Alone with Ian and me in our suite, Amaranth frowned and chewed her lip when I told her in detail about the dream and the conversation that had followed it.

“I guess it was kind of… drastic,” I said when I finished. The word seemed a little inadequate, but it really only seemed that way when I tried to explain it to someone else. Inside my head I understood what I’d done and why.

“Well, yes, it might have been better to wait and think about your options before going straight to something so… irrevocable,” she said. “I’m not saying you did the wrong thing, baby. Just that you could have waited to be sure it was the right one.”

“When I picked up my mirror, I didn’t think I’d actually be putting anything into motion,” I said. “I just felt like I needed to do something, even something small and symbolic like finding out how to get a hold of Kent, while I was still feeling all… well… while I was still capable of doing something. I think if I had gone back to sleep and waited until later I probably would have found it easiest to do nothing and just wait for my appointment with Teddi.”

“Would that have been so terrible, though?” Amaranth asked. “I mean, not only might she be able to give you other options for keeping your father out, but she could have been a sounding board for the whole Law plan.”

“Maybe… but, Amaranth, I feel like I did the right thing,” I said. “I don’t know how it’s going to turn out. I don’t know if it’s the best thing. But I’ve had a great day and I feel good about what I did.”

“Then I’m glad you did it,” she said. She sat down on the bed and patted her lap. “Come here, baby, and I’ll get you ready for bed.”

That apparently entailed a torturous make-out and teasing session that heavily involved my nipple piercings and a lot of light, ticklish touches from the ends of her nails around the inside of my thighs.

Amaranth knew better than anyone how easy it was to set me off. I almost came three times while Ian watched. She knew exactly where the edge of that particular cliff was located, and she knew how to push me right up to the very brink of it before yanking me back from it. She got me panting and left me there… and I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard myself pant before. I hoped it sounded better farther away from my skull.

At the very least the sound couldn’t have been too distracting because Ian finished once just from watching… well, I think his hand helped, but under the circumstances I think that was the least that could have been expected. He was nearly hard again by the time Amaranth released me to take care of his needs, which I did without complaint.

One thing that had to be said about the whole denial thing: his sex life was definitely improving by any measurement.

Mine was… harder to say. The climax had always been more of about release and relief for me than simple pleasure. It was frustrating to have Amaranth work me up and then kiss me on the cheek and turn and walk away… but somehow that frustration made it all the more fulfilling for me to put my needs aside and get down on my knees in front of Ian.

It felt more like service, like a real gift I was giving him.

It was hard to explain, which made it all the more awkward when I found myself trying to do so to Nicki in class the next day. We’d sort of drifted in the topic of my sex life, ironically because I’d been asking her about what she would look for in a girlfriend. She didn’t really know what she liked, sexually, so she turned things around back to me.

“So, wait… Ian can just decide that you don’t get to get off for a few days?” she said.

“If that’s what he wants,” I said. I manged to say it without blushing, though I did incline my head. It felt more like a token of submission than embarrassment, though it was at least a bit of both. “It’s not a regular thing with us. I mean, it hasn’t been. We kind of just started it… I think we’re both getting to a place where we’re confident enough to try that kind of thing. Who knows where it’ll go?”

“Do you actually enjoy that?”

“I’m… learning to appreciate it,” I said, after some consideration. I didn’t want to sound like it was bad, but I felt like I’d only just barely brushed the surface of the good.

“More so than you would an actual orgasm or three?”

“No,” I said. “They’re… different styles of good. Good in different ways. It’s not something that could replace actually, you know, having sex all the way. Like I said, we’re just trying it, but now that you’ve got me talking about it my feeling is that in the long run it’ll kind of be like… like not having the same thing to eat every night. you know?”

“So you are into it?” she said.

I laughed a kind of sputtery laugh, that kind of came out my nose when I tried not to be too loud during class. Nicki seemed to provoke this reaction from me… in this case I wasn’t laughing at anything she’d said and I certainly wasn’t laughing at her. It was more that the question was unexpected. Normally the unexpected would make me freeze up for a moment.

With Nicki… I really couldn’t say what the difference was, but it was there.

“Well, I’m not out of it, I guess?” I said. “I mean, I don’t want to give you the idea that I’m reluctant or I’m just putting up with it for his sake… I’m not sure how I’d feel about it all the time or long-term, but it’s… a new experience. I’ve never had a chance to get used to having sex every day for a long period of time in the first place. In some ways, I’m getting more attention than usual. It’s not something I would have picked for myself… but it’s not something I’d turn down.”

“But you… you told him to do this, right?”

“No,” I said. “It was all his idea.”

“I thought that the whole sub thing was supposed to be voluntary?”

“It is,” I said. “I’m his sub, voluntarily.”

“So, would you normally tell him what you want and then have him make you do it?” she said. “I mean, that’s the impression I’ve had… the sub has the power.”

“Um… I think maybe some people do it like that that,” I said. “Maybe. I don’t really know. And, if I’m completely honest, there are some elements of me wanting someone else to take charge for the stuff that I want but I’m self-conscious about doing for myself… but really and truly, one of the things that I want is for someone to take charge. Period, and for real.”

“Oh,” she said. “Um… oh.”

“I have a feeling like I’m disappointing you,” I said.

“Oh, it’s not that,” she said. “I mean, not you, personally. I just had an idea about how the whole d-and-s thing worked that I guess was wrong… I’m not sure it’s something I can support.”

“Why not?”

“Well, you don’t have any control. It just seems really… unequal. One-sided.”

“The basic idea you were describing sounds one-sided, too,” I said. “I mean, you thought someone was calling all the shots for the other person. That’s still true.”

“Yeah, but it seems less squicky to think that the person who’s tied up or being whipped or whatever is the one in charge. You know?”

“I could see that,” I said. “But… if I wanted to be in charge, I wouldn’t want to be tied up. So to speak.”

“So… do you think you could ever be dominant?”

“N-no,” I said, with only a small sputter. “When I’m at my most confident… well, confident and self-aware… is when I’m most submissive. The times when I’m confident and really assertive, I have a small tendency to sort of be a bit of a clueless bitch. I don’t think there’s a lot of talent there waiting to be harnessed.”

“I can’t picture you being a… you know, bitch,” Nicki said, and it was adorable how much her voice dropped in volume when she said the word. “But then, I have a hard time seeing you as submissive. I guess that’s part of why it made more sense to me that you would be the one calling the shots?”

“You know, I’m really happy to be a passenger,” I said. “I’ve never really had a lot of feeling of control in my life, but I’ve also not had a lot of security. This gives me a feeling of both things at once.”

“I just don’t think I could do it,” Nicki said, shaking her head. “I mean, I’ve had dirty-tingly thoughts about women in leather with thigh high boots and whips, but it’s mostly thoughts about having sex with them while they’re slightly bossy, and maybe calling me, you know… names.”

“I can understand that,” I said. “I’m fond of… names, myself.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“A little bit,” I said. “But if you knew how rarely I’m the most experienced person in these conversations you wouldn’t blame me.”

“I’m not in-experienced,” Nicki said. “I just have had… different experiences. Then you have.”

“Well, most people have,” I said. I noticed that Professor Stone was kind of looking our way, so I added, “Let’s finish this conversation at dinner?”

“Okay,” she said. She was blushing. “I’m not like… I mean, I know you said I was welcome, but sometimes I like to eat lunch at different times, and…”

“Hey, you don’t need a reason to join us or not,” I said. “Real friendship isn’t an obligation… that’s something I learned from Puddy.”

“That doesn’t seem like something… oh,” she said.

After having spent a whole hour in Coach Callahan’s class the day before mostly trying the same couple of things and having my classmates catch on, I decided to spend the Thursday evening session working on feinting and faking people out so I could get around their defenses instead of powering through them all the time.

I figured that was the sort of thing the coach wanted to see from me… ways of handling situations where my usual tactics wouldn’t work or where my strength wouldn’t be such an overwhelming advantage. My strength and the speed it gave me still provided me with some benefits, because I could whip my staff around and reverse direction really fast. I wasn’t really great at it to begin with, but I picked things up as I went and I didn’t have to even be haflway good for another day.

As a half-immortal half-demon, I didn’t sweat much, but I still felt a little unnecessarily grubby after the unusual workout. I didn’t really have time to head back to the tower and take a shower, especially when I might need to eat in hurry to make my appointment with Teddi afterwards. There were shower facilities somewhere in the athletic center, but it would be a dry day on the plane of water before I ever set foot in them. I decided to just head back and change into a nicer, cleaner top.

I had a fitted T that had been a gift from Two. It was black, but it had a little bit more of a v-shaped neckline and some… reflecty-rectangle… things… making a kind of checkmark pattern around it. I didn’t wear it very often because I had a feeling I’d break the whatevers off of it if I wasn’t careful, and I was never careful… but I figured I could be careful enough for one evening.

As I carefully didn’t hurry to meet the others for dinner, I wondered if Nicki would say anything about the change. I really didn’t want to give her the wrong impression, that I was the kind of person who’d change clothes just for dinner.

It turned out that I’d had no need to worry, though, because she didn’t show up. Two noticed and appreciated it, though.

“I like that shirt,” she said. “It looks pretty nice on you.”

“You gave me this shirt,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Amaranth helped me pick out. She said it was more to your taste than my first choice. Otherwise it would have been nicer. You and your friend Nicki and I should go shopping sometime. She could help me convince you to wear more colors that are… colors..”

“My wardrobe is the most diverse it’s ever been, thank you very much,” I said.

“Yeah, ever since you bought that third pair of jeans things have really taken off,” Ian said.

“I have m… I do have more than three pairs of jeans,” I said. “I just… when I find a pair that I like, I get more of them. It’s more about comfort than appearance.”

“We could put sequins or rhinestones on the duplicates to make them more distinct,” Two said.

“I have only two questions,” Steff said. “Where would these sequins go and what would they spell?”

“On her pants,” Two said. “I have not thought about words. They could say… Mack’s Jeans?”

“There will be no writing things on my pants!” I said.

Ian gave Amaranth a meaningful look, and she smiled.

“I think we have some say in the disposition of your pants, baby,” Amaranth said.

“You didn’t say if you wanted to go shopping,” Two said.

I thought about it. It was in Two’s nature to keep herself busy, she had a wider circle of friends than I did, and since I wasn’t dating her and hadn’t needed her help with mental invasions we really hadn’t seen a lot of each other so far during the school year. And I had a feeling Nicki would be flattered to be asked along for her fashion expertise.

“Okay,” I said. “Well, we’ll have to ask Nicki, obviously… and I’m going to be kind of occupied this weekend.”

“With me,” Steff said. “And I think this sounds awesome. I can take you out for a little walk… I still remember our first time hitting the town.”

“Then it’s a date,” Two said. “But not a date-date, except between Steff and Mack, and maybe Mack and her friend Nicki, and maybe Mack and her friend Nicki and Steff.” She paused and her face scrunched up as she worked her way through the various permutations. “It is perhaps substantially but not entirely a date-date, pending the acceptance of Mack’s friend Nicki.”

“Two, you’re one of a kind,” Hazel said.

“That’s our pseudowench,” Steff added.

For an hour, I kept my head down, I stepped up when it was my turn, and I swung my illusionary staff through the heads and knees and arms of my classmates. I ignored the brief spatter of gore that disappeared as soon as the red box enchantment registered that I had taken the fight out of my opponent and vice-versa.

I was also thinking less about what I was doing. I wasn’t going full-on automaton, but I was thinking about situations rather than people. He’s got a longer reach. She’s faster. He’s guarding his legs. Once I started seeing each fight as a problem to be solved, the solution to each seemed more obvious and less distasteful. The previous day, I’d won more fights than I’d lost. On this day, I only lost one.

I wasn’t crazy about the thought of becoming so inured against violence, even mock violence… but being unaffected by it was better than reveling it, I supposed. The great fear I’d had about learning how to fight was that my barely restrained demonic side would take the opportunity to assert itself.

So far there didn’t seem to be much danger of that happening. Ignoring my feeding cycle was dangerous. Exposing myself to violent situations just reminded me how much I disliked violence. Even putting myself in a situation where I had to fight five days a week just strengthened my resolve to get through it.

“You’ve been showing some focus these past couple of days, Frybaby,” the coach said to me at the end of class A. “Maybe you aren’t bringing everything you’ve got, but you aren’t dropping what you brought. If you keep building on this you’ll be in decent shape, but if you try to just coast along like this you’ll be lucky to end up with a low B?”

“I did better today than I did yesterday,” I said.

“Yeah, but I’m talking about your trajectory,” she said. “What you’re doing’s only going to carry you so far. You won’t be better Friday than you are now, the way you’re going.”

“I only lost one fight,” I said. “Do I need to be perfect?”

“I don’t grade on win/loss ratio,” she said. “You’re getting better, but don’t get comfortable. Listen, you can go nuts the next two days… I won’t be watching for how many hits you take or counting how many times you go down, I’m going to be watching to see if you’re trying new things. Then on Friday, if you’re doing better than you are now, I’ll tell you how you can get some of the extra credit you need.”

“I thought the point was to take our opponents out the quickest and easiest way,” I said.

“Quickest and most effective way,” she said. “That’s not always the easiest, and it’s not always the most obvious. Easy and obvious has its advantages when it works, but it doesn’t always… and then you get the little corner cases where the most obvious thing is going to blow up in your face.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Ask anyone who fought the hundred and fifty pound girl who rammed a staff through their head today,” she said.

“I do not weigh a hundred and fifty pounds,” I said.

“Whatever,” she said. “The point is that you’re a great learning tool for everyone else because of your strength, but this just makes it easier for you to get complacent and also harder for you to impress me, which is what you need to do. Lucky for you I’m not going to let you fall into a rut. Next week I’ll have something to shake things up for you. This week you’re going to have to do some shaking of your own if you want to keep on course. You got it?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I winced as I said it and I knew she saw me do it.

I couldn’t help it, though. “Ma’am” was Amaranth. I couldn’t say it without connotations of submissiveness and even sexuality creeping in. But putting myself into Coach Callahan’s hands and ignoring my ingrained instincts sort of shifted me into that headspace… and anyway, a one-word answer felt surly, and for me to call her “Coach” seemed phony.

My worries about bringing Nicki up to speed about my life’s strange goings-on proved to be a little premature. There was nothing new to say on the ridiculous owl-turtle thing front, so no reason to bring it up immediately.

She had changed for dinner, her hair and clothes both. She’d put on a pair of dark hip-hugger jeans with a wide belt studded with metal squares, and a black midriff-baring fitted tee with a spiraling starburst of sequins rotating around on the front of it.

Her hair was now a kind of pinkish-purple color in a messy style that looked something between a pixie and a pageboy cut, though one of its major features was that it was pretty much immobile. I wondered if her tendency to lock her hair in place reflected some limitation in her abilities, or if she was going for it on purpose.

It seemed safer not to ask, though. If it was on purpose I might be implying that it looks like an accident, and if it was accidental I might be rubbing it in.

“I like your top,” Two said.

“Thanks,” Nicki said. “If I say the word ‘rose’ it… oh, there it goes.”

The spinning sequins formed a flower, held the pattern briefly, and then separated and went back to their usual dance.

“It knows other words, but I don’t remember what they are,” she said.

“What is the purpose of this enchantment?” Dee asked.

“I don’t know, entertainment?” Nicki said. “It looks cool, I guess.”

“I grant that entertainment is a legitimate need of the mind, but I would imagine there is a limit to how much meaningful distraction there is to be in a set of silver dots forming an image.”

“It’s kind of hypnotic,” Amaranth said.

