Teddi Lundegard was an empathic telepath, which I imagined made it really easy for most of her patients to let her know what was going on in their lives and how they felt about it… they could just open up. My mind was hostile terrain to living, mortal creatures who were of the material plane. Any direct contact with a plane-touched mind could have adverse effects on a subtle artist, but a demon’s mind contained elements that were directly inimical to mortal life.

I was mortal enough that indirect contact… like picking up thoughts and feelings leaking from my head… was largely safe, though I’d been told it could be uncomfortable to be around me when I had a lot on my mind. Shielding against such background noise was a natural knack for most telepaths, but something that could impede the mental healing process.

Teddi had a magic item that worked like a filter. It didn’t keep everything out… that was the difference between a filter and a shield, I supposed. With guidance from some think tank back on the coast she’d learned to do a sort of indirect scan… was how she’d explained it, though I was pretty sure that a gorgon’s gaze actually did transmit through reflections and the mirror thing was a myth that dated back to before it was common knowledge that gorgons needed to turn their petrifying glare on in the first place.

The session rooms in the mental healing office were designed to be comfortable and relaxing, and as a result they were homier than the dorms most of the university students lived in, which hadn’t been. Over the summer they’d evidently been remodeled. The room that Teddi had used had been something like a large and open living room, with the feel of a cabin or lodge complete with comfortable furniture and a great big fireplace. She was still using that room, or a part of it. It had been cut in half.

It seemed like she’d opted to give up more of the office part of the office in order to keep the sitting area comfortable.

I’d opted to sit on the floor, and Teddi had done the same. She’d cut her hair short over the summer, and without so much weight holding it down the remainder had gone all curly. I complimented her on it because it seemed like an easy way to start talking.

“Thanks,” she said. “You look like you’re growing yours out?”

“I guess maybe by default, at first,” I said. “Now I kind of feel like I might like to see it a little longer, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

“Well, you know, most salons have a glamour mirror that can show you what it would like, and different ways to wear it,” Teddi said.

“What I really mean is that I wouldn’t know how to do anything with it,” I said. Teddi nodded. The subject of my grandmother and her thoughts on hair, vanity, and utility were an old subject between us. “Though I guess… well, I’m becoming friends with this G&D student who does effects with her hair. I don’t know if she does regular styling or not, because with her own she goes for sculpting and bright colors… but I could ask her advice. And Two could help me. She’d love that.”

“You say that with less… resignation… than you might have before,” Teddi said. “As I recall, you weren’t a fan of Two fussing over you.”

“No,” I said. “But she’s mostly over her phase of wanting to make me into a copy of her. She still treats me like a doll, but… I don’t think she has a dichotomy in her head between people and things. She believes she was just a thing before she was freed, but becoming a person didn’t make her stop being a thing, if that makes sense.”

“I’m sure it makes sense to her,” Teddi said. “It doesn’t need to make sense to me.”

“It makes a kind of sense to me,” I said. “She’s taking me shopping for clothes this weekend. Nicki… that’s my new friend… might be coming, too. I have to ask her. But, anyway, Two’s a bit better about things like compromise now.” I gestured down at my shirt. “Like this top. It’s me… like me, embellished. But still me.”

“She got that? It’s nice.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s not something I’d wear day-to-day, especially when I’m in a fighting class five days a week, but it’s something that I can at least see myself wearing on purpose.”

“You’re suitemates now?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And I think it’s going to work out better in the long run than being roommates, though we’ve kind of got to find a balance, I think, between living on top of each other and only seeing each other at meals.”

“Maybe you could join some of the groups she’s involved with,” Teddi said. “I can’t think of a campus bake sale I saw last year that she wasn’t part of.”

“I don’t think she belongs to all those groups,” I said. “She just likes bake sales.”

“Still, that’s something you could do with her,” Teddi said. “But I know what a difference it can make, being adjacent to someone instead of sharing space with them… up through last year, we all shared offices here. Now I have my own little sanctum.”

“Yeah, I noticed you’ve been remodeling,” I said.

“Well, the mental healing department’s budget has about doubled in size,” she said. “But demand has more tripled or quadrupled, so…”

“Isn’t that kind of… alarming?”

“I don’t think anything has happened to make people need our services more in particular,” she said. “It’s more that people are more aware of the opportunity, and less reticent about seeking help. That’s a good thing. We’ve been somewhat… underutilized for most of the time I’ve been here. That’s one reason I didn’t mind taking on the cases that my colleagues felt less comfortable about handling. That, and I thought everyone was entitled to the same care. But it wasn’t a hardship, it was just work… the kind of work I’ve wanted to be doing all along.”

“In retrospect, it does seem a little weird to wait two days to get in,” I said.

“I hope you would have said something if it was urgent,” Teddi said. “I can tell you’ve been talking around something since you sat down… I mean, if I wasn’t empathic, the fact that you said something about my hair would have been a dead giveaway. I don’t mind playing catch-up, Mackenzie, especially when we haven’t seen each other for months. But is there something important?”

“Yes,” I said. “But when I contacted you, iit didn’t seem too… time-sensitive. I mean, it’s an ongoing issue, but by definition that means it’s not going anywhere.”

“You know that things can get worse if you ignore them.”

“Yeah, I do,” I said. “This isn’t exactly something I can ignore… I guess I’m looking for something more like a consultation than our typical healing sessions. I was actually wanting to talk more about mental defense than anything else..”

“Your father?”

“Yeah, he’s been back,” I said.

“Well, like I’ve told you before, the kinds of defenses you’re looking for… they’re really more your domain than mine,” she said. “The subtle arts aren’t magic like you know it. I can form a shield of thoughts around another person or even a space like a room, but that’s my thoughts… when I’m not there and not focusing on them, it’ll fade. There’s no way to weave that into an enchantment that will make it stay.”

“But magic can affect thoughts in similar ways to your thought-shield,” I said, pointing to the circlet she wore.

“It can,” she said. “It’s just not my particular area of expertise. I did look into it a little, in case that the assertive dreaming and forced waking you practiced didn’t do the trick. There are potions that prevent dreaming, but dreaming is a part of the mind’s natural healing and defenses… going too long without doing it will make you more vulnerable to outside influences. There are amulets that encourage good or peaceful dreams, but I haven’t found anything that suggests this would prevent someone from coming into said dreams. There were some more possibilities, like astral seals, but they didn’t seem necessary… did he bother you more over the summer?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I went a long time between visitations… anyway, it’s not him alone that’s brought me here.”

“You’ve been having other visitations?”

“One,” I said. “Or visitor, multiple visitations. It’s… complicated. When I contacted you, I was looking for a way to tell if someone had been in my head. Preferably an early warning system, but even something that let me know for sure, after the fact…”

“So you’re not sure if this new visitor is real, or just a dream?”

This was the part that I’d been reluctant to broach. Dee was also a patient of Teddi’s, and while that could make it easier to explain the owl-turtle thing, we could also get into awkward territory because of confidentiality issues.

Also, Dee had made it sound like Teddi didn’t quite believe in the owl-turtle thing as an entity in its own right. It was possible that hearing confirmation from a second person would assuage her doubts, but it was also possible that she’d maintain her existing skepticism would win out.

“You know Dee… Delia Daella… right?” I said.

“I know Dee,” Teddi said.

“You know about her, um… owl-turtle thing?”

“You’ve been dreaming about it?”

“No,” I said. “Not dreaming about it, really, as such.”

“…I take it that Dee has shared with you some of her theories about its nature,” Teddi said.

“They aren’t just theories, Teddi,” I said. “It’s been in my dreams… and sometimes maybe skulking around them. I’m pretty sure of that fact now, but the confirmation comes from a questionable source, so it wouldn’t hurt to be sure.”

“Okay,” Teddi said. “Let’s maybe start at the beginning.”

“That would actually be last year, when things got weird and the ambassadors from Ceilos were here to protect Dee and the other underworld students in Harlowe Hall,” I said.

“Just before you started seeing me,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “The underworlders had this creature from the outer planes who was…”

“The big, sightless fish thing,” Teddi said.

“Yes,” I said. “And one night it turned its attention to Harlowe Hall in a way that sort of… messed up the rules of dreaming in a way that made spontaneous dream-sharing possible.”

“…my instinct is to say that that’s impossible, but I guess I don’t know what sort of effects a cross-planar distortion might have,” Teddi said. “I am skeptical of the existence of the owl-turtle thing as more than a construct of imagination because as a telepath I’m aware that dreams aren’t an actual ‘place’ or ‘thing’, they’re just thoughts… with all the weight of thoughts and usually with less coherence. The idea of a dream object or creature having any persistence outside of a dream… well, it’s the same problem you’d have with a psychic enchantment.”

“Yeah, the owl-turtle thing actually pretty much said that itself,” I said. “That’s there no ‘world of dreams’ it exists in or anything like htat. But it has the coherence that a very literal and coherent mind could give it. Two’s mind is… okay, I think if you could look inside her skull you’d probably see something that’s a lot like a brain. But her mind was made by a human, and it was made to be very… task-oriented. So if you or I dreamed and in the dream there was… a filing cabinet in the corner of the room… it might just be a thought that says ‘there’s a filing cabinet there’ and we just sort of fill in the details, but Two’s mind would actually create a filing cabinet and define its properties.”

“That sounds plausible, from what I know about golem psyches,” Teddi said. “Which I admit is not much. Audra and my family’s other house golems aren’t as mindful as Two. Still, though… I know you’re not really in a position to know, but do you think it’s possible that Dee herself is reaching out subconsciously in her sleep?”

“Do you think she’d be able to do that without a reaction between our minds?” I said. “Extraplanar influences, demonic tendencies… I’m pretty sure you know better than most people what my mind can do to a telepath who wanders in, and Hissy was awake when she tried to read me.”

“Yes, but Dee’s a more powerful and better trained telepath,” Teddi said. “Hissy’s a more efficient communicator, but that would work against her… she could have had as many as four or five separate channels open between her mind and yours.”

“How much of it is Dee acting under some kind of heavy psychic impression from Two and how much of it is an actual thing in itself, I really don’t know,” I said. “But for now it’s more useful for me to take it at its word that it’s real. And that night was the first time I encountered it… and the only time, until recently.”

I gave her a rundown of the way my dreams had been going, including the cat-and-mouse games between the owl-turtle thing and the man, and the effects they’d apparently had on my sleep those nights.

“I have to tell you something and I want you to know I’m only saying it because I’m being completely honest,” she said.

“I, uh, kind of expect that,” I said.

“Well, it’s been a few months,” she said. “Anyway, if you were anyone else and I weren’t more aware of your history, I’d be wondering about your fantasy life right about now.”

“My fantasy life involves things like getting rich for designing the next big TV, or being collared… or knights riding around on motorcycles, though it’s been ages since I had time for that,” I said. “This stuff… night time cloak-and-dagger, tangling with Law agents… it’s not the sort of thing I’d ever wish for. I mean, there have been times I’ve wished for my life to be more exciting, or to involve some sort of, you know, conflict… who doesn’t want to be a hero?”

“I think some people would prefer to be a villain,” Teddi said. “But most people want, at least, to be a pivotal figure in the story of their lives.”

“I don’t want to be the bad guy, but I really don’t feel particularly heroic,” I said. “I feel… well, actually, I just feel really put-upon. I’m sure that sounds… I don’t know what it sounds like. But I feel like I’m being intruded upon and inconvenienced for a bunch of stuff that I really… okay, I actually know how to explain exactly how I feel.”

“Okay.”

“Ever since she got back, Steff has been telling people this story about me fighting some sort of dread lord or something,” I said. “It’s really just Steff being Steff… and in a pretty innocuous way for Steff, but I find it more frustrating than I probably should. It’s just the idea of my school year and my social life being interrupted because somebody’s got some kind of evil master plan that I have to foil… in a book or TV show, it would all kind of neatly fit together, but my life doesn’t have room in it for fighting evil. So it’s like, I don’t know what my father wants and I wish I didn’t have to care, because I don’t have time to deal with him. I don’t want to ‘vanquish’ him or come up with a plan to stop him, because I don’t think I should have to.”

“I think that’s valid,” Teddi said.

“But he’s my father.”

“That doesn’t make him your responsibility,” Teddi said. “When he manipulates you, he’s making himself into your problem, but there isn’t an actual tie of obligation between the two of you. And it’s fair to resent him for that.”

“You know, it’s funny, but I actually worry about that,” I said. “I hate him and I’m sure he’s evil, but now that we’re talking about it… I feel kind of petty about resenting him, and it’s hard to feel petty and fair.”

“Well, he is a person,” Teddi said. “Not necessarily a good person and not a person you need to have in your life. But it’s hard to ignore the fact that he’s a person, or turn off your normal emotional responses to people. That doesn’t mean you owe him anything. You can feel bad about cutting someone out of your life but it doesn’t make it the wrong thing to do, just like you can feel sorry for someone without being obligated to help them.”

“He keeps trying to convince me that he has nothing but my best interests at heart,” I said. “But he’s… pushy. When he pretends to care about me, it reminds me of the old comedy cliche where the guy is told to be quiet and he goes on a monologue about of course he’ll be quiet when he’s told to be quiet. You know?”

“I do,” Teddi said. “You’re talking about someone who shows every sign of ignoring your boundaries and no sign of respecting you. You’ve never asked me if I agree with your decision to shut him out, but I support it completely. Whatever you have to do to establish a boundary…”

“I’m not sure you’ll agree when I tell you what I did,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“I asked a guy I sort of know with access to his government file to slip it to my grandmother,” I said.

“Do you regret it?”

“No,” I said, and if I sounded surprised it was because I was. “You know, I was pretty sure that once I started explaining this to someone outside my life I’d be like ‘What have I done?’, but really… no, I don’t regret it. It was something to do, a way of striking back. I did it.”

“Do you think it’ll accomplish anything?”

“At the very least I hope it will give him something to worry about other than digging around in my head and trying to run my life,” I said. “I don’t know if anything will come of it. It’s like trying to hit someone with a double ricochet. But I felt like I had to do something… I was angry at the time I decided to do it, but it was a pretty calm rage, considering. I don’t think it’s a revenge thing.”

“I think we might want to explore that further, but I did have a thought pop up from my head and I wanted to share it before I forget,” Teddi said. The wording was unusual, but professional telepaths tended to be more specific about where thoughts originated. “Depending on the exact channel that’s being used to enter your mind, something like my filter circlet might impede entrance… it’s not exactly a cheap or common magic item, but I don’t have a pressing need for mine outside of my sessions with you. And it is mine, not the office’s. If you would like to borrow it for a few nights to see how it works… I think it’s got a good chance of keeping out Dee’s owl-turtle, because one way or another it’s using her natural telepathy.”

“How about my father?”

