After lunch I followed Ian outside and we sat on some steps while he strummed his lute. I didn’t say anything. Not so much for fear of distracting him… to some extent, he played better with a little distraction than when he was super focused on what he was doing. But he played best when he felt like no one was paying any attention to him. Luckily for the sake of any future he might have as a performer, being in a “stage” situation that sufficiently separated him from the crowd seemed to work. Once he got going, he was in a world of his own.

He wasn’t exactly playing a song, more just trying things out. Watching the little contortions his face made as he fiddled around was kind of fun and weirdly hot. He twisted his lips, and bit them. At one point he stuck out the tip of his tongue. He squinted, and glared at nothing in particular.

If we’d had unlimited free time then he likely would have either got comfortable enough with what he was doing to start busting out actual songs or grown frustrated and given up, but sadly neither one of us was finished with classes for the day so he had to pack it up before too long.

Though I still had to go to Coach Callahan’s fighting class afterwards, my next class was my last new one of the semester… the only remaining unknown quantity. I felt kind of ambivalent about it. There were classes that I needed to take and classes that I wanted to take… a lot of the time I could find a class that fell into both categories. While not every class I’d taken was something I’d classify as “fun”, most of my classes so far had at least not been unpleasant.

An Applied Enchantment major required six credit hours in crafting. It was a sensible requirement. I understood the reasoning behind it. In the old days, enchanting had generally been a solo operation, plus an apprentice or two. Most enchanters had made or at least added some personal flourishes to the items they enchanted. During the rise of industrial enchanting, there had been an early movement away from that, with a lot of magic swords made by taking ready-made weapons produced using the fastest techniques available and slapping enchantments on them.

It pretty quickly became apparent that the old way… the crafting-based approach… had existed for a reason. Simply put, it’s easier to enchant something that you had a hand in making, and the results are better.

This is one of the reasons why there will always be so many more lower level magic weapons and things. It’s not just that a weaker magic item is exponentially more easy to make in terms of enchantment skill and magical power… it’s that producing base items that will accommodate higher levels of enchantment is that much more difficult, as well.

So I understood why I was required to have a minimum of two regular-sized crafting courses, but the selection that was available had not excited me at all. They were also more expensive than regular classes, with all of them having either a hefty lab fee or requiring the purchase of tools and materials or both.

I didn’t want to shell out a ton of coins to make wooden cabinets or armor or something that wouldn’t really apply to anything I did outside of class. So I’d gone for something that was a little more general-purpose and a little less hands-on and material-oriented, an aesthetics of product design class. It counted as a crafting class but if I’d read the course description right, the emphasis was on “design” more so than “product”… I’d have to produce something for a final project, but not every day would be spent working with actual physical materials and turning out something tangible.

The class was listed under Glamour and Design, and it took me to a building I’d never been in, a low, rambling building of brick and glass that housed the Domestic Arts program as well. A few people that I only vaguely recognized as being some of Two’s friends said hi as I wandered the winding hallways looking for the right room.

Everything about the building seemed to have been designed with a touch of whimsy, or what an architect thinks is whimsical. The doors were all slightly slanted. The walls were mostly irregularly alternating panels of brushed metal and variously sized and colored tiles. A big hallway ran along the outside of the building, with the exterior wall being a bunch of little glass panes in a metal framework that cast weird shadows on the floor and gave me the feeling of being caged. I wasn’t sure what the point of the corridor was as it didn’t seem to have any doors branching off from it at all, but by the time I noticed that I’d been going down it for some time, following hanging signs that assured me I was going the right way.

The signs were made of sheets of metal with the corners cut off and the letters punched out. They weren’t at all easy to read… the only reasonable explanation for their existence was that somebody had spent a lot of money having stencils made and then ran out of funds before they could produce the finished signs.

The hallway did eventually end, and conveniently took me right almost to the entrance of my classroom, which I could now see was about twenty feet to the left of the sign that had directed me to go right when I first entered the building.

My completely justified dislike of the building evaporated somewhat when I stepped through the stupid sideways-leaning doorway and saw the room I’d be in for the semester. It was a high-ceilinged room, spacious and well-lit… qualities I didn’t necessarily look for in a class room but that I noticed in this one. There were a bunch of widely spaced semi-circular desks, each of which had an abundance of clear space, an adjustable lamp, and an inset crystal ball.

Even though I’d headed out pretty early, there was already a good number of students in the room when I got there. I assumed that they’d had classes in the building before and were wise to its ways.

It was only when that thought went through my head that it occurred to me that there could be a downside to taking a class that was technically a Glamour and Design class, that being the number of people I knew from Harlowe who were glam majors and who I would rather avoid. Well, okay, that number was two: Mariel, Puddy’s semi-off-and-on girlfriend, and Ms. Suzune Hoshinotama… better known as Sooni, my semi-off-and-on self-proclaimed rival and fabulous star of the TV show in her head.

Like an ifrit summoned at the sound of its name, Sooni popped up in my field of vision as soon as I thought of her. She had cut her hair at some point over the summer. The lack of cathedral-style piles of braids atop her head made her fox ears stand out more, but also made it more apparent that they were in fact her ears and not an outrageous fashion accessory.

Along with the bushy tail that protruded from a slit up the back of her skirts and her shiny black eyes, the ears marked her as a member of the kitsu caste of yokai. Her habitually bronzed skin… she tanned even in the winter, using alchemical preparations… was hairless and smooth, unlike the nekoyokai, feline “friends” her parents had bought for her.

Somewhat ironically, her everyday clothing had slowly shifted towards western conventions as her costume design business had taken off. Her skirts were still pretty short… and still separated in the back to accommodate both the tail and anyone who wondered what color and how small her underwear was… but they looked less like something that would be found in an imported comic book and more like the sorts of skirts that Magisterian girls wore. Her tops looked less blousey and more… shirty. Her outfits tended to be in less attention-grabbing colors, as today when she was wearing basic black.

The only part of her typical ensemble that remained were the big clunky wooden sandals. They had been a gift from her mother, and she was reluctant to give them up for anything more fashionable or less suited to use as a blunt instrument.

She had a bunch of people turned around at their desks talking to her. I felt weirdly torn between saying hi and hoping she didn’t notice me. I’d spent a lot of time trying to duck her attention, but I’d also grown accustomed to it.

I decided to leave it up to fate, since my experience was that fate would pretty much have its own way regardless. I picked a still empty station not too close to her and took a look around the room. There was no sign of Mariel, but in looking for the sylph I spotted someone else from last year’s crop of Harlowe fifth floor girls: Twyla.

She was fairly easy to overlook: not thin, not chubby enough to register as anything but sort of normal-ish to me. Hair blonde, but not alarmingly or alchemically so. The two little horns that stuck out of her forehead weren’t even terribly noticeable from behind when her head was down. If I hadn’t glanced past her right as she happened to be looking up, I might not have spotted that she was in the class at all.

I was surprised to see her. There were a number of different majors I could see benefiting from a design class, but the last I had heard she was studying Divination. Of course, the last I’d heard had been just before the start of the fall semester the year before. I knew how much could change in one year.

It was also possible that she was just taking the class for fun, like I did history classes. She would probably be good at it… I had witnessed Twyla’s remarkable skill with forming images in the ether.

I realized that I was staring at her and that I wasn’t the only one who was doing so. I decided to study my syllabus instead.

The instructor’s name was only listed as Professor Stone. No first name, or possibly no last name. In light of Steff’s aside about which races can be considered monoliths, I wondered if the instructor wasn’t from one of the earthier elemental races… though that would be a bit like expecting a human to be called “flesh”.

My other guess was a dwarf who’d had part of his name transliterated into Pax for convenience… there were plenty of Steins to be found among the dwarven clans. Though as I understood it, it was a bit of a faux pas to use a clan name as a personal name.

The only thing I could tell for certain from the name was that the professor wasn’t very likely to be a human. Based on the accuracy of my previous guesses along that line, I was almost surprised when he showed up and he wasn’t.

It was hard to say just what race he was, though. He was a small figure… slightly taller and broader than a gnome, but short and narrow for a dwarf. His chin was bearded, but it was a curly little goatee and not the full-on dwarven apron look. Given my acquaintance with Hazel and her dwarven boyfriend Andreas, I might have pegged him as a mix of the two, but honestly he seemed to be a little svelte for either. When I said he was broad for a gnome, I meant big across the shoulders… he looked pretty lean, which seemed to be the opposite of the gnomish tendency.

But of course there were exceptions, and anyway it wasn’t as though it should matter what proportion of which races had gone into the making of Professor Stone. I couldn’t help but try to sort him into the proper boxes when I saw him, but that didn’t make the exercise necessary or productive.

“Hello!” he said. “I am Professor Stone. To answer the question that’s on everybody’s mind: yes, I do have a little dwarf in me. Though, from the point of view of my father, she was in fact a pretty big dwarf. This is aesthetics of product design. I know some of you from Glamour and Design classes. I suspect most of the rest of you are either Armoury or Applied Enchantment majors, though this class can be rewarding for anyone who wishes to produce things that are as beautiful as they are useful. I thought we’d begin today by taking a look at some examples.”

He clapped his hands, and a bunch of objects appeared at the front of the room. The larger ones… like a gilt-edged full-length mirror and something that looked like a miniature waterfall set in a stone arch… were free-standing. The others, which included shiny weapons and elaborately designed staves as well as garments and art objects, had also manifested with shelves, hooks, and brackets as needed.

The point of the display was obviously to grab the class’s attention, and he had mine. I wasn’t so much captivated with the appearance or seeming value of the items as I was with the amount of magic that must have gone into setting it up.

They had seemed to appear from nowhere. If that was the case, it was more likely they really were coming from nowhere… like the things that Amaranth put away… than they had been teleported in, because of the sheer amount of power and precision that would have been needed. Illusions would have taken less power but considerable skill, as the results were not only perfectly designed but expertly positioned, and the trigger that would have been set up for them would have taken a lot of care.

The most likely explanation was that they had always been there but had been invisible. That meant that the objects were real, or at least not illusory fakes. Then I considered that illusions could have been prepared and then turned invisible… that would have been less tricky than setting up several complex illusions to be triggered all at once.

“While this class centers on aesthetics as its subject,” Professor Stone continued as I tried to analyze his trick, “it is specifically the aesthetics of product design that we will concern ourselves with. Now in a sense, a painting or a sculpture may be considered a ‘product’ if it’s made to be sold, but we will not be focusing on beauty and art for their own sakes. Let us look at the examples on display at the front of the room.”

He strode up to the sword.

“This is an unenchanted prototype of the coronation sword used by Magisterion IX, made by Clan Schwertgriff, swordmakers by imperial appointment. Note well: this is not, technically speaking, a replica. The actual sword used in his elevation is a replica of this one. The ladies of Schwertgriff are unique among dwarven clans in favoring the sword, and like every blade they turn out, it is a work of art.

He waved his hand at the sword, and it floated up out of its brackets and turned in the air to hover point down beside him. He pointed to its features.

“Observe the silvery blade,” he said. “Pure platinum. Unenchanted platinum is not, in fact, an ideal material for making a blade. That’s why most Schwertgriff weapons are made from mithriled steel, but it was considered inappropriate to make an official weapon for a human ruler using alloys of the dwarven sacred metal. This honor they reserved only for Magisterion I, XI, and most recently XIII.

