Out-and-out humiliation could get me hot and bothered given the right context, but it would also leave me just as bothered as I was hot. But what we did was not humiliating. Giving in to Ian, giving myself over to him, being put to his use like that… it was more a form of sublimation, no pun intended, and it left me feeling both very relaxed and very strong in myself. Amaranth’s gentle, loving, but firm spanking had had a similar effect, or else I probably would have been too frazzled about the casual nudity to pull it off.

We didn’t go to bed any time soon after I finished Ian off, but instead just went back to our homework. Only now I was sitting cross-legged on the floor near him, and he still had his dick out until the next time he needed to get up… but only in an incidental sort of way.

The whole thing left him with a kind of unassuming cockiness, pun somewhat intended, that just made me want to be used even more by him.

I’d spent enough time sitting on the floor at the feet of either Amaranth or Ian to be comfortable doing it, though doing homework was a new experience. I thought I would probably need to get some kind of writing surface if I were to do it more often. The interesting thing was that even without a desk to write on, the clarity and calm it left me with made a huge difference in my ability to write out a spell formula flawlessly.

If Ian really did want to assert more dominance in our relationship, I could definitely see the upsides from where I was sitting. It was something to talk about in the morning, I decided, once I’d re-emerged from my submersion. I didn’t feel like talking much at all as it was, and there didn’t seem to be any need to.

My dream that night began with me naked and on the floor, though sitting rather than kneeling or crawling. It had the horrible hyper-real clarity that told me it wasn’t just a dream.

The contours of the room had shifted a bit. In the waking world, the only way to fit a queen-sized bed into the undersized dorm room was to have it with one end stuck in the nook where the original bunk beds had been. In the dream, the whole room was bigger and the bed had its head towards the outer wall and its foot towards the door.

The man was sitting on the foot of the bed, his hat in his hand. I didn’t know how much control he had over the initial setting of the dream, but he certainly would have had a hard time figuring out a better way to make me feel looked down upon. The altered dimensions of the room even made me feel smaller, like I was a child instead of being a mostly-adult college student in what was technically her own room.

“So that’s how you spend your time,” he said, shaking his head .”On your knees, slobbering all over a piece of human meat… it’s like watching a vampire kiss a boo-boo to make it all better. Disturbing”

“Well, I’m sorry for having sex in a way that makes it creepy for you to spy on it,” I said.

I used the shot of indignation that went through me as I said it to asset myself a bit, and I found myself sitting on the desk chair. I’d go to the floor for any of my lovers because I chose to be beneath them, but I wouldn’t lower myself for him.

I kept myself naked, though. I was naked, in real life, and since I was alone in bed with my boyfriend I didn’t see a problem with that. If he was going to sit there in judgment of the way I lived my life, pretending I was living it a different way wasn’t exactly a strong opening move.

“Listen, child, your mind’s not a television box and it’s not a book,” he said. “I can’t change the channel and I can’t flip around in it. You got something fresh and firm in your head…excuse my choice of words… when you fall asleep, it’s going to be right there when I show up.”

Buoyed by the sense of clarity that still lingered from my earlier submission, I took the time to dissect what he was saying before responding. He was acting like he’d had the misfortune of stumbling into his knowledge of my bedroom hijinks… but even if that were true, he’d had no business in the place where he was stumbling.

“Think of it as a trap for the unwary burglar, then,” I said. “I’m sure you’d rather I’d been biting and tearing… but I’m just not made that way, and even if I was, he wouldn’t be very filling any more.”

“Hey, just because I’d like to see more respect for yourself doesn’t mean I’d want you to do anything that makes it more dangerous for you to live in this world,” he said. “You are far too precious to me. That’s one reason I took your pitchfork away until you’re a bit… wiser. It was apt to get you into far too much trouble.”

The mention of my pitchfork stirred something in me that almost distracted me from the ongoing judgment, but I decided to address that and ignore the dangled bait.

“I’m learning how to respect the person I am,” I said. “I have to know myself in order to respect myself, and I’m not going to accept the judgment of someone who doesn’t know the first thing about me when it comes to what is and isn’t respectful… and anyway, you could have told me what the pitchfork could do to me and how to handle it safely!”