“I’d file that under ‘it could work’,” Teddi said. “From what you’ve told me about him, though, I think his way in is deeper and more… well, I suppose I’d say ‘primal’. That’s what’s going to make him hard to keep out.”

“Then I think I’m going to decline,” I said. “If I could keep both of them out, I would, but the owl-turtle thing is more benign, and it makes him nervous. He doesn’t understand it, and that scares him a little. When I contacted you I was hoping to get some help in dealing with it, but now… now I’m starting to think about making a deal with it.”

“Is that really wise?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Dee’s pretty sure it means well, though. This isn’t a matter of the lesser of two evils or the devil you know… I definitely know my father better, even if I don’t know him well. It’s more of a choice between evil and not evil, or the devil I know and the… anomalous dream-thing I don’t. But the owl-turtle thing just wants to exist, and it doesn’t need to hurt anyone to do that. That, and Dee thinks it might be some sort of representation of self-awareness.”

“Sounds like her theories have evolved,” Teddi said. “She told me it was an avatar of annoyance.”

“It’s… hard to like,” I said. “Dee thinks that’s because Two didn’t like it, so ‘unlikeable’ is part of its make-up.”

“I don’t mean to treat your life like it’s a subject for a paper, but this is pretty interesting,” Teddi said. “I think I might be able to help you more if I knew more… and maybe I could help you and Dee both if I actually observed this owl-turtle thing. Would you mind passing along a message that I’d like a chance to talk to her about it some more?”

I wondered at the fact that Teddi had doubted Dee’s reports of the owl-turtle thing but I’d apparently trusted mine. That probably had little to do with her or me personally, though. It was just a matter of one person telling her a crazy, impossible thing being easier to write off than two.

“I don’t know how she’ll take that, but I can pass it along,” I said.

“That’s all I can ask,” Teddi said.

“Are they necessary?” I asked, looking at a page asking me to write out my goals. What were my goals? I didn’t really know what the mental healing process consisted of or what it was capable of achieving, exactly.

“They can be useful,” she said. “Some people come in here with one specific problem, or they otherwise have a clear agenda. Some people come in with nothing more than ‘I want to be better.’”

“I don’t think I really fall into either category,” I said. “But… I suppose I’m more like the second one. I know you need something more to go on than ‘I want to be better’, but I didn’t really have anything more substantial than the fact that I’ve been through some messed up stuff and I have a lot of issues and things about my life that I don’t really enjoy.”

“When you say ‘my life’,” Teddi said, and I would almost swear she was projecting the concept of “aha!” directly into my brain as she said it, “are you talking about circumstances that surround you, or are you talking about internal aspects?”

“You mean, do I like myself?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t put it that way.”

“Because you’re being diplomatic?”

“Because I’m being precise,” she said. “There are going to be aspects of yourself that you do like and aspects you don’t like. That’s true of any person. The question is, are you here to learn to deal with those parts of yourself that you don’t like?”

“‘Deal with’ as in ‘put up with’, or ‘deal with’ as in change?”

“Either or both may be appropriate or possible,” Teddi said. “You see, Mack… mental healing isn’t like physical healing. Physical health is a thing, a quality. If someone’s body gets sick, they just need to be cured. A body in its normal state is healthy and undamaged, and healing spells just reset it back to that. Mental healing doesn’t work like that. Mental health is… well, it’s more like an opinion.”

“An opinion?” I repeated.

“Do you feel like you’re okay?” she asked.

“Honestly? No.”

“Then you need mental healing,” she said.

“So, if I believed I didn’t then I wouldn’t,” I said.

“If you believed you didn’t, you wouldn’t be here,” she said.

“So there’s no such thing as a person who believes they’re okay but who really badly needs some mental healing?” I asked.

“Well… people can have differing opinions, can’t they?” Teddi replied. “My point is that there is no baseline of health for the mind. There’s no normal to reset it back to.”

“Why do you suppose it’s like that?” I asked. “Why isn’t there like a ‘Cure Serious Issues’ potion I can take, or whatever? Why can’t a wizard just heal my mind?”

“Well, think about what a spell like that would actually be doing,” Teddi said. “If your mind is wounded, what are the wounds?”

“I don’t know, my memories, I guess?”

“Memories,” Teddi said. “Experiences. Patterns of thought and behavior. Imagine a potion removing those things… what would be left?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Would it be so bad finding out?”

“There’s a theory among alchemists that potions of forgetfulness work by healing the mind,” Teddi said. “Under this theory, every lingering thought or pattern… every memory… is a wound on the mind. Sometimes, it is necessary to remove something from the mind in order to heal the person, but we obviously have to be more selective than an all-out healing spell could be.”

I remembered the warning I’d been given when I got my piercings. It hadn’t really crossed my mind much since then, even though I was still in the period where a non-extremely-localized healing spell could cause a lot of sudden discomfort.

“Anyway,” Teddi said, “Like I believe you said, you’ve got a lot on your mind… those sheets aren’t necessary in the sense that anybody will require you to complete them, but they can be useful.”

“The problem is that I’m not even sure where to begin,” I said. “I feel like I could probably fill ten times this space, if I sat down and started writing.”

“Then just sit down and start,” Teddi said. “Maybe eventually you will fill that many pages, but for now, what you put in the space you have will be where we begin. You know, some people say that writing can be like therapy… I believe that’s true, but I also believe the reverse.”

“Therapy can be like writing?”

She nodded.

“Do you do much writing, Mack?” she asked.

“I used to,” I said.

“Have you ever had so many ideas in your head that it seemed like you could just sit down and start writing and they would just all come pouring out?” she asked. “But then you sit down with a piece of paper in front of you, and can’t think of any one specific thing in particular to write down?”

I nodded.

“Yeah,” I said. “I do know what that’s like.”

“Well, this can be like that,” she said. “You have days or weeks between sessions and your head’s full of thoughts, but then you have an hour or two to do something with them and… nothing comes.”

“So is there any point to me being here right now?”

“That’s up to you,” Teddi said. “I’ve told you I’m free and I don’t mind being here, so it’s really a case of what you want to do with your time. Would you like to hear an observation?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s what I’m here for.”

“If you’ll have a better idea what we should talk about after filling out that sheet, you might have a better idea how to fill it out after we’ve talked more.”

And so we ended up just talking. There was no agenda, there were no goals. We paused briefly when Audra came back to gather up the files that Teddi had been sorting and take them to another room.

I think I learned more about Teddi than she did about me in that first session, at least in terms of the number of facts recounted. I’m sure she took away quite a lot of stuff about me even when she was just telling me about her childhood, which was a lot in line with what I expected for someone from such an old family with such old money: dance recitals, private schools, riding lessons.

“Did you have your own horse?” I asked.

Something about the question seemed to surprise her, or make her realize something surprising.

“Oh, no,” she said.

“Did you have one that was owned by your family?” I asked.

“No, no,” she said. “I mean, there would have been money for one if I’d wanted one, but it never occurred to me… I guess it would have been inconvenient. Our house didn’t have any stables. None of the houses did, my grandparents’ or my uncle’s or any of the cousins we visited. I guess I sort of grew up thinking that horses weren’t something you kept at a house. I remember thinking it was sort of novel the first time I visited a friend whose family did have stables, but by that point I was over my pretty pretty pony phase.”

“Your family has dwarven stock, doesn’t it?” I said. “Somewhere way back.”

“Good guess,” she said. “You got that from the lack of stables?”

“Well, it fit with the sort of clannish attitude towards property,” I said. “I mean, I’m sure there are families with nothing but human blood and proud of it who set up legal hurdles to protect their assets, but I can’t imagine those assets wouldn’t have included horses a few hundred years back.”

Teddi nodded.

“Dwarves are one of the longer-lived mortal races,” she said. “So they tend to think in terms of ancestors and descendants in a fairly distinctive way. I didn’t realize that was a dwarven thing until I went to college. My school was women’s territory, for dwarves. A woman in my class had a textbook that was sixty years out of date. It had been meticulously updated several times. There were a lot of jokes about how cheap dwarves are, but it’s more a matter of… well, stone lasts. Gold lasts. A thing that one person uses once isn’t that valuable, to the dwarven perspective.”

A lot of the things in my mother’s house had been older, but mostly that was because she’d got them second or third hand. My grandmother’s house had been full of things that were probably older than she was, though that hadn’t occurred to me during the years I was living there. They were relics of an older time, but so was she. I wondered about whether she’d intended to pass any more of them down, if things had gone differently. They’d been more strained than estranged, before my mother’s death.

“You’ve gone quiet again,” Teddi said. It wasn’t the first time I’d lapsed into thought during our conversation.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s your time,” she said again. “Spend it as you will. If you need to gather your thoughts, that’s fine. If you’re not yet sure if you’re ready to voice something, think about it for next time.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s more… it’s habit. I’m not used to having someone to talk to. Someone, else, I mean.”

“Do you talk to yourself a lot?”

“Does this question have a wrong answer?”

She laughed.

“Anyone who would lock someone up for talking to themselves isn’t much of a judge of mental health,” she said. “Having a confidante is important, and sometimes there are no other options. Also, how else do you get to know someone if not by having a conversation with them?”

“I’d like to get a little better at having conversations with other people,” I said.

“Well,” she said. “There you go. I do believe we have discovered a goal… and that makes this as good a time as any to mention that I haven’t eaten since noon.”

“Do we have to stop now?” I asked.

“We can, or we can break,” she said. “Or we can have something sent in. How do you feel about pizza? Oh, there’s that suspicious twitch again.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know it’s the most stereotypical college food, and the one that’s almost synonymous with the word ‘delivery’… but I kind of have… well, okay, this isn’t something I think is written down in a file in some vault somewhere in the first place, so I don’t even know why I thought…”

“In fairness, you are dealing with a mindreader,” she said. “But really, it’s just the most obvious and convenient choice. There are other options.”

“I just had pizza last night,” I said. “And I technically don’t have to eat food, so… you just get whatever you want.”

“Would it bother you to watch me eat?” she asked. The words hit me like a cold draft. “Oh… well… maybe we should break while I take care of that, then?”

“No,” I said quickly. I didn’t want her to think that this was a big thing, since it related to what I couldn’t talk about, and I also didn’t want it to become any bigger of a thing. “Let’s… I don’t know. I want to try something new, maybe. Not pizza. What do you recommend?”

“Well, the pizza place I like also does pasta and hot Vitulian sandwiches,” she said. “Meatballs, salami, that kind of thing.”

“I don’t know if I like that sort of thing,” I said.

“Is that because it’s something new, maybe?” she said. “I have some menus in my desk. They’re all places that I like so they could collectively be considered a very broad recommendation. I’ll let you see them and you can see if anything jumps out.”

I don’t know if she put the Vitulian place on top or if they just happened to be arranged that way. The meatball sandwich didn’t look any more appetizing than it sounded. Another one that had piles of shaved beef was kind of hard to look at… but in tearing my eyes away from it, I spotted something that looked better.

“Four cheese and tomato sandwich,” I read. “That sounds interesting.”

“The vegetarian option,” Teddi said.

“I guess,” I said. “That’s not specifically why… though, I suppose I’m not really in the mood for meat.”

“Did you only start eating food recently?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, again. I ate it growing up. I don’t really recall a lot of strong preferences. I think I had a mix of little kid pickiness and omnivoraciousness, pretty much.”

“That’s a good word,” Teddi said.

She put an order in. I apologetically noted that I’d left my money in my room, and she said I could pay next time. I didn’t really see the point of a “hot sandwich” as opposed to any other kind, unless it was a hamburger or something. I couldn’t picture how heating up a ham or turkey sandwich would improve it… and probably that was true for the sorts of sandwiches we got in the lunch room, but the toasted or grilled or whatever they did with it bread and gooey layer of cheese was pretty good. I had been thinking that tomatoes and cheese sounded a bit like pizza, but despite the similar cuisine it was really quite a different taste.

I felt better in a lot of ways after eating… more relaxed, and more trusting, I supposed. Maybe some people can eat guardedly, but I’m not one of them.

“You said you used to write,” Teddi asked me later on in the session.

“Yeah,” I said. “Fan fic… uh, fiction based on…”

“I know the term,” she said. “What fandom?”

“Mecknights, mostly,” I said.

“I don’t know that one,” she said. “Why’d you stop?”

“I didn’t set out to,” I said. “I just… well, I realized that I’d never get away from my grandmother if I didn’t get serious about going to college, and that meant more focus on school work and getting a job, which wasn’t easy. You were pretty right in judging my accent. I’m from Blackwater.”

“I suppose I should have known that,” Teddi said. “You and your grandmother have both been in the news. I try to block that stuff out when I’m dealing with you, though. I don’t know how much of that is true, how much of what’s important to some reporter actually loom large in your own mind, and so on… the things you tell me matter, Mack. It matters that you tell me them, when you tell me them, why you tell me them. That’s why I’d like to rely on what you tell me and what I can tell for myself instead of what I hear somewhere.”

“I appreciate that,” I said. “What else does my voice tell you?”

“Either you pick up regional variations really quickly, or you’ve taken a little trouble to not sound like a wetlander,” Teddi said. “The accents are similar, but most people from Blackwater sound more like what the coasters think plainsfolk sound like.”

“It’s not really deliberate or anything,” I said. “I just… well, I guess at some point I decided it would be better to sound like the people on TV than the people all around me. In the long run, I mean. I never planned on staying in Blackwater. Anyway, we never lived in the swamp or anything. It was more hills and trees. It’s funny, you know, Prax is considered a prairie province and Blackwater is supposed to be the swamp province, but following the Enias River, it’s all hills and trees.”

“The grasslands open up more to the west,” Teddi said.

“What about me?” I said. “Not just where I’m from. You said that you learn to read other things. What does my voice tell you about me?”

“You’re somewhat guarded,” she said. “Except for a few times when strong emotion overtakes you, your voice has been really level.”

“Amaranth says I only have two volumes,” I said. “It’s funny, when I met Audra I was thinking that a friend of mine doesn’t really inflect her voice much. It never occurred to me that I might be the same.”

“When you get indignant,” she said, “there’s a… well, okay, I’m trying to project again. There’s a sort of conflict or imbalance or something in play there. It’s as though you’re really proud of yourself without actually believing in yourself.”

My first reaction was to say that sounded impossible, but my second reaction was that it was pretty accurate.

“How is that possible?” I asked, which addressed the first without denying the truth of her observation.

“If I had to put into words… and I suppose I do… I’d say it’s like you have confidence in the truth of what’s being said but you don’t have confidence in the speaker.”

“I am the speaker, though.”

“Do you have confidence in yourself?”

“No,” I said. “Even when I’m sure I’m correct, I can’t quite bring myself to believe I’m fundamentally right.”