“This is the only non-functional item I’ll be showing you, and it’s only non-functional in terms of having an inferior blade. The balance is perfect. The salamander-skin handgrip is comfortable. The jewels on the crosspiece are inset so as to be protected from the brunt of any trauma. The sword that this one was mother to was never in fact intended to be used in combat… though it would have attested to the skills of its makers if it had been… but when dwarves are asked to make a weapon, they make a weapon.

“Incidentally, this weapon is on loan to us by very special arrangement. Some of the products I’m exhibiting will remain on display as inspirational examples throughout the semester, but this one must be returned in seven days. I’m also afraid that I cannot allow you to handle it, though you may inspect it at your leisure while it remains in our keeping.”

He snapped his fingers and a soft blue glow briefly surrounded the sword then disappeared. He went to the next item on the wall, a small square box with some kind of scene set into its side in a mosaic of gem-like tiles. He pointed at it and the top opened, and a haunting lullaby began to play.

“This music box is of elven make,” he said. “It is not, in fact, bejeweled as it looks… rather, the wood has been given a high polish with certain alchemical varnishes. It looks like the scene is made out of individual pieces because of a ‘leaf’ aesthetic that shows up cyclically in elven crafting circles. I recommend close inspection to get the full effect.”

He went through the next few items, weapons and high-end household goods and tools and knickknacks. Not everything was enchanted, or enchanted much in the case of a set of kitchen knives, but they were all very finely made. The big mirror was not just a standard communication mirror but a traveling model, which got my attention. Those were rare and very valuable.

“Gold is, of course, the gold standard for certain types of enchantment,” he said, running a finger along the gilt curlicues surrounding the reflective circle. “It doesn’t actually hold magic the way that silver would, for instance, but it can be used to shape magic quite effectively. This mirror’s silver backing holds the enchantment that connects it to the ethereal plane. The gold has been enhanced to help keep all the energy from swirling out of frame when a gateway is opened. Which brings up an excellent point: choosing materials that are appealing is not the same thing as choosing materials that are useful. It is the designer’s task to satisfy both requirements.”

I began to wonder at his choice of examples, and what exactly the class was going to be about. He wasn’t exactly showing us anything that was a mass-produced consumer good. Some of the items were literally one-of-a-kind, and while there were other elven music boxes in the world the one he’d showed us had obviously been individually crafted.

“Now, a lot of the pieces I’m showing you are actually taken from around my house… this is the television box from my private study,” he said, putting his hand on top of an ornate wooden box decorated with scrollwork and little imps and cherubs across the top. The opening in the front was hidden with a red velvet curtain, as had been the case with many of the first TVs. “It was not made by me, but it comes from an age when every such device was made by a skilled artisan. I like it so much that I craft one or two new ones in the style every year. If I ever retire from teaching, it will become my full-time hobby.

“Because of the, ah, frugal nature of educational institutions, you can find examples of older TVs throughout the campus. Harlowe Hall used to be home to an exquisite if somewhat poorly maintained specimen, until it was destroyed by a squabble among careless students last autumn.”

I resisted the urge to look at Sooni, who I hoped was resisting the urge to look at me. I doubted she felt guilty about her role in trashing the outdated TV in the fifth floor girls’ lounge, which I had to say had not really been all that exquisite. I’d always thought it was just tacky and old, up until our fight destroyed it.

“Now,” Professor Stone said, “these various objects I’ve shown you and the others I haven’t yet reached, they all have one thing in common… apart from being both beautiful and useful. Can anyone tell me what that is?”

I had an inkling that he was getting at what I’d noticed, but I wasn’t sure he considered that remarkable or not. I was having a hard time getting any kind of a read off of Professor Stone. There were some interesting points in his demonstration, but for all I knew he was just showing off the furnishings of his house and his connections to dwarven swordsmiths.

Twyla raised her hand.

“Yes, Miss?” he said.

“They’re all unique, sir,” she said.

“Yes, or very nearly so,” he said. “The mirror, for instance, has a twin in the court of the sum… well, never mind that. You are correct. All of these items were made for a specific person, a particular event, or by a singular artistic inspiration. They are not, therefore, the sorts of products we will be concerning ourselves with, precisely, but they are what we might consider the great-great-grandparents of those things. Observe.”

He clapped his hands, and more items came into view. Next to the gilt-edged travel mirror, there was a modern public mirror, the same sort that hung in nooks all over campus. A pair of high-heeled women’s boots with slightly pointed toes stood on a small shelf next to a pair of hand-tooled leather boots with very pointy toes. The various staves and rods that had been created by individual wizards had been joined by the kind that could be bought off-the rack. A plain black modern TV box stood on top of Stone’s personal television, empty and open to the world. The waterfall was apparently some kind of sink, as an elegant and high-end but distinctly modern glass vessel sink atop a stone pedestal had appeared alongside it.

Every object that he had brought forth was now paired with a modern descendant. Some of the modern examples were completely standard and everyday objects, like the mirror, and others looked almost as upper-crusty as the originals.

“Now, you can see that as times have changed and production methods have evolved, so, too, have tastes,” Stone said. “The people who designed our modern world have had to make the decision about what to keep unchanged, what to bring forward, and what to throw out when they create the products we use. Sometimes these decisions are aided by matters of practical necessity, or of economy. Sometimes it’s a matter of straddling the fine line between a genuine classic and an old-fashioned relic.”

He made a sweeping gesture with his hands, and the items that had been bunched up at the front of the room began to spread out all around the walls.

“Now, I deplore an extended lecture, especially as this is a ‘doing’ class and not a ‘saying’ one,” he said, “so for the rest of the period I am going to invite you all to go up and inspect the items I’ve brought. Your assignment for the day is to select three of them… three pairs… and note three ways in which the designs are different and three ways in which they are the same.

“While you’re inspecting, I will be going through the class work requirements and standards of grading… which shouldn’t take long… and I will answer any questions you may have. Once I’ve covered the basics and you have as much information as you need for the assignment, you are free to go out and enjoy the day. Your homework for today will not be collected, but the assignment for Thursday will build on it, so you will be at a disadvantage if you slouch off.”

I was glad at least that Steff shared my last class with me. I wouldn’t have to walk back to the dorms alone. I didn’t know… and didn’t really want to find out… if a mermaid on land could move and react faster than a half-elf, but I trusted Steff to see an attack coming and respond to it before I could.

After some debate about whether it would be worse to go out unprotected or stay in the dorm and miss it, I set out for my logic class alone. I reasoned that the dorm was not necessarily a place of safety, especially as it would be fairly empty during the height of the afternoon, whereas there would be many students out and about between classes. Spending an hour sitting in the middle of a room full of witnesses sounded like a better idea than spending it cooped up in my dorm room, jumping at noises. And if my scent had changed enough that Feejee couldn’t recognize it, then it seemed like a better idea to be moving around than to stay in a place that Iona might check first if she were looking for a trail.

I was also curious to see if Sooni would make an appearance in the flesh in our shared logic class… though it kind of pained me to think of Sooni and I sharing logic. Thus far she’d been attending remotely or by proxy.

Once I was thinking about Sooni, it occurred to me that I had some direct knowledge that Sooni was a technically competent magic blaster, at least when it came to cramming the impressive-looking off-the-shelf spells… and while Maliko lacked Pala or Dee’s looming presence, she was a trained fighter.

Assuming that Sooni’s television-influenced senses of friendship and heroism would hold out if she saw me being attacked by something recognizable as a monster… and that Maliko would either obey her or jump into a fray to protect her… then it was just possible that I’d find some protection if I were attacked close enough to the logic class, in time and space.

It was just the time and space between classes that I really had to worry about, then.

It really sucked to be looking at the world that way, blocking out my day in terms that amounted to darting from one piece of cover to another like a hunted animal. In a real sense, though, that’s what I was… the hunted part, at least. The fact that my predator had gone missing brought no real relief. All it really meant was that I didn’t know where she was.

The weird part was, it all felt slightly familiar. I’d spent all of high school wary and on edge. I hadn’t been constantly harrassed, but the harrassment had been consistent enough that I knew that the quiet periods when I was left alone weren’t a sign that it was all over.

And of course none of the people I went to school with had been out to kill me… but the thing was, when I saw teachers ignoring or excusing the things that were done, when I was the target of a thousand messages telling me that I was lucky to be alive,lucky to be tolerated, to be taken in and allowed to go to school with the good kids, the normal kids… well, there had been times when it had felt perfectly plausible that one of my fellow students could hate me enough to want to kill me, and that they would have felt confident enough that the world would take their side to actually do so.

And I’d felt the same way, of course, which was why that had managed to just feel normal to me after a while, when the threat from Iona felt new and wrong. It reminded me of the discussion we’d had in Hart’s class about the colonists feeling outraged at being denied their birthright as citizens of the old empire, and as humans. Many of them would have lacked several important privileges and the full protection of the law back in the Mother Isles, but they accepted their place in the larger society because it was normal. It was only when deprived of the protections they expected for accepting that place that they’d turned rebellious.

I couldn’t say that it didn’t bother me when human students referred to me like I was a monster or implied that I shouldn’t have… or didn’t have… the same rights that they did. But in a way, it felt like I was more offended, for lack of a better term, by Iona’s threat to me than I had been when the student delvers had been discussing my fate in the labyrinth. Humans dismissing my potential death… or even advocating for it… was something I objected to, but it was within the boundaries of what I’d learned to expect. What Iona was doing was out of bounds, even though I’d be dead either way.

Realistically, even if Iona were taken care of, I’d still need to be prepared for a life of feeling hunted, because even if I wasn’t being hunted at the moment it didn’t mean my ordeal was over… and even if I didn’t know about anyone hunting me, it didn’t mean it wasn’t happening.

The only thing worse than living a life like that, I decided, was living it halfway like that. Where Ian had arranged a bodyguard during what we’d assumed was the most dangerous time, when the whole campus had been on edge, I’d made no real provisions for my safety against the threat that I knew was targeting me personally.

There I was relying on the happenstance of sharing classes with people who would be better than I in a fight. I’d been learning how to use a staff to take down opponents and keep them away from me, but I hadn’t even thought to bring it with me on the walk between classes. At least I had spells ready for projecting elemental fire, and some limited experience with improvising elemental effects in combat.

I felt like maybe I should thank Sooni for that, but chances were excellent that she had already worked it around in her head until I’d expressed my gratitude to her for the magic brawl that had put me in the healing center.

I decided that if Iona attacked me, I would not hesitate to lash out with everything I had available. I was unarmed, but I could magically sharpen my nails and even my teeth if I had to. I was sure I could make some sort of ground-based eruption of earth, at least outside the protected paths. Though they would sadly do absolutely nothing to prevent another student from attacking me, I knew they would act out against me if I used magic in a way that would directly damage them.

Setting myself on fire would probably be more efficacious than trying to do the same to her directly. I was pretty sure that fire would hurt her, but sea life tended to be very low in fire quotient and possessing of a high balance of water, not surprisingly. It would be an uphill battle to pull fire out of her under stress, which I certainly would be.

I could surround myself with fire and throw that at her, but people didn’t burn very well, as a rule. She wouldn’t have clothes or even necessarily hair to catch on fire. Magically produced fire was a little better at burning things that were too stubborn to ignite for mundane fire, being closer to pure elemental fire and thus more of an embodiment of burningness than anything you could produce through mundane reactions, but that would again run into the problem of there not being a lot of fire in a mermaid’s body to release.