Okay, so ignoring the dangling bait hadn’t completely worked out. But I hadn’t let his judgment pass unchallenged, and I’d kept mostly calm.

“Still could,” he said. “Will, one day… when I can trust that you’ll listen to me and won’t just go doing the opposite of what I say out of sheer damned spite. The point isn’t that you should be out there killing humans or that you shouldn’t be enjoying yourself, it’s about how you do it.”

I didn’t want his approval, but I didn’t deserve his disapproval.

More than that, he didn’t deserve to approve or disapprove of me.

“Yeah?” I said. “If you think you could do a better job, I’ll dream a dick and you can show me.”

“So that’s how you talk to your daddy?”

“I wouldn’t know, I’ve never met him,” I said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think he even exists. I also don’t think you really give half a disapproving cluck who I have sex with, or how I do it… it’s just a convenient lever, a way of making me feel inferior.”

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent,” he said.

“Right, which is why you need to go to that kind of effort to convince me to,” I said.

“Hey, listen,” he said. “We’re getting off to a bad start… again… but I’m not here to push my own agenda. I wouldn’t be bothering you at all, to tell you the truth, but there’s something going on you need to know about. Something new.”

“What?”

“Well, I don’t want to alarm you any, but you should know you’ve got something creeping around your backstair,” he said.

I bit back my first response and forced myself to breathe, in the process realizing that I hadn’t been. At all. One of the lesser pitfalls of a dream. Elves… full elves… could stop their breath in real life, though they lost some of what made them like mortals in the process.

What did I lose when I didn’t have a breath? Any sense of tempo, or temper, probably. Though I still felt more in control than usual, I’d been getting angrier and angrier.

Focus, I thought, and it sounded in my head like Dee’s voice during our meditation sessions. Breathe.

I made myself breathe and thought before I answered. The way he said it, it sounded like he didn’t know that I knew about the owl-turtle thing… that seemed impossible, but the owl-turtle thing itself was an anomaly to begin with, and Dee had said that it was able to hide its nature and true presence from even skilled telepaths. Whatever path he’d taken to my sleeping mind, I didn’t think the man measured up to the standards of Dee’s people in that department.

If he didn’t know, I decided, I wasn’t going to tell him.

“What, child?” he said. “What were you going to say?”

“Nothing… just another retort wasted on you,” I said, realizing that leaving it at “nothing” was telling him that it was something I didn’t want him to know. “But it seemed too obvious, and honestly, you’re not worth the effort.”

“I’m serious, though, and no, I’m not talking about me,” he said. “There has been something lurking around the edge of your mind the past couple of nights. Listen, I know you don’t think much of me but I’ve always been up front with you about my presence. I’ve got no reason to come by except to see you, so you’ll always know when I’m around.”

“As far as safe but meaningless claims go, ‘I’m never around when you can’t see me’ rates pretty high,” I said. “How exactly is it that you came to know what’s going on in my mind, if you weren’t around?”

“A father knows,” he said.

“So how did you?”

“Thought you weren’t wasting time with obvious retorts,” he said.

“It’s a work in progress,” I said. “If you haven’t been spying, how do you know what has or hasn’t been in my head?”

“When I go in and out, I leave protections over my path. Alarms, you might say,” he said. “It’s you I’m thinking of… I wouldn’t be so irresponsible as to leave a way into your mind that any Tom, Dybbuk, and Harry could crawl in through, you know. I hope you can at least appreciate that.”

“Thank you for taking the time to put a string with some tin cans on it across the hole you leave in my head,” I said.

“Yeah, well, something tripped over that ‘string’, only it was heading in the wrong direction… it wasn’t on the outside heading in, but the inside going out.”

“Oh,” I said. So, it seemed that the owl-turtle thing had at least made an initial foray in the direction of the man’s mind without my permission. It seemed obvious that the sense of lurking presence I’d felt the past couple of nights was either a result of it trying to skirt around the edges of my consciousness, or a side-effect of it trying to get past the man’s defenses. So it seemed that either it had decided there was something there worth pursuing with or without my cooperation, or it was trying to test the feasibility of its ideas in the hopes of better persuading me to go along with them.

The man’s eyes narrowed, just a bit. I realized my noncommittal response had rattled him somewhat. That was surprising, but it was nice to see.