“That’s not quite another goal, but it is a problem identified,” Teddi said. There were no timepieces in the room, but she glanced at a window. “Did you want to get back to your dorm before full dark?”

“Yeah, but… what?” I said. I hadn’t even noticed how much dimmer the room had become, to say nothing of the sky outside. “Wow, the time… I…”

“I think we should probably set an appointment,” Teddi said. “I’ll have to consult my calendar if you would like another weekend session; my Saturdays are pretty packed, ordinarily. Honestly, I’m getting to be booked up most weekday evenings, too.”

“How about Wednesday afternoons?” I asked. Monday seemed too soon… I wanted a few days to digest things, not just come back and try to start talking again. I felt like we’d made more progress in terms of a relationship than anything else, and that wasn’t bad… it was probably necessary, even. But it wouldn’t accomplish much in the long term.

“After classes?”

“I have a big break after lunch,” I said.

“I know I don’t have anyone at one on Wednesday,” she said. “It’s yours, if you want it.”

“Every week?”

“If you want it,” she said. “And you can a-mail me if there’s something on your mind at an odd hour, or if you’d just be more comfortable saying something in writing.”

“Okay,” I said. “So… I guess I’ll see you Wednesday, then.”

“If you hold on a moment, I can give you an appointment card,” she said. “And I can set up an automated reminder if you’d like.”

“You have no idea how good an idea that is.”

It was the weekend, after all… and even if his lack of availability had anything to do with recent events, it could be nothing more than him wanting to keep his head down for a few days, or have a chance to step back away from things.

He had a life outside of work, after all. Maybe this wasn’t universally true of lawyers, but it was in his case. He was planning a wedding, or at least he was party to one that was being planned… and that was just one more reason why it wasn’t necessarily suspicious or remarkable that he wasn’t around to take my reflection on a Saturday morning.

If some shadowy figure I didn’t recognize was answering his mirror and telling me that I should not concern myself with the whereabouts of Mr. Jenkins, I would have known that something was definitely going on and I shouldn’t trust anyone or anything, but with nothing but an ordinary canned image popping up and telling me how much he values his generic client or associate’s time… well, that didn’t give me much to go on.

If I had any real reason to be suspicious of the mental healing center, I would have just not gone… but it was in the same innocently menacing category as Lee’s absence. Steff and Dee vouched for the woman, there were all sorts of legitimate reasons she might have been available to answer at three in the morning… and really, if there was some sort of sinister shadowy something or other at work, wouldn’t they have gone out of their way to not be suspicious?

My brain wanted to fill in something like “unless they knew I’d think that”, but I wasn’t so far gone into the depths of paranoia as to believe that somebody might have instructed Lundegard to act suspiciously in order to lull me into a false sense of security.

Anyway, the really big shoe had already dropped… if there was an agenda at work here, it would be a little one. The school looking for information to use against me seemed like one possibility, and the reason I’d wanted to talk to Lee. In the absence of his advice, I supposed that I would just ask for a statement of confidentiality in writing so if they tried to do anything with anything I said we could turn it around on them.

It didn’t even have to be any bigger than one person… maybe “Teddi” was writing a book or something.

In any event, with no real chance of a literal ambush or anything concrete I could put my finger on, it seemed like the best thing to do was just go in. I could always leave, if it wasn’t on the level… it seemed like it would be tantamount to legal suicide for the school to keep me in the mental healing center against my will, given the facts in my case against them.

As soon as I thought that, though, it occurred to me that there was something more of a precedent for holding someone in a mental healing facility against their will. Okay, an extension on the side of the student healing center wasn’t exactly an asylum, but it didn’t seem completely inconceivable that the professional mental healers the school employed would be capable of making the determination to have someone put away for good.

It seemed mostly inconceivable that they would, for all the reasons that I’d told myself it was unlikely that imperial agents would make me disappear and more. Power had its limits, even when it was being abused. Without someone like Embries trying to get rid of me, I doubted the school could pull something like that off… and I knew Embries didn’t want to get rid of me for the simple reason that I was still walking around, and I was pretty sure there weren’t two entities with his level of power and influence intimately tied into the school’s administration.

I doubted he would have stood for that kind of competition. I doubted the school would have stood long after it, either.

So it was that after a lot of hemming and hawing and a little bit of sleep that I found myself walking into the waiting room of the mental healing annex. It wasn’t like the waiting area of its physical counterpart… it was an actual lobby. There was a small, contoured wooden desk near one wall, but nobody sitting behind it. The other furniture seemed like something you’d see at a mid-range inn… comfortable-looking chairs with backs and armrests, neither identical to each other nor mismatched.

I didn’t get a chance to find out how comfortable they were, though, because a woman in a purple outfit that looked like something between an exercise suit and pajamas popped into view in far doorway.

“Miss Mackenzie,” she said, smiling blankly and pleasantly. It wasn’t quite a question, but it didn’t sound definite.

“Ms, please,” I said.

“Are you Miss Mackenzie,” she said, still smiling and still not quite asking. Brown bangs moved as she tilted her head slightly, and I glimpsed some indistinct runes. I was too far away to read them and didn’t want to stare, in any event.

“Yes, I’m Mackenzie,” I said. That seemed like a good compromise between causing her distress by giving her an answer she couldn’t deal with and sticking to my wands when it came to biased naming conventions.

“Teddi is waiting for you,” she said. “If you will follow me.”

Her unchanging facial expression was somewhat disconcerting, as was her lack of inflection. Two had a somewhat unmodulated voice, but in her case it wasn’t so much that she couldn’t inflect as she wasn’t acquainted with when and why to do so. This woman’s voice just sounded like she was stuck speaking in a soothing tone, with results that were anything but.

“Have you worked here long?” I asked her as I followed her into a hallway.

“Sometimes,” she said. She didn’t elaborate and I didn’t ask.

The room she took me to again reminded me more of an inn or lodge than anything else. It was big enough that a somewhat intimate and informal class could have been taught in it, and I supposed that maybe that did happen… skilled subtle artists were rare enough and mental healing was a demanding enough vocation that it seemed likely the professors did double duty.

The golem didn’t follow me inside but just knocked on the doorframe.

“Ms. Mackenzie to see you, Theodora,” she said.

“Thank you, Audra,” a woman said. I hadn’t immediately spotted her because I hadn’t known where to look. She wasn’t behind the big oak desk, or sitting in front of the fireplace, or on any of the chairs. She’d been seated on the floor in the corner, in what I recognized as a meditative position. “Go get some lunch.”

Audra turned and left with an abruptness that would have garnered some words about manners from Two.

“You’ll have to excuse Audra,” Theodora Lundegard said to me. She was wearing a brown tunic-like blouse with some beadwork on the front and a pair of tannish leggings. She had a metal band across her forehead, sort of like a very minimalist crown. There was some kind of crystal set into the middle of it, covered with a network of metal lines. “If she isn’t polite, she also isn’t exactly rude. Her ways are simply inflexible, and they were set by someone who didn’t consider manners to be important in a golem. Also, please call me Teddi… only Audra and my mother call me by my full name.”

“Your mother’s responsible for her ‘ways’?” I guessed.

“Oh, no,” Teddi said. “She tried her best… well, her hardest… to get Audra to behave the way she thinks a servant should. She’s very well-preserved, but she’s from an age when even making golems that looked human was sort of daring. Audra is, I mean.”

“But she eats?”

“And breathes, and sleeps, after a fashion,” Teddi said.

“How long has she been working without a meal break?” I asked.

“We’ve been working since a little bit before noon,” she said. “We had breakfast then. She’s good at filing and things. Please, come in.”

I realized that she was sitting in the middle of a semi-circle of stacks of papers.

“Does she belong to you now?” I asked. My internal debate on whether or not to distrust “Teddi” was not alleviated at all by the revelation that her family owned a golem that was at the very least pre-Republican… and that she was making use of Audra, despite her barely-concealed distaste for her mother.

“To my family,” she said. “I don’t have any power to free her, Ms. Mackenzie, but I believe she’s happier when she can get out and do things.”

“Have you ever thought to ask her what would make her happy?”

“Many times,” Teddi said. “Many times I’ve thought I’d figured out a way to ask her in a way that would make sense to her and that she’d be able to answer. My mother… when she didn’t tell me I was foolish for even wondering… always told me that Audra is always happy, she’s just made that way, but I’ve watched her carefully and I think there’s a difference between when she feels… fulfilled, and when she doesn’t.”

“Well, that’s convenient for you, if you have a lot of filing to do,” I said.

“If I didn’t want Audra, my mother would keep her in the china hutch,” Teddi said. “She only needs to eat when she’s active, and she’d only be taken out to dust herself. I don’t exactly work her fingers to the bone, Ms. Mackenzie, but I don’t let her feel neglected or useless, either. I wonder, do you always care this much about people you’ve just met?”

She got points for saying “people”, but then if she knew anything about me at all she’d know I had a golem for a friend and roommate.

“Not always,” I said. I finally closed the door and began to move nearer to her. “The truth is, I don’t notice most people, individually. But Audra sort of… well, she was standing right in front of me and talking to me. I couldn’t help noticing her. Once I noticed her, I cared.”

“I don’t normally use her as a receptionist,” Teddi said. “But it’s sort of a weird weekend here, and I suspected that you wouldn’t give her any problems so I sent her to fetch you.”

“Were you trying to show me how open-minded you were by hanging out with a golem?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” Teddi said. “I had a feeling you might have difficulty opening up to me about your life, so I thought I’d show you something of mine. Audra was my companion, growing up. She did a lot of the raising of me. I can see on your face that you’re trying to imagine what that was like. It wasn’t bad.”

“How much money do your parents have?” I asked. Being raised by a golem nanny was almost a cliche, but I didn’t know that it actually still happened… at least, not among the common folk of the Imperium.

“My parents? Not much,” Teddi said. “My family has a lot of money tied up in land, mines, and various investments. The house I was raised in belongs to a trust. The house I live in today is, too. So does Audra.”

“So only the trustee or trustees could free her.”

“No,” Teddi said, shaking her head. “There are all kinds of protections built in, to make sure the ancestral properties can’t be sold off, the family’s capital can’t be invaded, and the house golems can’t be transferred, sold, or freed. More recently purchased ones have more flexible terms, but the originals… including Audra… are bound to the family.”

“What happens if the family dies out?”

“There are various theories,” Teddi said. “But no one’s really sure.”

Talking about Teddi’s family wasn’t necessarily making me trust her more, or even like her… I couldn’t say that I disliked her, but her background was as alien to me as another plane. I could see the conversation moving smoothly from her background to mine, which was no doubt what she had in mind, but I didn’t want to be distracted from my concerns.

“Isn’t there any paperwork I have to fill out?” I asked. “At the… other place… they won’t even talk to me without giving me a form, any more.”

“Of course,” she said. She rose to her feet. “Would you like to sit down? You can sit anywhere you’d like, I can make myself comfortable anywhere in the room.”

The air temperature was comfortable, but after a moment’s thought I decided to sit in a chair near the fire. I’d never lived anywhere with a fireplace that was in regular use… my grandmother’s house had fireplaces built into some of the rooms, but the chimneys had been blocked off during some modernization and she wasn’t the sort of person to have an illusionary one put in for show. She’d just painted them, bricks and all, like she thought she could paint over a hole in the wall and then used them as little alcoves for knickknacks.

“The fireplace makes you think of something,” Teddi said as I sank into a chair. She sat down on the footstool in front of the one facing it. “Not exactly pleasant, but not unpleasant.”

“My grandmother’s house,” I said. “I don’t have a lot of fond memories of it, but I lived there for nine years. I didn’t come here to talk about her… specifically, I mean.”

“I imagine you have a lot of things on your mind,” she said.

“You have no idea,” I said. “So, what do I have to sign?”

“I made a record for you before you got here,” she said. “That’s all that’s necessary, unless and until we begin any healing. At the moment, we’re just talking. I like to have a bit of an informal chat, so we know what we’re doing with each other, before…”

“I don’t want to do anything informally,” I said. “I want a record.”

“You don’t trust me,” she said. Her face was more responsive than Audra’s, but only just… I could tell that her reactions were deliberately muted instead of non-existent.

“I just wonder if you had some kind of instructions on me,” I said.

“What, like ‘handle with care’?” she asked.

“I just mean… you got back to me awfully quick,” I said. “I wondered if anybody had told you to, you know, be available to me.”

“That’s my job,” she said, as though she would have responded just the same to any other student who reached out in the middle of the night.

“At three in the morning?”

“Not every morning, but I tend to stay up late Friday nights,” she said. “A habit from my student days that I never grew out of. I saw your a-mail right before I went to bed. I knew if it was urgent, you’d be waiting for my reply so I wouldn’t have to wait around to see if you responded. Mackenzie, even if I had been given some instructions concerning you, my priority would still be simply to help you. Not ‘just the same as’ any other student, because you’re not any other student, but neither is anyone else.”

“I didn’t a-mail you, though, I a-mailed the center,” I said.

“It forwards to everyone when there’s no one in the office,” she said.

“And no one else answers messages from a Harlowe girl?”

“If you don’t think you can trust me, I can see that someone else helps you,” Teddi said. “Or I could refer you to someone in town. I’m afraid you’d have to pay, but there is a student rate.”

“I don’t distrust you more than anyone else, at the moment,” I said. It was actually kind of pleasant to talk to her, though I didn’t want to say that just yet. I didn’t know her and she didn’t know me, though obviously she knew of me, and she probably knew quite a few specific things about me. “Are you able to read my mind?”

“Possibly, with practice and care,” she said. “If there’s something you want me to delve into your psyche for, we’ll have to do that over the course of many sessions, and I’ll need another healer to act as a… well, spotter, I guess. There is a procedure for it.”

“Have you ever done this… ‘procedure’?”

“Not as such, no,” she said. “We used the technique recently in another situation involving a potentially dangerous mental contact, but it didn’t directly involve a half-demon. We pulled it off successfully.”

“How confident are you that you could do that on my brain without getting hurt?”

“We work on minds, not brains,” Teddi said. “I’m confident that we could stop it before any harm was done, to you or anyone else. I couldn’t promise you results, in other words, but I can promise you safety. Exposing myself to risk isn’t responsible healing. Is there something along those lines that you would like to investigate?”

“No,” I said. “I was just… well, when you said ‘just the same as any other student’, you kind of echoed what I was thinking. I’ve been told that casual contact with my brain… mind… would be bad, so it surprised me.”

“Learning the subtle arts, as they relate to others’ minds, teaches one to read other things,” she said. “Facial cues, body language… and to recognize patterns in thinking even when we can’t see thoughts. I try not to make too many assumptions about what’s going on in a patient’s head, but to a certain extent it just comes naturally… and if you hadn’t been thinking that, well, the phrase wouldn’t have been out of place.”