Thinking about fighting off Iona with fire was making me doubt my ability to actually follow through with it. It was one thing to coldly contemplate the best method of setting a living, thinking being on fire, but it was another to… well, it was actually another thing to coldly contemplate the best method of setting a living, thinking being on fire.

If the time came, I’d be prepared to act. That was probably the best I could do, since I didn’t know where or how she would end up coming after me, if she did. I couldn’t guess how she would arm herself, or if she’d think to find some kind of additional countermeasures against fire. Evey if that was outside her expertise… and I had no idea if it was… someone willing to kill for enjoyment wouldn’t balk at swiping some of the magical items that were lying around.

So I’d just be ready to fight, and I’d do more to be prepared in the future… I’d carry the borrowed staff with me to my next class, and I would make arrangements with my more capable friends to not be alone.

And I would not spend the time walking to classes lost in thought instead of paying attention to my surroundings, as I realized I’d just done when I arrived outside the building for my logic class.

At least it meant that nothing interesting had happened to me on the way, which could only be a good thing, I supposed.

Sooni was in fact back in class, wearing the same outfit her stand-in had worn, minus the veil… I was almost fooled into thinking otherwise, because an illusion had been inexpertly applied over her facial features. She looked normal, but when she moved her head, it kind of blurred out when viewed from the wrong angle.

It looked as though she’d tried to use it in place of a glamour, maybe to hide a blemish or enhance her appearance in some way. Glamours weren’t foolproof, but they didn’t fail in that way. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if she’d used glamour regularly in the past to make herself look more… well… glamorous, and had to scramble to find a replacement when her father’s people cut her off from access to it.

It would have to have been an act of desperation of some kind, because while glamour could be expensive, it was simple and relatively easy to use glamour to subtly alter appearance than it was to affix an enduring illusion to something.

I was still pretty sure it was her, though, unless her double had spent the past two days learning to copy her swinging walk… and I only noticed the flickering because she turned around when I came in the room and started bouncing down the aisle towards me, tossing her braid-bedecked head in a way that made my neck ache.

Any doubts about her identity that I might have entertained vanished entirely when she opened her mouth. There was just no counterfeiting Sooni.

“I do not wish to brag or boast prematurely,” she said, “but I do believe that people have noticed my excellent and professional handling of the Case of the Killed Princess Of A Not Very Important Kingdom.”

“What in the world are you talking about now?” I asked. Between the fact that she’d been sequestered away from the rest of the campus and the one that she hadn’t actually done anything for anyone to notice, I kind of found this unlikely.

“Well, I mean… it’s not as though she was from a very large or powerful kingdom, with a big military or any industry to speak of,” Sooni said. “So while she was a princess, technically, when compared to the only daughter of an important man from a larger and more prosperous empire…”

I almost pointed out that this wasn’t what I’d been referring to… and maybe I should have. But the extent of her insensitivity and self-centeredness kind of caught me by surprise.

“Sooni… are you actually trying to pull rank on a dead girl?” I asked.

“I am just saying that if Yokano were as lawless and fractured a place as the Shift, my father would probably be a king, too,” Sooni said. “He is important! And a leader! It is only because he is wise and strong enough to yield to the rule of our just and powerful god-emperor that I am not a princess. But don’t you think the vassal of a god outranks any other mortal ruler?”

“So that’s a yes, then,” I said, out loud. That was my next mistake.

“You agree, then!”

“What? No,” I said. “My emperor is kind of pointedly mortal, and we kind of like it that way.”

Also, agents of one of the skeevier and less legally constrained agencies that ultimately answered to that imperial power may or may not have had me under surveillance, so it kind of behooved me to say a word or two in his defense.

“I do not see how you can venerate a mortal emperor,” Sooni said.

“We don’t,” I said. “That’s kind of the point of having a mortal ruler. We fought a couple of wars over it, actually. The Magisterian System holds that absolute temporal power is enough for one man. Anything more would be too much.”

“And it is no wonder you have so many problems,” Sooni said. “Racisms and murders and sexual deviancies and so on.”

“I don’t believe for one second that you don’t have all of those things in Yokano.”

“We do not,” she said. “There can be no racism when each race has its own honored place to be celebrated in turn.”

I had to imagine that some of the other yokai would bristle at that kind of talk the way Steff had at Dee’s talk of people’s place in her society… though I imagined they would do it quietly, considering how completely cowed Kai was around Sooni. I also had to wonder how long the nekos and other races whose honored place was below foxes had been waiting for their turns to celebrate.

I didn’t say any of this, of course.

“This is an interesting discussion, but I really meant was, what do you mean people noticed?”

“Oh!” she said. “Well, I’ve noticed that everywhere I go, people say things like ‘I’m glad that’s finished.’ or ‘I’m so glad that’s over with.’, when talking about the case. You see what that means?”

“…that they’re glad it’s over with?” I said.

She gave me a look like she was trying very hard not to hit me with her shoe.

“Why would they say it in front of me?” she said. “Think!”

“Sooni, you’re hearing people say it in front of you because it’s the sort of thing that’s going to be said all over the place,” I said. “You just don’t hear it in the places you aren’t because… well… you know. You aren’t there.”

“See? You want to argue because it is in your nature to be spiteful, but you cannot think of a good reason why it should be so,” Sooni said.

“I’m glad you’re back, Sooni,” I said.

It was the safest reply I could muster.

*For Certain Values Of You

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“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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“You!” Pala said when I came out. The cloud dissolved, though the demi-giantess was already drenched from its downpour. I wondered what the water would do to her nice sweater, and how she could be comfortable with it plastered against her skin like that. “I will guard your body, but I am not doing anything with her body.”

“Um… what’s wrong?” I asked.

“Why are you staring at my bosoms?” she asked.

“I’m not!” I said. “I was… concerned about your sweater.”

“Oh,” Pala said. She glanced down. “Oh! I rained on it… do you see what you made me do now?”

When I saw her reaching down and grabbing the bottom of the shirt, I had a single brief, glorious vision flashing through my head of her peeling it off in one fluid motion to reveal first a flat, well-toned stomach and then… well, the vision didn’t last that long before reality informed me that she was awkwardly wrestling the sodden garment off, to reveal an only slightly damp white blouse underneath.

“My uncle warned me about people like her,” Pala continued. “Well… not people just like her. I do not think Uncle Hallbjorn has ever heard of people like her. But he has heard of other people who behave like people like her, and he warned me about them, and I think his warning would be a good one for people like her as well.”

“That’s about the fifth time she’s said that,” Steff said. “The first two times she repeated it, it got longer. After that she started paring it down a bit. She used to go on and say…”

“That is, it would be a good warning for people like me about people like her,” Pala continued. “I mean, a good warning to give to people like me…”

“What exactly did you do to her?” I asked Steff.

“…about people like her.”

“I didn’t do anything to her… I just made her a bet,” Steff said. “On the subject of spatial relationships. Specifically, what would or would not fit where.”

“You should know better than to suggest such a thing to a young woman,” Pala said. “And you should not engage in such things yourself, either. My Uncle Hallbjorn says that young women should not gamble.”

“Oh, we don’t have to wager money,” Steff said.

“I do not have any money, anyway… I lost it playing cards.”

“Would you like to earn some?” Steff asked her.

“I thought your uncle told you not to gamble,” I said.

“Yes!” Pala said. She stomped her foot. It was probably a good thing she was standing on the soft ground to the side of the path… if she damaged university property, we’d probably all share in the blame somehow. “Because I lost all my money playing cards. Uncle Hallbjorn probably should have told me before that, but I’m afraid he isn’t very clever.”

“Well… anyway… it looks like this may all be over soon,” I said. “There’s an a-mail going around that there’s going to be a press conference at five.”

“Think it’s worth ditching Hart’s class over?” Steff asked. “I mean, I know I’m not supposed to encourage you to skip classes, but this could be important…”

“I’d still rather not,” I said. “History’s one of my favorite classes, and I’m really not sure where I stand with Hart. If they thought it was important enough to send out an announcement, they’ll probably put the important parts in another one. Even if most students are done with their classes by five, they can’t expect everyone to get to a TV, and they probably don’t really want everyone to show up at the admin building in person.”

“You are going to history now?” Pala asked me, frowning down at confusion.

“No, my next class is logic,” I said. “It’s still not for a little bit, but I wasn’t really… the library’s kind of stifling right now, and I thought you two might want to know about the press conference.”

“Well, you should not be standing out in the open until then,” Pala said. “If you are done in the library then I will be taking you back to Harlowe.”

“I think I’d rather stay in the library, then,” I said. I wouldn’t be any more or less alone with my uncomfortable thoughts back at Harlowe, and as far as I knew, nobody was trying to spy on me in the library.

“Okie dokie,” Pala said. “As long as I know where you are.”

“I think I’ll go inside for a bit, too,” Steff said. “The company’s easier.”

“What exactly did you think was going to happen with her, anyway?” I asked her as we headed back in.

“Exactly? Well, I did have a pretty detailed scenario in my mind,” Steff said. “It started with a series of friendly wagers that escalated until she ended up being my personal pretty pretty pony for the rest of my life.”

“Did you really think that would work?” I asked.

“Hey, I haven’t given up on the idea of having your head hanging on my wall someday,” Steff said. “And if I can get Pala back to Kilrest, I could make that deal that much sweeter for you, because there would be no need to breed you if we had a giantblood in the stables. Quarter-demon/quarter-ogre would be wicked awesome, but giants get serious cred from ogres. The fact that I could throw a saddle over her would make me basically the most badass person ever to them. I mean, talk about your epic mounts.”

“Steff, the idea of having Viktor’s baby is so far from being the reason I don’t want to be your zombie sex slave,” I said.

“You wouldn’t be a slave,” Steff said. “Well, you would be, until you died and became a zombie, at which point your will… and soul, if I did it right… would be bound to me, which would make slavery kind of a moot point. But really, there are worse lives than that. At least you’d be with someone you love.”

“Steff… I don’t think some fantasies are meant to come true,” I said. “Or be shared.”

“You’re the one who asked,” she said.

“About Pala,” I said. “And I don’t think that one’s going to come true, either. I don’t think you have a chance of even… you know, getting anywhere… with her.” Phrases that had passed through my head and been rejected as beyond my ability to pull off included getting with and nailing. “Much less turning her into an ‘epic mount’.”

“Oh, come on, Mack,” Steff said. “Look at her… I can’t believe she’s ultimately going to be much harder to get into bed than you were.”

“I can,” I said. “First of all, she’s straight…”

“Oh, you know… I think I’ve heard this story before ,” Steff said.

“Okay, but I get the feeling that she’s from a very different background,” I said. “It sounds like her family is very protective of her.”

“I think ‘raised by a fundamentalist ex-paladin’ would probably fit into both of those columns,” Steff said. “And look how you turned out. Trust me, it’s the ones who start out really uptight who eventually run wild.”

“I didn’t ‘run wild’,” I said. “I… opened up to a few new possibilities, that’s all.”

“Opened wide,” Steff said.

“Is the library really the best place for this conversation?” I asked. We weren’t talking loudly, but what we were talking about and where we were talking about it seemed to count almost as much as actual volume, in my head.

“Again… you started it.”

“Okay, well, let’s just drop it, then,” I said.