I kept breathing. Slow, steady.

“What?” he asked. “What do you know?”

“Nothing,” I said, this time counting on the fact that it was the world’s most transparent denial. It was more or less the truth, but if I said it loud enough he’d never believe it. “I mean, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you noticed.”

“What were you doing?” he asked.

“Nothing!” I said, even more forcefully. “I mean, you’d know if I did, right? You’re the expert here. I’m just sort of… feeling my way around.”

I didn’t have to force the smile that came onto my face as I said the last part. Feeling my way around. If he thought I was stumbling around in the direction of his headspace, that would probably reinforce it.

“Don’t play around,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he meant not to play around with him in the here and now, or not to play around at poking back at his mind, or if he was just covering all the bases in general. “Seriously, girl, you do not want to mess with me.”

“You’re right about that,” I said. I got up and stretched. Now that he was getting uncomfortable, I was feeling far less so. “I don’t want to have anything to do with you.”

“You’re not fooling anyone,” he said. “I know there’s something else that’s been bird-dogging me. Not you. More than you.”

The phrase “bird-dogging” made me smile because of its accidental almost-appropriateness. I didn’t hide my amusement from him… I’d let him wonder what was so funny.

“I thought I made it clear that who I let into my room and what I do with them is my business,” I said. I wished it were true, but I could say it with enough conviction anyway because given the choice I would take the owl-turtle thing in over him.

I had the increasingly surreal sense that to an outside observer… someone who had no clue what was going on in my head… I’d look a lot more clever than I actually was, like a character in a TV show or comic book who always keeps her cool and always has a plan.

I didn’t have a plan, exactly. I was just liked seeing him rattled.

Is this how he feels? I wonder. Not knowing half of what he wants me to think he knows, not telling me half of what he does know. I didn’t necessarily agree that turnabout was fair play, but playing fair had to be done on both sides.

“You’re messing with things you don’t understand,” he said.

“I’m messing with things you don’t understand… and that worries you,” I said. I added the last bit when I realized how I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I I had almost sounded. With the addition, it almost sounded insightful.

“I’m worried for you,” he said. “Can’t you understand that?”

“Yeah, well… if I didn’t have anyone climbing into my head in the first place, I wouldn’t have to turn to anyone else to help keep them out,” I said. “So if you don’t want me making any alliances with forces that are beyond your reckoning, stop giving me a reason to.”

I felt every inch the brat that Amaranth had said I wasn’t, and that thought gave me a weird thrill of impish glee. Asserting myself like this was doing nothing to knock me out of my comfortable headspace.

I still felt submissive, that just made it all the more significant that I wasn’t submitting to him.

“Girl, you have no idea what kind of forces I can reckon with after a thousand years of crawling about the skin of this world,” he said. I could see fire behind his eyes… I could practically see it burning beneath his skin. For the first time, the thin veneer was fading away.

“No, but I know at least one thing you can’t reckon with,” I teased.

“You’ve got too much of your mama in you,” he said.

“Nine years’ worth of her… not nearly enough,” I said. That was probably his fault, but I sat on the blast of anger that thought provoked. “Can I blame you for that? I think I will.”

The offhand way I said it to him was apparently the conversational equivalent of a head blow in Callahan’s class. He leaped to his feet like he’d just sat on something with teeth, a sneer on his face.

“Yeah, don’t you be so proud,” he said. “You know where you get that from, don’t you? You Blaise women are so prideful, so stubborn when you get pressed to the point. Your granny would light the whole world on fire if she thought that wickedness could be burned out of it.”

“I bet she’d do just about anything to stop you,” I said.

“Of course she would, even on principle alone,” he said. “Wouldn’t even have to be personal. That’s what I’m saying. No sense of proportion at all, just like your mother. Just like you.”

“Like you’ve never given her a reason to make it personal.”

“Not so far as she knows.”

“You mean she doesn’t know who you are?” I asked.

“As much as anyone does, I suspect she does,” he said. “We’ve had our go-rounds, but I think I learned more from them than she did. Mostly I learned she’s not worth trying to tackle directly.”

“No, not when you could take advantage of her daughter and rub her face in it,” I said.