“Can I ask a question?”

“You may ask any number of questions on any subject that strikes you,” Teddi said.

“That thing on your head… does that do something for your telepathy?”

“It’s a filter of sorts.”

“To block out my infernal nature?” I asked.

“It does that,” she said. “But you know, a filter isn’t the same thing as a wall… we sometimes define filters by what they keep out, but really what distinguishes one filter from another is what it lets through.”

“And what does that one let through?” I asked.

“Emotions, mostly,” she said. “When I’m wearing this, I’m more strongly empathic than I am without it, even as I have less access to thoughts and images. I might use it as a diagnostic tool with any patient, or when someone has privacy concerns but still wants the advantage of my insight.”

“But you have to wear it, around me,” I said. I could see where she was trying to put me at ease by suggesting she wasn’t just wearing it because I was a half-demon, but the fact that there were other reasons she might use it with someone else didn’t actually change the reason she was using it with me.

“If it bothers you, I could take it off,” she said. “But wearing it allows me to relax, and I think I can help you best if I’m relaxed. But if you’d be more comfortable without…”

“I’d rather know that you’re safe,” I said, and she nodded.

“Do you worry about that often?”

“Your safety?”

“People’s safety,” she said. “Other people, I mean. Around you.”

“Maybe not enough sometimes,” I said, thinking back to my hungry spell earlier in the year… and the wacky hijinks with my pitchfork. “I could do a lot of damage, being careless. And I am careless.”

“So have you done much damage?”

“Some.”

“But you’re careful, even with people you’ve just met… people you don’t really trust and aren’t sure you like,” she said.

“I worry,” I said. “I’m not sure that’s the same thing as being careful.”

“You haven’t asked me about a form again,” she said. “Most students are happy to find out they don’t have to fill anything out.”

“Is everything I tell you confidential?”

“With the usual restrictions,” she said.

“Meaning?”

“We live in an Imperial Republic,” she said. “No citizen or agent of the Republic can compel me to breach the bond of confidentiality.”

“But agents of the imperium might,” I said.

“Ordinarily this would be where I would say ‘but I can’t see that happening’.”

“Are you going to say that this time?” I asked.

“I don’t see it happening,” she said.

“You aren’t prescient, are you?”

“Not even a little bit,” she said. “I don’t have to explain what I meant, do I?”

“No,” I said. “I got it.”

“As far as I know, the Law operatives packed up shop and left campus in a hurry the other night,” she said. “Some rather conspicuous blank spots in my awareness disappeared then. And I think the IBF left before them. None of that means there isn’t any official interest in you, but no one’s waiting to rifle through my filing cabinets as soon as you’re gone.”

“Would you tell me if anyone was?”

“I probably wouldn’t be allowed to, but I certainly wouldn’t sit here and tell you otherwise.”

“Even if you were ordered to?”

“I wouldn’t lie for my country,” she said. “And that’s the truth… and, no, that would only be treason if I were actually being ordered to do so by a duly-appointed imperial authority. Otherwise it’s…”

“…empty defiance, which is protected in the Bill of Prohibitions,” I said. “I wasn’t actually thinking that it was treason.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, sometimes I guess wrong. You seem like the sort of person who has a lot of… for authority.”

“A lot of what?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m used to being able to fill in gaps by projecting things and letting the listener’s mind fill in a word that fits to them. You don’t respect authority, exactly, but the way you behave towards it is quite a bit like the way someone who does would.”

“I obey authority, you mean?”

“I was aiming for more of an emotional connotation,” she said.

“You aren’t used to communicating with someone without using telepathy,” I said.

“Imagine you found yourself suddenly lacking a letter,” she said. “One letter. Maybe not the most commonly used one, but there are only twenty-seven letters in the alphabet. How many letters, besides the sacred one, could you carry on a conversation without using? A vowel would trip you up immediately. A consonant might take longer for you to feel the lack… say you lost Q, for instance. You might be able to talk for a while without stumbling, but then something happens and quite quickly you find yourself in trouble.”

“So most of the time when you’re talking to someone, they think you’re saying things that you’re not actually saying?”

“But I am saying it,” she said. “If I could just think at someone with something like this is what you need to hear from me and have their mind sort it out, my job would be easier but a lot less satisfying. Whatever someone ‘hears’ from me, I am saying it to them, whether they’re hearing with their ears first or their mind.”

“It’s different with me, though?”

“Not in a bad way,” she said.

“I don’t want to be someone’s special challenge,” I said.

“Every patient is a special challenge,” she said.

“I think you know what I mean.”

“You were raised human,” Teddi said. “You’re a basically shy person. You’re Magisterian, and if you didn’t grow up on the plains, you grew up in the wetlands or the edge of the badlands. Pax is your native language. If we didn’t have similar childhoods, we at least have a frame of reference for each other. Your mind is essentially mammalian, and you think one thing in one direction and dimension at the same speed that I think. Ms. Mackenzie, whatever minor… interface… problems we have with each other, you are not my special challenge for this semester, believe me.”

I blushed at that. There I was, more or less assuming that the sphere revolved around me alone… I really should have known better. She was seeing Steff and any other student in Harlowe who felt like having his or her thoughts examined.

“It’s not just the demon thing,” I said. “I mean, I think maybe a lot of what I want to talk to you about ties back in that, but I don’t think it’s just the, you know, practical problems that presents that might be a challenge.”

“I expect so,” Teddi said.

“There are some things I can’t talk about,” I said. “They’re… pretty big.”

“Are these things we should be working on talking about, or things we should be working around talking about?” she asked without missing a beat.

“Around,” I said.

“Alright, then,” she said. “It’s your time, Ms. Mackenzie… if you understand that you’re going to be spending more of it to make less progress and you still say you can’t talk about what’s bothering you, then I have no objection.”

“I’m not saying that just to be difficult,” I said.

“I’m not, either,” she said. “I mean it. If there’s something you can’t talk about, we’ll work around it. It will slow us down, but slow progress is still progress.”

“When do we start?” I asked.

“Well, you really do have excellent timing… I’m free the whole rest of the afternoon,” she said. “Though that means we will need to get the paperwork squared away.”

“You don’t have any other appointments?”

“I did, but I canceled them,” she said. “No, not because of you.” That time she was spot-on. “I canceled them yesterday because I wanted a chance to get my files back in order, but you seem to prefer a little distance for now and I don’t think you’ll take offense or think I’m not paying attention if I’m sorting while we’re talking.”

“Something happened to get your files out of order?” I said.

“I couldn’t possibly say,” she said. “But I can say you do have excellent timing, Ms. Mackenzie.”

“Do you always address your patients formally?”

“Usually, I can pick up on a patient’s preference after trying it once,” she said. “You’ll have to tell me if you prefer something else.”

I thought about it. The “Ms. Mackenzie” thing was making me feel too much like I was in a classroom, or that I’d been called into someone’s office. But I was kind of hesitant to just ask her to drop it… the people who called me Mackenzie were among the people who knew me best and the ones who knew me least. I thought about Dee’s habit of introducing herself.

“Call me Mack, please,” I said. I felt in some way as though I was trying the name on for size. “For now.”

“Okay, Mack,” she said. “If you’ll move over to the desk very briefly, we’ll get you signed in and have a little talk about goals and then we’ll begin.”

“I had an altercation with my resident advisor today,” Dee said.

She was sitting on the floor in front of the hearth, her face towards the fireplace. Teddi wasn’t if she was facing the fire, or facing away from her.

“I’m not sorry,” Dee added, though Teddi had said nothing. “I feel as though I should apologize, though I am not sure to whom, or for what. The obvious recipient would be her, but I cannot think of what I would say without becoming angry. I could say that I am sorry that it was necessary, but for that again I am angry and not truly remorseful.”

“We don’t apologize solely for the benefit of the listener,” Teddi said. “If you’re feeling guilty, Dee…”

“I am not. I feel horribly remiss in my duty for not feeling guilty about a willful act of disrespect towards a person in a position of responsibility,” Dee said. “And I do not know what to do about that.”

“If you don’t feel guilty… have you considered the possibility that you might have been in the right?” Teddi asked.

“That is often the first possibility I consider when dealing with my floormates,” Dee said. “I’ve found it to be more efficient to do so. In this case, my mind rebels at the thought… and yet I cannot see how I was wrong to do as I did.”

“Would you like to tell me exactly what it was that you did?”

“I am not certain it would make sense without the full context,” Dee said.

“I’m all ears.”

“I feel she has been remiss in her duties,” Dee said. “Sorely remiss.”

“There’s an elven philosopher who said that when a healer harms a patient, he is not a healer,” Teddi said. “In that moment, he is acting against the nature of his occupation. If you think about it in those terms, it could be said that you did not disrespect your resident advisor, you called a young woman out for failing to be one.”

“That sentiment does not seem very elven,” Dee said.

“I’m sorry, I mean, you know, the surface kind,” Teddi said. “What would you have done differently back home, had you felt someone wasn’t performing their job?”

“It would depend on whether or not it was my place,” Dee said. “Something I have no clear concept of here. Kiersta is a student like myself, though more senior. She has limited powers, which she rarely uses, though it seems she is not below overreaching them when she finally stirs herself to act. The impression I have gleaned from classmates housed outside of Harlowe vary… some treat their advisors as peers and some view them as nemeses or clowns. I have not yet encountered anyone who gave any indication that they viewed their resident advisor as a figure of real authority, though they’re clearly meant to be such.”

“I think part of the idea of having a student in charge of each floor is that they can be peers and authority figures,” Teddi said.

“Kiersta endeavors to be neither,” Dee said. “She associates only with the most closely human-descended residents on the floor and imposes discipline only when she has been personally inconvenienced by Mackenzie’s antics.”

“Is it always Mackenzie?”

“If we have time I would like to get to her,” Dee said. “But Kiersta… for public intimacy in the showers, she declared that Mackenzie should clean the whole of the bathing area for a week, and her latest partner would then do likewise.”

“You thought this was heavy-handed?”

“I was unaware of it, but in all honesty, I think it might have done Mackenzie some good,” Dee said. “She is not the cleanest person to begin with, she has a visceral reaction to the thought of physical labor that is unbecoming, and she has the bearing of a servant with a highly incompatible and inappropriate streak of uncontrolled arrogance that she will need to overcome if she is to lead the sort of life I expect she will be drawn towards. The problem came from the reaction of others on the floor, who decided to make her task more difficult by committing some rather extreme acts of vandalism. They were not caught, though they made no true attempt to hide their involvement… it certainly radiated strongly enough from their minds… but Kiersta made no attempt to determine the culprits or to redress the wrongdoing in the same way in which she did Mackenzie’s transgression.”

“And what did you do about that?” Teddi asked.

“I spoke with her,” Dee said. “I demanded that she act and she said she didn’t see it so she could not do anything. I suggested she change Mackenzie’s penalty to something that would not be an incentive for such actions and she declined. Finally, I lost my temper and told her that if she did not resign as resident advisor, I would expose her abuse of alcohol on campus… I believe this is known as ‘blackmail’.”

“It could almost be called that,” Teddi said. “But in all honesty, Dee, you’re not the first person who’s offered to let somebody step down voluntarily instead of being turned in for something that would remove them from an office anyway. It might even be thought of as a form of kindness, or civility.”

“I did not feel particularly civil at the moment,” Dee said. “I shook… my hands quivered. My voice rose and my lips quivered. I felt warm. It was not a pleasant encounter for either of us. She was terrified when I came in, and she became angry to push that away. She called me a rude name, but she was terrified again before I left.”

“You aren’t responsible for other peoples’ prejudices,” Teddi said. “You know that, right?”

“Certainly,” Dee said. “After I was done… I cleaned the bathroom myself. It was… a new experience. I had some apprehension about how to go about it, but then I simply took off my robes, tied a sash beneath my breasts, and got to work.”

“I think I get why you wouldn’t wear your priestess robes to do that sort of work, apart from keeping them clean,” Teddi said. “But would you mind explaining, for my own understanding… why the sash?”

“My Dehsah wears garments that frame the bosom and make it more… protuberant,” Dee said. “It seemed… appropriate to me.”

“There’s an association in your mind between Dehsah and cleaning?”

“We all clean up after ourselves to a greater degree than seems common within the Imperium,” Dee said. “But it falls to persons who lack other specific duties to do such chores, as they become necessary. Dehsah’s main task was the rearing of our family’s children, which involved cleaning; when there was no such work to do, the common areas would quickly grow pristine. My friend Two reminds me of Dehsah. She used to get out of bed in the middle of the night and clean the hall and the lounge when she couldn’t sleep. There are some other similarities, too.”

“Like what?”

“The appreciation for a sense of place,” Dee said. “The desire to be busy, to have work set before them. We all want to feel useful, even though it is not truly expected of Dehsah.”

“I don’t think anybody likes to feel useless,” Teddi said.

“But that is what Dehsah is for, as Two would say,” Dee said. “The halfkind do the odd jobs because they have no other purpose. An older name for them translates as ‘ornament person’ or even ‘useless person’. There was a vogue in some houses, between ten and twelve centuries ago, for binding the feet of growing halfkinds so they could not walk unaided. It’s a cyclical trend… the last time it was in fashion was two millennia before that. Dehsah was born between these periods, a fact for which I am glad, but they are rooted in a simple truth of our society: the point of raising halfkind is a sort of boasting that the house can afford someone who is neither male nor female, who can fulfill no role and who exists to consume resources and display their looks.”

“But unless I’ve completely misunderstood you, they do have roles,” Teddi said. “Apart from looking pretty. They do the ‘odd jobs’, as you put it. They rear important children. They, uh, service folks. They liaise with the monks.”

“After so many millennia, I suppose they do have roles a sort,” Dee said. “But if you understood how our society is ordered, you would understand that each of those things is not a discrete function in and of itself, but one that falls between or outside the boundaries of male and female responsibility. I do not wish to spend more time on this subject.”

“Alright, Dee,” Teddi said. “We don’t have to talk about that.”

“The other way in which Two reminds me of Dehsah is somewhat odd,” Dee said. “In that they aren’t really very much alike at all. But they each have a somewhat… askew… perspective on things. I do not mean to say that their personalities are similar, but that they differ in similar ways.”

“They’re quirky?” Teddi supplied.

“I have only heard that word applied to magical implements with a defect in their enchantment,” Dee said.

“It’s not a negative label,” Teddi said. “It can even connote fondness.”

“Then perhaps it is the correct word,” Dee said.

She grew silent. The fire popped and cracked convincingly. Dee said nothing else and Teddi counted off the seconds.

“How did you come to be cleaning the bathroom?” she asked.