“Alrighty,” Steff said. “What do I know? I’m just the assistant bodyguard… and a darn good one if I say so myself.”

“How so?”

“Well, you know the saying: set a thief to catch a thief,” Steff said. “And so if you’re trying to protect bodies…”

“I think the point is to protect the people before they become ‘bodies’,” I said.

“People are always bodies,” Steff said. “Corporeal people are, anyway. Though I don’t know… I could probably objectify ectoplasm if I tried. It doesn’t seem like it would be hard. Well, I mean, it’s ectoplasm, so it wouldn’t… ack! I think Pala might be contagious.”

“Better give her a wide berth in the future, then,” I said.

“I don’t think she’d fit in a narrow one. Why are you so anti-Pala, anyway? I thought you’d be drooling all over her,” Steff said. “Which you kind of did back there, but you did it while looking at her like she was some kind of insignificant little giant insect.”

“She’s so not my type,” I said.

“As if you wouldn’t let her spank you,” Steff said.

“As if she’d be into that,” I said, feeling my cheeks flush with heat at the thought… both sets.

“As if that’s even the point,” Steff said. “Besides, I have a feeling that would be easier to arrange than my fantasy… we’ll just tell her you’ve been naughty and ask her what she thinks should be done.”

“I don’t think she’d fall for that,” I said, trying to imagine how that would even work. She’d have to kneel beside me… unless she picked me up and laid me across her knees?

“No, but you’re trying to picture it, aren’t you?” Steff said. “I bet you haven’t had a good spanking in days. Amy’s probably slacked off because of the whole ‘campus in crisis’ thing.”

“She’s not exactly slacking off,” I said.

“No, but she’s not exactly giving you what you need, either,” Steff said. “Let’s face it, she’s not a natural disciplinarian. Okay, she’s good at the motions, but the mindset doesn’t come naturally to her. She’ll never give you consistent punishments, Mack… on the other hand, I can give you eternal torment. It doesn’t get much more consistent than that.”

“You’re not even trying to make it sound appealing,” I said.

She shrugged.

“Hey, it’s a rough gig, but it’ll either appeal to you or it won’t,” Steff said. “I’m betting that by the time I graduate you’ll have realized that it does.”

“Then you’re going to be waiting a long time to find out you’re wrong,” I said.

“Good thing I’m known for my patience, then,” she said. “At least I think I’m known for it… I don’t usually stick around long enough to find out for sure.”

In fact, she didn’t stay at the library for very long, whether because she had a class to get to or because she was bored, I wasn’t sure. Pala walked me to my logic class, waiting outside while I went in. She wasn’t the only bodyguard in the hall, either… after having used a mirror on Monday, Sooni had returned to class in person, a fact which made me feel a surprising amount of relief.

She was wearing a very conservative outfit by her standards: a blouse with a dark blue jacket and a matching pleated skirt that stopped just above the knee, with a slit up the back for her fox tail but overlapping folds that closed up below. Maliko was wearing a similar, but somewhat simpler, outfit in gray as she had been during the previous class.

Sooni’s outfit was topped off with a scarf and veil that covered her face. Despite her furry ears and mountain of braids, I wondered if it was actually her, or if her father had provided a stand-in to act as a decoy… this was the first time I could remember Sooni not coming over to say hi or deliver a random threat, or at least look at me when I came in.

What must her parents think of the situation on-campus if they’d go that far for his daughter’s protection? If they were that overprotective, I’d be surprised they let her go to school halfway around the world, particularly at a mid-continental one and not one of the eastern universities.

Still, even if it was a stand-in that meant that he wasn’t planning on yanking her out of the school entirely. She’d have to be back when the current crisis was resolved, which would probably be soon. This was a bit of a relief to me. Maliko I would rather do without, but Sooni’s company was…well, she had her good points.

She had points that were better than her worst points, anyway.

Some of those points seemed less appealing once I’d realized that sex with her was out of the question, after our “date”… she didn’t even really know what it was, or what it really signified. The idea of lesbianism horrified her, except when she believed it was required by the plot of the comic book or animation she thought she was the star of. There was just no way I could take advantage of someone like that. The ethical problems aside… and I wasn’t sure that I could articulate those behind “it feels skeevy”, or that I needed to… I didn’t think I was equipped to take the lead in something like that.

My fantasies about Sooni had all revolved around her domineering personality, her ability to walk all over people. Sooni in the inn room had been uncertain, vulnerable… it was kind of touching, but not really arousing.

The professor started class by stiffly reading an announcement that there was going to be a statement for the student body from school officials and representatives of the Imperial Bureau of Finding at a press conference at five that evening. So apparently there was somebody in the office who realized that many students didn’t check their university a-mail accounts regularly.

After class ended, I waited around to see if Sooni would try to say anything to me. She didn’t, but as she went past I got a slight glimpse of her face around her eyes… and saw fur. So I had been right… it wasn’t Sooni. Unlike her nekoyokai “friends”, Sooni had smooth and bare skin.

The imitation was flawed in other ways. While the decoy had a tail like Sooni’s, but it didn’t swish nearly as much when she walked. Her backside was very similar in shape but she didn’t have Sooni’s walk down. She was much too prim and proper… when Sooni wasn’t stomping around in anger, she was slinking around like the fox she resembled. This woman, whoever she was, just… walked. The visual resemblance was so good it had to be a complex illusion or full-body glamour, which left me wondering why her face had come out furry.

“Hey!” Maliko said, hitting my head from behind with her logic textbook. “Quit staring!”

“Quit hitting me,” I said.

“Sooni is not allowed to speak to you but she wanted me to tell you…”

“Where is she, really?” I asked.

“What? You are so weird and stupid,” Maliko said. “And… weirdly stupid and stupidly weird. Sooni told me to tell you that you need to hurry up.”

“Hurry where?”

“Hurry to find things out and tell them to her so that she can solve the murder,” Maliko said.

“How am I supposed to tell her things when she’s not allowed near me?”

“She says she can’t think of everything!” Maliko said, snarling with a fury that I guess was probably an accurate reproduction of what Sooni had said when Maliko voiced the same objection.

“Yeah, well, you can tell Sooni there’s no need,” I said. “I have a feeling the whole thing’s going to be solved soon enough anyway.”

“Yes, she thinks so, too,” Maliko said. “That’s why you have to hurry up, so Sooni can solve it before anybody else does.”

“Yeah, I’ll get right on that,” I said.

I had the thought run through my head that I could have just told Sooni what I knew and let her be the big hero of the hour, but of course there were numerous reasons that wouldn’t have worked. Aside from the simple fact that I hadn’t had any contact with Sooni, any explanation she came up with for how she had come to know the nature of mermaids would be as ridiculous and flimsy as her typical outfits, which meant that the actual story would come out rather quickly.

No, Lee had been a much better choice than Sooni to entrust with the truth. His solution had been surprising and a little bit self-serving, but it was the best bet for my anonymity and safety. I supposed I’d have to get in to wait until I could find out what was said at the press conference before I knew how well his plan was progressing, or if it had progressed at all.

I wondered if Hart would have to read an announcement about the press conference, and tried to imagine how he’d take the intrusion into his class time, especially since the only way it would make a difference was if some of his students opted to duck out on his lecture.

When I got to Early Republican History, I realized that I’d been wrong about the last but right about Hart having reason to resent interference in his class time. There was a flat box TV set up on a rolling cart at the front of the room. Unless he’d suddenly decided to take a more multimedia approach to teaching then it seemed like we’d be getting to see the press conference after all.

Tuesday: Pressing matters are resolved.

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She shrugged.

“I honestly wasn’t expecting it to stick to me in the first place,” she said. She giggled. “I suppose Two could have warned me, if I’d asked.”

“What, is she some kind of an expert on body paint?” Ian asked. I was just as perplexed as he was by this idea.

“No, but she’s an expert on things doing what they’re supposed to,” Amaranth said. “And body paint is supposed to go on bodies. I might have remembered, if I’d thought about it, that we sometimes get decorated with woad and henna for festivals. It wipes right off, though, because whatever residue would be left behind is mess, and I simply don’t do mess.”

“Isn’t it already a mess when it gets smeared on your skin by accident?” I asked.

“Probably, but I think she was decorating me… that girl is really into the idea of marking people,” Amaranth said.

“Yeah, that sounds like Semele,” Ian said.

“Oh, do you know her?” Amaranth asked. “You should introduce us sometime. She seems like she might be fun if she learned how to relax a little… Semele.” She sounded it out a few times like she was trying it on for fit. “Semele, Semele. That‘s kind of a pretty name. I’d love to get to know her.”

“What, did she just run off when you finished?” I asked.

“Well, she did kind of mess up her costume,” Ian said.

“Oh my kosh, is she okay?” Winnie asked.

“Yes, I think so,” Amaranth said to Winnie. “It was a very emotional experience for her… I think, in spite of my best efforts, it still wasn’t quite what she was expecting… but maybe she’ll have a better time the next time around, now that she’s got some idea what it feels like.”

“I’m just happy she got laid,” Winnie said.

“I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ve met,” Amaranth said. She held out a spotless hand. “I’m Amaranth.”

“Winnie Champlain,” she said.

“Oh, I have class with William Champlain!” Amaranth said.

“I’m related to at least three Williams, and two of them are here now,” Winnie said.

“Oh, this is the one with an incest fixation,” Amaranth said.

“Boy, I wish I could tell you I needed more to go on,” Winnie said. “But I know exactly who you mean.”

“He has brown hair,” Amaranth said.

“Brownish-blond?”

“No, more like a dark chestnut.”

“That’s not… oh. Oh!” Winnie said. “Ew.”

“As transgressive fantasies go, it’s one of the more harmless ones,” Amaranth said. “There isn’t even an implicit power differential, in cousin or sibling incest… and the extension of the taboo to include cousins is kind of a recent innovation in the first place. Before the most recent advances in communication and transportation, most people never met enough people to be sure of a match they weren’t related to.”

“Really?” Winnie asked. “That’s interesting.”

“Oh, yes,” Amaranth said. “And in fact, while it’s kind of become an entrenched view in the Imperium, it’s far from universal among humans. And that’s to say nothing of other races. Some elves consider it enough to avoid a partner who shares both their parents, and dwarves don’t even track kinship with the opposite sex.”

“So, a dwarf could end up dating his sister?”

“For a certain value of ‘date’, I suppose,” Amaranth said.

“It’s amazing how much she knows about how other races fuck,” Ian said to me.

“Wasn’t Winnie grossed out a moment ago?” I asked him. He shrugged.

“So, what about other races?” Winnie asked Amaranth. “Like, gnomes.”

“Well, gnomish attitudes pretty much mirrored human ones at the time they both colonized the Westering Lands,” Amaranth said. “But their insularity and isolation means that they haven’t changed as much. So on the one hand things like cousin marriages never really became taboo, but on the other hand, things that are seen as perfectly normal in human society would be scandalous in theirs. Things are slightly different in the riverfolk subculture… they travel more, so they’re exposed to wider influences and as a consequence, they end up being a little more adventurous about some things.”

“Hey!” Hazel yelled from a short distance away, where she was dancing with… or rather, around… Two. “Watch it with the ‘a-word’!”

“I can’t think of a better word for a woman in shoes,” Honey said. “No, wait, I can. I’m just not going to say it.”