“Oh, like I’d be so indiscreet,” he said. He sounded offended… not wounded in the way he did when he was pretending to flinch at my disdain, but actually insulted. “Being with your mother was a great big risk, and I’ll admit to some private pleasure, but what happened between your us wasn’t about petty revenge. I wouldn’t risk what we accomplished together just for the sake of spite… though the same can’t be said for your mama.”

I wanted to tell him to shut up… but more than that, I wanted him to keep talking. I’d never made him mad like this before, and his chrome-plated tongue seemed a lot looser when he got wound up.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Do you want to know the real reason why she’s gone?”

“If you’re going to say it’s because of me, you can save your breath,” I said. “I know it wasn’t my fault.”

“It wasn’t,” he said. “And if you’re going to guess it’s because of me… well, that’s what she’d say, too, if she could tell you. But the truth is, I didn’t lay a finger on her. She did it all herself, and she did it out of spite… to spite me. She was so dead-set on shutting me out, she was willing to take herself out of the picture to make it happen.”

“Even if that is true, I don’t think you’re proving what you think you’re proving.”

“She left you alone, Mackenzie,” he said. “She left you alone with that woman. Think on that a spell, why don’t you. However much I irk you for whatever reason, try to imagine having a daughter you love, and taking your dislike of me out on her the way she took it out on you. Could you do it?”

“No,” I admitted. “I really don’t think I could.”

“Didn’t think so,” he said.

“That’s why I don’t think she did,” I said.

“I’m telling you, I didn’t kill her,” he said.

“I can believe that much,” I said. “I’m not saying I do. But if I go with the idea that you’re slanting things rather than lying outright, then maybe she did give her life to spite your plans… and I’d have to be pretty stupid to not think your plans don’t revolve around me.”

“Then you’re as arrogant as your grandma.”

“Fine,” I said. “They revolve around you using me. From this point on I’m working on the assumption that she gave her life to put me outside your grasp, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to honor that.”

“Girl, you’re making a mistake you don’t want to make,” he said. “You’re doing the exact same thing she did.”

“And wouldn’t she be proud to know it?” I said. I walked over to the door and opened it. “I think you know what this is and how to use it. I’m going to give you exactly one chance to walk out of here under your own power, and then I’m going to wake up. I’d rather not do that because I have class tomorrow, but missing a little sleep is the least of what I’m prepared to do to keep you out.”

“Girl, every time I see you, you say you’re going to…”

“Goodnight,” I said, and I pried my eyes open.

Support Tales of MU! Paypal: WePay: Or maybe… …buy one of my short stories on Amazon. Thank you, and enjoy the read.

I didn’t mind. Sex was only disappointing if you were disappointed by it, after all. Asking for sex to be satisfying wasn’t too much, but expecting great big explosions of pleasure all the time, every time, was a bit unrealistic. We did have the whole weekend ahead of us, and the semester after that, and anything up to and including a lifetime after that.

Satisfaction we had, and afterwards we collapsed into sleep, curled up together in the middle of the roomy bed that Amaranth had smuggled into our dorm. It was a deep sleep, and it probably would have qualified as restful… but the dream that I had was anything but.

In the dream, I found myself standing on a little overhang jutting out over a creek bed. The creek was just a trickle of water at the bottom of a deep channel. It had evidently been a dry season, or possibly even a dry year… at the moment, you could have spread a picnic blanket out on either side of the water. The trees on the other side of the ditch certainly looked parched and dry.

I recognized the landscape, in a certain sense. It could have been somewhere in the backwoods near my childhood home. It wasn’t… or at least, it didn’t stand out as any real spot I’d ever visited in particular.

There was a vivid, hyper-real quality to it all that I definitely recognized… I’d trained myself to recognize dreams like this, and to wake myself up at the first sign of them. The odd sense of familiarity I had for the setting had slowed me down, but it was definitely time for me to leave.

“Hold on a moment, girl… don’t you go rushing off just yet.”

The voice came from just behind me. I was more in control in my dreams than I was in real life, or else I would probably have been startled enough to fall off the overhang to the bottom of the creek bed, about ten or so feet below.