“I can see two sides of it,” Hazel said. “On the one hand, I have to agree with Dee about there not being much point to it beyond the shiny. On the other hand… shiny. And it is kind of compelling.”

“I just thought it was neat,” Nicki said.

“I think it’s neat, too,” Amaranth said.

“I like it,” I said. “You didn’t change just for dinner, did you?”

She ducked her head and blushed. I started to wonder if her interest in me was about more than making new friends and maybe meeting girls… or rather, if she’d already met a new girl. Then I ducked my head and blushed.

“…I decided to change my hair after class, and then it didn’t really go with what I was wearing anymore,” she said.

“I would never have been able to tell,” I said.

“It’s true,” Two said, nodding solemnly.

“Thanks, Two,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

“We can’t all be fashion-conscious,” Amaranth said. “But Nicki clearly uses her clothing to express herself, and she likes to look her best… so dressing up a little when class is over and she wants to hang out with her friends is not so much making an extraordinary effort as it is making a gesture.”

“In my experience, the main reason for changing your pants is to get into another pair of them,” Steff said.

I felt really bad for Nicki. Amaranth was trying to be nice, but even she’d managed to talk about her in the third person like she wasn’t there. I tried to think of something to say to her instead of about her, but the most obvious things that popped into my head were compliments on her appearance… which she might have liked in general, but at the moment it seemed like a good way to prolong her torture.

“Nicki plays stone soldiers,” I said to Hazel, immediately before I realized that this was also talking about her in the third person. Though I was trying to start a conversation that woudl involve her.

“Oh?” Hazel said. “You should come up to Gilcrease sometime, we’ve a nice set-up… a whole room just for gaming. It’s a bit cozy with too many tall folks, but big enough to accommodate players if not a lot of spectators.”

“Really? I’ve been hearing rumors about a room somewhere that they took the furniture out of and turned into a battlefield,” Nicki said. “But I figured they were just… well… rumors.”

“No, it’s true enough,” Hazel said. “It’s my room, to be perfectly technical, but I share a suite with my friend Shiel and her friend, er, Mouse, and there’s room enough for the three of us in one half of it. It gets a little awkward when my man comes around, but we’re working things out.”

“Is ‘Mouse’ a… um…”

“She’s not an actual mouse,” Hazel said. “And that’s just her nickname. It’s the translation of her name, Nae. She’s a kobold, like Shiel… who is incidentally also a kobold, if that wasn’t clear. She’s tiny, and quiet. Very serious. Big fan of standing in the corner.”

“I like Mouse,” Two said.

“You would,” Hazel said. “Two gets on well with her. The pair of them can just sit there quietly forever and never say a word.”

“It’s true,” Two said.

“I find Mouse’s company restful and her demeanor agreeable,” Dee said. “I was surprised to learn she is not a divinity major, as she has a very spiritual bearing.”

“That’s submission,” Amaranth said.

“You mean she’s religious about it?” Ian asked.

“No, Dee had it right,” Amaranth said. “She’s spiritual about it. Full submission can be a sublime, almost ecstatic state… my Mack has brushed up against that level only a few times, but I think Mouse has been living there.”

“Is Shiel her dom?” Nicki asked.

“No, I think they just met a bit ago,” Amaranth said. “Mouse’s primary relationship is temporarily on hold for her education.”

“Oh, so I guess it’s a long-distance thing for now.”

“You might say that,” Amaranth said. She focused on her salad. She respected people’s privacy, but wasn’t terribly comfortable lying.

We both knew that Nae’s girlfriend was Caron, a human-raised dwarf who lived no further away than the town of Enwich. I wasn’t a fan of Caron, due to the small matter of her trying to trick me into a lifetime of servitude at the hands of a deranged slaver. I had a slightly higher opinion of her “Little Mouse”, whose disapproval had somewhat blunted Caron’s determination to snare me, and whose existence had ended Caron’s hold over me when Amaranth deduced her identity.

Dwarves and kobolds weren’t exactly like oil and water when it came to mixing. They were more like oil and fire. Elves and dwarves were the more stereotypical rivals, but they didn’t tend to live literally on top of each other and they didn’t compete for the same resources or business. The two races of miners and smiths had been going at it hammer and tongs for long that they were probably responsible for the phrase.

“I guess there probably aren’t any kobold whatsits around here,” Nicki said. “No mountains.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think Shiel’s from one of the eastern ranges. I’m not sure where Mouse is from.”

The conversation from that point on was pretty easy, though a little bit heavy on tiny imaginary warfare for my tastes. I tried my best to hide my lack of interest in stone soldiers, since Nicki still seemed to be taking the things I said to heart. Maybe it was arrogant of me to think that she’d changed her hair just because I’d said something about it, but… I really thought that probably was true. I knew she’d kept it orange because I’d mentioned it in class, and then she went and changed it after I asked her why she hadn’t.

There were probably only so many times I could tell her that she didn’t need to impress me or to just be herself before she’d start feeling bad about wanting to impress me. I wasn’t going to start censoring everything that popped into my head, but it wouldn’t kill me to avoid casually disparaging the things that she liked. Even Steff was being fairly restrained, after all. If all my friends were making the effort to be nice to my new friend, it didn’t seem like it was asking too much for me to do the same.

After dinner, I got Steff alone to ask her about fixing her picture. I didn’t have to do more than pull it out before she started snickering.

“So… you noticed?” she said.

“Nicki did,” I said.

She laughed.

“It figures… I could hide a fortune in platinum five inches from a decent pair of tits and you’d never find it,” she said. “Apparently doesn’t even matter if they’re yours… how do you ever make it past a mirror?”

“I don’t spend a lot of time looking in mirrors,” I said. “Steff, come on… will you change it up a little?”

“You said you were satisfied with it as-is,” she said. “You said I’d fulfilled my end of the bargain.

“Okay,” I said. “What do you want for it, Steff?”

She sighed and took the paper from me.

“Nothing more than you’re already giving me that would be worth it to you for a few quick edits,” she said. “Did your teacher give you an extension?”

“It’s been pushed back until Thursday,” I said.

“I just have two favors I’d like to ask in exchange,” she said.

“What?”

“Viktor’s starting to get all… intense,” she said. “I’m going to need to sleep over for a few nights, maybe.”

“Okay,” I said.

“And when I say ‘sleep over’, it kind of goes without saying that my penis is going to be inside you at some point. Or several points.”

“It kind of just went with saying,” I said.

“Yeah, well, it goes both ways,” Steff said. “And the other thing: when Nicki makes her move, find out if she’s down for threesomes.”

“If that happens, I’ll ask,” I said.

“And put in a good word for me,” she said. “Or a sort of ambiugously evil but still vaguely good natured one.”

“She made it sound like you weren’t too interested in her,” I said.

“I’m not,” she said. “She doesn’t really do anything for me… but you and her together, that’s more interesting.”

“Okay,” I said. “And just so we’re clear, what I want from you is to make the mermaid look less like me… and not like anyone else in particular. Just a generic female figure.”

“I’ll have it back to you tomorrow.”

“Cool, thanks,” I said. “Um… can I just ask…”

“Why I did it?” she said. Her eyes kind of flicked down, and a touch of color crept into her pale cheeks. “I could say something about liking to see you squirm, and that would be true, but… I was a little annoyed, and that was just me being… well… a little bratty.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wouldn’t have asked you if I didn’t think your skills were up to the task, but I guess this time I pushed you out of your comfort zone.”

“I don’t know, maybe it’s good for me, too,” Steff said. “Hey, if you get a good grade on it, let me know.”

“I will,” I said.

“Come here,” she said, and pulled me into a kiss. Her hands were on my ass for a moment, before she realized we were still semi-public, and then she pulled away.

“Um… I’m pretty sure Ian’s sleeping with me tonight,” I said.

“It’s cool,” she said. “I’m thinking more of the weekend, anyway… Viktor’s started grumbling about how classes get in the way of his ‘real work’, so I think he’s going to be want to be alone and I’m going to want some company.”

“Company you can have,” I said. “Depending on how things are going in my life, I may or may not wake up in the middle of the night screaming…”

“Oh, I can help with that,” Steff said.

“How?” I asked. “And please don’t say something about making sure I don’t wake up.”

“I was going to say I can help keep you awake..

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”

“And screaming, of course.”

“Of course.”

I made it through the gauntlet of Callahan’s melee class by keeping my head down and powering through it. I was glad that it was my last class of the day… there would be days when I would be really worn down by the time I got to it, but it gave me plenty of time to get over a bad beginning.

The design drawings that Steff returned to me at dinner really were sketches, but they were good sketches, with intricate shading and a lot of detail work. Most importantly, she had absolutely nailed the look I was going for.

“Thank you,” I said. “You’re a lifesaver.”

“I prefer the term ‘deathkeeper’ or ‘soulbinder’, but I guess ‘lifesaver’ is halfway accurate from a certain point of view,” Steff said. “Just remember our deal.”

“Remember your part of it,” I said. “Somewhere safe and private.”

“Right,” she said. “Do you think there’s any chance you could do it in slow motion?”

“Burn my clothes off… in slow motion?”

“Isn’t there some kind of elemental manipulation you can do?” she asked. “Like, a slow burn?”

“Yeah, if you want to watch my clothes get kind of singed,” I said. “Slow burn equals cool burn.”

“Well, maybe we’ll start slow, then, and build to a jaw-dropping climax,” Steff said. “Are you going to have a problem with me capturing some images of it?”

“Of me being full-on demonic and then naked?” I said. “It’s hard for me to imagine two things I would enjoy the thought of floating around less than that.”

“It won’t be floating around,” Steff said. “Just my own one private copy, for personal use. Archival purposes only.”

“You’re getting a live show,” I said.

“You know I’m not picky about that part.”

“Yeah, well, it’s what you agreed to and what you’re getting,” I said.

“But I am definitely getting it, right?” Steff said. “I mean, these fulfill my side of the bargain? Let’s be explicit about this.”

I looked at the pictures. Where’d I’d originally suggested a merman, she’d drawn a mermaid… this was probably her idea of a sick joke, but it was mild from her. Anyway, I couldn’t really complain since I’d put a merfolk in there to begin with. I hadn’t even thought about it. It was just one of those things people put in aquariums.

The only real problem was that the mermaid was naked and human-looking from the waist up. That was accurate to their usual habits and presentation, but might present some marketing difficulties.

“Can you do something about her nipples?” I asked. “I don’t want to do the shell bra thing because that’s playing into a stereotype.”

“Right, let’s not stereotype the anthropophagous monsters we’re using to evoke warm fuzzy feelings of enchantment-under-the-sea-ness,” Steff said.

“Okay, I wasn’t thinking when I put the merman in, but I’d still rather stay true at least to how they present themselves to the surface world,” I said. “Just maybe put some jewelry on her, or reposition her hands or something?”

“How about this?” Steff said, and she pencilled in a stand of seaweed plastered to her chest, and then some similar ones around the rock the mermaid sat on so it didn’t look so random.

“That’s perfect,” I said. “Yes, definitely, you’ve earned your reward. Quest complete.”

Steff’s grin was priceless.

“You have no idea how happy I am to hear that,” she said.

Monday night was relatively untroubled, but though I didn’t remember even a tiny fragment of a dream I woke up with a certainty that I’d been observed while I slept. The feeling was too strong for me to write off and was with me as soon as I woke up, but it had even less foundation than my suspicions of the night before. This was the worst thing about dream problems: they made even less sense than real ones.

There was something almost taunting about it. I could force myself out of a dream if I knew it was happening. I was good at recognizing dreams, and as far as I knew I had a perfect record for spotting the ones that were being sent by an intruder. But if nothing happened that I could feel or identify while I was asleep, I could do nothing about it… allowing me to realize my headspace had been violated after the fact just seemed to be rubbing that in.

I acknowledged the possibility that I was being paranoid. Not in feeling like someone had been watching… that certainty had came out of nowhere. If it wan’t true, something must have planted it as a suggestion.

But it was possible I was being paranoid in ascribing motives. Maybe whatever method of penetration was being used couldn’t be done without leaving some kind of trace that would be noticed when I woke up.

Unless that was what someone wanted me to think…

I was inclined to blame my father over the owl-turtle thing, because the thing didn’t seem like the type to creep around and play this kind of head games. That wasn’t to say that it couldn’t be manipulative, but its conception of itself as a champion of self-awareness meant it would probably be less sneaky about it.

That was assuming it was on the up-and-up. I was more inclined to suspect my father, but there was something satisfying about laying the blame at the owl-turtle-thing’s feet.

Of course, it was possible that some third force was impinging on my sleep, knowing that there were two ready-made suspects for the blame to fall onto…

If just two nights of this was enough to have my head whirling around like this, I didn’t want to find out what a week or two would do to me. But I decided that no matter how I felt this morning or the next one, I was going to push all concerns about what may or may not be going on in my head to the back of the shelf.

I couldn’t be certain of anything on my own, and I couldn’t do anything about it, so there was no point in getting worked up about it.

I did check my a-mail as soon as I could Tuesday morning. I found a reply from Teddi asking me if seven on Thursday evening would work for me. I might have liked something sooner, but I hadn’t asked for anything specific or said it was urgent so I sent her a message back saying that it would work. I also sent an a-mail to Lee Jenkins to tell him I would like his lawyerly opinion on the letter that Professor Ariadne was apparently circulating.

With all that was going on in my head, I had a harder time paying attention in my lore and history discussion class. It was a participation-based class so I managed to throw out the answer to a couple of pretty obvious questions Professor Hart threw out to try to encourage discussion, but I had a hard time offering or taking in anything substantive.

I got my focus back in my first afternoon class, when I walked in and noticed two things that were missing. The dwarf-made model for the coronation sword that had been given pride of place among the various items Professor Stone had on display for inspiration was gone, and so was the girl who’d been a little too interested in it.

My heart sank. Trying to steal from dwarves was dangerous on a level that bordered on suicidal, but I wasn’t a big fan of disproportionate punishments. I’d almost had my own ass sold to a fairly deranged slaver as a result of a lopsided deal with a dwarf… my own carelessness, but it hadn’t left me with a positive opinion of the traditional dwarven standards of fairness and justice.

“I’m afraid the coronation sword has been removed ahead of schedule,” Professor Stone said at the start of class. He sounded genuinely regretful, though that could have meant a lot of things. “Our rare opportunity to study it up close will probably be all the rarer for a few generations. I did not become a teacher because I enjoyed lecturing, but let me take this opportunity to say that seeing a beautiful work of art should inspire you to create something of equal magnificence.”

“I heard someone stole it,” Nicki whispered to me. There were other murmurings around the room that I imagined were of a similar content.

“Just to prevent any rumors: it was not taken by thieves though, in fact, an attempt was made,” Stone said. “The sword’s protections were sufficient to stop the thieves, one of whom was apprehended shortly thereafter and released on a private bond. The vice-chancellor assures me that the other would be dealt with internally and then expelled.”

Knowing the vice-chancellor as I did, I couldn’t help but feel like this might be less benign a fate than it sounded. I wasn’t the only one who looked at the vacant spot where the overly inquisitive Ms. Anderson had been.

“To forestall any further rumors: Ms. Callie Anderson was not one of the thieves, but as I understand it she had at least a tenuous connection to some of them,” Professor Stone continued. “I believe she has withdrawn on a temporary holiday for her health, pending the negotiation of a satisfactory cure. Let us say no more on the subject! You should all have some designs for me, I think. I’m a little behind in my preparations for today, so instead of collecting them and moving on, why don’t you form into groups by table and present your designs to each other? Collect written feedback from at least two people, and then decide what changes, if any, you’d like to make. When you hand your work in Thursday, explain what you changed or didn’t change, in regard to the feedback, and why.”