“Sorry, Hazel!” Amaranth said. She giggled a little, which was cute, and Winnie giggled, too… which was not. “What’s really interesting is when you look at cultures that have entirely different kinship systems, like the lizardfolk in Blackwater, or the Kaha Moai people.”

“Everybody’s making new friends,” Ian said. I followed his gaze to where Pala and Sooni were hanging out on the dance floor. Pala was clutching the dolled-up Kai to her chest, the giant costume head very badly askew. I hoped for her sake that they’d left Kai’s sword in the baby buggy, if not back at the dorm. “Want to dance?” he asked me.

I looked at Amaranth, who it seemed had somehow got onto the topic of the reproduction habits of freshwater hydras… and Winnie, who seemed to find the topic humorous. Ugh… that laugh of hers. It went right through me like a red-hot skewer.

“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”

“You don’t have to jump into my arms or anything,” Ian said.

“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head to try to clear out the lingering sound. “I want to… I’ll be a little better when we get some distance between us and that laughter.”

“Winnie’s?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“It is a little infectious,” he said.

“That’s not the word I’d use,” I said. I put my arms on his shoulders, then realized it was a fast song, then decided to leave my arms there anyway. Fast meant it would be over fast, and I didn’t want us to devolve to awkward conversation or something while waiting for a slow song and then miss it.

“It’s okay,” Ian said. “I’ve had to get used to the idea that you’ll be easily distracted by pretty girls.”

“Winnie Champlain is not pretty,” I said.

“Also not deaf,” Ian said, wincing. “Though I might be. Khersis, Mack. Okay, yeah, she’s kind of plain, but she’s got a nice laugh and I’m not going to be jealous if you notice it.”

“What? No. She laughs like the bizarre offspring of a barghest and a howler monkey,” I said. “Who was raised by woodpeckers. Woodpeckers with an annoying laugh.”

“Whatever,” Ian said. “I’m not going to stand here and argue with you about a girl’s laugh.” The song finally changed to something good, and he put his hands just above my hips. “Not when I’ve got you to myself and there’s music.”

“Yeah, sorry,” I said, and we started to sway. “There’s something weird about her, though… her whole family.”

“Oh, don’t start,” Ian said. “She’s related to Puddy. So what? All that means is that they could get married in gnomeland.”

“Be serious,” I said.

“You be serious,” he said. “Are you seriously going to start judging people based on their family relations?”

“I don’t think of that side of my family as family, per se,” I said.

“And you think everyone who shares a little blood with Puddy’s going to own her?” Ian asked. “Anyway, the only person on your other side that I’ve heard of besides your mother is your grandmother. Would you want to be judged by your relationship to her?”

“I don’t not like Winnie because she’s Puddy’s cousin,” I said. “I dislike her, I dislike her cousin in my history class, and I dislike Puddy, all independently of each other… and then I find out they’re all from the same family.”

“So’s half the human student body, it seems,” Ian said. “A group that includes a lot of jerks and losers, but also a lot of people who came out to rally for you when you went poof, and who walked out of your history class with you, who’ve been writing letters to the student paper…”

“What letters?”

“You could try reading it every once in a while and finding out,” he said. “My point is you’ve probably bumped into a lot more LaBelles than those three.”

“Yeah, and the three I’ve had enough contact with to find out their family background all turned out to be…”

“What?” Ian asked. “Slightly annoying?”

“Puddy’s not just slightly annoying.”

“She’s naked.”

“No, she’s… what?”

He turned us around so that I was facing the entryway. There was a crowd gathering, and I had to stand on my tippy-toes to try to see what was going on. I couldn’t see more than the top of Puddy’s strawberry blonde head, which had a circlet of laurel leaves. Then the crowd shifted a bit and there she was, in all her… glory. She was naked except for the wreath, and holding a gold-colored lyre and a big scroll wound around wooden roller thingies.

I let go of Ian and he turned around.

“What’s she supposed to be… a muse?” Ian asked.

“Looks like,” I said.

“She’s really not bad looking,” Ian said. “She could lose some weight, but she’s carrying it pretty well. She’s a lot smoother than I… would have thought.”

There was a commotion out on the dance floor.

“But why do I have to leave?” Pala said, her voice carrying clearly now that all conversations everywhere else had stopped. She sounded like she was near tears.

“Yes, why does she have to leave?” Sooni demanded.

“Just step into the ladies’ room for five minutes, Tiny,” Callahan said to her. “Just five minutes, okay? I’ll make it up to you, I promise. I’ll buy you stilts.”

“Fine! I am going!” Pala said, turning and storming towards the restrooms. “But don’t think I’m not going to…”

The rest was unintelligible blubbers.

“What the heck was that about?” Ian asked as Callahan headed over to deal with Puddy.

“No idea,” I said. “But I think Puddy’s about to get a bit of a talking to.”

“You mean a dressing-down?” Ian asked.

“Funny,” I said.

“I don’t think she can do anything, really,” Amaranth said, coming over to join us. I felt a stab of jealousy that she was holding hands with Winnie, and I took her other hand.

“What do you mean?” Ian asked. “I know it’s a costume party, but… I’m not sure that qualifies.”

“Yes, but… nymph,” Amaranth said.

“No offense, but I don’t think your presence in a room this size negates the need for her to wear clothes, especially when you aren’t even together,” Ian said.

“Not me,” Amaranth said. “Puddy. She’s got her bloodline registered with the Hamadryad Preservation Board. One-sixteenth… the smallest proportion they recognize, but legally, she’s a nymph.”

“You don’t really buy that, do you?” I asked her.

“Oh, no, it’s true,” Winnie said. “Her great-grandmother Eugenie Banks was an oak tree who fell in love with a woodcutter.”

“That must have made for some awkward holiday visits,” Ian said.

“They say that’s why the Bankses are so, you know, wild… and why they have so many daughters,” Winnie said. “It’s in their blood.”

“So what about her dragon and her giant blood?” I asked her.

“I don’t know anything about that.”

From the way Callahan stomped off, it looked like Puddy had won the argument. Mariel, who had some kind of djinn/harem girl thing going on with her costume, just looked like she could die.

I felt a cool hand touch my neck.

“Hey, Mack,” Feejee said, leaning her body against my back. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“Were you looking for a dance, Feejee?” Amaranth asked, letting go of my hand so she could turn and look at us.

“What? Oh, no… I wouldn’t want anyone to think I’m… you know,” Feejee said, draping her arms down my front and feeling my sides. I tried to see if I could smell anything on her breath, but there was just the slightly salty scent of Feejee herself. “I just thought… well, I kind of wanted to talk to her about something she said earlier.”

Amaranth gave her a pleasant but fixed smile.

“If it’s not something you’re comfortable talking about in front of everybody, I don’t think it’s a conversation you need to be having with my Mack,” she said.

Feejee looked back at her. I couldn’t see her face, but her body went tense and her hands kind of clutched at me. One of them was kind of right between my legs at that moment. Under other circumstances, it might have been kind of… actually, it was pretty arousing.

“I just wanted to give Mack a chance to talk about her true feelings, now that they’re out in the open,” Feejee said.

“True feelings?” Amaranth said.

“What she said… what she did… this morning,” Feejee said, and my stomach fell out of my abdomen. What had I done that morning? Pretty much try to jump into her mouth and climb down her throat. “It was very revealing.”

“I don’t think you should pay much attention to anything she said or did while under the influence of alchemical products,” Amaranth said.

“Even when those products are doing nothing but revealing people’s inner desires?”

“Feejee, I know this must be confusing for you, but there are desires and there are desires,” Amaranth said. She put her hands on Winnie’s shoulders. “For instance, Winnie’s cousin William masturbates while he imagines having sex with her, but that doesn’t mean he’d actually desire a relationship with her if the chance came up. It’s the idea that…”

“I know what I saw,” Feejee said, letting go of me and straightening up. “And we are going to talk about it, whether you want to or not… now that I know for sure we both want the same thing, I’m not going to let anything stop me.”

“Wow, is everyone gay for you?” Winnie asked while Feejee walked away, her naked butt peeking out from beneath the apron strings like a present beneath a little bow.

“I don’t understand it, either,” Ian said. “And I never figured you for the jealous type,” he said to Amaranth.

“I just don’t want to see anyone getting hurt,” Amaranth said.

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My scream of unadulterated horror at the appearance of the scarecrow backlit by a lightning flash cut through the ambient noise and the general atmosphere of fear.

I recovered a bit when the figure jumped away from me in obvious surprise, if not fear, letting out a distinctively womanish shriek. Recovered mentally, anyway… my heart was still pounding in my ears and my limbs were shaking like jelly in an earthquake. I’d landed on my ass, my cape tangled up beneath me and pulling on my neck.

The afterimage from the lightning burst cleared away from my eyes, and I found myself looking up at Barley, in her most immodestly modest outfit yet: coveralls over a long-sleeved shirt, with straw sticking out around the openings and a floppy straw hat.

Seen clearly, she looked more goofy than anything… it had only been the timing of the thunderburst and the resulting silhouette that had kicked off my fear reflex.

Not that I was positively ecstatic to see Barley… I’d take her over the shadow scarecrow from the cursed farm any day of the week, but I wouldn’t have sought out either of their company. The relief I felt was relative. My reaction to her was pretty visceral in its own right.

“Oh my goddess, I didn’t mean to startle you!” she said. “I hope that was just you being startled, I mean… because I also kind of hoped that we could get past, well, you know, everything…”

“Everything” was a funny of saying “attempted rape”, I thought, but my tongue was pretty much still pressed against the roof of my mouth by my heart and my stomach.

“What… what are you doing here, Barley?” Amaranth asked, her voice croaking a little.

“It’s a school party,” Barley said. “That means it’s for everybody, not just you and your special friends.”

“There’s room for everybody, but I thought you were supposed to stay away from us,” Amaranth said. “Mother Khaele told me…”

“Mother Khaele told you that I’m not your concern,” Barley said. She reached out a hand to me. “Here, Mackenzie let me help you up.”

“Don’t touch her!” Amaranth shrieked, getting between us… but not fast enough for me to miss the look of pain on Barley’s face.

“I think she can speak for herself,” Barley said. “Unless you’ve beaten that out of her.”

I found my voice then… anger will do that. Calm, rational thought isn’t so great for pushing back even the silliest and most baseless mortal terror. Anger, though, cuts through it like an enchanted knife through warm butter.

“I can,” I said. “And I don’t want you touching me.”

I reached a hand up to Amaranth and she helped me up.

“Well, you shouldn’t need her to say it,” Barley said.

“I agree,” I said. “It should go without saying. Barley, you tried to rape me.”

“But Puddy…”

“I don’t want Puddy touching me, either,” I said. “I might be… adventurous… a little, sometimes… but I’m not public property, and I don’t like people who treat me like I am.”

Barley’s eyes rolled over to Amaranth in a way that made me glad that nymphs weren’t related to basilisks.

“No?” she said. “But you love her.”

“Amaranth has her values,” I said. “They’re not always the same as mine. We… we compromise sometimes. But she’s never tried to rape me.”

“Listen, can we not use that word? I’m willing to talk about what I did, but…”

“Great… good for you. But I’m not willing to talk about it,” I said. “Not with you.”

“Could you just hear me out for one minute?”

“Were you possessed?” I asked. “Had you been messing around with strange pitchforks? Were you under the influence of strange alchemical vapors?”