“It would not have been an easy or pleasant task to undo the vandalism without greater magic than comes in a bottle of commercial cleansing concoctions… or with a gift like mine.”

“Your telekinesis is still growing, then?”

“Opening would be the word I would use,” Dee said.

“Does that worry you?”

“No,” Dee said. “Not as such.”

“You do have a concern, then,” Teddi said.

“I fear the effect it will have on my perceived fitness for the matriarchy,” Dee said.

“If you don’t want to be matriarch, couldn’t that be a blessing in disguise?” Teddi asked.

“My fear is that my perceived fitness will increase,” Dee said. “Telekinesis is a rarer gift than telepathy. Most of my line has it to some degree, but at a level that one of my instructors refers to as ‘spoon bending’.”

“Is telekinesis a valuable trait for a matriarch?”

“It could be seen as a sign of divine favor,” Dee said. “It certainly increases my ability to secure my personal safety, which is far more important for a matriarch than a chapel priestess. A house leader must go out and be seen, must interact with delegations from other houses. A low priestess can go a human’s lifetime without seeing anyone outside her own house.”

“Is that something you desire, Dee?”

“I’m merely remarking on the differing levels of security concerns between the two positions.”

“I would think that your coming here displays an interest in traveling outside your normal borders,” Teddi said. “Expanding your horizons.”

“Interesting phrase,” Dee said. “I feel as though I am supposed to be here. No, that’s not correct. I felt as though I was supposed to come here. I was not happy to leave my home, nor to arrive here.”

“Are you unhappy here?”

“I’m frequently frustrated,” Dee said. “I am lonely and homesick and shocked at the brutal barbarism that surrounds me on a continual basis. The lack of respect for basic privacy appalls me. The ways in which I see men treating women make me sick with rage. I’m a decade older than my supposed peers, and it seems I had more control over my person than they do before I had control over my bladder. But my goddess wanted me to come here, and I am learning things that will be of value.”

“What would you be doing, if you hadn’t come here?” Teddi asked. “You’re already a priestess. Would you be serving in the house chapel?”

“I was,” Dee said. “The situation was somewhat awkward, as I am of too great a social rank for any of the positions that were open to me. Technically, I would have precedence… as a firstborn daughter of the line, I could supplant any woman serving in the chapel, but at my age I would not be supported in that action and none would be likely to step aside on her own.”

“But when you’re older?”

“It might become more appropriate,” Dee said.

“Your ambition is to be the, uh, low priestess of your chapel?”

“I have no ambition except to serve,” Dee said.

“Dee… you aren’t in your priestess robes now,” Teddi said gently. “You can speak your own mind.”

“I apologize,” Dee said. “I am not trying to be disingenuous with you.”

“I’m not encouraging honesty for my own sake,” Teddi said. “I would get paid the same if you recited a romance novel… or if you didn’t show up at all. But you are here, and you’re my patient, not a priestess, so you might as well tell me what’s on your mind.”

“I do feel that taking on greater my duties in the temple would make it less likely I would be selected as matriarch,” Dee said. “And… to be completely honest… part of me did chafe at being a simple attendant in most ceremonies.”

“How do your… uh… parents feel about career path?” Teddi asked. “Are they supportive?”

“My stepmother seems a bit conflicted,” Dee said.

“How so?”

“I would have to speculate,” Dee said. “Her mind is like a wall of iron… a wall of iron I do not particularly care for the sight of.”

“Go ahead,” Teddi said. “It’s just you and me here… it’s not like she’s going to be condemned on your words.”

“She wishes for my mother to rule,” Dee said. “If my place were cemented in the chapel, this would become more likely. However, I believe… and again, I stress that this is barest speculation… that she fears what I might do if I became more powerful in the house hierarchy than my mother, as I would if I became low priestess while the current matriarch sits.”

“What might you do?”

“I do not honestly know what she fears,” Dee said. “The low priestess does not have official power outside chapel operations, though she does wield considerable influence. I cannot imagine using that influence to inflict petty harm on my stepmother, but apparently she is more imaginative than I.”

“And your mother?”

“Durilla’s opinion on the matter seems to be quite sufficient for her.”

“Do you feel guilty for not liking your stepmother more?”

“I would feel terribly guilty if I felt anything less than love for Durilla Degra,” Dee said.

“One thing I’ve heard other patients say about their family members is ‘I love them, but I don’t like them’,” Teddi said. “We don’t get to choose our family, and it’s great if we can get along with them, but people are who they are.”

“The only times I can remember my parents disagreeing with each other, it involved my lovers,” Dee said. “They had opposite opinions on two of them. My mother was aghast at my relationship with my Dehsah. Her first reaction was to try to have Dehsah removed from the house.”

“Why?”

“My pursuit of Dehsah began before I was of age,” Dee said. “She thought I had been seduced. Of course she was not successful. Dehsah is part of our house’s pride, along with our line of matriarchs. But it was never easy for my mother to accept it. A person like Dehsah is not an ideal match, which was more of an issue as I had not yet displayed love for the other sexes. That may be… again, I stress that this is speculation… that may be why Durilla Degra convinced her to accept it. It made me look ridiculous to some eyes and diminished my suitability as an heiress. Also, while I would have been required to produce a daughter eventually even if I had no relationship with a man, this would not happen as a matter of course with Dehsah as my lover.”

“I’m sorry, but didn’t you tell me that Dehsah is… functionally equipped?”

“Yes,” Dee said. “But that is not the same thing as being a man.”

“She’s infertile?”

“I do not believe so,” Dee said. “If anything, halfkind are known for their virility. It’s simply not a factor.”

“But she could father a child, potentially.”

“The idea is ridiculous and more than a little disgusting,” Dee said.

“I’m sorry,” Teddi said. “It’s a tangent. I don’t know much about your culture. I don’t understand why… if having a daughter were so important and if you didn’t have a separate male lover… why it couldn’t be with Dehsah.”

“How do you feel about anal intercourse?” Dee asked.

“I think it’s a perfectly valid and healthy form of sexual expression,” Teddi said. “And I know it’s important to the elven cultures.”

“You think,” Dee said. “You know. Be honest with me: how do you feel?”

“No offense, but it’s gross,” Teddi said. “You won’t catch me doing it.”

“Imagine a child born from that,” Dee said.

“That’s how you feel about your lover?”

“That’s how I feel about the prospect of Dehsah giving me a child,” Dee said. “I understand you have a notion that the ‘father’ of a child should ideally be the mother’s lover, but this is not a standard among my people. Darek is likely a suitable enough male that he could be both my wife and my mate, but the latter is a…”

“Wife?”

“Is that not the word?”

“‘Husband’ is what we call a male spouse,” Teddi said.

“I learned that as a verb. ‘To shepherd, conserve, guard.’,” Dee said. “Are men shepherded by their wives?”

“I think the idea was the other way around,” Teddi said.

“Ah,” Dee said. “Very well. Darek could serve as both my husband and my mate, but the latter is a fleeting condition whereas the former is a lifetime commitment. He will likely give several other women children, with no implications on our relationship with each other.”

“Isn’t reproduction a rare privilege?” Teddi asked.

“Yes, but most women are accorded it at least once, if they live long enough,” Dee said. “But only a small amount of men are given the responsibility of giving children. Their suitability is judged by the house elders on an individual basis… the ideal ratio is one accepted for every seven who is passed over. Thus, Darek could statistically expect to serve as mate for eight women, though his union with me is likely to make him more ‘fashionable’ than that.”

“And this doesn’t bother you?”

“It’s part of his suitability,” Dee said. “I do not choose my lovers on that basis, obviously, but it was a bit of a relief to have one who wasn’t the source of a conflict with my mother.”

“What about the men who aren’t selected?” Teddi asked. “Are they expected to abstain?”

“From breeding,” Dee said. “You have to remember that it is not uncommon for men to love each other, among elves. But even those who favor the love of the opposite sex may enter into a relationship and even marry. Breeding and sex are viewed as distinctive actions. Though, some of the men who are relieved of the duty to breed do have themselves altered as a point of pride.”

“Altered?”

“Castrated,” Dee said. “I suppose you would call it a sub-culture. The men with breeding duty are… flayed?”

“What?” Teddi said.

“The skin is removed,” Dee said. “Have I said it incorrectly?”

“Oh, do you mean ‘circumcised’?” Teddi asked.

“The answer to that question hinges upon the definition of that word,” Dee said.

“It’s the removal of the foreskin of the penis,” Teddi said.

“Oh,” Dee said. “Yes. That. They are circumcised by a priestess. Those who are relieved sometimes choose to be castrated by the same. They form their own sub-gender.”

“Like the halfkind?”

“Not precisely,” Dee said. “The altered are considered to be a sort of ultra-male, where the halfkind are not fully male nor female.”

“I’m not sure if you’re using the right word again,” Teddi said. “‘Ultra’ would mean similar to ‘super’ or ‘extra’, ‘more than usual’, or maybe ‘extreme’.”

“Yes,” Dee said. “Extreme males. That would be exactly the word I would use.”

“After they’re castrated.”

“Yes,” Dee said. “Some houses encourage it more, as a point of pride in their men. Ours leaves it an individual choice. The ratio is about the same as those who breed: one in eight. In my time in the chapel, I participated in three castrations and four circumcisions. My Darek was evaluated as part of a group of eight, five of whom chose to undergo alteration, if he is to be believed.”

“Is that significant?” Teddi asked.

“He claims they felt compelled to prove their manhood,” Dee said.

“This is your therapy session,” Teddi said. “But I’m feeling more and more confused.”

“We could speak mind to mind if you thought that would help.”

“I think the barrier here is cultural rather than linguistic,” Teddi said. “In my culture… in most cultures I know of… the concept of ‘manliness’, of ‘masculinity’, is bound up in sexual potency and in the physical genitalia. A man who loses part of them may feel ‘diminished’ for a period of time.”

“Interesting,” Dee said. “Why would that be so?”

“Well… it could be because it’s the most obvious physical difference of what sets apart men and women,” Teddi said. “And for better or for worse, there is a stigma in our culture against a man being perceived as feminine.”

“But merely removing the genitals, even in their entirety, does not transform a male body into a female one,” Dee said.

“But you can see how that body would be seen as less male,” Teddi said.

“In quantity of male body, perhaps,” Dee said. “But if a man loses his hand, could not the same thing be said? His body is less one male part.”

“I think this is just a different cultural construction… I’m sorry,” Teddi said. “I have a lot of questions and I fear it’s getting astray of your issues… but it is helpful in letting me understand where you’re coming from when you talk about Dehsah and Darek and your, uh, mothers.”

“It’s quite alright,” Dee said. “I have a lot of thoughts to sort out, and my friends rarely express interest in hearing about my homeland. When they do, they can scarcely contain their scorn for it. You radiate shock, but you aren’t so judgmental.”

“Just out of curiousity… if you consider Durilla Degra to be your stepmother… if Darek and you married, and you had a child, whether by him or not, would he be considered anything to it?”

“You are determined to find a father in my culture,” Dee said.

“Sorry,” Teddi said. “Your family dynamics are hard for me to grasp.”

“There is the partnership among spouses, there are lines of descent, and there are families,” Dee said. “Dehsah is already my family, being d’Wyri. Darek is descended from my family, unofficially. Marriage won’t change either of those. My daughter will be family to Dehsah and not to Darek. Had I a female wife in this scenario, she would be in the position I have been calling stepmother.”

“But even if Darek fathered your daughter, you wouldn’t see a connection between them?” Teddi asked.

“Honestly?” Dee said. “It would be considered a bit of a romantic notion, but I enjoy the thought of a child born of my body, given by Darek and reared by Dehsah. It seemed like an additional tie among the three of us. It was Dehsah who pointed this out, when the four of us were in bed.”

“Four?”

“Alea,” Dee said. “She… did not appreciate the notion, even when Darek offered to give her a child as well.”

“Was she jealous?”

“She had no reason to be,” Dee said. “Woman love is a sacred and special thing, greater than man love, which is greater than all other loves. Whatever ties of biology we could contrive, my bonds with Dehsah and Darek could not rival the bond I shared with Alea.”

“You don’t talk about her as much as you do the others.”

“I have less past with her and no future,” Dee said. “There is not as much to talk about.”

“How did you meet Alea?”

“She came from… an orphanage, I suppose you would call it. I think the literal translation would be ‘the outhouse’.”

“The outhouse?”

“Yes,” Dee said. “It is a social institution for the protection of children of the polloi who have no mother. It is analogous to a house, for those without one.”

“Oh,” Teddi said. “‘Outhouse’ has an idiomatic meaning in Pax.”

“I gather from your shocked tone that it would not be a flattering one?”

“No.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a freestanding structure sheltering a, uh, pit toilet.”

“I see,” Dee said. “I believe I shall stay with the term ‘orphanage’. Alea did not speak much of her experiences growing up in the orphanage, but I believe they did not warrant that term. She assisted in their chapel as a child, and was judged to show the right attitudes and aptitudes for the priestesshood, so she was sent to us in order to learn more by assisting our priestesses in greater rites than were performed for the children.”

“Similar to an apprenticeship, then?” Teddi asked.

“Yes,” Dee said. “I suppose it was. As an uninitiated novice, Alea was given to me to instruct.”

“You were her teacher?”

“For a time,” Dee said.

“As Dehsah taught you?”

“Dehsah is not equipped to be a priestess,” Dee said. “In any sense. I do not think a person is alive who has been flogged for impiety more times.”

“Does she ever feel guilty?”

“Never,” Dee said. “Except when I express disappointment. In my prouder moments, I flatter to think that my love may one day provide the correction that centuries of lashings could not.”

“Do you ever envy her, Dee?”

“Envy Dehsah?” Dee asked. “Whatever for? I am not expected to have that kind of beauty.”

“For not feeling guilty,” Teddi said. “For being able to be ‘bad’ and get away with it.”

“I assure you, Dehsah is punished severely for any wrongdoing.”

“Not in her head, she’s not,” Teddi said. “From what you say.”

“I suspect the list of things that are not in Dehsah’s head is quite extensive,” Dee said. “If the good sense to be properly chastised is among them, the dubious benefits of that one deficiency do not outweigh the others.”

“Is that really what you think of your lover?” Teddi asked.

“It is right now,” Dee said. “I may think more fondly of Dehsah at a calmer time.”

“Fair enough,” Teddi said.

“It isn’t,” Dee said. “It is horribly unfair. I am angry and I take it out on someone who is not even present.”

“And you feel guilty for that,” Teddi said. “Even though she is not even present.”

“I still feel no envy.”

“Have you given any thought to what you’ll do if Kiersta does resign?”

“No action will be required of me,” Dee said. “I have been giving thought to how best to follow through on my words if she does not.”

“The floor won’t have a resident advisor, though.”