I was pretty sure he’d set things up that way on purpose, and proud that I hadn’t given him the satisfaction. I turned to face him, but instead of picking up my feet and doing so, I just envisioned myself facing the other way. I didn’t actually see the world apparently revolving. The world of the dream just resolved itself so that I was facing the man I knew as my father… and about a foot and a half farther away from the ledge than I had been.

He was standing with one leg up on a felled tree a few yards away. The trees here were pretty thin. Dead branches and even fallen trunks littered the ground. If this represented a real place, it was parched.

He let out a low whistle.

“Impressive,” he said.

I ignored the compliment.

“So, I’m supposed to stop and chat just because you asked me to stop?” I said.

“Well, it’s working out that way so far,” he said. “And yes, you can fix that in a moment… but it doesn’t really matter which moment, does it? I mean, if you decide to wait a minute or two before you rouse yourself, that won’t stop you from waking up later.”

It was an old argument, an old tactic… it sounded so reasonable. There was nothing about it that wasn’t true. It was still a trap, though.

“Come on,” he said. “What’s the point of having a choice if you keep choosing the same thing every time?”

“What’s the point of having a choice if I let other people second-guess my decision?” I asked.

“Always running away isn’t freedom,” he said. “It’s just another form of prison.”

“So I’m supposed to do what you want this one time to prove that I’m really doing what I want the other times?” I said.

“Do what you want,” he said. “But doesn’t it make sense to check in every once in a while and make sure that what you want hasn’t changed? Make an informed decision. You believe I have an agenda that doesn’t involve your best interests. You don’t trust me. That’s fine. I wouldn’t want you to. But you don’t have to trust a person to make use of them, do you?”

“I don’t ‘make use’ of people,” I said. “And I don’t want anything from you.”

“All I ask is five minutes,” he said.

“You have until I decide to leave,” I said.

“That’s fine, keep things flexible… you probably won’t be in such a hurry to shut me out when you realize I just wanted to talk to you about your friend with the horns.”

“She’s not exactly my friend.”

“That’s a shame,” he said. “You could always use another friend.”

“I’m surprised you’d encourage me to hang out with a Khersian,” I said.

He gave an exaggerated shrug and sat down on the log.

“I don’t have a problem with Khersians.” he said. “Most of them have a problem with me, and I’m smart enough to not waste friendship on anyone who sees me as their enemy…”

“Present company excluded, obviously.”

“Girl, you’re family,” he said. I expect a lot of parents go through a spell where their child thinks they’re absolutely the worst person who’s ever walked the face of the world…”

“You aren’t a parent,” I said.

“Not for lack of trying… anyway, though, plenty of humans who’ve ‘lapsed’ or never had anything to do with the temples in the first place still don’t like demons. I can’t assume I’m safe when talking to a human who isn’t a Khersian, so why have a particular beef against ones who are?” he said. “I may not be a fan of that guy but I’m not too bothered about what others believe about him. Just so long as she doesn’t get any of it on you… she doesn’t seem like the careless type. Open-minded, too. You could learn a lot from her.”

“I can’t imagine she’d be a big fan of you,” I said. “She might be a pretty liberal Khersian but I can’t imagine she’d like hearing you talk about ‘that guy’.”

“And why not?” the man asked. “Gods are just people. Powerful people, people not to be trifled with, but that one blew his load long ago.”

“What do you mean?”

“When’s the last time you heard about a manifestation of Khersis?”

“He did have a rather famous incarnation.”

“Of course he did… don’t think I’m playing the ‘myth’ card,” the man said. “There isn’t a demon who’ll dispute that Khersis exists or that he walked the world… but what’s he done since then? Granted most of his kind keep pretty well to themselves these days, but he does so more than most. The way I figure it, they have some serious limitations when it comes to direct intervention or manifestation. Whether it costs them something in power, or they have some sort of private agreement among themselves… otherwise we’d all be elbow-deep in divine meddling all the time, and we’d all be screwed.”

“Interesting idea,” I said. “Not exactly original… I think most theologians believe it’s basically true, though few work up the courage to ask any gods about it. But there’s also the question of inclination… plenty of gods manifest more often than others, and it seems to be as much a matter of preference as anything else. Some gods are just more active than others.”