“Oh, yeah. See, that’s the thing. I actually drank some of Puddy’s wine to get my courage up…”

“Up for what?” I asked. “Look me in the eye and tell me that you hadn’t already made up your mind about what you were going to do before you took the first swig.”

She steeled herself up, swallowed, and then she did look me in the eyes.

I didn’t know if it was something that was against their nature, or if going for a dozen and a half years of mature existence with nothing worth lying about just didn’t cultivate the habit of deception. I knew the truth as soon as her eyes met mine, all big and bright and brittle as Two’s… but not nearly as innocent.

There was a calculation in there. Not a particularly complicated one… one that was straightforward and direct as two plus two equals four. I’d just told her what she had to say for me to give her a chance, and she was about to say it.

“Honestly, Mackenzie, I don’t remem…”

“Stop,” I said. Her eyelids ratcheted down and her blue eyes flashed with anger. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see her face any more. “Stop, Barley… you’re lying to me.”

“That’s because you won’t listen,” she said. Her straw-stuffed pants crinkled as she stomped her foot.

“Barley… if you really are trying to change, I’m glad,” I said. “For so many reasons. But it’s not my job to forgive you. I don’t owe you that. Your mother was right… the best thing we can do is stay away from each other.”

“I will,” she said. “I was going to, except for this one night when she’s not looking… I just thought I’d be big and apologize, but if you don’t even… if you won’t… if… I wonder if it’s the demon blood that makes you so petty, or if it’s her.”

“Barley… just go,” I said. I kept my eyes closed as I heard her crinkling away, then let out a very relieved breath.

“That was… that was really pretty good, baby,” Amaranth said.

“Thanks,” I said. I turned to Ian as we started to wander away from the scene of the… scene. “Were you planning on jumping in at any point?”

“Not even a little bit,” he said.

“I guess there’s a reason you didn’t go as a knight in shining armor.”

“Maybe because you didn’t need one?” he said. “I don’t know what I could have added except another loud voice, and I don’t think that’s the same thing as helping.”

“Is doing nothing really better?” I asked.

“Excuse me,” Pala said. She held up a furry bikini bottom that looked a lot like mine, except for the broken strap and the not even barely covering up my girly parts. “Is this yours?”

Ian’s gaze flicked down. I was suddenly intensely aware of the feel of my cape on my barer-than-before butt. While my face turned into another glowing pumpkin, Amaranth reached out and took the broken garment from the demi-giantess.

“Thank you so much, Pala,” she said. “Hold your cape closed, baby… I’ll just go grab Two. Unless you just wanted to slow dance real close against Ian for a while?”

“Uh, yeah, no,” I said, pulling the cape around myself. “Hurry back.”

“It was just a thought,” Amaranth said. “Making the best of what could be a fortuitous accident. I’ll go get this fixed, though,” she said, and she hurried off towards Two’s group, which had gone straight for the refreshments.

“I don’t get a vote on the slow dancing thing?” Ian asked. “You impressed Amaranth with how you handled that whole deal… it could be like a whole streak.”

“That’s pretty much what I’m worried about. Anyway, you can dance if you want to,” I said. “It’ll be like a compromise. She likes those, too.”

“Miss Mackenzie!” another voice said, the speaker coming up behind me. “Miss Mackenzie!”

This time, I knew exactly who it was, even though the voice was a little muffled and echoey… Sooni was one of the few people apart from teachers who ever used a title when she addressed me, and her yippy little voice was fairly distinctive even when she wasn’t quite screaming at the top of her lungs.

“What, Sooni?” I asked, turning to face her. “What is… ack!”

I had an excuse for being startled that time… even if her voice might have suggested a mask, the last time I’d seen her, her head had been uncovered, and in any event, the last thing I would have expected was to see her entire head covered with a “realistic” (as far as that went) foam representation of an animated character.

“You’re bunching up the cape! It doesn’t look right!” she said, slapping at my hands where I was clutching it. I yelped and let go. The big foam head rocked back a bit. “Actually, I think maybe it did look better the other way.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I said, closing it.

“Science Princess!” Pala yelled, running over… well, stepping over. We weren’t that far away from her, comparatively. “You are the Pretty Neko Science Princess!”

“Yes!” Sooni said. She looked up at Pala and her badly abused elven gown. “I like your swimming costume!”

“Thank you!” Pala said. “It is in my room at the inn. Why do you not have Science Princess’s science boots?”

“Oh, these are my mother’s shoes,” Sooni said. “She gave them to me when I was very young. I liked them because they made me look tall.”

“Oh,” Pala said. “Maybe I should get some?”

“You look pretty tall already.”

“They must be working already,” Pala said. “I need to stand next to you some more.”

“You… you aren’t a lesbian, are you?” Sooni asked.

“That is a type of sex pervert?”

“Yes!” Sooni said, nodding her head so enthusiastically I thought it was going to fall off.

“No!” Pala said.

I mouthed “Let’s get out of here,” to a very bemused Ian, and we began to shuffle away from the new best friends, in the direction of Two and Amaranth.

“If that head doesn’t win for scariest costume, I’m demanding a recount,” Ian said.

“Don’t speak too soon,” I said. spotting something that would give Sooni’s head a run for its money: two people who could only have been Suzi and Maliko wearing similar outfits complete with heads, and… most frightening… pushing a stroller with Kai, who was wearing a giant Baby Kai-Kai head with giant oval eyes taking up almost all of the face that wasn’t covered by the giant pacifier. “Don’t stare at her,” I said. “She’s probably already plotting to kill me in my sleep.”

“She could probably sneak out of that and nobody would ever know,” Ian said.

The nekos were parked at one end of a long table covered with Veil treats. Amaranth and Two’s group were at the other end, fortunately, next to a big placard welcoming students to Anna Paradox Tower and Residence Hall for the Veil Ball.

“Hey, baby,” Amaranth said as we approached. She held up the repaired garment. “Two put it right for you.”

“Thanks, Two,” I said. “Sorry for making you work during the dance.”

“It’s okay, I forgive you,” Two said. “Anyway, it isn’t your fault that you were made clumsy.”

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“Hey, listen,” Hazel said. “I don’t know the whole thing that’s been going on between you and that stuffed shirt, but if she gets up in your business again, I’ll be happy to show her how we do things on the river.”

“Oh, Hazel, don’t,” Honey said, looking as mortified as she ought to have looked in her mock-goblin costume. “Not in your…”

“Not another word from you on that, or I’ll give you a refresher course,” Hazel said. “I’m as fit as the day I was I popped Andy one for putting his hands where oughtn’t've, and a woman who can whoop a dwarf could take on just about anyone in this room, up to and including the very tall elf.”

“You didn’t ‘whoop’ him, Hazel, you took him by surprise,” Honey said. “Which he had every right to be, considering that you apparently weren’t so modest as to…”

“Not another word, Honey,” Hazel said.

“Where… um… so, where is Andy tonight?” I asked Hazel.

“He’s… we’re taking a little bit of a breather, actually,” Hazel said.

“I can’t believe that even a dwarf would cut and run when…”

“Owain! Will you please shut it? I will belt you one, Heather Callaway!”

“Let’s go find the ladies’ room, baby,” Amaranth said, grabbing my cape-wrapped elbow and pulling me away.

“Yeah, I think I’ll just join you,” Ian said.

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“You know, this thing is sticking worse all the time,” he said, fighting with the knob. “You really should have someone come up and fix it before it breaks.”

“No, it’s just locked… you just have to push it in and jiggle a little,” I said.

“I unlocked it,” he said.

“No, you didn’t. It’s the lock that sticks,” I said. “If it’s not opening, that means it didn’t unlock, so push it in and twist.”

“I did!” he said, but obviously he knew he hadn’t and he listened to me or else it was a sheer coincidence that he got the door open a second later. “There it… aaaaah!”

His own scream was quickly overwhelmed by another louder and much higher pitched one, one I instantly recognized even though I was just out of the line of sight of the door.

“What’s going on, Sooni?” I said, rushing forward. “And why are you screaming?”

She was dressed like her favorite animated heroine, Science Princess… at least from the neck down. She was wearing the miniskirted labcoat that was Science Princess’s uniform in her powered up state. She had full length leggings and gloves that replicated Science Princess’s tabby fur, and even had a kind of sleeve thing over her fox tail to make it look more like a cat. She must have known that no mask would really make her slightly vulpine face and fox ears look like a cat, so she just had her miles of hair piled up on top of her head like a helmet.

I was a little surprised that she hadn’t at least replicated the goggle-mask thing that Science Princess wore, but maybe she just hadn’t put that on yet.

She was holding a big cube-shaped box with a pair of handles on the sides, that I assumed was supposed to be some kind of science thing… at least until she flipped it around and I saw it had a crystal prism jammed in a hole on one side. It seemed Sooni had gotten ahold of a clunker of a camera from somewhere. It looked like it was at least sixty years old… I was surprised she didn’t have something newer. But, then, if she was short on funds, then maybe it was a case of beggars and choosers.

“I screamed because he screamed at me!” she said, jabbing a finger at Ian. “I only was coming to take your picture, not have your naked boyfriend attack me!”

“He’s not naked, and he didn’t attack you!” I said. “And what do you want to take my picture for?”

“For the weavesite, if you ever make it!” she said. “Turn sideways, and pull the cape around you. Nobody wants to see your flabby tummy.”

“Uh, yeah, no,” I said, sucking in my gut a little bit. “I am not getting my picture taken like this.”

“Mack… she did help fix up your costume,” Amaranth said. “And, anyway, I think it’s the costume she wants a picture of. Am I right, Sooni?”

“What? Yes, of course,” Sooni snapped. “Did I not just say that? I must have a picture for the weavesite so people can see how good my fur is.”

“It is very good,” Amaranth said. “It almost fooled me.”

“Of course it’s good, I just said that!” Sooni said, stomping her foot. I had to amend my previous assessment: she was dressed as Science Princess from the neck down to the ankles. Below that, she was still the same stompy old Sooni, with the hideous wooden platforms that her mother had picked out for her. “Stop being so stupid and make your lesbian girlfriend pose right!”

“Sooni. Look at me,” Amaranth said, giving her a stern voice I’d only ever heard her use on me. I felt a little bit jealous, especially when she tilted her head forward and rolled her eyes up to give her an over-the-glasses glare. “My Mack is not being completely reasonable, but this isn’t the way to get what you want. I want you to…”

“Don’t talk to me like that, you fat naked tree cow!” Sooni shrieked, stomping up a storm. “You are not my mother! My mother is a lady! She possesses quiet dignity and refined grace!”

“Does she have any extra?” Ian whispered.

Amaranth stood unmoved by this display. She didn’t flinch, or move her head.

“Mack,” she said. “Take off the cape and give it to Sooni.”

“What?” the two of us said at the same time.

“You’re not wearing it,” Amaranth said. “Not like that. Sooni, you can take your pictures of it and then undo your alterations and give it back to Ian. If that’s not something you can do right away, just hold onto it and return it at your convenience. The tiara, too, baby.”

“But… but… I did it for her,” Sooni said. “Because she’s my friend! It matches her underwear! It won’t look right on anybody else!”

“Mack, apologize to Sooni,” Amaranth said.

“What?” I said, and this time, Ian joined me.

“Don’t make me say it again. Sooni was nice to help fill out your costume. You were inconsiderate when she wanted to take a picture. Apologize, missy.”

“I’m… I’m sorry, Sooni,” I said.