Nicki and I immediately turned and handed our papers to each other.

“I bet some of the dwarves here tried to steal it,” she said. “I mean, they’re boy dwarves, so they’d be the enemies of the Schwertgriffs, right?”

“I don’t think it works like that,” I said. “I mean, male and female dwarves fight each other, but I don’t think they jockey for position or go for symbolic or strategic victories. Anyway, the Underhall went on some kind of lockdown over the weekend.”

“That could really go either way, though,” she said. “I mean, if they were working with the thieves, they’d be expecting retaliation.”

“I don’t think Professor Stone would have brought the sword into disputed territory.”

“Please,” Professor Stone announced to the class in general, “focus your attention on the subject hand. There is little to be gained in idle speculation, and there is nothing moe I can tell you than what I have already said.”

“What does ‘private bond’ mean?” Nicki asked me, a little more quietly. “Is that like out on bail?”

“Sort of,” I said. “It means there’s an agreement between a person and someone with standing in a case, where they’re basically not pressing charges on a certain condition. They used to be really common but it’s really easy to abuse them and turn it into extortion, so now they’re only allowed in certain conditions and have to be done through a tribunal. I’d guess in this case it means someone’s paying a hefty ‘fine’ to Clan Schwertgriff, possibly annually.”

“Wow,” Nicki said. “And the other person only got expelled.”

“Well, we only know that they weren’t caught and arrested,” I said. There was no reason to burden her with my suspicions. “They might be paying, too.”

“I guess,” Nicki said. She looked at my paper. “Wow, this is really good… this is… it’s not Steff’s art, is it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

“Oh, it’s just weird that she drew something and nobody’s like all impaled or decapitated or something,” Nicki said. She pointed to the mermaid sitting on a rock. “I’d expect her to at least have a fish hook through her cheek or something.”

“I take it you’re familiar with her ouvre,” I said.

“Well… I know she has a lot of pictures of you.” She blushed. “When I said I’d seen you naked… I haven’t actually… I just… um, anyway, that’s how I recognized her drawing style, because of the mermaid. That’s how she always draws you. You know, minus the seaweed strands.”

“What do you mean, the pose?” I asked. I’d never made a habit of flipping through Steff’s sketchbook, but I’d seen her doodling me in a variety of positions, none of which looked half as comfortable or pleasant as perching on a jagged rock would be.

“No, not really the pose, more your face and the shape of your body and, um, breasts and stuff,” she said.

When I looked at the mermaid, I was surprised I hadn’t seen it sooner… and once I saw it, I could not unsee it. Steff had modeled the mermaid off of me. No, that was putting it too mildly: she’d used me as the mermaid. It was a drawing of me with a tail for my legs and a bit of seaweed obscuring my nipples.

“Oh, fuck!” I said.

“Please, class, let’s keep a certain level of decorum in our discussions,” Professor Stone said, exactly as if it hadn’t been any one person who had just screamed profanity. This transparent attempt to not single me out left me feeling more embarrassed than if he’d just said something to me.

“You didn’t notice?” Nicki asked.

“I didn’t think to look at her face,” I said. “And her hair’s all floaty… mine hasn’t been even this long for all that long, and I don’t spend a lot of time looking at my own boobs.”

“No, you’ve got much better ones to look a… oh, I didn’t mean it like that!” she said. “Yours are very nice. I mean…”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“Well, at least you have time to fix it,” Nicki said.

“Yeah… oh,” I said, and it occurred to me why Steff had wanted me to explicitly validate the deal with her. I hadn’t thought that was weird because we were both used to the idea of affirmed assent.

But it meant if I noticed her insertion and wanted her to change it, she could refuse… or hold out for something else. She’d given the pictures back to me knowing it was possible I wouldn’t catch it at all until it was too late and I had to turn them in as they were, but that probably didn’t bother her.

“Sorry,” Nicki said.

“What for? If you hadn’t said anything, I probably wouldn’t have noticed.”

“But now you’re gonna be all mad at her,” she said.

“Less mad than I might have been if I noticed it when I got it back,” I said. “Or if Professor Stone noticed and commented on it. Anyway, I did kind of twist her arm into doing this. I mean, I made it worth her while, but maybe I should have taken the hint that she’s not fully comfortable with the idea of having her artwork submitted for a grade.”

“I don’t think we’re being graded on artistic ability,” Nicki said. “And she sure isn’t, since she’s not in this class.”

“Yeah, but she still probably feels exposed,” I said. “I’ll apologize for pushing her and ask her nicely if she’ll alter the mermaid. If not, I’ll change it a bit myself. Make the face a little less distinct. It won’t look as good, but like you said, we’re not being graded on artistic ability.”

“Um… since you’re going to change it, do you want me to write down that the mermaid looks like you as my feedback?” Nicki said. “Because then you’re half done.”

“No,” I said. “The last thing I want is to leave a paper trail.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’d better find something else to put, then.”

“Yeah,” I said.

We both turned our attention fully to each other’s projects. Her sketch for her mirror was a simple picture of a standard public mirror with slightly more rounded corners and a dotted outline around it showing the margin for illusions around it, next to a picture of the same mirror with a fancy scrollwork design around it and one where the mirror was wreathed in flames. The scrollwork in particular was pretty sharp.

She had additional pictures showing a mirror with a face in it going “Blah, blah, blah” and vital statistics about the person hovering in little bubbles around it. That was a cool idea, but I thought it was a little busy and the position of everything seemed random. For my written feedback, I suggested something more condensed and to the point hanging beneath the mirror, with the possibility that the user could expand it to get more information showing up like as sidebars. It was less quirky, but arguably more useful.

Once we finished with each others, we had to find someone else to exchange papers with. I ended up with a guy who looked like he’d started from the same sort of ground that Nicki and I had both started with, a plain and functional sword that was illusioned up to be all fancy. He’d gone one step further, though, and dropped the real sword entirely. His product was a hilt that could project an illusion around itself, complete with a phantasmal blade. Taking Professor Stone’s advice, he’d presented the facts about his product as advertising copy.

The Phanblade 250 is the ultimate weapon in non-lethal self-defense. It’s light. It’s portable. It’s safe indoors and out. Never injure yourself or your loved ones even temporarily with a personalized white list. Customize your blade and trade designs with your friends.

Phanblade 250 may not be effective on mindless constructs or undead. Damage restrictions may apply.

He had a page and a half of notes that sketched out how the enchantment would function, in general terms, which wasn’t actually required but it seemed like a good idea now that I was looking at it. Technically until we got to the product we actually had to produce we could probably hand in ideas that were completely unfeasible as long as the reasons for that had nothing to do with aesthetics, but I had a feeling that Professor Stone would prefer that we stuck to things that could actually come about. Using the television’s own illusion spells to show an aquarium seemed pretty self-explanatory, but I decided to add at least a brief mention in my own notes about it.

For my feedback on the Phanblade 250, my first thought was that I would have more use for it personally if it wasn’t limited to swords, but telling the guy that he should make something else instead didn’t seem to be actually addressing the product in front of me. Then I realized that if he simplified the actual physical part of the hilt… drop the cross piece, just basically make it a short grippy stick… then it could become part of an axe handle or a staff or the haft of a mace as easily as it became a sword hilt.

I wrote out some brief words to that effect and handed it back.

“Thanks,” he said, looking at them. “I think I’m probably going to stick with the sword hilt, though. It’s simple and iconic.”

“A full sword hilt is simpler than just a straight grip?”

“I mean the concept is simpler, easier to graps,” he said. “Easier to sell people on. That’s my instinct, anyway.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

I looked at what he’d written on mine.

Cool idea, but using the creator’s face for the naked mermaid seems a little weird.

“Is there any chance I could get you to write something else?” I asked.

Sunday was a busy day for me. Not necessarily hectic. I had more time than things I needed to get done, but I did have things I needed to get done. Even at my best periods when it came to things like study habits I tended to put things off until Sunday, because that was the day when I had time to do things. It gave a last minute feel to a lot of things, but it wasn’t like I had a day off in the middle of the week.

I would spend the afternoon in the library with Amaranth where I would actually do the all-important “doing my homework” part of doing my homework, but my first order of business after breakfast was sitting down with Steff. I had to turn in my design drawings to Professor Stone in two days, and without her help I would have little more than incoherent scribblings.

With her help I would have incoherent scribblings and some really nice pictures that would theoretically relate to those scribblings. I wanted to sketch a rough layout for my illusionary aquarium in front of her, because I thought my picture would help her more if I told her what the blobs were as I sketched them.

“I want like a castle here… with tall spires and coral bricks,” I said as I sketched it near the upper corner of the page. “Maybe three towers, like this.”

“That… looks like a cactus,” Steff said.

I tried not to let her criticism sting me, because I knew she was harder on herself. She was also, incidentally, correct.

“It’s coral spires,” I assured her. “It’s majestic… or at least it will be when you draw it.”

“If I copy your sketch, it’s going to look like a majestic cactus.”

“Then don’t copy my sketch,” I said. “Draw it, you know, right. That’s why I’m asking for your help.”

“I thought the idea is it’s supposed to be your vision?”

“It is,” I said. “I just need you to draw it for me… okay, I’ll go on the weave and find you a reference picture of coral to use. Maybe that will count for more. I mean, Professor Stone did say it was okay for me to get help with the drawings as long as I could show it was done from my ideas. And here near the center… not in the dead center, but near the center… a big treasure chest, just like…”

“Like the TV you broke,” she said.

“Like the TV that Sooni broke,” I semi-agreed. The key thing was that she knew the TV I was talking about, as that had been a particular favorite of my design professor.

“Okay, but I’ve got to say… if you make the chest that big, that’s either going to be a really small castle or a really big treasure chest,” Steff said.

“Nobody says they have to be on the same scale,” I said.

“Not if they’re random things somebody’s grandma thought would be cute in a fishbowl,” Steff said. “But this is a design class… don’t you think you’re going to be judged on, you know, the design?”

“Well, the castle can go towards the back and the chest will be closer to the front,” I said. “So then it’s a perspective thing, right? The castle’s not out of scale, it’s just farther away.”

“I just don’t want to catch it if you get a bad grade,” Steff said. “All last year that was your default excuse for not doing anything… ‘Steff, my grades!’ and ‘Steff, I have to study!’ and ‘Steff, you can’t doodle suggestive pictures on the back of my oration notes!’”

“…I didn’t take any oratory classes,” I said.

“I know, that one was just a very vivid and elaborate recurring fantasy,” she said. “And it was a pretty good one.”

“You fantasized about sabotaging my classes?”

“I fantasized about ways to make you blush so hard you spontaneously combusted out of your clothes,” Steff said. “I mean, as far as sexy ways to get naked go, it’s hard to top that… but I couldn’t see you doing it on purpose, hence the really detailed fantasies of contrived ways to bring it about. That, and the embarrassment just adds to the hotness… you know I like it when you blush.”

“I know,” I said, ducking my head and involuntarily obliging her. “Anyway, I think if I got embarrassed enough to burst into flames, I’d be too embarrassed to function… and that’s before I end up naked in front of a class.”

“Yeah, well, the rest of the fantasy doesn’t really depend on you being functional,” Steff said. “My ideal would be that you can see and feel the things I’m doing to you, but that’s negotiable so long as you were completely helpless and immobile.”

“Do I even need to be there, then?”

“In body, at least, if not in spirit,” she said, grinning wickedly.

Steff had tried to get me to will my body to her on more than one occasion. That wasn’t necessarily unusual… as a necromancer-in-training, she had uses for it that weren’t technically completely lacking in legitimacy. Steff was the sort of person who believed you couldn’t spell necromantic without romantic, though.

The motives behind her attraction to the unliving were probably more complicated than any one thing. Possibly the least egregious part of it was a desire to vent her darkest impulses on something that had a face and person-shaped body but was beyond any harm… that was one of the reasons she liked my mostly-invulnerable body, after all. She could do things to me that she could only fantasy about with someone else. Sometimes, I let her.

For that reason, I did my best not to judge her other predilections… but if by some chance I didn’t survive until graduation, she’d be getting a crack at my dead body over my dead body.

My living body was another story.

“If you help me with this, I’ll do the clothes thing on purpose for you,” I said.

“Are you serious?”

I had to think about that. As it happened, it turned out that I was… with a few conditions.

“You buy the outfit you want to see me burn off… and help me find a safe place to do it,” I added, as I thought a bit more about what we were discussing. “Because I’m not doing it in the dorm, obviously, and I’m not getting naked in a spell lab. And definitely not anywhere public.”

“There are always empty labs,” Steff said.

“And I’m not getting naked in them,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “Find me some reference pictures, then, and I’ll get this back to you tomorrow night.”

“Remember, you provide the clothes and the venue,” I said. “And no audience, either… you can have Amaranth there if you want, but no one else.”

“Like I’d share you with the world,” she said.

“You’re the one who’s turned on by my embarrassment,” I said.

“The other one, you mean,” she said, and she couldn’t really argue with that.

After I got Steff some pictures of coral and various other undersea features… including a bronze statue of a trident-wielding merman that gave me a small case of the willies but that I thought would make a good aesthetic match with what I was going for… and gave her a rough layout of where everything should go, I spent the rest of the morning ambling around in the sunlit campus trying to imagine monster attacks in various locations.

The walk was pleasant enough, but this wasn’t the way I would have chosen to spend my time… Professor Bryony Swain had given us the assignment in my local hazards class. I might have done some preliminary investigation for that earlier in the week, but I’d had other things on my mind and I wanted to have everything fresh in my head when I went to write it up.

Especially since it really didn’t play to my strong points. As a teenager, I’d learned that the safest thing to do was keep my head down and my eyes on my own business. Danger then had meant human students who didn’t like the way I looked at them and their outraged parents if I breathed in too retaliatory a fashion.

I knew the campus wasn’t a safe place, but it wasn’t ambulatory plants or undead scavengers that I worried the most about. At night there were patrols on and around the school grounds by armed students in the martial and delving programs trying to earn their experience credits. This helped keep the population of marauding monsters intruding from outside the campus grounds down, but made things a little dicey for students who might be considered monstrous themselves.

I looked perfectly human, but my demon heritage was known and there were plenty of people who knew me on sight. You might think that anybody who knew I was a student here also knew that it was perfectly legal for me to be out walking around and perfectly illegal for someone to stick a magical or holy sword through me because AAAH, DEMON!… but it’s not like some central authority made sure that people thought through all the implications of their irrational beliefs before they were allowed to act on them.

It wasn’t just students who’d girded themselves for a fight and were looking for threats that I had to worry about. Anybody who recognized me as “the demon girl” and flipped out was a hazard to me. What made the whole thing even more precarious was the chance that my self-defense would be taken as aggression. Somebody could be trying to kill me and I would have to think about how it looked to anyone watching while I defended myself. Not exactly a great situation.

Then there was the ugly flipside to the student patrols, which was that there actually had been at least one student of what might be called a monstrous appetite who had prowled the campus after dark for a while. Iona had been so casual and matter-of-fact about it that it seemed like she’d only been punished for overstepping, for choosing a high-profile victim who was in an area that should have been relatively safe.

Given how many hazards there were in the immediate area and the general laissez-faire attitude towards public safety, it was entirely possible for opportunistic and intelligent predators to operate on the campus at night while attending classes during the day. If this actually was an ongoing thing, it was my hope that the word of what had happened to Iona had worked its way around whatever channels existed and made people think twice about hunting their fellow students.

