this, Mar?” she asked her companion, and I remembered where I’d seen the bigger girl: she’d been using the game room when it was time for Two’s party. “If we’re not even going to go down to the party…”

“Oh, do you want to go to the party?” the other girl asked, not taking her eyes off the map.

“No!” the fairy girl said. “I’m just saying, there’s no point in wearing the costume…”

“You lost the bet,” the cat girl said. “Your ass is mine.”

Ian was staring at the skinny girl in a way I didn’t like at all… I didn’t want to be jealous, but he seemed way too happy to see her. Okay, “slutty fairy” was probably one of the old standby male fantasy fulfillment costumes… for some reason… but he had at his side a slutty barbarian, showing a lot more flesh.

“Hey, where’s your little boyfriend?” Ian asked her.

“Right here,” the girl called Mar said. “Good costume, isn’t it? I swear didn’t recognize myself. I caught sight of myself while I was getting ready and almost called out the campus guard for a burglar.”

“Don’t say a fucking word,” the fairy girl said to Ian. “Not one fucking word.”

“What is this, your ex?” I asked Ian.

“What, are you serious?” Ian said.

“Yeah, I’m serious,” I said. “What’s going on here? Obviously you know each other…”

“We’ve bumped into each other,” Ian said. “Amy, right?”

“Jamie,” the girl said.

“Remember the penalty clause,” Mar said to her.

“If he says something, it doesn’t count,” Jamie said.

“Funny, I don’t remember putting any conditions on that,” Mar said.

“Don’t say a fucking word,” Jamie said to Ian. “I will kill you. I will kill you and I will make a fortune and donate it to a temple so they’ll resurrect you and I can kill you again.”

“Oh, this is hilarious,” Ian said. “Mackenzie, do you have your mirror? I want a picture.”

“Where exactly do you think I’d be hiding a mirror?” I said.

“Probably in the back,” Mar said. “Looks roomier.”

“Don’t start,” I said.

“I haven’t yet,” she said.

“You really haven’t,” one of the guys on the other end of the table said. “What are you waiting for? It’s been your turn for fifteen minutes.”

“I couldn’t possibly move until Shiel gets back,” Mar said. “I wouldn’t want her to miss this.”

“Just go!” another guy said.

“Her turn is after mine, so I’d be hurrying up just so you can wait,” Mar said. “If she’s not back in five minutes, Fifi the Fairy Princess will dance for your amusement.”

“I’m not dancing,” Jamie said.

Shiel came hurrying into the room a couple minutes after that.

“This place is a maze,” she said. “And I say that as someone who grew up in a mining warren. So, is it to me?”

“It’s about to be,” Mar said. She started picking up the cards that were laying down in front of her and putting them down face up. “Spatial bridge,” she read. “Planar conjunction. Planar disjunction. Incendiary weapons. Forceful attack.”

“What the fuck?” Shiel said.

“If you gentlemen would be so kind as to help move the rest of my army up onto the ridges overlooking Shiel’s little valley fortress…” Mar said. The two guys started moving a bunch of the miniatures up in a semicircle around some of the others. Jamie helped them. “I’m not fussed as to who goes where… just try to achieve an even distribution,” Mar said as they finished. “Now, that’s my casting phase. It turns out I don’t actually need a movement phase, so… I guess that means… I attack now?”

“How the fuck did you pull that off?” Shiel asked. “I’ve never seen anybody blow five greater spells at a time.”

“Now you know why I kept holding onto them. I don’t know as much as you do about military strategy or tactics or little tiny rock people,” Mar said, “but I do know something about putting together a winning hand. Ask Fifi here.” She tilted her head to the side. “Should I roll for damage now?”

“I concede,” Shiel said.

“What was that? I didn’t quite catch it.”

“I concede!” Shiel said. “I give up. No need to roll.”

“Dude,” one of the guys said. “Dude.”

“Nobody’s beaten Shiel before,” the other one said.

“Yeah, well, you all play the way she taught you,” Mar said. “And she doesn’t pay attention to every aspect of the game. I’m not going to beat you guys unless you’re stupid… I lost too many men in the war of attrition with her while I was marshalling my magic, and now I’ve spent that.”

“So you’re giving up, too?” one of the guys said.

“No,” Marlot said. “Just making an observation. Anyway, I haven’t ruled out you being stupid. Anyway, our bet wasn’t that I’d win, it was that I’d beat Shiel.”

“Yeah, but we only agreed because it’s pretty much the same thing,” the other guy said.

“Except we’ve just established that it isn’t,” Marlot said. “It’s okay, we don’t have to settle up now. You’ve got to the rest of the game to come to terms with it.”