“That’s a little better,” Sooni sniffed.

“Now you apologize to me,” Amaranth said. “I’m not a ‘tree cow’, and I’m not fat, and I am not stupid.”

Sooni sighed dramatically, but she bowed slightly at the waist and said, “I am sorry, Miss… Nymph.”

“Thank you,” Amaranth said, relaxing her pose. “I’m sorry I tried to act like your mother.”

“Hey, what about me?” I asked. “Aren’t I going to get an apology?”

“Nobody did anything to you, sweetie,” Amaranth said. She put her hands on my shoulder and stepped me back a bit, then turned me a quarter to the side. “Is this something like you had in mind, Sooni?”

“Yes,” she said. “Only she needs to take the cape and hold it across her, so it’s the focus.”

“I don’t want my picture on a weavesite,” I said.

“You can blank it out,” Amaranth said, molding me into the desired position. “And even if it doesn’t go up anywhere, it’ll be nice to have. Hold that!” she said, and she stepped out of the shot.

“Thank you,” Sooni said, taking the picture.

“Fine. Can we go now?” I asked.

“Just a second, baby,” Amaranth said. “Sooni, none of us have any cameras… since you have one, would you mind taking pictures of us in our costumes?”

“Not at all!” Sooni said happily.

“Okay, let’s get one all together, one with our two fierce warriors, and one with me and my toy,” Amaranth said.

When Ian and I came together for our picture, he whispered, “I do have a camera, actually.”

“Did you bring it?” I asked.

“No.”

“That was fun!” Sooni said when we were finished. “I can’t wait to extract them!”

“Just remember to get us copies,” Amaranth said. “Thank you so much!”

“You’re welcome!” Sooni said, and she skipped back across the hall.

“You see, Mack?” Amaranth said. “That worked out pretty well, once we gave Sooni a chance.”

“Once we got past the screaming and stomping and fit-throwing,” I said.

“That only happened because you wouldn’t give her a fair hearing when she asked for a picture,” Amaranth said.

“Yeah, well, if she’d come to me and said, ‘how about I help you make a better Veil costume and you let me take a picture and put it on my weavesite’, then I could have told her hell no,” I said. “I can’t be held responsible for deals she imagines we make.”

“But it’s such a little thing that she wanted, and it makes her so happy,” Amaranth said. “And part of that happiness is the fact that she did something for her friend. Did you miss that?”

“Hold on,” Ian said. “Did you miss the part where she wanted the picture for her weavesite and Mackenzie doesn’t want that? That’s not a little thing. That’s like, personal integrity or autonomy or something like that.”

“Well… yeah,” Amaranth admitted. “But that’s only one part of it. And anyway, she can’t put together a weavesite on her own. Ultimately, Mack’s going to be the one who controls what happens to that picture.”

“I will be if I give in and make her weavesite for her,” I said. “I hadn’t actually committed to that yet.”

“Oh,” Amaranth said. “Um… okay. Well, maybe I was trying to be clever there and I missed the mark a little bit. But, still… at least we’ll have pictures now.”

“I guess,” I said. “Let’s just get going before anything else happens.”

My coat didn’t exactly sit right over the cape, or vice versa so I ended up carrying it. The boots really were awesome at keeping cold air from seeping in around my ankles. The campus was an amazing sight… I started to feel like maybe I didn’t need an all-concealing mask to walk freely and not be remarked on… there were fairy princesses and dragons and a wizard in purple robes with a wand that trailed stars when he moved it. There were scientists and mechanics. There was a girl who looked like she was an elf under heavy glamour, with a silvery mane, hooves, and a unicorn horn. There were zombies and ghouls and revenants, and even a few old school misconceptions of demons.

“The G&D students must be making a killing tonight,” I said. “I hope they can get some kind of class credit for it all.”

“Speaking of… where’d the… bug-fairy-thing… person… find the energy to do so many full-body glamours?” Ian asked.

“She’s a sylph,” I said.

“Sylphs have pretty high energy reserves,” Amaranth said. “And they can replenish them fairly quickly.”

“Also, glamour doesn’t take as much as an actual alteration,” I said.

“I just think it’s wonderful that she’s doing something like that,” Amaranth said. “Using her talents, making some money for herself… doing something that’s hers and not Puddy’s.”

“I can’t believe she’d do it if Puddy’s against it,” I said.

“Well, you know, she’s been hanging out with Trina more,” Amaranth said. “And whatever you think of Trina, I think it’s been good for both her and Puddy for them to have separate lives. I don’t want to defend anything Puddy’s done, but… this is probably her first time away from home and her parents’ supervision. There’s a lot of new stuff to deal with, even without getting into relationship stuff.”

“It’s not Puddy’s first time away from home,” I said. “She told me she went to summer camp, and I got the impression that’s when her whole ‘Girls Gone Primal’ lesbian thing started up, so it’s not like this is a huge experiment.”

“Well, it could still very easily be her first serious relationship,” Amaranth said. “I mean, does it seem to you like she has any idea how those work?”

“No,” I admitted. “I guess it doesn’t.”

“Well, that’s what I’m talking about,” Amaranth said. “They hooked up the very first day, and then they were joined at the hip… Mariel latched onto Puddy like she was a lifesaver, and Puddy… well, I’m sure she has her good points, but she’s obviously relished the power this gives her. I don’t think their relationship is hopeless, necessarily, but I think it can only be a good thing that they’ve got some distance and the perspective that brings. It’s got to be healthier, in the long run.”

Ian cleared his throat.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Seriously, what?”

“Just… uh… nice night for dramatic irony, huh?” he said.

Even though he was being kind of a dick, I had to snerk at that a little.

“You don’t know the half of it,” I said, shaking my head.

“Yeah, that’s generally the idea,” he said.

Discuss this story on the Livejournal feed.

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

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

“Hello, Sooni,” I said,

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

“Uh huh,” I said.

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

“Yeah…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Was it just laziness? Or xenophobia?

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

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

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

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

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

“About the rum excise?”

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

“I’m all ears,” he said.

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

“Yes, that was kind of the point.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discuss this story.

Unless he planned on handing out some more free hundreds before the end of the semester, I couldn’t really afford to skip any more Fridays. So, I decided to steal a bit of relaxation and get in the bathtub before the rest of the dorm woke up.

Feejee was snoozing in her usual tub when I got in there. She had the curtain drawn for once, but her flipper… or fluke, I guess she called it… was kind of poking out. I didn’t want to wake her up, but it wasn’t like the tub came with a volume control… though I could see how that would be useful. Not only would it help you not disturb your neighbors if you were the sort of person who took baths at odd hours, but it could be useful if you wanted to listen to music while the tub was filling, or whatever.

That seemed like the kind of feature that a really high-end tub might have. There hadn’t been anything like that in the Empress Suite, but I could see a custom bath with its own music box also having a silence spell on the faucet, or even something that transformed the sound of it.

Of course, the simple stone tubs in the dorm bathroom wouldn’t have anything like that… but was I an enchanter, or wasn’t I?

I wasn’t, in point of fact… but I had spent like a month and a half learning how to alter the intensity of a property. I could probably make a loud thing louder. It seemed to me like I should have been able to make a loud thing less loud… or at least make a very slightly quiet thing more quiet.

Of course, there was a problem… the water pouring out of the faucet wasn’t a single discrete thing, it was a bunch of amorphous stuff that would crash against the bottom and fall apart as soon as I grabbed hold of it. Even still water was hard to enchant. What I really needed was an actual silencing spell to throw around it. I could have maybe made the walls in the alcove less echoey, and the curtain more muffling, but they were very echoey and it wasn’t much of a muffler. Trying to turn the bathtub into a zone of silence for the duration of the tub filling wouldn’t have made for a very relaxing start to my bath.

But it was interesting to think about it, about what I could do with my limited knowledge and how far I had to go. That was what applied enchanting was about: finding uses for this stuff. In the bad old days, you’d throw a silence spell on a pair of boots or a cloak or something so you could sneak around and kill people or things without getting noticed. Now it could be used for privacy, for greater comfort in travel, or to avoid awkward and disturbing conversations with ravenous floormates.

I giggled a little at that last thought… I tried not to, and only succeeded in sublimating it into a loud and kind of painful snort that resounded way too loudly all around me. I froze. Feejee muttered a “huh, what?” kind of sound and shifted around a bit in the water.

I considered very quietly picking up my things and going back out the way I came, but only for a moment. I’d come there to take a bath. Why did it have to be a whole big operation? Well, partly because of Feejee, but I was letting that happen. I could have just come in all matter-of-fact, turned on the water, and climbed in. If I wasn’t letting Kiersta’s lame attempt at being an authority figure keep me from enjoying a morning soak, why was I letting a little thing like… okay, it wasn’t a little thing. It was a serious problem that needed dealing with.

But it had nothing to do with me taking a bath or not.

I turned on the water, slipped out of my robe, climbed in, and closed the curtain. A liberal application of bath products and a few minutes later, I was in steamy peppermint heaven. Dee’s deep-breath-through-the-nose thing was so much easier to practice when the air tasted like soothing candy.

Why couldn’t I smell like this all the time?

Not rotten eggs, not Feejee’s favorite treat with a possible side of supernatural addiction, but just… a pleasant peppermint haze. It would be nice to smell like that… like anything other than what I was, anything other than a demon or a human or a mixture of the two.

I must have drifted off, because I didn’t hear Feejee getting out, or the curtain sliding open, but I opened my eyes after a particularly deep and soothing breath, and there she was, looking down at me.

With the whole “don’t eat me” thing, I’d kind of lost sight of how beautiful she was. Feejee’s skin… when she wore it as skin and not scales… was incredibly clear and smooth, but it was a color you didn’t find in most races: like a deep tan, but tinged slightly green. Not what people call “olive skin” on humans: just deep tan, mixed with a bit of green. She was very solidly built, broad across the hips and shoulders.

For all that they were equally unsupported, her breasts hung more freely than Amaranth’s did.. and while I liked Amaranth’s, there was something very free about Feejee’s. She was wild and untamed. Amaranth was cultivated.

I realized that my hand was between my legs, and I didn’t care. Neither, apparently, did she.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said, my finger rubbing all around the area around my… well, the general clitoral area.

“You smell like candy canes,” she said, breathing in.

“Yeah,” I said. My finger flicked back and forth.

“I like candy canes,” she said. “In fact, I love candy canes.”

That was a little surprising to me… I wouldn’t have guessed she would have known what they were, much less that she had a taste for them.

“Me, too,” I said. Had I had a candy cane that I could remember? Not that I could think of. I didn’t fucking care. Feejee loved candy canes. I had enough scent clinging to me that could have been one. I loved them, too.

“I like to lick them,” she said, flicking her green tongue out around her lips. “Until their stripes come off in my mouth. I like to suck on them, until they’re worn down to little nubs. That’s what I like to do, when I can… but I’m usually not that patient.”

“Me, neither,” I said.

“I’m going to eat you now,” she said, and she started to climb into the tub with me.

“Okay,” I said, only hoping that she wouldn’t finish before I did. I could feel it building up inside me, getting closer and closer… I had this idea that all I needed for a truly epic climax was Feejee’s teeth sinking into me.

“Mack?” she said.

“Okay,” I repeated. I closed my eyes and drank in more of that scent. Closer… closer. “Eat me.”