I had my doubts about that, though. There had been a flap late in the previous school year when a harpy student was caught snacking on human remains. She’d maintained she’d rested it away from a ghoul, and there were no freshly missing students and a dead ghoul in the area… dead-dead, I mean… so she’d been given some kind of probation.

Of course, what happened to Iona was itself a local hazard. The school’s vice-chancellor was a silver dragon in human form. Metallic dragons were reckoned to be “noble”… the good ones, in other words, but that was in comparison to their less shiny kin, and maybe “less destructive” or “slightly more trustworthy in general” would be better phrases. He wasn’t necessarily dangerous in the same way that a pack of ghouls was dangerous, except when he was… and you could outrun ghouls, or fight them off.

I’d fought off ghouls early in my school career, after some careless words on my part had sent Amaranth off and running straight into a pack of them. As low-level, naturally-occurring undead, their teeth and claw-like nails held no magic and couldn’t penetrate my invulnerable skin. I’d fought without skill or strategy, but with supernatural strength.

Steff had helped…. or maybe it was better to say that I’d helped her. She was the one who’d taken the initiative in going after Amaranth, and in taking on the ghouls. She wasn’t invulnerable but she was a better fighter than I ever would be… and if she wasn’t exactly fearless, she wasn’t afraid of things that a lot of other people would be. Slimy, bloated ambulatory corpses were among those things.

If I said that these things… both her relative fearlessness in the face of ghouls and the fact that she’d helped me when I needed it… were among the reasons that I liked Steff, it might give the wrong impression, that I tolerated her less charming qualities because I felt like I owed her or because she was useful.

It was really hard to pin down the alchemy of liking or disliking someone. Nights like that one and things Steff had done for me… including getting my ass in gear when it came to making up with Amaranth in the aftermath of it… had helped to forge and strengthen a bond between us. Even without them, there was attraction… strong attraction. It wasn’t that Steff’s better qualities canceled out her less appealing ones, or excused them.

There was some calculation of worth-it-ness going on at some level. How to cut ties with someone who was wasn’t worth the harm or aggravation they brought me was among the more important lessons of my freshman year. Steff herself had helped me learn that. But even if Steff had done something that pushed me away… even if I couldn’t think of a single good thing about her as a person… I might still like like her.

I really hoped that it would never come to that point, because it had been hard enough pushing myself away from people I couldn’t stand at all.

Ian was kind of quiet and stood back a bit through a lot of the night. I worried that he felt left out by the amount of time I spent talking to Nicki, but every time I looked at him he looked like he was enjoying himself, and he seemed perfectly fine when he was talking to me, especially when we were out under the lights together.

Still, I worried about it enough to ask him if he had a problem with her when I was sure we were well away from Nicki.

“I like her okay, so far,” he said. “And it’s good to see you making friends you can talk to like that.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like you talk to her,” he said.

“So why don’t you talk to her?” I said.

“If you want me to make forced and awkward conversation with her because it’ll make you feel better, I will,” he said. “But if you want me to do it because you think it’ll be fun for me or her, you’re probably wrong.”

“Why would it be forced and awkward?”

“Because I’ve never been great at talking to girls,” he said.

“That’s stupid,” I said. “All the people you hang out with are girls.”

“First, not all the people,” he said. “Most of my friends are guys. Close friends? I don’t know. But I don’t wink out of existence when I’m not with you. And I don’t spend that much time talking to a lot of the group. And the reason I can talk to you…”

“Don’t say I don’t count as a girl,” I said.

“You don’t count as ‘girls’,” he said. “You’re a specific girl. I’ve spent time getting to know you and figuring out how to talk to you. Mostly by trial and error.”

“So get to know Nicki,” I said.

“I will,” he said. “But even if I don’t end up best friends forever with her, that doesn’t mean you can’t hang out with her.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t mean to pressure you.”

“You were just looking out for me,” he said. “I’m a quiet guy sometimes. It doesn’t mean I’m not a good time. You of all people should know that.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“Say that a few more times and I’ll be having a great time.”

Steff did show up, as I’d been pretty sure that she would… her transparent attempts at being coy and blase about it had been, of course, transparent. She’d taken the time to get dressed up-ish, wearing a lacy spider web-patterned shawl over a loose peasant top and black jeans that hugged the hips she’d sprouted early in the previous year.

She didn’t dislike breasts on others and I think she enjoyed having them, but her internalized elven mores meant that she was often less comfortable with clothes that showed off the bulges on her chest than she was with clothes that made it hard to hide the one between her legs.

Neither touch made her look any less feminine to me… or any less hot, for that matter.

“So this is the new sidekick,” she said, giving Nicki an up and down look.

“This is my friend, Nicki,” I said, correcting rather than arguing with her… just on the off-chance that Nicki actually aspired to sidekickdom and would have found it slightly soul-crushing to hear me blurt out a quick rejection of the idea.

“Hi,” Nicki said. “We’ve actually met, a little.”

“She looks a little sturdier than the last one,” Steff said, “but I still don’t think she’d last three rounds with the Dark Lord.”

“Wait… what Dark Lord?” Nicki asked.

“This is Steff’s sad little attempt at a running joke,” I said.

“Yeah, I’m just kidding,” Steff said. “Like he’d kill someone important to Mack that quickly after what she did to him last year.”

“Seriously, there isn’t a Dark Lord,” I said. “There isn’t even so much as a beige duke. My life is not the simplest place to stand, but it has yet to be complicated by any evil overlords.”

“And isn’t that a mercy?” Steff said.

“Mostly uncomplicated by evil overlords,” I said before she decided to spill any more in front of Nicki. I was sort of equally concerned of her being scared off and of her continuing to get the wrong idea about my life of adventure and excitement… i.e., that it existed. “Though I can’t really say the same thing about overlords-in-training.”

“There are classes for evil overlords?” Nicki asked.

“Not as such, no,” Steff said. “I mean, I thought about minoring in poli arts, but that’s only because it sounded like something else. Um, Mack, I think you might want to rescue your girlfriend from the fight she’s about to start?”

“What?” I said, looking around. Amaranth was a bit more prone to wide open socialization than any of the rest of us, and so I hadn’t thought much of it when she’d split off to go talk to someone else. I could easily see a fight breaking out over her attention, but I didn’t see anyone squaring off over her… instead, I saw her engaged in a conversation with a somewhat bemused Eloise Desjardins while looking increasingly flustered. “I, uh… I should probably go see what that’s about.” I looked at Nicki. “I’ll be back, seriously, don’t…”

“Go!” she said, with an easy laugh.

Amaranth wasn’t quite at the foot-stomping mad stage, but she looked closed… her cheeks were red and her eyes could have been flushed with tears. Her losing her cool was unlikely to lead to violence, but it could easily lead to her saying or doing something she’d regret… and I’d regret if she alienated or pissed off Eloise. Not only was she pretty cool, but her presence was the only part of my local hazards class that I actually liked.

I knew that the two of them’d had at least one debate before, though I hadn’t been present for it… Amaranth generally tried to err on the side of respecting other people’s beliefs, but it’s possible she had a blind spot regarding secularists… especially ones who were specifically not following the ways of her goddess. She might have been the first one to agree that Mother Khaele didn’t particularly want or need worship, per se, but she identified the goddess as her literal mother to the extent that a perceived lack of respect offended her.

Once I got close enough to hear what Eloise was saying, though, it seemed that religious conviction in and of itself wasn’t the source of the dispute.

“No, I’m not saying it’s an absolute certainty that there are no druids anywhere who have ever had sex with a humanoid while ‘shaped, I’m just saying it’s not likely,” Eloise said.

“I don’t know how you can say that, though,” Amaranth said. “I mean, it’s not like you’ve spoken with every druid who exists.”

“It seemed like you were willing to take me as spokeswoman for druidry when you asked me if I agreed with you,” she said. “Anyway, I’m not talking about what other druids think, I’m talking about how we think. You have to understand that even when we keep our minds, we are the shape we wear. Fundamentally. That’s not just a basic tenet of druidry, it’s a big part of how it works. If I’m being a hawk, I’m thinking I’m a hawk or else I’m falling.”

“And?”

“And hawks aren’t interested in people,” she said. “Romantically. Sexually. On any level you can think of.”

“Maybe that’s typical, but is that the same thing as fundamental? I just don’t see the fundamental incompatibility between an animal’s nature and the physical act of love with another being,” Amaranth said. “We may be different orders of creation, but we were created after the same models.”

“I ever meet a hawk that wants to engage in the physical act of love with people and I’ll lead the hunting party myself,” Eloise said. “That would be a serious menace… a seriously fucked-up menace.”

“Look, can you let go of the hawk example? I wasn’t thinking about a hawk specifically,” Amaranth said.

“Okay, you look,” Eloise said. “If you’re not actually trying to talk me into putting the ‘wild’ into ‘wild shape’ with you, then I really don’t care what your beliefs or preferences or predilections are. But… and this is the key part… I really don’t care. That doesn’t just mean I’m not going to say anything about them. It means I don’t need to hear anything about them.”

“Has anybody ever tell you that you have a very closed mind?” Amaranth asked.

“Nothing’s fallen out of it yet.”

“Um… is everything okay?” I said.

“Just a minor disagreement on a philosophical point,” Eloise said. “But you know, since I’m not affiliated with a circle and I’m not religious I really don’t think you should be bringing any more questions like this to me.”

“Alright,” Amaranth said. “I just thought that since you’re not affiliated, you might have a different opinion…”

“And it turns out I do. How about that?” Eloise said.

Amaranth didn’t seem to have an answer for that. She opened her mouth and closed it a couple of times. I felt bad for seeing her so completely frustrated, but… she was very in the wrong here.

“Is that Steff?” she said finally. “I’m going to go say hi to Steff.”

“Sorry about that,” I said to Eloise.

“What for?” she said. “You’re not her keeper… anyway, I wanted to tell you that Swain’s finalizing the schedule for her field excursions. It’s actually supposed to be done already but she’s had to juggle things around a bit to make things work… it seems neither one of us has a lot of luck getting attention and respect from the bureaucracy.”

“I’ll be looking for it… I know you’re leading your own excursions, but are you going to accompany hers?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m definitely going to be on for the overnight trip,” Eloise said. “And the plan is for me to be there on the shorter trips, too… but that’s going to come down to some external factors.”

“Well, I’ll keep my fingers crossed,” I said. “I’m not exactly comfortable in the woods, so I’m hoping to go out with as big a group as possible…”

“Yeah, it seems like a safe bet that she’ll have the largest group,” Eloise said. “Maybe not as big as you think, though… some people will go for the other accredited guides just because they aren’t teachers, is my guess. And if you’re worried about safety, you stick close to the professor. Don’t let her hear you repeating this, but she had a pretty good run as a wilderness adventurer before she took up teaching. The wee folk respect her, and so does the forest.”

“Somehow I’d take more comfort in your presence than hers,” I said.

“You’d have a hard time keeping up with me when I’m airborne, and when I’m not… well, I’m more about seeing the sights up close and getting my hands dirty,” she said. “I’m not careless, I just weight my priorities a little bit differently. I pick the reasonably safe place that gives me the best view. She picks the safest place she can see okay from.”

“Do you spend a lot of time as a bird?” I asked. I didn’t think druids were very limited when it came to the forms they could assume, but it seemed any time Eloise’s animal time came up she was flying.

“In total? No, but compared to other animals, yes. I’m a city girl originally, but I always wanted to fly,” she said. “It was either that or the air navy… I thought about both, but I decided I’d rather be able to spread my own wings and see the whole world spread out beneath me than be stuck on a boat looking over the railing, when I had time to look at all. That and the philosophy of druidism appealed to me more, though the hierarchical aspects put me off the religion. A hawk doesn’t answer to anyone, or have anyone under them… both are important to me.”

“So I guess you’re not looking to go into teaching full time,” I said.

“I don’t think teacher/student has to be a hierarchical relationship,” she said. “Students have to respect teachers for anything to get done, but it’s just as bad when teachers don’t respect students. I taught myself more than I ever learned from half the teachers I’ve had. I don’t know, you might have had something similar to deal with growing up.”

“I suppose,” I said. “I’ve had pretty good luck in college so far, though the exceptions have been… exceptional. So far even the classes I haven’t been crazy about have had good people leading them.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said. “Is it that obvious that I really don’t want to be there?”

“There’s a lot of resentment over the new rules,” she said. “I guessed it from what you said about the excursions. I wouldn’t have picked your face out of the crowd as being someone who was ticked off… you look like someone who has a tendency to look more sullen than you actually are, if only because you don’t go around looking people in the eye and smiling at them.”

“It’s been more interesting than I expected, really,” I said. “I don’t think I’d drop it now if I had the choice of opting out of the requirement somehow… though I would skip the excursions if I could.”

“You can,” she said. “You’ll fail, the class of course, but that’s the nice thing about failure: it’s always an option.”

“Well, it’s an option I can’t afford,” I said.

“Oh, you’ll do alright,” she said. “Professor Swain is a pretty soft touch when it comes to grading, as long as you’re legitimately trying. Anyway, they couldn’t make these classes too hard when they’re making the whole university take them, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m not really worried about passing the class. I’m just…. not looking forward to the process of getting there.”

“Well, there’s that other option we talked about,” she said. “Relax, though. Maybe it’s been a rough beginning, but we did kind of throw the thing together. Things will smooth out further down the line.”

“Actually, it hasn’t been that bad a beginning,” I said. “I mean, last year I’d already changed one class by this point and I was on the verge of dropping another. All things considered, this year has been going pretty smoothly, classes I’m not crazy about included.”

“Glad to hear it,” she said. “Hey, I’m going to take off. Not that I don’t like fraternizing with undergrad, but this isn’t really my crowd. See you next week.”

“Yeah,” I said.

She walked off, and I headed back to my group, thinking that the year really had been off to a much better start than the one before. Sure, there had been some rough patches. I’d let myself get way too caught up in the whole thing revolving around Twyla… but we’d got that sorted out pretty quickly. I was doing at least okay in my classes so far, and my relationships were going pretty strong… we had our miscommunications and our miscues, but we cleared them up like grown-ups most of the time now.

Nothing was perfect, nothing was terrible, and so the year rolled on.

We’d never really come to an official conclusion about what we were going to do about going to the dance, which meant that Ian’s idea of not worrying about who was officially going with whom sort of unofficially won by default. Amaranth and I talked about it briefly and decided that we would each go over on our own, to give her some time to spend circulating around one of the dorms since she’d spent the night getting intimate acquainted with a book instead of performing her nymphly duties. She’d still be there to step in if I needed support or if things got weird or uncomfortable with Nicki.

On a certain level, this made the whole thing a lot easier. Not sweating over who I was going with somehow meant that I was sweating a lot less over things like what I was going to wear and worrying less about who else would be there or what they might think or say… of course, noticing how little I was worrying made me start to worry, but I was able to cut that line of thought off fairly quickly.

I did have to give some thought to what I would wear, but I decided to just go with one of my nicer dark blue pairs of jeans and a black fitted tee with a bit of an actual neckline… not exactly the stuff I would have pulled on after rolling out of bed if I still got dressed by rolling out of bed and pulling on what I found underneath it, but not exactly the sort of big production I’d gone with for my first dances.

I had a few skirts, mostly gifts from Amaranth and Steff, and even one that had been a Khersentide gift from Two, but I didn’t feel fully comfortable in them. The shorter ones left me feeling exposed and the longer ones just felt ridiculous. I could navigate either of those feelings in the context of submission, but I wasn’t going out in sub mode.