“I am not sure it is anything more than an unfounded rumor that we have one now,” Dee said.

“Have you ever considered applying for the position?” Teddi asked. “I’m not sure whether it would be open to a frosh in the first semester, if she did resign this semester.”

“I have not given thought to any such thing,” Dee said.

“I think you might find you have an aptitude for it,” Teddi said. “And it might help you with one of your ongoing problems.”

“Which problem would that be?”

“As you put it, everyone likes to feel useful,” Teddi said. “Right now, your only duties are your classes, and no matter how much time they consume, they’re a duty you owe to yourself. You are the primary beneficiary of any effort you expend on them. True?”

“True,” Dee said.

“You told me on Monday that you felt you’d bit off more than you could chew, helping your friend,” Teddi said.

“I do not believe I used that exact phrase,” Dee said. “But yes.”

“Do you think that might have happened because you were trying to act as a priestess?” Teddi said.

“I am a priestess,” Dee said.

“But how frequently do you fulfill the definition of one?” Teddi asked. “How often do you feel useful?”

“With a regularity that should be both depressing and alarming, considering that outside chapel functions my talents are most useful in an emergency,” Dee said. “But… not on a routine basis, no.”

“You’re in here three times a week,” Teddi said. “And while I’m always here for you and I’ve learned a lot about your culture, I think there’s a limit to how much progress you can make by thinking out loud.”

“You do not think it is fruitful to continue these sessions?” Dee asked, sounding worried.

“I would not say that at all,” Teddi said. “I can tell you’re working your way, uh, down to certain things and I don’t want to rush you. But I also think you need another outlet. I don’t think you are going to find a forsaken chapel any closer than the mountains so I would recommend a part time job of some sort… and in my opinion, you have everything you would need to be an outstanding resident advisor except for the experience, and there’s only one way to get that.”

“I would have to consider the matter,” Dee said. “I could not let it interfere with my studies, nor with my attempts to locate the artifact.”

“You’re still looking for that?”

“It is difficult,” Dee said. “I cannot divine it directly; that is like searching for the sun.”

“The sun’s not that hard to find.”

“A fact which would stand in your favor if you ever wished to gaze at it,” Dee said.

“I see your point,” Teddi said. “But do you think it’s possible that you’re still doing the same thing you did on Sunday? Trying to handle this yourself?”

“I would not engage with it,” Dee said. “I merely wish to locate it, so that I may inform somebody more capable.”

“That sounds like a good plan,” Teddi said.

“I suppose I may have a better chance of becoming a resident advisor within the walls of Harlowe than I would being hired in food services,” Dee said.

“Technically, the work programs are supposed to be equal opportunity,” Teddi said. “Though you’re aware enough that I won’t sugarcoat things for you. Honestly, if the RA position doesn’t become available, or you don’t want it? I think the next best job might be something in housekeeping.”

“Because I showed an aptitude for that, as well?”

“I think it might be good for you,” Teddi said. “Physical labor isn’t just for half-demons, you know.”

Discuss this story.

“It’s not a problem, Dee,” Teddi Lundegard said, stepping aside to let the ebony-skinned elf into her office. “We’ve all been on call since the news hit… the tsunami, I mean.”

“I apologize,” Dee said, freezing mid-stride in the doorway. “My concern does not directly touch upon the events of the tsunami, and I am keeping you from somebody whose need is greater.”

“Figuring out whose needs are greater or lesser is a job for somebody higher up,” Teddi said. “The on call status is just in case somebody needs us . Right now, you do, so that’s who I’m here for.”

“Your concern touches me deeply.”

“It’s my job,” Teddi said.

“But it’s genuine.”

“It is,” Teddi said.

“The care with which you dispatch your professional obligations is not something to dismiss lightly,” Dee said.

“Well, thank you,” Teddi said. She gestured at the couch and the chairs over by the fireplace. “Sit anywhere you’d like, and we’ll get down to it.”

As she had the previous time, Dee sat on the floor in front of the hearth.

“I hope you are not offended if I don’t disrobe this time,” she said.

“Like I told you, most of my patients don’t,” Teddi said, sitting down on the carpet a couple yards away from Dee. Her back wouldn’t thank her, but she didn’t want to appear to talk down to the proud divinity student. “It doesn’t bother me, and if it helps you to be open I’m all for it, but it’s not an essential part of the process.”

“Thank you,” Dee said. “I am trying to balance an instinct towards privacy with the need to… come clean, I believe is the phrase.”

“On a related subject, I notice you’re shielding more tightly than normal,” Teddi said. “And considering your normal shields, that’s saying something.”

“My thoughts are running in circles,” Dee said. “My whole mind is drawing inward.”

“What’s on it?”

Dee was silent, her face motionless. Her breathing was so slow and measured that she might have been a statue.

“Take your time,” Teddi said. “But you told me on the mirror you were afraid you would hurt someone. If you need…”

“To be precise, I said I felt like hurting my friends,” Dee said. “While I would fear the outcome of such an action, I have no reason to fear it would come to pass. My self-control remains intact.”

“Did your friends do something to hurt you?”

“They disappointed me.”

“Sometimes, when we love somebody, we think so highly of them that it becomes impossible for any real person to live up to our expectations,” Teddi said. “And so we end up disappointed, and hurt because we expected so much better of them.”

“To be perfectly honest, I didn’t expect that much of them to begin with,” Dee said.

“Oh.”

“But I did not expect this.”

“What did they do, Dee?”

“They were party to something… terrible,” Dee said. “Horrible… abominable… unconscionable.”

“Can you be specific?”

“Remind me of the rules which bind you, regarding confidentiality,” Dee said.

“Dee, if a crime’s been committed, I can’t cover that up,” Teddi said. “And neither should you. You’ve had one run-in with the law already…”

“I am not a legal scholar, but they believe their actions fell within the bounds of the law,” Dee said. “And they may be right. Do you know anything of the rights of slaves?”

“They don’t have any, practically speaking,” Teddi said. “Not to liberty, or even life.”

“Where I come from, we don’t speak of rights,” Dee said. “We speak of privileges and responsibilities. But life is a privilege that belongs to all who fulfill their basic responsibilities. It is revoked only with regret. I do not understand how a people who speak of the right to life… and then do such a thing.”

“It can be tough to deal with,” Teddi said. “The dichotomy. History’s not my specialty, but I did have to take ethics courses, and one of them touched on this. The pendulum’s always swung back and forth on the question of slaves and their rights, and there came a point where the law had to decide if slaves were property or people. If they were people, then they couldn’t be abused or killed… but they couldn’t be slaves, either.”

“I do not have to ask how that question was decided,” Dee said.

“I try not to be a cynical person, but on the one side was big business and moneyed folks, and on the other were a bunch of idealists,” Teddi said.

“The law can declare that water pools on the ceiling, but it will not change the course of things,” Dee said. “Personhood is a function of being, not something to be adjudicated by a court!”

“Dee, I feel your anger, and I agree with you, to be honest. Not a lot of people love the system,” Teddi said. “But it doesn’t affect most people.”

“Those it does affect, it affects quite deeply,” Dee said.

“If you think about it, though, even without legal protection, many slaves are protected and well-cared for,” Teddi said. “There isn’t much money in working somebody to death.”

“No, but there may be money in slaughtering them outright,” Dee said. “And college students… children… can order death on an ill-considered whim.”

“Is that… is that what happened?”

Dee nodded.

“Are you sure?” Teddi asked. “I know you told me you overhear a lot of things, and…”

“This was no half-heard conversation,” Dee said.

“Is there any chance it might have been a mistake?” Teddi asked.

“There remains a possibility of an external influence,” Dee said. “And, in a calmer moment, I intend to investigate that possibility. For now, I cling to it like a spot of warmth in the coldness. I do not like to believe it happened at all, but knowing that it did, I would prefer it to not be the fault of anybody I know. Though, that hardly matters to the victim.”

“So, you’re angry that your friends participated in this system,” Teddi said.

“Aren’t you?” Dee asked.

“I don’t know them,” Teddi said. “I know the people you’re talking about aren’t human, and they would have different needs, different customs… I’m appalled, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not here to judge your friends. You don’t need me to validate your outrage.”

“I do not,” Dee agreed. “But… I do not know what to do. Before I learned of this, I had planned on… this falls within the bounds of confidentiality?”

“So far,” Teddi said.

“You are certain?”

“I’ll let you know if we stray into iffy territory.”

“Very well,” Dee said. She closed her eyes and began to speak. “I had planned on asking Amaranth, who is a nymph-creation of the human nature goddess, to instruct me in pleasuring women.”

“I remember you mentioned being nervous about that,” Teddi said. “It’s not anything to be embarrassed about. I think more than a few men… and some women… have used nymphs or golems for ‘practice’ before they move on to the real thing.”

“Yes,” Dee said, her eyes still closed. “My love was not my social equal, so I was not able to reciprocate her skillful attention. Our marriage would have rectified the disparity in standing, but not the one in experience. I screened my fear from her, but I was terrified that I would not be able to perform adequately.”

“A marriage is more than a wedding night,” Teddi said. “Up here, a lot of people save themselves. If there’s a certain amount of fumbling on the night in question, they’re fumbling together, and then they have a lifetime together to improve.”

“A lifetime…” Dee said. “I fear I’ve shortened Alea’s drastically by coming here.”

“You said she left you.”

“She did,” Dee said. “And left the protection of my house and family. I pray for the safety of all my loves. Darek is a skilled soldier, but he is a soldier. Dehsah… Dehsah is called the black diamond of the d’Wyri. Few elves are better protected than my pretty Dehsah, but if somebody wished to harm our house’s standing, that is where they would strike. The risk to either of them fades in comparison to the dangers Alea faces in her dispossessed state.”

“She’s like a slave?” Teddi asked.

“We have no custom so barbaric as slavery!” Dee said, her eyes flying open. Her ebony cheeks were touched with streaks of scarlet, and she lowered her head. “But… she is like a slave, in that privileges I take for granted are not extended to her, and like a slave in that she must to some extent depend upon the kindness of those… above… her, and in that she may be called to lay down her life for no fault of her own.”

“So, you take the death of the slave personally,” Teddi said.

“It would be an outrageous offense had I never met Alea.”

“But the outrage hits closer to home because of her.”

“Yes, it does,” Dee said. “And yet there are differences. I would not have Alea endangered, but that is a selfish impulse… there are things which need to be done for the safety of all, and somebody would have to do them regardless. The slaughter of slaves for pay is a different matter. Nobody ever needs to die for the entertainment or sensual pleasure of others… and while I can well believe that such a thing happens, it seems inconceivable… well…”

“You feel betrayed by your friends?”

“Blindsided. Amaranth is not exactly a master philosopher, but she does not even eat the flesh of dumb beasts,” Dee said. “Her involvement in this dumbfounded me. The other two… one can hardly be blamed for her appetites even if she is responsible for acting upon them, though I thought she had a core of decency. The other… the other has no great respect for the dead, or the living, or anything else… but I somehow thought better of Steff, all the same.”

“Steff Johnson?” Teddi asked.

“Yes, why?”

“No reason,” Teddi said quickly. “You said you were going to ask Amaranth to, uh, instruct you?”

“I would have, before. Amaranth is not my social equal, but she does not exist on the same scale as I do,” Dee said. “She is a child of divinity, and is pious in her own way. I have to believe she would be a skilled teacher.”

“Probably,” Teddi said.

“She isn’t exactly ideal,” Dee said. “But given the chance, I thought it would be better to learn before I return to Durakesh. The only person in my house who would instruct me in the sacrament of cunnilingus is my stepmother.”

“I’m going to need some time alone with that sentence,” Teddi said. “Sacrament of… your stepmother?”

“There’s no precise translation,” Dee said. “She is married to my mother. This makes her my social better, along with my mother and the matriarch. Clearly, she’s the logical choice.”

“Clearly,” Teddi said.

“But, meaning as little disrespect to her as possible, given the choice of submitting to her tutelage or waiting until marriage provided me with an equal, I would have waited,” Dee said.

“I’m getting that there’s not a taboo involved here, so I’m guessing you don’t get along with her.”

“As you are bound by confidentiality and so far removed from my family that you might as well not exist in the same plane, I will say that in my private moments, I have entertained the unworthy thought that she sees me as an obstacle to my mother’s path to the throne,” Dee said. “In the event that our matriarch vacates it within our lifetimes.”

“How would you be an obstacle, exactly?”

“We have an equal claim to it,” Dee said. “The next matriarch would be chosen on merits. I feel my mother is the clear choice, but there have been surprises before. Would you excuse me for a moment?”

“Do you need to use the restroom?”

“I would like to disrobe,” Dee said.

“Oh, uh… feel free,” Teddi said.

She regretted that she didn’t have a notebook or anything in her hands. Looking at the ceiling was a little transparent, so she looked at the pictures over the fireplace instead as Dee removed her cloak and her robe and set them on a chair. The paintings were all still lives and seascapes… she’d insisted there be no portraits over her work space, no eyes gazing down unblinking at her patients.

“Thank you,” Dee said, when she’d sat back down. “The idea of being matriarch terrifies me beyond reason, Teddi. That’s part of the reason I sought a surface education.”

“You wanted to remove yourself from the pool of candidates for a few years?”

“That is part of the appeal,” Dee said. “But a small part. Four or five years is not much, in the span of things. But, no, the human education system condenses practical lessons that I would be expected to learn over a decade or more. It will speed my advancement to full priestesshood, enabling me to marry Darek all the quicker. The sooner I am married, the sooner I can fulfill my destiny as a mother. My first daughter will also be eligible for the matriarchy, as will her first daughter, and so on.”

“You want to hedge your bets.”

“I want the best woman to be chosen,” Dee said. “I simply do not want to be her.”

“Sometimes, the best person to wield authority is the person who wants it the least,” Teddi said. “There’s a story of a man in the old republic, a retired general who was given supreme power to fight off an army of orcs… he whipped the army into shape and routed the invaders, then disbanded his legions and went quietly back to his peaceful retirement.”

“There would be no retirement for me,” Dee said. “It is a lifetime appointment, with few exceptions. Matriarchs have stepped aside, but not for selfish reasons. The thought that I might become one of those forms a basis of my fear.”

“Is the desire to have a child who might inherit the throne instead of you the reason you’re marrying Darek?”

“It’s the reason I wish to marry him quickly,” Dee said. “He has many fine qualities, and he is enthusiastic about me.”

“Last time, you told me you thought your goddess wanted you on the surface,” Teddi said. “Was that an excuse?”

“By no means,” Dee said. “She is a goddess of intricacy… as her servant, I rarely do things for a single reason. Just as there are many reasons I wish to marry Darek, there was more than one reason for my period of exile. Like the strands of a spider’s web, they all weave together to form something stronger than the individual parts. Like my reasons for coming here now.”