“Mack?” she said louder. She bent down and started shaking me, and that was all it took… I was off. I was bursting off like bubbles rising to the top of a cauldron.

“I said you could eat me!” I shouted through the waves of pleasure. “Go ahead!”

The world seemed to flip around, the water of the tub sloshing up past me to envelop her. My leg was tangled up in the curtain somehow. Feejee had resumed her fishy lower form for some reason.

“Mack!” Feejee said again, her voice suddenly seeming much closer to me even though she’d been right in front of me all the time. “Mack, I’m glad you’re coming around but… time and place?”

“What?” I asked, kicking free of the curtain.

Her tail melted into a pair of scaled legs and she sat up, scooting out from under me.

“We can’t do this here and now,” she said. “Among other things, Iona would never forgive me… and we’d never get away with it.”

“Hey, you started it!” I said, trying to get to my feet. What had I been thinking? “And I am not coming around, Feejee. Not to that… not for real.”

“Then why’d you climb into my tub telling me to eat you?” she asked.

“You climbed into my tub,” I said.

“What?”

That was when I realized where I was.

“Oh,” I said. “Um… I guess maybe I was sleepwalking?”

“What?”

“I think I was asleep,” I said. “I was dreaming.”

“People walk in their sleep?”

“Not usually,” I sad.

“But you do?” she asked.

“Not usually.”

“Then why do you think you were doing it now?” she asked.

“Because I was dreaming that you and I were having a conversation about candy canes and then I woke up over here,” I said. No sense going over the details.

“Uh huh,” she said. I could tell she wasn’t buying it. “And that stuff you sprayed was part of the dream?”

“Stuff?”

“From your…”

I was probably already blushing, but the realization that I’d probably gushed all over her stomach really turned up the steam.

“Sorry,” I said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s kind of interesting. I always wondered if being lesbian meant you were part guy. I guess now I have proof that I’m not one.”

“What? Feejee, that’s just… you know… an orgasm,” I said. “Every woman does that. It’s normal.”

Not that I had a lot of basis of comparison there, but Amaranth hadn’t said that anything was wrong the many times I’d came in her presence, and neither had Steff or Ian.

“I don’t,” she said.

“Yeah, well… maybe yours isn’t completely functional,” I said. “Like a decoy. Actual mammalian vaginas do that. It’s normal.”

“If mine’s not doing anything it’s supposed to, Rick’s been a pretty big gentleman about it,” Feejee said.

“Well, maybe he doesn’t have a lot of experience,” I said.

“Yeah, I guess you would know better than most,” she said. She stretched her legs back out, slipping one of them across to trip me up so I landed with my butt on her ankles. “This is kind of nice, you know. Sharing water.”

She gave me the hungry look that let me know exactly what she meant.

“You’re not worried that someone will come in and realize we’re in here together?”

“I don’t really care about that now,” she said. She tilted back a bit and lifted up her legs so I started to slide towards her. Her legs seemed to be surprisingly strong, but then, she did swim with them. “I just want to keep you close to me.”

“You don’t care if someone thinks you’re a lesbian?”

“If someone comes in, you can be very quiet, can’t you?” she asked. Darkness started to swirl out of the centers of her eyes, turning them into black pits. “Very still?”

Push back, I thought… and then I wondered if I really wanted to listen to the advice of a demon. If not listening will get me killed…

But I didn’t want to push back, not too much. I wanted to be close to Feejee. The scent of peppermint still hung over me like a shroud, still filled my nostrils. I felt my hand moving.

“No gay stuff,” Feejee whispered. “We don’t need that. I know what you want, Mack. I know what I want.”

“Feejee, whatever I said… I was dreaming,” I said. “Raving.”

“Shh, shh,” she said, her eyes boring into me. “Food doesn’t talk… and anyway, maybe you were just saying what you really felt.”

She pulled me in against her chest, turning me around to face away from her. Breaking contact with her eyes didn’t seem to lift the heady fog that filled my brain. But even through that haze, I realized there wasn’t anything she could do to me… she didn’t have a magic blade with her, and her teeth couldn’t pierce my skin.

I felt her teeth closing in on the skin of my neck, as if to confirm that. She bit hard and she pulled hard to the side like she would rip and tear, but of course all that did was spike the pain in a wonderful way. She let go of that mouthful and began to nibble up and down my shoulder.

This wasn’t so bad. The scent of peppermint and the teeth of a mermaid, her breasts pushing against my back… it wasn’t bad at all.

“We’ll just enjoy a little nibble,” she whispered in my ear. “And then I’ll take you back to my room. I caught you in water. That’s close enough, I think. It’s close enough. I mean, you’re only halfway human, so even if it only halfway counts… you know?”

Something was badly wrong… beyond the fact that I was getting snuggly with a mermaid who wanted to devour me, beyond the fact that a mermaid wanted to devour me. Even though Feejee’s self-control wasn’t much better than mine, she should have at least reacted to the possibility of being caught in another supposed lesbian tryst. She’d always been as scrupulous about the restriction to feeding in water as Dee and Amaranth had been about their own religious beliefs.

“Celia,” I said. Feejee didn’t have a private room. No matter how muddled she had me, she couldn’t risk doing me in the bathroom, but she couldn’t take me back to her room. “What about Celia?”

“Probably didn’t sleep in our room,” she said.

“Iona!” It was a weak objection, but it could stall.

“I saw you first,” she said. She turned me around again. Her mouth split open wide, her teeth gone long and pointed. “But Mack, I keep telling you food doesn’t talk… I think it’s time for us to go before you get more ideas.”

Her head whipped to the side, and then I heard voices outside the door: Trina and one of the Leightons. The door swung open. We both froze, I felt as guilty as Feejee looked, for some reason.

“Oh, kheez, what the hell happened in here?” Trina said. “There’s more water on the floor than in the tub.”

“What happened, Feej… wet the bed?” one of the Leightons said, and the other laughed.

I tried to make myself very small… as Feejee had said, very quiet and very still. Why was I hiding with the ravenous, me-eating monster to escape from mere bullies? It was a good question. I could have screamed murder as soon as they interrupted Feejee’s hold over me… or could I?

Maybe the fact that I still felt paralyzed with fear proved that I couldn’t… but it wasn’t fear of Feejee, it was fear of them, of their scorn. I knew that Feejee longed to literally eat me alive, but in that moment I was almost convinced that what Leightons and Trina would do would amount to the same thing.

“It was probably the other one,” one of the Leightons said. “Look at all these fruity bubbles… by the Dark Herald, if I didn’t know she was a dyke I’d think she was a faggot.”

Fortunately, the sound of my gasp was covered by the sound of her sister’s and Trina’s.

“You can’t say that!” her twin said.

“What? Yes, I can.”

“Are you crazy? We’re attached. You can’t say that kind of shit, Tara, not when you’re stuck to me,” the one who by the process of elimination had to be Sara said. “You can’t!”

“Oh my khosh, I have to tell everyone, right now,” Trina said, and she did just that, her flip-flops making splat noises on the wet floor as she ran for the door yelling, “Everybody was up! You won’t believe what Tara said!”

The vague silhouette that was the Leightons began moving in the strangest way as they both stopped talking and instead starting making other sounds. It took me a moment to figure out that they were fighting. Trina, still in the doorway, reported this new development: “Everybody get up right now, the twins are killing each other.”

Thinking there wasn’t going to be a better time, I stood up and slipped out of the tub… “slipped” in the sense of “my foot failed to find purchase and I ended up landing smack on my ass with my legs going in directions no gods of good had intended for them to go in”, not in the sense of “with commendable stealth and grace”.

Oh, well. I had a feeling I was going to be in trouble no matter what happened, but it would be far, far better to not be in the bathtub when people responded to Trina’s summons, as they would… it was the time of day when people would be heading there anyway.

The Leightons were really going at it. Tara seemed to be trying to choke her sister with her one hand when she could get a grip on her neck, and was otherwise grabbing and pulling on her. Sara was just straight out beating on her. Neither of them was doing anything to defend herself from the other. They’d been wearing nothing but a towel when they came in, and now they were wearing nothing.

It was… well, they had kind of an athletic build that didn’t do a lot for me. Tara had gouged out some scratches on her sister’s arm and shoulder, and Sara had bloodied her nose in return. The tangy sweet coppery scent mingled with the smell of the peppermint, so strong in the aisle between the tubs.

Feejee climbed out of the tub. She put her hand on my shoulder and I felt torn: eat or be eaten. They both seemed like valid choices in that moment.

More people were crowding around the door, though there was a bit of a logjam with Trina of the creepy eye and the plump ass standing in the way. I could see the people milling around behind her, though.

There was Rocky, who’d tasted so good.

Sooni… why couldn’t she have been as mature on the inside as she looked on the outside? My insides ached for her, but she was every bit the baby she pretended Kai was… otherwise I’d fuck her brains out. It would be worth the trip to Yokan just to smack some sense into the idiot mother who’d spoiled her.

Who was I kidding? If I wasn’t Amaranth’s, I’d trade places with Kai in a heartbeat. I’d be a better match, anyway. Sooni could throw shoes at me all day long and not even dent me.

Oru was peeking around Trina’s legs. She creeped me out. Goblinoids creeped me out. That was all there was to it.

There were more, but they were at the front. Behind them all was Two… I couldn’t see her, but I could smell her through the peppermint haze and I could hear her complaining about people blocking the door when she needed to take a shower. The sound of her voice… I wanted to deck her. That wasn’t all, though. I wanted her to spank me, I wanted to eat her, I wanted to hold her forever, I wanted to kill everybody who’d ever hurt her, I wanted to build her a box and hide her away from the world, I wanted to climb inside her dreams with Dee and watch her fly.

What the hell is happening to me? I thought, and then I watched the Leighton’s foot smash down on a pile of bubbles I must have tracked across on my way to Feejee. Peppermint, I thought. Peppermint haze.

Discuss this story

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

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

This means she’s dreaming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you try what I said?”

“No,” Two says. “I did not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That isn’t very funny,” Two says.

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

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

“And who told you to sweep?”

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

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

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

“Miss Ruth says that practice makes perfect.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How will you know when you’re done?”

“When I’ve swept the whole place.”

“But it’s endless.”

“Yes,” Two says, and she smiles.

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

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

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

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

“You aren’t supposed to hate anybody.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah,” Moeli said. “I did.”

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

“I do, too,” Moeli says.

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

“No shit?” Moeli says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hello, Two,” he says.

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

“Sweeping? I thought you were dreaming.”

“I can do both,” Two says.

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

“I know,” she says.

“I’m a teddy bear,” he adds.

“Yes.”

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

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

And onward she sweeps.

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

Nobody else sees. Nobody else knows.

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

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

How much longer can this go on?

How long before the school’s overrun?

Something must be done.

Something must be done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some dreams are simpler than others.

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

Feejee dreams of blood in the water.

Iona dreams of blood.

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

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

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

“Hey, hey Two!”

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

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

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

“You never dream about them here, either.”

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

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

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

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

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

“But have you considered the ramifications of that?”

“No,” she says.

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

“Yes,” she says.

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

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

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

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

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

No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her mother is a nekoyokai.

“Mother… you’re…?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But you are.”

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

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

It’s the war again.

The bridge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about The?”

“She bugs out, too.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Need to know basis.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She knows what’s coming next.

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

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

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

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

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

And so the dream went.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” Two repeats decisively.

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

“You are mistaken.”

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

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

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

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

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