I did let Two put my hair up in barrettes, after I asked her how I looked and she asked me what I was doing with my hair in a way that suggested that ”nothing” was not an available option. I had a feeling that Amaranth would approve of the effort, and Two certainly enjoyed it.

It was a little weird to think of a golem who’d spent the majority of her life living in what basically sounded like a display case playing dress-up doll with me, but that was how I felt any time Two took an interest in my appearance.

“Thank you,” I said when she was finished and had pronounced the effect to be suitably cute.

“You’re welcome, Mack,” she said. “You can pay me back for the barrettes later.”

“Um, I wasn’t planning on keeping them,” I said.

“I do not expect you to, either,” she said, and I understood her meaning.

“You will get them back, Two,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “I will be very pleasantly surprised when that does happen.”

She was being very matter-of-fact about it, not snotty at all or anything, but it was definitely irritating the way she just assumed I would lose or ruin anything I borrowed from her. Okay, yes, that had happened before, but it was one thing to extrapolate a future pattern from past events and it was another thing to… the point is there was a good chance that I could get through the night without losing a barrette.

With half the day gone and the dance ahead, I was basically setting Sunday aside for homework… I’d had a tendency to do that during the slower parts of my freshman year anyway, because I could usually take it to the library and so still keep that part of my social routine.

There was one part of my design assignment that couldn’t wait, though… asking for Steff’s help in bringing my vision, such as it was, to life. If she wasn’t willing or able to help me, I’d have to get cracking on my own sketches all the earlier to make sure that I was able to adequately convey my intentions with them. I wasn’t exactly a terrible artist, but I had managed to improve my grade in a junior high art class by keeping my mouth shut while the teacher explained what she thought I’d been painting.

Steff had said she might drop in at the dance, which made me think that she probably would… but I thought it would probably be a mistake to assume that I’d see her there, so I wandered over in the direction of Harlowe to see if I could find her.

It was weird how this could feel both completely normal and extremely strange at the same time. Harlowe had been my home for the better part of a year… not even my home-away-from-home, but my only home. I hadn’t had anywhere to go back to over the holidays or at the end of the year. It had been where I’d met most of my current friends, and I’d felt like I belonged there more than anywhere else on campus… but I’d never really felt like a member of the crowd there.

As a participant in and occasionally alleged ringleader of the so-called Harlowe Exodus, I felt doubly out of place when I thought about going back to it.

I knew that going into Harlowe and up to Steff’s room during daylight hours wouldn’t be violating any rules… you couldn’t get around a campus having as much anxiety as I tend to have about doing things wrong or being in the wrong place and not become acquainted with the rules regarding things like visitation and what buildings are open when and stuff like that. But the room she shared with Viktor was on the boys’ side, and it was the room she shared with Viktor and both of those were reasons for me to feel a touch of trepidation about the whole thing.

I’d learned long ago that the best way to get along with Steff’s primary partner was from a distance. They had a mirror in their room, but I knew I could get Steff’s attention from the hallway without disturbing Viktor if he were trying to sleep or compose. From what I knew about him, it seemed like he did very little else.

It turned out that luck was with me, because Steff wasn’t in her room… she was wandering the pathways around campus, as she often did when she needed to think. And, as she often did, she noticed that I was out and about and took the opportunity to sneak up on me. This time, she goosed me right as I reached the door from the nexus into Harlowe Hall.

“How long were you following me?” I asked her after I’d settled back into my skin.

“Just since you came around the corner of the complex,” she said. “Look at you, half dressed up. Is this for your new stalker?”

“It’s for the dance,” I said. “And just because I have a new stalker doesn’t mean I love you any less.”

“Well, at least she’s having a positive effect on your banter,” she said. “But it seems the stalker has become the stalkee… you were looking for me?”

“Yeah, actually, I was,” I said.

“Let me guess: you wanted to tell me the latest about Twyla?”

“I’m actually a little tired of talking about her,” I said. “I mean, it’s interesting, but I’ve got to get on with my school stuff. If you’re really dying to hear Amaranth’s theory about the alchemical properties of copper and its alloys…”

“Boring,” Steff said. “If you can’t drink it, it’s not real alchemy, and I’m not supposed to be doing that anyway.”

“Okay, then I’ve got this assignment for my design class that I need to get some drawings done for. I’ve spoken to the teacher about it, and it wouldn’t be cheating if I supplement my sketches with your art.”

“Why would you want to do that?” she asked.

“Because it would be a lot better than just turning in my sketches,” I said. “Steff, you can draw the pants off me.”

“Yes, and I have sketchbooks full of drawings that prove it,” she said. “But ‘art’ isn’t exactly the best word for what I do. It’s very flattering, but I think your feelings about me are clouding your vision… and that’s flattering, too, but I know your grades are like a big deal to you and I don’t want to be the reason they suffer now… not after all the times I held back to avoid distracting you.”

“It doesn’t have to be great art or anything,” I said, even though Steff’s quick sketches were pretty great. “I’ll just be supplementing my sketches with your slightly better sketches.”

“How much difference can that actually make?”

“More than you might think,” I said. “Whatever you think of your actual talent, you know you’re better than me.”

“That’s true, I guess,” she said. “What are we talking about, anyway?”

“The project is to redesign a modern utilitarian product in a way that’s more… elegant, I guess. I want to take a TV and make it look like a fish tank.”

“And you can’t draw some rectangles?”

“Well, it’s the decorations inside the fish tank… illusionary, obviously… that are the subject of the design,” I said.“And I have something kind of specific in mind. I want a castle and a treasure chest that sort of match the old TV from the fifth floor girls’ side of Harlowe.”

“You mean the one you broke?”

“The one Sooni broke, yes,” I said. “My teacher was evidently a fan of it.”

“Does he know you broke it?”

“I don’t know who he thinks broke it,” I said.

“Sounds like it would be smarter to avoid anything that would make him think of it,” she said.

“It’s a little late for that,” I said. “Anyway, I’m not great at this kind of thing in general, so I’m trying to work the angle that I have. I know he likes this kind of thing. I don’t really have much else to go on here.”

I might have said that I really needed her help or that I would seriously owe her, but it was a little early in the year to be handing an emotional marker like that over to Steff. I loved her, and I was pretty sure that she loved me… but if I gave her something like that, she would totally use it.

I wasn’t one hundred percent opposed to that, but I wasn’t in the mood for it at the moment.

“I don’t know, Mack… I like to doodle, but that’s just thinking out loud with my hands,” she said. “I’m really not great at the detail work.”

“That’s okay… I don’t need finished drawings, just rough concept sketches to get the general idea across,” I said.

“Then why do you need me at all?”

“My sketches are going to be a lot sketchier than yours,” I said. “Yours would at least be able to convey the resemblance. Besides, I have a feeling that your specific style might be better for this particular project.”

It was really a matter of quality over style, but I figured that Steff would be less likely to argue if I said I was looking for her style than if I told pushed the quality issue.

“I don’t know,” Steff said. “You know, I’ve got homework of my own… when you get up into the three hundred level classes the profs aren’t shy about bringing the rocks down during the first week.”

“If you don’t have time, I understand, but what I’m looking for is really basic,” I said. “If it takes you more than half an hour, you’re probably going into too much detail.”

“When do you need it?”

“Tuesday,” I said. “But… they have to be based on my sketches, and I’m not going to have them until tomorrow.”

“Well… I can probably find half an hour to sketch a castle between Sunday night and Tuesday morning,” Steff said. “But no promises about quality.”

“The treasure chest is the more important part,” I said. “And I’m not asking for any promises. Whatever you can manage will be better than what I can do on my own.”

“That much is definitely true,” Steff said. “Okay… I’ll do it. If only so you can get some official feedback from someone who actually knows something about art.”

“What if he comes back and tells me that he loves your drawings?”

“Then he’s a walking argument against tenure,” Steff said. “Do you want to bring the sketches over to my room tomorrow?”

“Um… I was thinking I’d just see you at dinner tomorrow night, so…”

Steff laughed.

“Relax,” she said. “I’m just messing with you… I’ve seen you walk into a lawyer’s den with less dread than you had on your face coming over here.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said. “It’s nothing personal, I just…”

“I don’t mind,” she said. “Viktor and I are going to be co-overlords some day, so it’s really kind of good if people quiver a little at the thought of facing him in his lair.”

“I don’t think the other ogres are going to be quite as easily intimidated as I am,” I said.

“I don’t think burrow gnomes are as easily intimidated as you are,” Steff said. “Anyway, I have to go get ready for the dance, and since I doubt you want to tag along…”

“So you’re definitely going?” I asked.

“No, but I’m definitely going to be ready in case I do.”

Of course, I knew how stories that used a type of being as the villain could “demonize” them. Demons were a legitimate threat to the human race, but stories invested them with horns, leathery wings, pointy tails, and all sorts of other features that were either cribbed from unrelated creatures or simply used as a shorthand for scary. The older stories about elves took their abilities to move quickly and quietly and basically made them out to be natural teleporters. There might never have been an ifrit who was actually twenty feet tall and radiating menace like that… or if there was, he might have come by some exceptional abilities through magic, as often happened with the most powerful demons.

If you took the figure and scaled it down to somewhere within spitting distance of six feet and gave it more of a solid humanoid frame, I could see a progenitor for Twyla. The horns certainly looked similar, though the ifrit’s were quite a bit bigger, even proportionally. The picture wasn’t exactly a realistic portrait, but it wasn’t cartoony, either. Possibly Professor Bohd knew what ifrit horns looked like in real life from other sources, or had some other way of recognizing one… if not, she might have made one doozy of a rush to judgment.

“So Twyla’s part genie, then?” Ian said.

“I think an ifrit is actually a type of fire elemental,” I said. I tried to think of what else I knew about them, but that was about it. “I know they do get conflated with demons and other infernals sometimes, because of the fire and the horns, and no particular affection for mortals… but my grandmother was pretty definite that they were purely elemental. Not that she’d liked them any better for that.”

“Yes, I believe they are elementals, but so are djinn,” Amaranth said. “Though like all intelligent elementals, they’re mixed in their composition… not pure fire. Djinn seem to be airier. I haven’t had time to do any serious research into their origins, but it seems like they’re of the same order of creation… basically, what angels are to the celestial realms, ‘genies’ are to the elemental ones. It’s hard to work out comparisons like this across orders, but djinn and ifrits might be more like two different classes of elves than like elves and dwarves.”

“And djinn and ifrit… djinns and ifrits? Whatever the plurals are, they’re rivals?” I guessed.

“That makes sense,” Ian said. “I mean, in the story of the two genies as I read it, it seemed like the ring guy and the bottle guy just had an ancient grudge against each other.”

“Worse than rivals,” Amaranth said. “Ancient enemies. One of the biggest stories in Nights is about a war that flattened mountains and destroyed a lush paradise in the middle of the desert. It doesn’t get translated or adapted very often… maybe because the scope of the destruction doesn’t translate well when it’s talking about somewhere so remote to the audience, or maybe because there’s no reason for demons and djinn to be fighting, and calling both sides djinn also doesn’t work because it doesn’t really convey the reason for the fighting. Well, the story doesn’t convey that anyway… I assume its intended audience would already know about the conflict’s origins, or else take it for granted that the conflict exists.”

“But the bottom line is that djinn and ifrit are… or have traditionally been… enemies,” I said.

Amaranth nodded.

“That story ends with a human king who’s also a sorcerer of some kind forcing them to accept a compact that stops them from making war on the mortal plane,” she said. “That is, from making war on each other while on the mortal plane. And a certain number on both sides are bound to objects to make them hostages to their free kin’s good behavior. But later stories, like the one about the ring and the bottle, show that they still feud and plot against each other.”

That did go some distance towards explaining Professor Bohd’s reaction. If she’d reacted with hostility… or as though she thought Twyla’s presence was a hostility itself… that would explain Twyla’s response, too. Without any explanation for Bohd’s behavior, she might have assumed that the professor just didn’t like students, or unscheduled drop-ins, or people with horns… and that I’d sent her there knowing this.

“So… what does this mean, if it’s true?” Ian said. “I don’t mean about the war, I don’t really think Twyla’s going to be making a blood feud against a teacher. But can she grant wishes?”

“I actually have read more on djinn culture than is found in storybooks, and if ifrits are anything like djinn… and they seem to be a lot like them,” Amaranth said, “then they as a society have more access to true wishes than most beings do, and use them as a sort of currency in their culture in sort of the same way we use gold. A coin is valuable because it’s gold, but it will change hands many, many times before it’s ever melted down and the gold is used, if that ever comes to pass.”

“Why would you buy something with a wish?” Ian asked. “It seems to me you could just wish for whatever you wanted and them some.”

“Well, the common denominations are actually in fractions of wishes,” Amaranth said. “They might have the equivalent of a bond or personal check that’s worth a thousandth of a wish, for instance. The wishes themselves are held by very powerful djinn houses that act as bankers. They pay for services and favors with notes, backed by the wishes in their vaults.”

“Still seems silly,” Steff said. “What do they gain from circulating tiny, unusable fractions of a wish?”

“An economy,” I guessed. I’d never heard of or considered this before, but it did make a kind of sense to me. “Actually using a wish is tricky, and once it’s used, it’s gone. No one’s actually sure where they come from, though the common theories involve stars… wherever they come from, it can’t be easy to get more. By basically trading shares in the wishes, they can get the things they need… sustenance, entertainment, comfort in whatever forms those things take… without depleting their stock or risking the consequences of a poorly worded or badly interpreted wish.”

Amaranth nodded.

“Exactly,” she said. “The thing about three wishes? That’s basically a benchmark, like being a millionaire in human terms… not that three wishes are worth exactly a million gold, but I mean, three is significant to them so that’s the level at which a djinn is considered to be among the rich and powerful, when they own three wishes. If one is bound to help a mortal, they’ll do whatever they can to avoid expending an actual wish, including using magic and their own natural abilities, and begging, borrowing, or even stealing. Not all ‘genie wishes’ that go badly are because of cruel fate twisting someone’s words… some are just the results of the djinn in question trying to frame the request in a way that’s easier to fulfill.”

“Shoddy wishmanship,” Steff said. “Frankly, I wouldn’t stand for it.”

“I want to do more research… a lot more research… but I could see a wish-based economy being the original cause of the conflict,” Amaranth said. “Whatever the ultimate source of the wishes is, they are rare and valuable. If there were two races competing to harvest or gather or whatever the applicable verb is…”

“I’m going to pretend it’s mining,” Steff said. “The idea of wish-miners amuses me for reasons I cannot explain.”

“Okay, if there are two races competing to mine them, it could get really heated,” Amaranth said. “But again, the story in the Nights about the war doesn’t go into that at all.”

“Not to keep banging the same drum,” Ian said, “but I really can’t see Bohd being scared out of her wits by an idea that came from a story.”

“No, but we’re getting all of this basically thirdhand,” Amaranth said. “These stories are only the human view of the conflict from the outside, and we can only read them in translation… and of course, all the stories in the Nights were transmitted orally for centuries before being written down in their modern forms. Professor Bohd might have more information that’s been handed down on the djinn side of the family, possibly including warnings.”

“Then why would she be looking things up in the book?” Ian asked. It was a perfectly sensible objection, but I couldn’t really see any flaw in Amaranth’s line of thinking.

“Well, her djinn heritage is distant enough that the information might be getting a little… attenuated?” Amaranth suggested. “Or maybe it only consists of general warnings about ifrits, and not anything about what to do if one makes a move against her. It can’t be something that comes up very often. There might be permanent populations elsewhere on this plane, but I think ifrits living openly around Magisteria are probably even rarer than bottled ones.”