“How so?”

“I am disappointed in Amaranth for her part in the atrocity,” Dee said. “This disappointment is deepened because of the important thing I would have asked of her. The plight of the slave reminds me of the plight of my… of Alea, which brings me once again around to Amaranth. The news of the devastation to the east is a reminder of the randomness and capriciousness of death, which may come without warning and from unexpected sources, which again makes me think of Alea, which makes me think of the slave and of my friends. They all connect, you see, and the more I try to fight my way out of the web, the tighter the strands bind me…”

“Have you talked to your friends about this?”

“That is how I know about it,” Dee said.

“Did you let them know how you felt, I mean?”

“I expressed my shock and my outrage,” Dee said. “What more can I do?”

“I guess the answer to that question depends on whether or not you still consider them your friends.”

“I do not know,” Dee said. “There seemed to be some regret… and as I said, there is the possibility of some mitigating circumstance. I have enjoyed their friendship, and would not look forward to spending the rest of the term ostracized from them. Additionally, it would be awkward sharing close quarters, particularly as one of them is the roommate of a very dear friend.”

“Would it be accurate to say that you would like to be friends with them, but you don’t know if you can?”

“That would be precisely accurate.”

“I think to start with, you need to tell them how you feel and why you feel it,” Teddi said.

“I need to explain to persons of human blood and likeness why I find the senseless slaughter of a human person disgusting?”

“You might explain why it affects you so much,” Teddi said. “So they’ll know where you’re coming from. If they feel guilty… and maybe I’m naive, but I have a hard time believing that they don’t… then they may end up becoming defensive if they feel like they’re just being unfairly judged.”

“I would not like being the one tasked with rendering a fair judgment,” Dee said.

“I’m going to go out on a limb here,” Teddi said. “And remember, what you tell me is confidential… but I saw you on TV with Mackenzie Blaise…”

“She was a part of this, yes,” Dee said. “Likely the crux of it, though I could well believe that Steff was the instigator. I don’t want to believe it of any of them. They do not seem to have enjoyed it, but… they are not acting with anything near the solemnity I would expect of a penitent, given the nature of the offense.”

“Have you considered the possibility that they don’t know how to act, under the circumstances?”

“I have not considered much,” Dee said. “I reacted, and I left, and then I slept, and contacted you.”

“I think this is something you need to talk to them about,” Teddi said. “If they listen to you, then you can figure out how to go forward. If they can’t or won’t respect your feelings, then there isn’t going to be much point in trying to save the friendship, and honestly, you’re probably better off for it.”

“I do not abandon a friend lightly.”

“Would you consider this light?” Teddi asked. Dee didn’t answer. “You’ve reached out to a half-demon, as well as to a very troubled person, but both of them need help that you aren’t qualified to give. It may be that hearing your honest feelings will help them come to terms with what they’ve done, and if so, they may become the better for it. That’s a good thing. If not… well, it’s not your responsibility to make them better people. You talk about ‘selfish impulses’ like they’re the worst thing in the world…”

“Believe me, I am aware that there are worse things,” Dee said.

“The fact is, we all have to be selfish sometimes, Dee,” Teddi said. “Selfishness can keep us alive. Eating is a selfish act…”

“Another fact of which I am currently crushingly aware.”

“…but we have to do it. Whatever aid, whatever comfort you give to your friends and loved ones, it depends on you being healthy and sound and able to give it. If you can haul your friends up from a precipice, you’ll do it, because you are a good and selfless person who can do nothing else… but if you can’t, you need to realize that, because you won’t help anybody by letting yourself get dragged down with them,” Teddi concluded.

“The hierarchy of high to low makes for some less convoluted metaphors,” Dee said.

“Say what?”

“Nothing,” Dee said. “I think I need to pray for guidance now. I have quite a bit to think about.”

“I’m sure you’ll make the right decision,” Teddi said. “You’re a very strong young… a very strong woman. I’m sorry, I realize you’re almost thirty, but I think of you as a child.”

“When I take off my robes, I do, too.”

The student healers who volunteered to meet the experience requirements for their degrees shared two of these in a rotation, but Theadora Lundegard had one that was ostensibly her own. She permitted students to use it when she wasn’t in.

Thus, even though they’d never visited with her in particular, this wasn’t the first time that Sara and Tara Leighton had been in her room. They’d ignored the comfortable chairs and sat their shared body instead in the dead center of the two-seat divan, speaking to each other in the language they’d shared since they were babies, the language that nobody could understand but themselves.

These various seats were arranged around the illusionary fire that crackled realistically in the brick fireplace with a dummy chimney. The desk was some distance away. Its marble surface was kept clean and free of both clutter and sensitive material, as other people might need to use it.

The twins craned their necks—that and their heads being the only truly independent body parts they each owned—at the sound of the door opening. The owner of the office had just entered, and was striding confidently towards them on one-inch heels.

“Hello, Sara,” she said, smiling reassuringly. “Hello, Tara. I’m…”

“Where’s Edward?” Tara asked. “We were talking to Edward last time.”

“We liked Edward,” Sara said.

“I’m afraid Edward’s not available,” the healer said. “I’m Teddi, and I’m taking his appointments this evening.”

“‘Teddy’ is a boy’s name,” Tara said.

“Well, it isn’t a proper name in and of itself,” Teddi said. “It can be short for Theodore, or, in my case…”

“If it isn’t a proper name, why should we call you it?” Tara asked. “Why introduce yourself by something if it isn’t a name?”

“I meant, as opposed to being a nickname,” Teddi said.

“Why are you so opposed to nicknames?” Tara asked. “What did they ever do to you?”

Sara snickered.

“I only meant…”

“Do they call you ‘teddy’ because you like to wear them?” Tara asked.

“What?” Teddi asked.

Sara laughed.

“Do you wear teddies?” Tara asked.

“I…”

“Are you wearing one now, under your clothes?” Tara said.

“Now…”

“When everybody’s gone, do you shimmy around the office in it?”

“That will…”

“Do you do a little teddy dance?”

“Out,” Teddi said.

“Or do you dress up like a teddy bear? Maybe a teddy bear, in a t…”

“Out,” Teddi repeated, pointing at the door.

The two girls stared at her in shock.

“Out of my office,” she said. “Go. Now.”

“Hang on, you can’t kick us out,” Sara said. “We’re your patients.”

“Yeah,” Tara said. “We’re entitled…”

“Let’s talk about what you’re entitled to,” Teddi said, settling down into a chair. “As students, you are entitled to healing services. As human—as free beings—you are entitled to a certain modicum of dignity. You are not entitled to walk into somebody else’s office and make fun of their name, or take up their valuable time which could be spent giving another student the services that she is entitled to.”

“But… I didn’t say anything,” Sara said. “Can’t I even talk? It isn’t fair to kick me out just because she…”

“Oh, again with this,” Tara said. She looked at the healer. “You know, she used to have a sense of humor, back before the accident. She used to love it when I did something funny, instead of acting like she’s above it.”

“I do not act like I’m above it!” Sara said. “I just think, we’re in college now, and we should be…”

“Oh, like you weren’t laughing. She used to egg me on,” Tara said to Teddi. “She’d be like, ‘Oh, there’s the Brighton boy tying his shoes, go over and kick him over.’”

“I never told her to kick anyone,” Sara said. “Never, ever.”

“Then we got back from break, and all of a sudden she’s dragging our feet every time I go to do something funny.”

“Why do you think it’s funny, kicking someone?” Teddi asked.

“I don’t!” Sara said.

“Hold on,” Tara said. “We’re here to talk about our problems with each other. Not the stuff we got up to in high school.”

“You mentioned it, not me,” Teddi said. “But if you’d like to work through your differences, then I think we have one right here. You say it’s funny, she says it isn’t. Let’s talk about that. Tara, why do you say it’s funny to kick someone?”

“Okay, first off… when you say ‘kick someone’, it makes it sound like I’m going up and stomping somebody in the ribs, or something,” Tara said. “No! I’m just talking about planting a shoe on his butt. He falls over, but nobody’s hurt. Big difference.”

“‘Nobody’s hurt’?” Teddi repeated. “That doesn’t strike you as being mean?”

“It isn’t nice, but… Willy Brighton’s not a nice person,” Tara said. “I mean, you should have seen him. No friends, always staring, dressed like a total gaywad.”

“He was kind of a creep,” Sara admitted.

“And he breathed funny.”

“None of that adds up to ‘not nice’, to me,” Teddi said.

“Well, she’s not explaining it very well,” Sara said.

“Oh, shut up,” Tara said. “You try, then.”

“Trust me, if you’d known him… even the teachers thought he was asking for it,” Sara said.

“Doesn’t sound like school was very pleasant for Mr. Brighton,” Teddi said.

“Well, maybe if he would’ve got some better clothes and stopped shuffling around with his head down… but, anyway, when we came back from break, all…” Tara gestured with her hands, moving them from far apart to very close together. “…everybody’s looking at us like we’re fucking Willy Brighton or something, and I try to set things straight, but she goes weak sister on me.”

“What changed?” Teddi asked Sara.

“What changed?” Tara echoed, incredulously. “We’re joined at the shoulders. We shit out of the same hole. Everybody said we were inseparable before, but now…”

“I’m talking to Sara,” Teddi said. “What changed, for you?”

“Well…” Sara began. “I guess… I kind of got a taste of what it was like… to be an outsider?”

“Oh, shut your fat mouth!” Tara said. “You still thought Brighton was a little freak. You just didn’t want to get in trouble. You’d gotten so used to being the nice one, to watching teachers tell me, ‘Oh, why can’t you be more like your sister?’, and you couldn’t stand the thought of being lumped in with me.”

“Well… honestly,” Sara said. “Is it any kind of fair that I should be?”

“See?” Tara said to Teddi. “She admits it.”

“Well, I’d call that progress, actually,” Teddi said. “You’re being honest with each other.”

“Like we can exactly keep secrets,” Tara said. “I have no privacy anymore. I can’t write in my diary without her seeing, and now that I have a boyfriend…”

“I think you mean I have a boyfriend,” Sara said.

“Oh, shut up,” Tara said.

“How do you handle intimacy?” Teddi asked.

“She’s supposed to close her eyes and just sort of hang back,” Tara said. “That’s what we agreed, when we first talked about this sort of thing.”

“But he’s my boyfriend,” Sara said. “He looks at me when he’s talking.”

“Oh, whatever,”

“Have you tried talking to the boy about this?” Teddi asked. “See what he thinks?”

“I would, if I could talk to him alone,” Tara said. “But that’s not happening.”

“‘Oh, whatever’, yourself,” Sara said. “You don’t want to ask him which one of us he likes because you know what he’ll say.”

“See? This is what my life is like,” Tara said.

“Our life,” Sara corrected.

“This is what I have to put up with, twenty-four hours a day,” Tara said.

“How long ago did you get… joined?” Teddi asked.

“Senior year,” Sara said.

“Just last winter,” Tara said.

“If you don’t mind a little telepathy, I’d like to join our minds. You can go back in your memories to that time, and the three of us will experience it as a shared vision. That might give me a better idea of what you’ve experienced than anything you could tell me, as well as letting the two of you see from each other’s points of views.”

“It’s not enough that we’re stuck in the same body, you want to sew our minds together, too?” Tara asked.

“Temporarily, and not completely,” Teddi said. “You’ll still retain your own individuality through the entire process.”

“Done cleaning out your locker yet, slowpoke?” Tara asked, swinging her book bag into Sara’s arm. Sara muted her annoyance at the intrusion into her personal space.

“Yeah,” Sara said, slamming her locker shut. “I am so glad they finally ditched the alphabetical order for locker assignments.”

“Tell me about it,” Tara said, though she had in fact been disappointed that her locker would not be right next to her sister’s for once. It stung her to know how happy this development made Sara. “I don’t have to smell your stank-ass sweat socks all the time any more.”

“Yeah, you can finally smell your own,” Sara said.

They both laughed.

“Hey, guys!” their friend, Georgia said. She was in Sara’s skirmish squad. Tara thought she was a bit of a brown-noser and a kiss-up. She wished Sara could see it. “You ready for break?”

“Tell me about it,” Tara said. “I wanted to cut out at lunch, but it’s not like I could give any excuse that would wash with my doppelganger hanging around.”

“I thought you were my doppelganger,” Sara said, trying to laugh off the joke, because that’s all it was. Tara had to go out for all the same activities she did. How did that make her, Sara, the copy? “Anyway, we’re still leaving early.”

“Are you guys still going to your grandma’s place?” Georgia asked.

“Yeah,” Sara said. “We’re leaving next Wednesday.”

“But that’s Eventide Day!” Georgia said. “Didn’t you tell me that your grandma lives in Phale?”

“Yeah,” Tara said, grinning. “She does.”

“But our dad’s a genius,” Sara said, proudly. “He’s got his new teleport system perfected now, and the five of us are going to use it for the round trip. We’ll make it to Phale and back, cheap and easy as sending an a-mail.”

“It won’t work,” a quiet, husky voice said. The three girls turned to see the stocky frame and greasy face of Willy Brighton.

“What do you mean, it won’t work?” Tara demanded. “It has worked. It does work. We’ve all done it.”

“The second principle of balance,” Willy said. “It says…”

“What do you know about balance, Wet Willy?” Tara said. She shoved him hard and he fell loudly against a row of purple-painted lockers, then fell to the floor.

“Tara!” Sara chided, alarmed that Tara had done something so openly and blatantly. There wasn’t even plausible deniability. He’d been facing them when she did it. Then the bell rang, and they high-tailed it for the doors.

“See what I mean?” Tara said. “She was standing right next to me so she acted all horrified…”

“I was all horrified,” Sara said.

“You were horrified you’d be caught,” Tara said.

“Was Willy alright?” Teddi asked.

“Far as I know, yeah,” Tara said. “He was okay when we got back.”

“Do you want to jump to the accident?”

The two girls looked at each other. They couldn’t actually turn their heads very far in those directions at the same time, but they angled them and looked out of the corners of their eyes.

“We can’t tell you about that,” Sara said.

“Our dad would sue you if you read it from our minds,” Tara said.

“Anything you tell me is in strict confidence,” Teddi said.

“Yeah, right,” Tara said. “In strict confidence with you and all your mind-melter friends. How’s it go, ‘telepath, tell the world?’”

“I’m a bonded and fully licensed professional,” Teddi said. “But if you aren’t comfortable… the basic details are in your file, so we can certainly skip to the aftermath.”

“See? It’s on file,” Tara said. “That’s not very confident.”

“Only the barest details, and they won’t be released outside this office,” Teddi said. “But please, let’s move on.”

“Oh, Mom was furious,” Sara said. “She cried for days.”