There was kind of a tense vibe at the table, which didn’t seem to concern Mar at all, but it made me very uncomfortable by proxy. I wandered away from the game, and Ian followed. He was snickering over something.

“What’s so funny?” I asked him.

“I’ll tell you later,” he said.

“Why not now?”

“Because it’s probably worse to keep… oh, anyway, it’s not like there’s nothing you’re waiting to tell me,” he said.

“Hey, guys,” Moeli said, waving a big hand at us. “What are you up to?”

“Just hanging out,” Ian said.

“Oh, cool,” Moeli said. “So you’re into motorcycles and stuff?” he asked me.

“Yeah, kind of,” I said. “I mean, I used to spend a lot of time on the ethernet at school, before I came here.”

“What sites?”

“Mostly fan fic and roleplaying tapestries,” I said. I felt awkward talking about my ethernet activities in real life, in front of a bunch of people I didn’t know, but I felt it would have been rude not to answer.

“Oh,” Moeli said. It was hard to tell if he was unimpressed or if it was just his normal somewhat muted reaction. “You ever go to the Garage?”

“Which one?” I asked. “The Garage” had to be the most common nickname for mechanic-themed sites. As soon as I asked, I kind of regretted it, because it just meant the conversation was going to keep going.

“T-Lou’s,” he said. “Part of the Fantasy Lovers weavesite.”

“No,” I said. “Never went there.”

“It’s kind of a big deal in fandom,” he said. “How about the Basement? Good people there.”

“Yeah, I think we must just have moved in different circles,” I said.

“Probably,” he said. “I never really cared for most fan fiction.”

“Yeah, that explains it,” I said. Could this conversation get any more fun?

“It’s been good talking to you, but I think we need to go sit down,” Ian said to Moeli, pulling me towards a couch.

“What was that about?” I asked him when we were sitting down halfway across the room.

“You didn’t want to stand there talking to him, so I got you away,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah. Thanks.”

“It was either that or wait to die of old age for you to walk away on your own,” he said. “Actually, though, you probably would have said something to piss him off and end the conversation before then.”

“That’s not exactly fair,” I said. “It’s… not exactly untrue, either, but that doesn’t mean it’s fair.”

“Hey… you know I like you, Mackenzie,” he said. “But you’ve got…”

“Issues,” I said. “Yeah. That’s why we’re going out next week, right? So I can get some socializing in.”

“You were just socializing,” he said.

“With someone I have just enough in common with to not have any common ground,” I said. “What was I supposed to do?”

“It might have been a good time to learn to gracefully disengage,” Ian said. “I mean, you knew what you wanted to do… I could see it on your face. But you wouldn’t. You usually wait for something to happen… for a conversation to end, for someone to solve your problem, whatever. You don’t do much.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I asked him. “I have done an incredible amount of shit in the school year so far, and it’s just getting started.”

“No, you’ve had an incredible amount of shit happen to you,” Ian said. “And don’t get me wrong, I sympathize with you for that. But you’re not exactly… pro-active… about a lot of stuff. You don’t initiate things.”

“I initiated things with you,” I said. “Physically.”

“All on your own?”

“Okay, point,” I said. “But… I’m not like some apathetic blob that’s just hanging around waiting for things to happen. I ran for the student senate.”

“All on your own?” he repeated.

“I do stuff,” I said. “I do.”

“How many times have you gone into town on your own?” he asked.

“It’s more fun with friends,” I said. “Since I finally have friends, I’d rather go with them.”

“Maybe I’m way off base,” he said. “I realize we don’t spend all our time together, so maybe I’ve picked up the wrong idea somewhere. It’s just… do you know why I really don’t want to just follow in my dad’s footsteps? Why I tried the thing with the band…”

“You gave up the band?”

“I’m in the process of trying it, I guess I should say,” he said. “Like I’m in the process of trying the gladiator thing. It’s because I want to do something, something that feels like it matters.”

“I do stuff for racial awareness,” I said.

“What do you do?” he asked. “When an issue falls on you and you get mad enough, you take a couple swings at it, and then you forget about it.”

“Well maybe that’s just me,” I said, feeling defensive. “Maybe I’m just naturally boring. Is that what you’re saying?”

“You’re not boring,” Ian said. “You’re anything but boring. Mackenzie, you’re… you’re amazing, honestly.”

I laughed.

“You don’t sound like you’re talking to somebody amazing,” I said.