“What kind of ‘natural abilities’ are we talking about?” Ian asked.

“Well, djinn can change their size and shape… and their whole composition, to an extent. They are a type of composite elemental, like I said, so they have everything within them they need to appear as a human or dwarf or elf… or a rock or tree, for that matter,” Amaranth said. “And of course, they can do anything that an intelligent greater elemental can. They can fly, and they can shift almost at will between the mortal and elemental planes, with enough precision to basically teleport. And they have tremendous magical reserves… like demons, but even moreso, because they come by their fire naturally.”

“And Twyla’s not even an arcanist,” I said. It seemed like a waste. I wondered what other classes she was taking this semester, and if any of them would reveal a talent for spell magic.

“Her body looks pretty fleshy to me…” Ian said.

“So to speak,” Steff said.

“What I mean is, I can’t really see her flying or dissolving into smoke or growing thirty feet tall,” Ian said.

“No, I doubt she could do any of those things naturally,” Amaranth said. “Even if she’s only one generation removed from a full-blooded… or equivalent… ifrit, she probably would have inherited enough of an earth nature from her human parent to keep her in one form. She’d probably have a strong affinity for any of those things plus elemental magic, if she ever turned her mind towards studying them.”

“So… basically, Bohd doesn’t have any more reason to fear her than any other nineteen-ish-year-old girl,” Ian said. “I mean, if Twyla actually did have it in for her. She could maybe throw fire at her, which is something anyone who’s taken one of Bohd’s one hundred level courses could do, anyway.”

“And not something Professor Bohd would have any problem dealing with,” I said. “I’m guessing she realized that after I talked to her… there was a definite change in her posture, from defensive to just kind of tired.”

“Wait… do we think Twyla is actually half-ifrit?” Steff asked. “Emphasis on the half, not the ifrit.”

“I don’t know,” Amaranth said. “She looks perfectly human except for the horns, but who knows what an ifrit looks like when it’s trying to look more down-to-earth?”

“The real question is, what do we do with this?” I said. “I mean, I don’t think Bohd was giving me the book to warn me or because she expected me to do anything about Twyla…”

“No, that would be really irresponsible of a teacher to give a student just enough information about an actual threat to get them interested and then hope they stumble into a solution all on their own,” Amaranth said. “I think it’s actually in the university charter that they can’t do that, under the section about signs and portents and magical menaces.”

“So, my thought is she wanted us to know so we could tell Twyla,” I said. “But we’re not exactly on the best terms, and I don’t think she’d be happy to know that we’ve been having a whole group discussion about this. I mean, she wants to know, but I think she might see it being her decision who else knows.”

“Then it was definitely a mistake to discuss this in the one place on the main campus where elves congregate,” Steff said. “Because I can hear at least three sets of pointy ears on this conversation.”

“You can hear people listening?” Ian said.

“Not really,” Steff said. “Not exactly, I mean. Sometimes Dee has a point about Pax not having enough words for things. Anyway, I don’t think we should be too hasty to set aside the magical menace theory. I mean, I’m only thinking this because you said djinn are greater than demons when it comes to the raw magical energy because of their fire… and you also said that ifrits are all fierier-than-thou, where ‘thou’ is equal to ‘djinn’.” She put her hands on my shoulders. “And that means if she is half-ifrit…”

“Then she’s got more power than I do,” I said. “Which is weird, because I’d think that would have been noticed. I don’t know if I would have felt it without looking for it, but one of her professors or someone might have caught on and said something about it, if only to try to steer her towards something more ‘hard magic’ than divination.”

“Maybe her instructors all thought there was nothing particularly wrong with divination,” Amaranth said.

“But that’s the other thing,” I said. “She went into divination to try to find out something about her heritage, but neither she nor anybody else were ever able to learn anything. I know that relatively simple divination could have detected a high energy level, because I can do that as an enchanter.”

“So either she doesn’t have off-the-chart magical power, or she does but something’s hiding it,” Ian said.

“What I was actually going to say is that if she has more power than Mack, she might be even more of a walking safety hazard than she is,” Steff said. “No offense.”

“Hey, my magic has almost never caused any danger or damage,” I said.

“Well, she does still have the problem that started this,” Amaranth said. “Which is why I think we should tell her. Though, you are right, baby, that it’s something that needs to be handled delicately. Unless you see an opportunity before then… from what I know about her, it doesn’t seem like it would be out of the ordinary for her to find you to try to make peace once she’s cooled down… I think we should stick with the original plan of waiting until you see her in class again anyway.”

“And hope she doesn’t burn and/or blow the school down and/or up in the meantime?” Steff asked.

“She’s had some small scares, but she hasn’t done that so far,” Amaranth said. “And anyway, a few more days will give us a chance to learn more. I would like to keep looking at the book, if only for my own curiosity. I checked the receipt in the front and it’s due back next week… apparently they don’t check this one out for any longer than that, which is sad but understandable… anyway, though, I think it’s important that we look for other, more modern sources of information. Chances are that Twyla doesn’t know any more about ifrits than we did. She might take things better if we can point her towards something that shows them as more than fairytale villains.”

I thought that Twyla was probably used to doing her own research, but I could also see Amaranth’s point. I’d only been nine when I’d learned that I was a half-demon. I doubted there was any kind of culture or civilization in hell that would have made me happier or prouder to claim as my heritage, but it would have been nice to have anything to soften the blow.

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Not that I had any interest in keeping the whole thing secret… I just didn’t have it in me to do a whole recap so soon after Callahan’s class. An hour of thinking on my feet, pushing myself past my normal boundaries of behavior… it took a lot out of me, more mentally and emotionally than physically.

Amaranth was in no obvious hurry to speak up on the subject. In fact, she seemed to be in no hurry to do anything, including eating. She took her time over her salad. Ian raced his way through his hamburger, but then lingered at the table after the others started to drift away. There wasn’t anything unusual about him wanting to hang around… especially on a night we intended to stay together… but I got the feeling that there was more going on than that.

“So… Amaranth said that you did go see Bohd, but I should ask you about it,” Ian saideventually, after everyone else had excused themselves and it was just him, Amaranth, and me left at the table. “How’d it go?”

“Weird and… inconclusively,” I said.

“Sounds like it’s complicated,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “A little more complicated than I really want to get into, if that’s okay.”

“I’m sorry, baby,” Amaranth said. “I thought you would probably be able to tell him better than I could, since you were there… is it okay if I explain it, or do you just not want to talk about it at all right now?”

“No, it’s okay… I’m just a little burned in the brain after melee class. Feel free,” I said, and she gave him a quick version of what I’d told her.

“That is so weird,” Ian said. “You’re sure she was afraid?”

“Everyone keeps asking me that,” I said. “Yes. It wasn’t a subtle and understated thing. She looked like she thought she might have to fortify her office against some kind of mystic siege, honestly.”

“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” Ian said. “It’s just… I really can’t picture Bohd scared.”

“Yeah, I guess you said that.”

“I was just thinking social anxiety bullshit,” Ian said. “Now you make it sound like she thought Twyla was there to kill her or something.”

“I really can’t picture Twyla threatening anyone,” Amaranth said.

“I can’t picture Bohd being threatend,” Ian said. “I’ll always be convinced she eats rock and breathes fire.”

“She probably could do both of those things, if she wanted to,” I said. “I mean, breath leaving the body has been warmed by heart’s fire, so it’s not a complicated tweak to push that to the surface. Eating rocks would be more complcated, but most mundane earth, including stones, has dormant nutrition in it so she’d just need to draw that out while softening it…”

Amaranth cleared her throat.

“Sorry,” I said.

“It’s okay, baby,” she said. “Anyway… I have been looking at the book and doing some research, and I do think I’ve made some progress, actually. I don’t have the full picture of what might have been going on in Professor Bohd’s head, but I think I have a theory that explains both Twyla’s horns and her reaction.”

“Ooh, I want to hear this,” Steff said, slipping back into her seat.

“Didn’t you leave like twenty minutes ago?” Ian asked her.

“Seventeen, but who’s counting? Anyway, my feet travel faster than my ears,” she said. “So, what do you have for us, Amy-Doll?”

Amaranth dabbed her napkin around her mouth, a thoroughly unnecessary gesture… if anything, the napkin came away cleaner for it… and then started clearing some space off the table. She produced a terrycloth towel and laid it out, then placed the enormous book on top of it.

Ian let out a low whistle, which I kind of envied. I couldn’t whistle at all. If I pursed my lips and blew I could sometimes make a blowing sound with a kind of high-pitched overlay, but that was it.

“That is what you call serious book,” Steff said. “Though I’m more impressed you were able to fit it in your nymph-pocket.”

“She did have a whole bed in there before,” Ian said.

“There isn’t any there for things to be in,” Amaranth said, and I would almost swear that she was blushing.

“Hey, I’m not making fun. I’d kind of like to be able to do that just so I didn’t have to haul my books between classes,” Ian said. “Though it would have really been handy in high school. We only had five minutes between bells, so you were pretty much stuck carrying the books for every class you were taking all morning or afternoon.”

“We only had two minutes,” I said. “It wasn’t a big school, but that pretty much only gave you time to get from one door to another without any margin of error. I don’t know how the people who had social lives managed it.”

“Of course, the fifteen minutes they give us here doesn’t seem like a lot when you have to book across campus,” Ian said. “The people who have classes on west campus have got to be freaking zephyrs.”

“That’s why I don’t get classes in a row, when I can help it,” I said.

“I never have a problem getting where I’m going,” Steff said.

“Why don’t you show us how it’s done, then?” Ian asked.

“Honestly, isn’t anyone interested in knowing what I found out?” Amaranth asked.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” Steff said.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Okay, so… I knew an hour wouldn’t be enough time to make a serious dent in reading it,” Amaranth said. “It probably would have been plenty of time to go down to a ballroom and do some gazing around the ethernet… but it seemed like such a shame to ignore such a big, beautiful book to just go off and read about the book… so I decided to start with one story from the book itself, to get a sort of feel for it. The only question was which story to pick? I couldn’t think of any story about a djinn being foiled by anything other than another djinn, or a tricky human or elf… but then I remembered that there was a story about a boy who got lost in the desert and encountered a demon, so I decided to start with that.”

“But we know that Twyla’s horned parent or ancestor wasn’t a demon,” I said. “Apart from demons not having horns, she prays to Khersis. That’s not something anyone infernal could manage.”

“I know, baby,” Amaranth said. “But I had to start somewhere, right? I wasn’t expecting to find the answer the first time I opened the book. The funny thing is that I couldn’t find that story, or at least I couldn’t find it in the form I remembered. ‘The Demon in the Wastes’ apparently doesn’t exist in the Nights of Fire and Wonder… it’s ‘The Ghul in the Wastes’ in the original. Same story. The boy runs away from his evil uncle, gets lost, encounters a hungry and intelligent predator, they have the same wager, he tricks the predator, the predator is impressed so instead of just honoring the wager he gives him a basket full of jewels… but it’s not a demon in the original, it’s a ghul.”

I’d heard that story, too, and as I thought about it, the rather inexact translation didn’t seem too surprising. Nothing I knew about ghuls would require any change in the story I knew to swap out the antagonist… only my mental image changed.

“That makes sense,” I said, “but… I’m pretty sure that Twyla’s not part ghul, either.”

“They can reproduce, though, can’t they?” Ian asked. “I mean, ghouls are supposed to breed in the wild. I’d assume the Maravayan version can, too.”

“Yeah,” Steff said. “Zombies and skeletons animated by outside magic are dead-dead, but
ghouls are technically living dead. I’ve never studied ghuls, but most corporeally intact self-willed undead are close enough to life to breed, even with the living. That’s where you get your angsty half-vampires and stuff. It’s pretty hard to imagine anyone breeding with a ghoul, but the desert ones are probably a bit less… squelchy.”

“I wish it were harder to imagine,” Ian said. “Thanks for that mental image.”

“Still not seeing the connection here, though,” Steff said. “Twyla’s a little… robust… for a demidead. And it still wouldn’t explain the horns.”

“Well, I’m not saying that I think she’s part ghul,” Amaranth said. “But it got me thinking. Most versions of that story that are told in Pax make the antagonist a demon because if they translated ‘ghul’ to ‘ghoul’ it wouldn’t make any sense to us. The story works with a demon, but it’s no longer the same story. That’s exactly the kind of detail that might have sent Professor Bohd looking for an older, less watered-down translation. So, after that I started looking around for complete listings of the tales, but I specifically tried to find different versions that showed conflicting titles for the same stories… more modern or Paxified ones versus ones that were more of a straight translation.”

“So, what did you find?” I asked her.

“Well, interestingly enough, the ghul/demon substitution only seems to occur in that one story,” Amaranth said. “When it’s a horde of ravenous ghuls, or a single ghul haunting a necropolis and not actually having much in the way of conversation, they tend to either translate it as ‘ghoul’ or leave it untranslated.”

“That also makes sense, but since I still don’t see how it gets us closer,” I said.

“Well, it’s still interesting to consider the way trying to reconcile the story to fit a specific cultural lens alters it,” Amaranth said. “I mean, we could read a story about a group of starving ‘ghouls’ and just see it as normal, while someone with a cultural understanding of ghuls would see a theme of desperation and want in the circumstances that reduced them to that state… but you’re right, it’s not directly relevant. What is relevant is that they’re not the only kind of being to get this sort of treatment.”

I could tell from the way she was grinning again that she was pretty sure she’d solved it… but however proud she was of that, she was also pleased with the learning that had brought her to that point. So instead of asking her to get to the point, I asked her, “What other beings got mistranslated?”

“This is where it gets really interesting,” Amaranth said, “because this could actually explain where the whole demon/horns thing comes from.”

“That doesn’t really need explaining, though,” I said. “Horns are just like common iconography for evil or bestial or scary.”

“That’s certainly the most popular theory,” Amaranth said. “And it may be why the image of horned demons is so wide-spread and easily accepted. Or if demons were already thought of as horned for other reasons, it might have influenced the way these stories were adapted…”

“You’re saying that there’s a horned creature in Nights of Fire and Wonder that got depicted as a demon in our versions of the stories,” I said.

“Sometimes,” Amaranth said. “When it was fulfilling a ‘demonic’ role. But in other stories… well, you know the story of the ring and the bottle?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The two dueling djinn with the same master.”

“Yes!” Amaranth said. “That’s the story I was thinking of when I was talking about djinn thwarting each other… except they aren’t both djinn. They’re both called ‘genies’ in every adaptation I’ve ever seen, but this is what the bottled one looks like in the original.”

She flipped open the book a the page she had marked, and it showed the tiny figure of the story’s thief cowering down in front of a towering being of billowing orange smoke. It looked about like I would have expected a powerful and frightening “genie” to look in a story about how powerful and frightening said genie was, except for one detail that had been left out of every version I’d ever seen: the small curved horns that jutted from his forehead.

“The genie of the ring is a djinn,” Amaranth explained. “But the one in the bottle is an ifrit.”

---

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Having a bed built for two people didn’t change much about the way Amaranth and I slept together. A good night’s sleep underneath her did nothing to change the malaise-y feeling that it should be the weekend. I spent a good five minutes or so when I first woke up thinking about how great it would be if I didn’t have to get up in the morning at all. So much of my academic day for most of the week was now made up of obligations… the survival course the school now mandated, and the combat class I’d agreed to take.

I only had one class to go to I actually liked, and sadly for the ambitions of my laziness, it was the first one of the day.

If I didn’t have to have those I could have filled my schedule with classes I wanted… and maybe I could have even found nothing but afternoon classes. I wouldn’t even have to crowd my schedule with three classes in a row. I was ahead of the game on credits, after all.