“She made Dad destroy his device,” Tara said. “She thinks he destroyed the notes, too, but he says he can fix it.”

“What about you two?” Teddi asked. “What was it like for you?”

“We didn’t realize what was wrong at first,” Sara said. “I just felt something on my shoulder, but then we noticed Dad and Brian were staring.”

“Mom started screaming,” Tara said. “We had to take an airship back. She wouldn’t let anybody go back through.”

“We had to learn how to do everything again,” Sara said. “Walk, get dressed, eat… we had to get all our tops altered.

“We didn’t want to go back to school at all,” Tara said. “They had this big assembly with everybody… we were supposed to be there, but we wouldn’t go. We came back a day late.”

“It was awful,” Sara said.

“All our friends… they kept looking at us like we were some kind of freaks,” Tara said.

“Some kind of freak,” Sara said. “Singular.”

“Let’s go back,” Teddi said.

“Here we are, side-by-side again,” Sara said while Tara hung her backpack up. They couldn’t both use their lockers at the same time with any effectiveness, though they’d tried. The door in the middle got in the way. “I can’t believe I had to move lockers.”

“It would have been hard to get from one to the other between classes,” Tara said. She didn’t know why Sara was grumbling about this. With everything that had actually gone wrong, why complain about this? “It’s hard enough walking with your foot getting in the way of mine.”

“At least they gave in and let me have my own,” Sara said. “I can’t believe they expected us to share one.”

“Would’ve been easier, though,” Tara said. “Wouldn’t it?”

“Not the point.”

“Oh… hey… guys,” Georgia said. Jennifer and Cori were both with her. They were keeping their distance. There was a wariness the sisters had never before seen in their eyes, and the smiles they wore were normally reserved for small children or teachers. “I heard you were back today.”

“Yeah,” Sara said.

“We are,” Tara added. “How were you guys’ breaks?”

“Good,” Georgia said.

“Good,” Jennifer said.

“Okay,” Cori said. “Nothing special.”

“Yeah, well, ours was a blast and a half,” Tara said sarcastically.

Everybody laughed nervously.

“You guys getting around okay?” Jennifer asked. “I mean, any problems?”

“We had some,” Sara said. “We’ve mostly got it licked, but it’s going to be a lot of fun at practice, trying to coordinate everything.”

“Practice?” Georgia repeated.

“Uh, yeah, George,” Tara said. “You know, skirmish practice? Hitting each other with sticks? Remember? I know it’s been a long break, but…”

She trailed off when she saw the guilty looks the three girls were giving each other.

“What?” Tara and Sara asked at the same time.

“Bostick said you guys were going to take some time off from the team,” Cori said.

“He might have ran that by us before he announced it,” Tara said.

“Who are the new girls’ squad leaders?” Sara asked.

The girls looked at each other, but said nothing.

“Who?” Sara repeated.

“Bostick split up one squad and combined it with the other two,” Georgia said.

“Did he split my squad or Sara’s?” Tara asked.

“Who’s the new squad leader?” Sara repeated.

Jennifer and Cori both looked at Georgia.

“Look, you guys had an accident, and that’s nothing to be ashamed about…” Georgia said.

“Who the hell is ashamed?” Tara said. “We only got stuck in a teleport accident. It isn’t like our mom banged a half-orc, Jennifer!”

“That’s… she didn’t…” Jennifer sputtered.

“And Cori, maybe if you could fit your fat fingers into a ring, you wouldn’t have ‘cold sores’ all the time,” Tara said. “Mike B. said your cunt looks like something that’s been ran over and left out in the sun, did you know that? And you, George, you gave us so much shit for copying off Wet Willy last semester, but everybody knows the only reason you’re passing naturalism is because you wear those tiny skirts and sit in the front row. Maybe you can teach your new squad how to distract the opposing side? And Cori’s crotch can be your secret weapon!”

“Kheez, Tara, calm down,” Sara said, panic filling her as she saw what remained of their social life crumbling away.

“Did you ever talk to the coach about re-joining the team?” Teddi asked. “Once you were more… acclimated?”

“He burned those bridges,” Tara said.

“Anyway, do you think he’d have made us squad leader after that?” Sara asked. “And how would that work, exactly? Which of us would be in charge? If I couldn’t have my own squad again…”

“It was our senior year,” Tara said. “We’d earned those positions. We’d earned some respect. We had freshmen… we had middle schoolers… pointing and laughing at us.”

“What about the team here?”

“They’d stick us with the freaks,” Tara said. “Just like they did for housing. They told our parents we’d be more comfortable in a ‘diversity friendly environment’.”

“You’re housed in Harlowe, then?”

“Yeah,” Sara said. “It has its high points. I mean, we get free food and all, but the closest thing to normal there, aside from us, is a girl with an eye in her forehead and a mermaid. Everybody else is some kind of a monster or a complete dork.”

“When you say, ‘the closest thing to normal, aside from us’… do you think other people see it that way?” Teddi asked.

“We know we’re normal,” Tara said. “Who cares what others think?”

“Is that why you yelled insults at your best friends in the hallway of your old school?” Teddi asked gently. “Because you didn’t care what they thought about you?”

Tara said nothing to this.

Teddi leaned forward in her chair.

“Ladies… Tara, Sara… I’m going to be honest with you,” she said. “We had a rough beginning here, and even now I’m not sure that we’re going to get anywhere.”

“Who’s fault is that?” Tara said. “You’re the professional.”

“It’s not about whose fault it is,” Teddi said. “It’s about whose choice… it’s up to you here. If you want to proceed, you’re going to have to drop some barriers and be willing to look at some of your thought patterns, your preconceptions about the world. We’re going to have to talk about what your goals are, too… learning to live with each other, learning to live with the world, learning to live with yourselves…”

“I live with myself just fine,” Sara said.

“If that’s true, great,” Teddi said. “But, let’s get down to it: are you two really ready to move forward and figure out your places in the world and what to do with your lives? Or are you just going to keep—pardon my elvish—dicking around?”

Sara and Tara looked at each other.

They didn’t answer for a long time.

Finally, it came to her: Magisterius University… but not any room in any building that she was familiar with.

She swished her tail around to clear the covers and then slid her legs over the edge, getting to her feet. Her knees bent backwards under her weight and she had to catch herself.

She blew out hard through her nostrils to clear them, then sucked in air to inflate the vocal sacs in her throat. She tried holding it in for the count of five before exhaling, but it was too painful. Everything felt stiff, dry.

She looked around the room for water and didn’t see any.

The door opened. Simultaneously, she felt the entrance of another mind into the immediate area… a presence which should have registered sooner.

“You shouldn’t be out of bed,” said the human woman who’d just entered the room.

Water/thirst, she projected, knowing that she’d never make herself understood verbally.

“Certainly. I’ll be right back,” the human said. “But please, you’re too weak to be out of bed.”

The lizardwoman clicked her agreement and climbed back onto the bed, arranging herself on her side so that her tail could hang over the side.

The human left. Though she left the door open, the trace of her mind disappeared from the lizardwoman’s consciousness as soon as she was out of line of sight… evidently the walls and door were shielded.

She returned with a pitcher of water and a large glass. The lizardwoman sat up and reached for the pitcher. After a moment’s hesitation, the human handed it to her.

She opened her mouth wide and poured some of the water down her throat, filling her throat sacs and “gargling” briefly before swallowing it. She repeated this several times, then drank the rest of the water.

“Thank you, I am grateful,” she said once she’d finished.

“You’re welcome, Miss… uh, is it Eve or Goldapple?” the human asked. “Some of the forms say one and some say the other, or both.”

“It is neither,” the lizardwoman replied. “Eve Goldapple is what they called me at the mission school.”

“What is your name, then?”

“They call me Hissy here.”

“I’d call you your proper name, if I knew it,” the human said.

After warming up with the slow, cumbersome human speech, it was a pleasure for the lizardwoman to produce her own name in her own language, even as she knew that the series of hisses, rattles, and clicks would be impossible for the human to reproduce.

“Um, does it have a meaning in Pax?” the human asked.

“What is your name, and what does it mean in Pax?”

“Teddi,” the human said. “Theadora Lundegard. ‘Theadora’ means ‘gift of the goddess’, and Lundegard means, um, ‘of the Lundegard family.’”

“Do you think you would answer if somebody called you ‘Lundegard’s Goddess’s Gift?’”

“Actually, I’d probably look at them funny.”

“My name approximates to 7-Leaf/3-Bell Gold/Apple, but 7-Leaf/3-Bell Gold/Apple is not my name.”

“Gold Stroke Apple?” Teddi repeated, confused.

“To say it properly, you have to say them both at the same time,” the lizardwoman replied. “But they are actually the same word. Our name for the color comes from the fruit.”

“That’s a bit odd,” Teddi said. “When I think of apples, I think of red.”

“When I think of apples, I think of gold,” the lizardwoman said. “I don’t mind being called Hissy. A nickname grates less than having my proper name mangled.”

“Very well, then, Hissy,” Teddi said. “Do you know why you’re here?”

“I do not know where I am,” Hissy said. “And I have even less idea why.”

“You’re in the mental healing annex of the student healing center,” Teddi said. “You were brought in yesterday…”

“What day is it?” Hissy asked urgently. “I apologize for the interruption.”

“It’s Sunday,” Teddi said. “Astera 27th.”

“The match,” Hissy said. “The skirmish match. Against Blackwater Province. Was I injured? Is that why I’m here?”

“You didn’t make the match, I’m afraid,” Teddi said. “Sometime in the late afternoon, you made mind contact with an infernal.”

Hissy made a rattle in her throat and projected an impression of negation.

“I have no memory of that,” she said.

“You wouldn’t,” Teddi said. “We had to remove a whole section of your memory in order to stop it from destroying your mind. Other portions of your memory which were infected may be fragmented or suppressed. Some of that will heal on its own over time. Some of it, we’ll have to work on recovering. What’s the most recent thing you remember?”

“Swimming in the fen,” Hissy said. “I had just caught a large fish and… that’s not right.” She rattled. “I’ve not been swimming like that since before the mission school.”

“Things might be a bit jumbled for a while,” Teddi said. “Your mind will put your older memories back in their proper order eventually. For now, you’ll probably have to focus on context. Remember, yesterday was Saturday, the weekend after your second full week of classes. Look inward, search for a memory which fits with that… and if you find something which feels dangerous, or hurts or disturbs you, look away.”

Hissy focused, probing her own memories, ignoring her impressions of chronology. There were some memories of her parents which seemed distressingly fresh. Doubtlessly, Teddi had meant something else when she talked about painful and disturbing memories, but she pushed them to the back of her mind all the same.

Eventually, she found what seemed to be a truly recent one, though it carried with it the impression of a lengthy passage of time.

“Rocky—Raquel—wanted to talk to the Blaise girl,” Hissy said. “I said it was a bad idea but she’s the lieutenant, and she said it was a squad matter.”

“That would be Miss Mackenzie?” Teddi asked.

Hissy clicked, then nodded.

“Did you try to touch her mind?”

“I do not remember,” Hissy said. “But I think that was the idea.”

“We thought so, but Miss Ra… uh, Ms. Peters wouldn’t say anything and we couldn’t safely examine your memory of the incident,” Teddi said. “Didn’t you know what would happen?”

“She seemed so… innocuous?” Hissy said. “Like a small kitten.”

“Cute?”

“Helpless,” Hissy said. “Edible.”

“Uh, right,” Teddi said. “Well, any mind of extraplanar descent is generally too alien to make unprotected contact with. It’s a bit like looking directly at a bright light and a little bit like me trying to imitate your language. The minds just don’t mesh. An infernal mind is even more dangerous, because it wants to actively destroy whatever it can.”

“I did not know,” Hissy said. “I suppose I’ve learned that lesson now.”

“Did you have any formal training with your gifts before coming here?”

“Only from the village teacher/shaman/witch,” Hissy said, using the sounds of her own language as there was no direct translation. “Those who ran the mission school would have rather we did not develop such abilities, and the only thing they told us of demons was they were to be avoided, though that seemed to be a human concern.”

“Well, it was good advice, in this case,” Teddi said. “Can you tell me anything about your confrontation with Miss Mackenzie?”

“I cannot,” Hissy said. “I have no memory of it.”

“But do you remember any plans? Intentions?”

“To talk,” Hissy said.

“Do you have an impression of any hostility from Miss Mackenzie?”

“I do not have any impression whatsoever, relating to the event.”

“I see,” Teddi said. “Well… we’re going to need to keep an eye on you for the next few days, in case of secondary effects.”

“What sort of effects?”

“Mindless aggression, bloodlust, that sort of thing,” Teddi said. “It sometimes comes through after direct contact with an infernal mind. You might find yourself craving raw meat.”

“I do that, anyway.”

“Well, it’s best if you try to avoid crowds of humans for a while, in any event,” Teddi said. “Assuming you’re not showing any signs, we can release you for classes, but we’ll want you to return here at night, as sleep is when you’ll be most likely to turn.”

“This bed is not comfortable for me.”

“I’m sorry, we don’t normally put patients on their faces, but we didn’t know how else to manage with the, uh, tail,” Teddi said.

“In my room in Harlowe, I make a nest of blankets on the floor,” Hissy said. “What time is it? Have I missed the temple services?”

“You’re… you’re Khersian?”

“That’s what they told me at the mission school. I didn’t have any particular objection.”

“Well, there’s still the afternoon service, but it’s probably not a great idea,” Teddi said. “It’s too soon to tell if you’ve been affected, and the sight of holy symbols and icons could trigger something.”

“It’s not a great loss,” Hissy said. “Did we lose the skirmish match?”

“I’m sorry, but yes, you did,” Teddi said. “The seventh squad kind of fell apart on the field, and BPC rushed in through the hole and cut our army in half.”

“It’s not a great loss,” Hissy said. “Do you have more blankets? If there isn’t anything more you need to do with me, I’d like to go dormant for a while.”

“Yes, of course,” Teddi said. “Just, you know, call out or something if you start to feel any strange urges.”

“What about skirmish practice?” Hissy said. “Can I attend squad drills?”

“I think it’s a good idea to avoid anything that might involve aggressive impulses for the time being,” Teddi said. “We’ll give you an excuse form for any combat classes, as well. I’m sorry.”

“It’s no great loss,” Hissy said. “They told me I should try out for the team and I did. They told me that I needed a weapons class so I took one.”

“Right, then,” Teddi said. “Well, I’ll go get your blankets.”

“Thank you, Lundegard’s Goddess’s Gift,” Hissy said.

Teddi smiled.

“Is that what you consider a ‘funny look’?” Hissy asked. “I’ve always thought so but I didn’t realize humans agreed.”

“I’ll go get your blankets, smartass.”