“Okay, well, I’m talking to somebody who could be amazing,” he said. “If you tried… and I don’t mean just one time and then giving up, I mean a… a… concerted try, a repeated and sustained try…”

“How can I repeat it if I’m sustaining it? That doesn’t even make any…”

“Okay, that’s one thing you do do,” he said. “You’re very pro-active about knocking serious discussions off the path by throwing up meaningless semantic objections.”

“I wanted to go to the dance,” I said. “I was excited about that.”

“So excited you waited until I picked something out for you to wear,” Ian said.

“That’s not true,” I said. “I just didn’t think of anything better. Couldn’t, I mean. It’s not that I didn’t give the matter any thought…”

“But at what point did it become a priority for you to actually do something about it?” Ian asked. “Look, Mackenzie… this whole thing of us going out and doing an ‘activity’ or whatever… it’s not going to help. Not on its own. I can lead you to water, and all that. You’ve got to honestly want to change, you’ve got to try. I’m trying things… I’ve tried so many new things since I’ve come here…”

“Yeah, I’ve done one or two myself,” I said. “Don’t overstate the case.”

“Okay, you’ve got a point,” he said. “But I believe that you know what I mean. You do, don’t you?”

I sighed. The thing of it was, he was right… I did know what he meant. It did seem like I’d been going around in circles, beating my head against the same walls, making resolutions and then stopping when I found the same barriers in my path. I’d made progress… I honestly believed that I had, and I wanted him to acknowledge that… but how far had I really come?

“Before I answer… you don’t think I’m hopeless, do you?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “My hand to Kh… my heart, I wouldn’t be having this conversation with you if I thought you were hopeless. And, to be fair, you do make some progress.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I just want to know… I don’t need like a promise or anything… but I just want you to tell me that you’re going to try a little bit harder, that things are going to be a little different from here on out. I’ll do what I can to help you, but I can’t do more than help. It’s got to be you, Mackenzie. You’re going to have to do this.”

I nodded.

“Okay,” I said. “You’re right. And tomorrow, I’m going to be laying some stuff out on the table, and if you think I’m the most stupid, selfish, thoughtless person in the world when you hear it, I won’t be mad if you walk away.” I was talking without thinking, but the words sounded right. It was time to start coming clean, before I acquired an even bigger logjam of secrets that would result in an even more devastating flood if the dam ever broke.

“What if I already think that?” he asked.

“I’m serious,” I said. Tears were filling my eyes, but despite the fact that I was talking about him leaving me, it wasn’t because I was sad. It was more just rising emotion that was squeezing them out of me. Fear, insecurity, and a small amount of triumph… and maybe it was the triumph that was making the difference. A little triumph could be a big thing. “No blame, no anger. If you stay… things are going to be different. They’re going to have to be. I’ll never make it through the rest of the semester if I keep going like this.”

“Hey,” Ian said, touching my cheek with the back of his hand. “You’ll make it. You’re strong.”

“I have strong friends,” I said. “I have people who are willing to support me, to put up with shit and prop me up when I’m falling. I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t have gotten this far without you, without them.”

“I’m happy to,” Ian said. “Most of the time… the times I’m not? Well, the rest of the time makes up for it. I wouldn’t be here if it didn’t.”

“Thanks,” I said. I sniffled a little. “Thank you, Ian… for putting up with me so far, if nothing else. Even if you can’t help me any more, it means a lot to me.”

“Hey, you’re not a charity case…it’s not like I don’t get anything out of it,” he said. “Sex aside… and I’m not going to lie, that is a factor… you’re nothing if not entertaining. Except when you’re painfully uncomfortable to be around, or devastatingly clever…”

“I’m devastatingly clever?” I said.

“Sometimes,” he said. “Probably not as often as you think.”

I blinked a couple times, and then laughed.

“Thank you,” I said. “Do you want to get out of here?”

“You mean go back to the dance?”

“If you want to,” I said. “But I think I got what I came here for.”

He looked at me, long and hard, and then he said, “Yeah, okay. Let’s go.”

We met Two and her friend Hazel coming into the oval lounge as we were going, and appropriate greetings were exchanged. Hazel was talking about someone.

“…be drunk as a skunk in no time flat,” she said.

Two laughed at that.

“It’s funny because skunks don’t drink beer,” she said.

“Yeah, it’s a laugh riot,” Hazel said dourly.

Ian and I picked up our pace to avoid eavesdropping, but we weren’t quite around the corner when Two said, very loudly and clearly, “That girl has a penis like Steff’s!”

“Fuck!” Jamie yelled, and Ian laughed.

“It’s a good night,” he said. “Happy Veil.”

“Happy Veil.”