I allowed that kind of thought to run around my head until I felt Amaranth shifting above me.

“Ah, sleep,” she said, stretching out luxuriantly as she sat up. “Is there anything more self-indulgent? Well, I mean, when you don’t really need it, I suppose.”

“There’s definitely something about lying in bed when you don’t have to, yeah,” I said. “But maybe doing it when you can’t is even more indulgent.”

“I suppose that’s true… we do have places to be, don’t we?” she said.

“We could skip breakfast,” I said.

That seemed to tempt her. She even laid back down while she thought about it, so I felt rather than saw when she shook her head decisively.

“No, that’s how it starts,” she said. “Sleeping in every once in a while is not the worst thing we could do, but it’s too early in the year to think about that kind of thing.”

I knew she was right… I hadn’t exactly needed her to tell me that, but I had needed her help convincing myself of it, and I suspected she’d needed my help as well. We were using each other as enablers… just for the things we needed to do, not the things we wanted to do.

It was the right decision, too. If we’d stayed in bed another hour or so, we probably would have felt exactly the same when it was time to go to class. As it was, breakfast made a good dent in the Wall of I Don’t Want To Be Here.

“Be sure to tell me at lunch what you’ve decided about Saturday,” Amaranth said to me as we left the cafeteria. “So we can ask them or not, accordingly.”

“Right,” I said, succeeding so hard at not looking like I’d completely forgotten about the decision I was sleeping on.

“I knew you’d forget,” she said, giving my hand a squeeze. “That’s why I’m reminding you.”

I was pretty sure I’d end up telling her I just wanted to go with her, for the simple purpose of not making my life more complicated. With the distance of one night’s sleep I couldn’t think of any really strong reasons not to do a multi-date… but I also just wasn’t really feeling it.

When I thought about going to the dance with Amaranth, I could look forward to it… I could also imagine things going wrong, and there was a feeling of apprehension verging on anxiety even when I didn’t consider any specific possibilities, but that was normal, background-level worry for me.

When I thought about getting everyone involved, though, the background stuff went off the charts. It wasn’t that I was that much more worried about Steff or Ian… it was just the combination.

I didn’t know if my decision would please Amaranth the most, but at least I’d decided it and so didn’t have to worry about spacing it off once class began… or spacing off during class to ruminate on the possibilities. If I did that, I’d miss out on the only really enjoyable part of my schedule.

“I’m sure you will be happy to know that everyone who turned their assignment in on time has received at least a C,” Acantha announced at the start of spellbinding class. “Those among you who earned Bs and As may feel suitably proud. The two people who failed to turn a wand in to me by the stated deadline of three in the afternoon yesterday had their grades lowered one full letter level. You may all come forward to claim your wand and your grade by matching your ticket to the attached tag… hand the ticket to me and I will match it to your grade and record it after class. Make certain your name is written clearly and legibly on the ticket.”

The class at large didn’t look or sound excited at the prospect of mostly Cs. There was no mass rush to find out who’d scored higher. Despite the work I’d put into my binding I felt a little trepidation as I approached the desk where the tagged wands were laid out neatly in rows. This early in the semester it was hard to have a real feel for what a professor was looking for and grading on. One person’s “going the extra mile” was another person’s “what are you, some kind of smart ass?”

The dismayed noises and indignant cries that came from some of the first few students who ventured forward made me even more conflicted. It was easy to dread one’s grade in the midst of evidence that the teacher was a harsh grader… but on the other hand, maybe the operative word there should be “strict” and maybe not everyone had even tried to follow her guidelines. She’d made it clear that some people had done better than a C.

It was only the first assignment, I decided. If I’d done well on it than I had nothing to fear, and if I hadn’t then maybe I could learn what to do for next time. I went forward to claim my wand, which was easy enough to find. There was nothing particularly distinctive about it that I could point out in contrast to any of the other homemade ones that were just twigs stripped of park and shaped a little, but it was mine.

I put my claim ticket down on the desk, grabbed it, and retreated to my table before I dared to look at the note attached to it.

It read:

An entertaining variation. I am uncertain if you fulfilled the letter or the spirit of the assignment, but either way I resolve the question you have hit all marks on one or the other. While the point of the assignment in no way depends on learning and mastering the particular spell that I outlined, in order to prevent the taking of undue shortucts I will reserve the right to demand you demonstrate the understanding of any spell you substitute for in the future if I am not certain you are capable of it. You have more than adequately demonstrated your grasp of the basics of the binding techniques at the core of the exercise.

My heart stuck in my throat a little bit. There was praise there, but it wasn’t unmitigated praise. More than adequate… if a C was adequate, that sounded like a B.

But below that was the grade: 102. Even with her rather exact and precise handwriting, I had to squint to make sure that third digit wasn’t another 0. There was a break down below that showing how I’d earned the points above average, with +2 listed as simply being “extra credit”.

Acantha’s voice whispered in my ear.

“I gave you two extra points for the extra steps you took and for the fact that you finished it in class, but please do not learn the wrong lesson from this and rush everything again,” she said. “It was bold of you to do so when you had time you could have used to ask me how I would receive your attempt. This time you’re being rewarded for boldness. If you want to impress me further, you must next show prudence.”

I nodded. I appreciated the personal explanation about my grade, especially as it came as she was being swamped by people who were demanding an explanation for theirs.

“I don’t understand what I did wrong,” one student said.

“Nothing,” she said. “You will note that I took off no points.”

“But…”

“You put forth an average effort and you have received average marks,” she said.

“This is bullshit!” another student said.

“I explained my grading scale in advance,” Acantha said, “and I set a clear deadline based on the amount of work it would take me to evaluate each student’s efforts individually, and I was flexible enough to accept several assignments turned in after that deadline.”

“Did anyone get an A?”

“I have said as much on that subject as I am able to,” Acantha said. “Other people’s grades are other people’s business. If you are dissatisfied with yours I will be happy to explain in greater detail how I arrived at that figure or how you may earn a higher one in the future immediately following class or during my office hours.”

“I’d like to discuss my grade now,” the guy who’d questioned her credentials on the first day said.

“If you’d like to thank me for taking the time to grade the wand you rolled through my slot at some time after I left my office at four in the morning, the time to do so is…”

“I want to talk about it now,” he said again.

“Yes, well, you do not set the curriculum,” she said. “It would not be fair to the rest of the class to spend their time discussing your grade, and it would not be fair of you to expect me to drop everything to grade your late homework again in the future.”

“It’s only your job.”

“This isn’t my job, it’s a favor to a friend,” she said. “What is your name?”

I halfway expected him to say “La Belle”, but he said, “Roberts. Gareth Roberts.” He said it with a self-assured smirk, like it was supposed to mean something to her.

“Mr. Roberts, your choices number two: you may sit down and hear the lesson I’ve prepared, or you may remove yourself from the class,” she said. “There is no middle ground between those two options… and if you’re about to ask me if I know who you are, I’m afraid I will have no choice but to embarrass both of us by admitting that I don’t.”

“You’ll be hearing about this,” he said as he re-took his seat.

“Just make certain it’s during my posted office hours and we won’t have a problem,” she said, and she began a more in-depth explanation of the spell-chaining that had been at the heart of the exercise with the wands.

It was a little harder to follow than it might have been… she was clearly rattled by having to defend her grading and her authority, and had defaulted back to reciting whole columns of text in a breathless exhalation.

I wondered if it would make a difference to her if she knew that some of us appreciated her efforts, or if she knew someone among the students would have her back. The problem was that I didn’t know how to let her know that I did… or even how to have her back, once you really got down to it. It would take something like a do-or-die moment for me to stand up to a Gareth Roberts if his attention were focused on me, and I just wasn’t equipped to walk up to Acantha with a friendly smile and a greeting.

Maybe the most I could do was not be difficult and keep trying to impress her. Thinking about it just made me feel even more awkward and impotent.

“We will begin our next assignment Monday,” Acantha said at the end of the class. “I will go over the grading scale in more detail then, with specific examples. If anyone wishes to redo the first assignment and turn it in again, I will average their grades together if the second result is higher, but you cannot expect this courtesy to be extended in the future.”

I thought she was being more generous than she needed to be… even if she wasn’t great at sounding generous… but I also thought it wouldn’t get her a lot of slack from the students who weren’t happy with her way of doing things. I had to admit that I preferred teachers who started from the standpoint of an A being normal and took points off instead of keeping with the idea that C really does mean average, but that was just because it was the approach that was easier for us, not because it was necessarily right.

“So, there’s this dance tomorrow night,” Ian said to me at lunch, just after I’d taken a bite of chicken that suddenly swelled up in my mouth and tasted like nothing. It was just the four of us—him, me, Amaranth, and Steff—at the moment, which I had thought would be perfect for talking about the dance, if he hadn’t had the idea before I was ready to do so. “I was thinking it would sort of be like our anniversary. I mean, our first date wasn’t exactly my finest moment, but I think it’s worth recognizing how far we’ve come, you know?”

I forcibly swallowed the lump of food in my mouth, my gaze slipping sideways to Amaranth. She’d brought up the point that Ian or Steff might make their own plans for the weekend, but the whole time that we’d been talking about the subject, it had never occurred to me that those plans might very well have involved me or the dance.

“Oh, well, if you guys already have plans…” Ian said.

“I don’t know if ‘plans’ are the right word,” Amaranth said, in an impressively neutral voice. “The subject of the dance has come up, but I don’t know if anything definite has been decided.”

“Oh?” Ian said. He looked at me. “Do you think you’ll go, then?”

“I actually got asked by someone else,” I said. “I mean, asked if I would be there. It’s not like a date, and I don’t know if I’d want it to be. My thought was that if I was there with someone else, there might be less awkwardness.”

“Oh, yeah,” Steff said. “The more awkward people get together in one place, the less awkwardness there is. I don’t know how things could get less awkward than that.”

“Well, there’s a thought,” Ian said. “Who says you have to go with just one of us?”

“Unless it’s like that,” Steff said.

“We talked about that,” I said. “And I thought about it. But I really wasn’t sure how the dynamics of a multi-person date would work out.”

“Just as a point of interest, most dates are multi-person,” Steff said. “Unless they’re surrounded by quotation marks and involve a box of tissues and a small jar of oil of slipperiness.”

“Well, okay,” Ian said. “Let’s look at it a different way. Why do you need to go with any of us?”

“I can just say anything right now and nobody would notice,” Steff said.

“We’re all very impressed with your cleverness, sweetie,” Amaranth said.

“Because I don’t want to go alone,” I said to Ian. “And leaving everyone at home if I can’t figure out who to go with doesn’t really seem like the way to avoid hurt feelings and resentments.”

“I’m not saying that anyone stays home, unless they want to,” Ian said. “People go, they don’t go… why does it have to be a matter of ‘going with’ each other, explicitly? We’re all adult-ish… and in theory, being in this relationship… these relationships… whatever… it doesn’t work if we’re trying to stake out territory like a bunch of high schoolers.”

“Says the nineteen-year-old,” Steff said.

“Hey, you’ve got to grow up sometime,” Ian said. “I’m just saying, it seems a little middle school to worry about who’s going with who. I mean, we know who’s involved with who. If some of us show up at the dance, why does it have to be any different from when we all show up at lunch?”

“I think a dance is a little more special than a meal,” I said.

“Okay, it happens less often,” Ian said. “But we’re talking Generic It’s The First Week Of The New School Year Dance sponsored by Campus Something Or Other. It’s not that much of an occasion.”

“You said it was like our anniversary,” I said.

“Not an anniversary-anniversary,” Ian said. “More like a milestone. Anyway, I’m not so much interested in reliving any memories as replacing them with newer and better ones.”

“Well, I think Amaranth and I are definitely going,” I said. “So I guess I’ll look forward to seeing you there.”

“How about you, Steff?” Amaranth said.

“I might drop in,” Steff said. “Just to get a look at the new crazy.”

“The what?” I said.

“I mean the next perfectly well-adjusted individual to take a healthy interest in you,” she said.

“Have I ever mentioned how much your support means to me?” I said.

“I love you, too,” she said.

Two and Dee arrived at the table shortly after that.

“Our apologies for being late but we had an issue arise with our room,” Dee said. “I believe somebody entered it without our knowledge or permission, but it is difficult to excite any interest in this transgression on the part of our resident adviser or the campus guard.”

“Also, a card came for you but it ended up in our mail,” Two said to me after exchanging greetings with everyone. “I was going to turn it in at the counter but Dee slid it under your door.”

“What kind of card?” I asked.

“An appointment card, but I didn’t read it because it wasn’t addressed to me,” she said.

“An appointment card?” I said. “Was it from the healing center?”

“I didn’t read it because it wasn’t addressed to me,” Two repeated.

“It was from Professor Elizabeth Bohd and it directed you to appear in her office at five this evening,” Dee said.

“You weren’t supposed to read it because it wasn’t addressed to you,” Two said.

“My apologies to the recipient, but I have already explained to you that I was not able to not read it,” Dee said.

“Thanks, Dee,” I said. “That’s during my melee class, though. Was there any explanation?”

“None,” Dee said. “The handwritten portions of the document fairly leaped out at me, but they consisted of nothing but your name, room number, and the time and date.”

“She must have figured you’d be done with classes by that time,” Amaranth said. “You’ll have to either drop by during your afternoon break, or send her a message that you can’t make it and asking when she’d like to see you instead.”

“Or, alternately,” Steff said, “tell her to eat a dick.”

“Steff!” Amaranth said. “That’s not called for.”

“What’s not called for is a teacher calling her in on the carpet when she’s not even in any of her classes,” Steff said. “You aren’t, are you?”

“We don’t know that she’s doing that,” Amaranth said.

“Right, we don’t know anything because she didn’t feel the need to explain herself,” Steff said. “She didn’t invite Mack to stop by, she summoned her like a gen… genuine person one would summon.”

“I actually think this does constitute an invitation,” I said. “I mean, we don’t really know each other socially to the point where it would be appropriate for her to just shoot me an a-mail asking me if I want to hang out, and… well, she’s always very professional about things.”

“This isn’t professional, it’s rude,” Steff said.

“I mean, I don’t know if she knows another way to reach out,” I said. “I think she’d be too self-conscious to send me an echo or an a-mail… In her own way, she’s as awkward and gawky as any student.”

I was actually thinking about Dee when I said this. Dee’s stiff and formal manners and the stock she put in things like formal declarations of friendship and explicit invitations weren’t necessarily the same thing as Professor Bohd’s reserved manner, but I thought they shared a common root. Acantha’s torrential lectures could probably be put in the same category.

“What, now professors are more afraid of us than we are of them?” Steff said.

“I agree with Steff,” Ian said. “Bohd’s a big girl, and I don’t believe for one minute she’s afraid of the student body.”

“I didn’t say she was afraid,” I said. “I just don’t think she knows more than one way to relate to students, and that’s as students.”

“But you think she should go anyway,” Steff said.

Ian nodded.

“Because the benefit of standing on how right you are doesn’t measure up to what it could cost you,” he said to me. “You’ve got another three years here. It’s not crazy to think you’re going to need Bohd’s support at some point.”

“It’s not really a debate for me,” I said. “I like Professor Bohd, so I’m not going to blow her off. Maybe I’d like her better if she were a little warmer and less, you know, brusque about things… but there are enough people at this university who would be happy to smile while they kicked me.”

“As a woman in a ‘high magic’ discipline, she’s probably used to having to defend her right to the same respect her peers get,” Amaranth said. “And that’s without even considering her non-human ancestry. I don’t think any of us can judge her for being a little prickly.”

“Oh, come off it, Amy,” Steff said. “You don’t let Mack get away with prickling at people, and she’s got more demon blood than Bohd and she’s been out about it longer.”

“Professor Bohd is only ‘out’ about it in the first place because she wanted to support me,” I said, “and other students in my position. Anyway, it’s my decision.”

“And I’m proud of you for making it,” Amaranth said.

That meant a lot to me, of course… among the things it meant was that now I actually had to follow through with it.

“Do you think she’ll be back?” she asked me.

“I really don’t know,” I said. “Before she showed up, I really couldn’t have imagined her coming to knock on our door in the first place. Why?”

“I think it would be nice to get to know her better,” Amaranth said. “She’s a hard person to get a sense of.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, she’s quiet,” Amaranth said. “And she’s never been sexually active… I don’t mean that she’s never had sex, I mean there’s no activity there yet. Most people, when I meet them I can learn quite a bit about them at a glance, but with her there’s almost nothing to read.” She shrugged. “It always seems weird to me, but it’s not that unusual… some people just never get around to thinking about sex much, before they’ve had it.”

“I’m pretty sure I had sexual desires before I had sex,” Ian said. “In fact, I’d expect there would more to ‘read’ before… I’m guessing ten minutes of my random thoughts could have filled a book about sex when I was sixteen. It wouldn’t have been the most accurate book, but it would have been enthusiastic. And illustrated in full color.”

“The Pop-Up Book of Teenage Fantasies,” Steff said.

“Well, what I’m talking about is a phase that not everyone goes through, or stays in long enough for it to be noticeable,” Amaranth said. “But there are people who just… don’t see the attraction, I guess. It’s not like being asexual, or celibate as a matter of discipline. She has ordinary sexual function and she feels attraction… just no interest in acting on it. It makes everything about her seem muted and dim to me.”

“Do we have to talk about someone else’s sexual thoughts?” I asked.

“Well, they’re not exactly thoughts,” Amaranth said. “It’s more like we’re discussing her sexual being than her sexual thinking… and that’s just how I see people. Anyway, I doubt she considers it a secret that she’d prefer to wait for the right person.”

“Maybe not, but I doubt she’d appreciate the angle we’re talking about this from, or the level of detail,” I said.

“I suppose that’s possible,” Amaranth said. “Do you suppose it’s possible that Professor Bohd might be able to help identify her heritage?”

“I don’t think that’s what she was looking for,” I said.

“No, but don’t you suppose it might come up?” Amaranth asked. “Professor Bohd’s knowledge of the elements must extend to elemental creatures, at least to some point.”

“I guess,” I said. “But in my experience she’s kind of… well, circumspect about that sort of thing. Unless Twyla asks her, I doubt she’d volunteer anything. It wouldn’t be like her to make any assumptions about what Twyla does or doesn’t know, or what Twyla wants to know.”

“Still, if Twyla herself is interested, she might ask, if she gets the notion that Professor Bohd might be able to help her,” Amaranth said.

“If you really want to know how it went, you’ll probably have to ask her yourself,” I said.

“But I wasn’t there when she talked to you,” Amaranth said. “If I go and talk to her, she might get the impression we were talking about her behind her back.”

“Yeah,” Steff said. “We’d hate for her to get the right impression like that.”

“Oh, you know what I mean… there’s a difference between talking in an innocent and well-meaning fashion about someone who doesn’t happen to be here, and talking about someone behind their back,” Amaranth said. “But to someone who’s not there to see it with their own eyes, it can be hard to tell the difference.”

“Seems like it would be pretty easy to avoid that kind of misunderstanding if you just didn’t talk about people who aren’t here,” Ian said.

“You could talk to her, baby,” Amaranth said to me. “To Professor Bohd, I mean. She likes you.”

“‘Likes me’ in the sense of thinking I have a lot of potential,” I said. “I think I could blow a lot of her goodwill by coming around digging after gossip.”

“But you wouldn’t be digging after gossip, you’d just be concerned for a friend and wondering if she’d been able to give her any help,” Amaranth said. “Since Twyla will probably have mentioned that you referred her to the professor in the first place, it should seem completely natural… because it would be completely natural, I mean.”

“Don’t you think Bohd would wonder why she’s not asking her good friend Twyla herself?” Ian asked.

“Also,” Steff said, “I think she’d suspect a trick if Mack came to talk to her about anything and it seemed ‘completely natural’… I know I would.”

“Yeah,” Ian said. “No offense, Mackenzie, but you’re not exactly a social butterfly.”

“More like a moth of solitude,” Steff said. “Or one of those bugs that goes skittering away when the lights…”

“Okay, yes,” I said. “If you want me to talk to Professor Bohd, Amaranth, I will… but if we have to jump through this many hoops to make it not look like we’re digging around for information that’s none of our business, that pretty much means we are.”

Amaranth sighed.

“You’re right, baby,” she said. “I just… I wish I’d got to know her better last year. In her own way, I think she was as lonely as you were, and you weren’t lonely for long.”

“Well, for all we know about her life, neither was she,” I said. “There’s a boatload of Khersian student groups and activities on campus. Even if she didn’t have a lot of friends in Harlowe Hall, she’s got a built-in way to make them.”

“I suppose,” Amaranth said. “Well, if you see her again, please tell her that I said hello, and asked how she’s doing.”

“Okay,” I said.

“And at least go see Professor Bohd in a day or two and ask if Twyla found her,” Amaranth said. “If she happens to mention anything… or doesn’t… well, it’ll be fine either way. It’ll be good for you to have an excuse to touch base with her anyway, since you don’t have her for anything this semester.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

After lunch, I killed some time deciphering more spell formulae from the spellbinding manual and tinkering with the formulation of my puff-spark-flame spell in my workbook. I wouldn’t copy it to my grimoire until after I got the graded results back… I was pretty confident of getting an A, but I didn’t want to copy a B or C spell down into my personal spellbook.

As it neared two in the afternoon I headed for my next class.

Entering the lecture hall, I had to a double-take towards the front of the room to see that Professor Bryony Swain was already present, chatting with her T.A. She seemed to be in a better mood at the start of the second day of her class than she had been on Monday. Taking that in concert with Acantha’s slightly more poised presentation, I was getting a bit of a lesson about snap judgments. A lot of students probably felt they suffered unfairly from making poor first impressions on their teachers, but the reverse could also be true.

She’d replaced the human-sized lectern and somewhat wobbly-looking stool with something more appropriately sized for a gnome, and that had to help things a bit. The presence of her teaching assistant, who’d been called away for an emergency search, also had to help.

I’d met Eloise Desjardins briefly already, even though she’d missed the first class. Like the professor, her garb was practical outdoorsy, in shades of green and brown. Amaranth had identified her as a secular druid… someone who practiced the primal mystic arts of druidism, but left the religious side alone.

Secularists kind of weirded me out. A big part of that was my grandmother’s influence, I knew. She’d lumped them in with worshippers of evil gods and the misguided servants of demons, but at the end of the day she’d had more understanding for worshippers of evil than those who stubbornly refused to worship anything.

I couldn’t claim to have received a balanced religious education, but from what I understood there were some secularists who acknowledged the gods as gods but didn’t believe mortals needed anything from them or vice-versa, and then there were some who went a step further and declared that gods were nothing more than powerful beings like the most ancient dragons or elementals or even formerly mortal wizards.

The man who had fathered me had, during one of his dream-visits, espoused a theory like that: in brief, that gods are anyone powerful enough to get away with declaring themselves gods.

I didn’t know Eloise well enough to quiz her about her particular beliefs, but Amaranth had apparently had a lively discussion on the subject. Modern druidry involved multiple deities but reserved a place of honor for Mother Khaele. I could imagine Amaranth trying to remain polite and effusively open-minded while grappling with a perceived rejection of her divine mother.

“Good afternoon, all,” Professor Swain said at the start of the class.

She repeated it again more loudly when it failed to catch the attention of those engaged in small conversations around the room. When that didn’t work, Eloise crossed over behind her and clapped her hands together sharply just behind the professor’s head.

“Thank you, Eloise,” the professor said. “Good afternoon, class.”

It had to be hard to be a gnomish teacher among humans and other races. Gnomes had a reputation for being a quiet, unobtrusive people, though my experience with Two’s friend Hazel was that they could be as boisterous as anyone. Professor Swain certainly didn’t seem to be all that shy.

But even the most outgoing gnomes have a tendency to fade into the background in the most literal fashion. They weren’t invisible or translucent or camouflaged or anything, just… hard to notice. Easy to forget.

“I want to start off today by introducing my assistant for the semester, Ms. Eloise Desjardins,” Professor Swain said. “Ms. Desjardins is pursuing her master’s in aberrant natural philosophy, and we’re very lucky to have her. Now, this school has protocols on how teachers address students and vice-versa. Ms. Desjardins is a student and also a colleague, so I shall address her so… you lot are her fellow students, and she’s made it known to me that she has no quarrel with being called by her given name.”

Eloise nodded.

“So, why don’t you tell the class a bit about yourself?” the professor said.

Eloise stepped forward. She ducked her head a little as she opened her mouth to speak… a touch of shyness like that always endeared a person to me… and then she looked up at the class and her voice came strong and clear.

“Well… my family is from New Port Chartres, but my earliest memories are of Blackwater and Prax,” she said. “I grew up in the area… all over the area. My father was in the ranger corps. My mother was a cleric of Khaele. I felt called to something different, though, and at the age of eleven I began druid training. Six years later I was invested.”

“And since then?”

“Well, I spent the next decade traveling the old world and the Mother Isles before I separated from the Khaelean faith and returned here to get my undergraduate degree, which I completed last spring.”

That timeline would make her around thirty at least… knowing that, I could see a certain amount of maturity cast into her features, but that aside she didn’t really look much older than the typical student. I wondered if that had played into her selection… most grad students would still be underage by gnomish standards. Early thirties would at least be on the cusp of adulthood.

“And what did you do when you were overseas?” Professor Swain asked.

“A mixture of missionary work and additional training,” she said. “The druidic rites of the Mother Isles are older and more established than Magisterian ones… they include training in bardic arts… history, story-telling, ethics, and law.”

“So, you’re a trained lawyer, then?” the professor asked.

“…not exactly, no,” Eloise said. “But I am a trained mediator, and my decrees are considered binding in some circumstances, though they can be set aside by a lawful tribune… really, it only comes into play when there’s no tribune available and something needs to be settled.”

“Is that just in the Mother Isles?”

“Here, too,” Eloise said. “It’s part of the common law we inherited, along with hospitality for druids and bards.” She shrugged. “Oh, I’m also a notary. That’s not a druid thing, though. It just… seemed… useful.”

“Oh, well, that’s fascinating,” the professor said. She appeared to notice that Eloise was getting uncomfortable with the attention. “You know, I’ve often remarked how much more quickly the wheels of justice might turn if we had judges who could turn into bears… but all this is probably a subject best left for another time. Right, so… we’ve the syllabus to go over today. Everyone have one? Anyone who didn’t bring it, raise your hand and Ms. Desjardins will pass one in your direction.”

There was a brief delay as everyone got theirs out or received a new one.

“Now, the largest single portion of your grade is what I call the excursion essays,” the professor said. “A quarter of your grade will come from essays you write based on actual excursions into the wilds. It’s not enough to take a stroll through the woods… this is a Local Hazards course, so to qualify for a grade, your excursion must include an encounter with something reasonably hazardous and local. If you’ll look at the back of the syllabus, you’ll find a list of accredited guides… including our own Ms. Desjardins… who can both help you find qualifying hazards and make sure your encounter doesn’t become a close encounter.

“You’ll need to turn in a minimum of three excursion essays, but if you’re not satisfied with the grades you get on them you can do any number of additional ones and I’ll take the best three. The rub is that you need a fresh trip to write a new essay. You must have a guide with you to verify the encounter, and while they are being generous with their time you can’t expect them to drop everything to show you the local carnoflora so I suggest you try to get on their schedules as early as you can and expect to travel with a group.”

The field work requirement was sounding better than I’d expected… I would have preferred that a class that advertised itself as a ‘lecture’ was graded only on things that could be done inside of a lecture hall, but going into the woods with a capable guide and a group of students didn’t sound terrible.

“I will myself be leading a total of three excursions for the class,” the professor continued. “So if you’re the retiring sort who doesn’t like to put themselves forward, you can just join up with me on the dates noted there in the upper right of page two. Note that the they’re all Saturdays, and that the middle one is an overnight camping trip. If you choose to participate in that one, you’ll get two grades… one for your essay, one based on my personal observations. That second grade is in the way of being ‘extra credit’. If you only turn in two essays it won’t count for a third, but if you have at least three it can take the place of the lowest. Is that clear enough to everyone? Right. Moving on…”

The remainder of the syllabus concerned matters less worrisome than “excursions”, and thus was less interesting. We went over the format and required contents of the essays, the frequency and importance of quizzes… Professor Swain was a believer in regular quizzes, which I liked because they made for an easy way to keep one’s grade up without adding to homework.
“I’ll be honest,” she said near the end of the class period. “This is a larger group than I’m used to leading, and it’s got a bit of a different focus than I’m used to, all because of the new requirements they’ve sprung on us all. But be patient with me and I’ll be patient with you, and we’ll all see if we can’t muddle through together, right?”

After Local Hazards, I only had one class left to go. Like Professor Bryony’s class, Coach Callahan’s Fighting To Disable class was one I wouldn’t have chosen to take for myself. Now I was not only committed to taking it, but to getting an A in it as well… that was the first of three tasks that Amaranth had set for me in order to earn the right to wear her collar.

There was a good practical reason behind that, as a low grade in a five credit hour class would have a heavier impact on my GPA. I wasn’t sure it was a goal that was within my reach, though… fighting was not something I was suited for, by aptitude or inclination. When I’d talked to Coach Callahan about my chances, she’d basically told me that she didn’t see me as an A student even at my best, but she might throw me some chances to bump my grade up if she thought I was giving it my all.

So that’s what I did… spent an hour swinging a phantasmal copy of my quarterstaff, doing my best to take my opponents out as fast and as hard as I could. That was the focus of the class. She called it “fighting to win”… it wasn’t exactly lethal combat, but it wasn’t specifically non-lethal. Her stance was that you got the most possibility of winning when you didn’t care if your opponent lived or died, so long as they were out of the fight.

It was gut-wrenching stuff… and head-, arm-, and leg-wrenching, too. I got through it the only way I could: by putting one foot in front of the other… and then swinging as hard as I could. The illusionary weapons we used were set up for maximum realism in their effects, including illusionary wounds… but luckily they’d also been set for a quick “reset” after one combatant was rendered unable to continue, so going for the most devastating blow possible actually made things less grisly.

Harder to shake off than the brief images of carnage was the feeling of impact when my mock-staff hit someone’s knee or head. I was starting to regret the scheduling that had me in Callahan’s fighting class every day right before dinner.

Amaranth still had the same thing on her mind as she had at lunch: Twyla.

“How sure are you that she doesn’t have demon blood, baby?” Amaranth asked.

“Very,” I said. “She’s religious, remember?”

“There has to be some proportion of demon to human at which it’s possible to invoke the divine,” Amaranth said. “Otherwise you’d get people who were human to every indication but who would suddenly be stricken with pain when they tried to pray.”

“Right, but at that point… well, if they’re human to every indication, they wouldn’t be spontaneously making fire, would they?” I said.

“Sneezing, you mean,” Steff said.

“What?” I asked.

“She sneezed. In the cafeteria that day,” Steff said. “She didn’t ‘make’ fire… she sneezed it.”

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