“Right, and we have in Khersis a god who went from activist to absentee landlord in a big way,” the man said. “You ask me? He wanted to do some cosmic rearranging that he knew the others wouldn’t go for, so he pulled a fast one by incarnating as a mortal first. The fact that he’s been so quiet since then means that either he’d used up all the juice he had for a few millennia or he lost the right to get his meddle on.“

“Or maybe he’d done what he’d set out to do and pulled back to let humans stand on their own,” I said.

“Are you defending him?”

“I don’t have any reason to have anything against him,” I said.

“He cast the demons out of the world and threw us into the pit.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“Is it a good thing?” the man said. “Listen, if regularly killing humans was enough to get a race kicked out of the world, then humans themselves would be at the head of the line. Khersis didn’t target us because we’re evil, or because we feed on humans. He eliminated us because we were the biggest threat to human dominance. We were the biggest thing keeping them from swarming all over the globe like locusts. Just look at what the years since ‘Lord Khersis’ left have been like: an age of empires, with Khersian-worshipping humans at the head of them.”

“Yeah, I don’t know much about her specific beliefs, but somehow I really can’t see Twyla thinking I should have anything to do with you,” I said.

“Yeah, well… you already have something to do with me,” he said. “There’s no getting away from that, is there? And now you do have something in common with her.”

“Ifrits aren’t infernal,” I said.

“No, just… interesting,” he said.

“Yeah? What I find interesting is that I’ve known her… somewhat… for over a year, and the first time you have anything to say to me about her is the night that I find out about her ifrit parentage,” I said.  

“Why would I care about that, do you suppose?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s the thing that’s changed. You leave me alone for months…”

“Only because you made it clear I wasn’t welcome. I can take a hint.”

I didn’t press the point, because he’d missed the emphasis in my initial statement and I really didn’t want to highlight it for him, in retrospect. Twyla had been part-ifrit the whole time… that information had existed out there in the ether somewhere, and yet it was only when I found out about it that he became interested. The obvious explanation was that he hadn’t known, either.

We hadn’t exactly been talking about it within a sphere of silence at dinner, but I still doubted that the campus rumor mill was all abuzz with word of Twyla’s heritage. If he’d found out about it in the interval between the last time I was asleep and this time, it seemed most likely that he’d somehow learned about it from me.

It wouldn’t have been the first time that he picked something out of my head, but it was the first time I knew about since I’d learned a bit of mental defenses. Had my mind ever been secure against him, or had he just let me think that? Maybe he’d found a back way in, somehow… if he could just flat out read my mind, of course, he already knew that I was onto him. But acknowledging that would give it away.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked me.

Maybe it was paranoid, but the first thing I thought of after that was it would be the perfect thing to say if he was following my thoughts and wanted to convince me that he wasn’t.

“Why is it ‘interesting’ to you Twyla’s part ifrit?” I asked.

“They’re unusual in this part of the world,” he said. “A powerful, proud people, I understand… not on the best terms with humanity or the other mortal races, but not ‘fallen’ like demons. Not the ‘ancient enemy’ of humans, or of anyone humans give a damn about in particular. But the girl’s got a long row to hoe, and maybe you can help her with that. Maybe you can help each other.”

“Maybe if she lived in Maravaya where ifrits are the bad guys in stories, we’d be in the same boat,” I said. “But here? There’s no entrenched fear or hatred of ifrits. It’s all ‘genies’ to the average Magisterian. She might have to deal with assholes who think she can grant wishes, or ones who know she can’t but think it’s hilarious to hang around challenging her to do so, but that’s not really the same kind of response she’d get for being half-demon. Which a lot of people think anyway, because of the horns.”

“So maybe you’re not in such different boats after all,” the man said. “Listen, I didn’t come here tonight to pester you and I didn’t come here tonight to try to fool you into revealing something or doing my secret bidding or anything… if you go trying to guess at my agenda, you’ll probably end up avoiding that Twyla girl because you think I want you to stick by her for some sinister reason… or you’ll end up being friends with her because you think I’m trying to trick you into thinking that way because I want you to stay away. You can keep letting those kinds of thoughts chase each other around in a circle forever… believe me, your mother was like that towards the end, and you are her daughter. So instead of trying to guess at what I want so you don’t end up doing it, just think… really think… about what you want when it comes to this girl.

“Isn’t she friendly enough? Doesn’t she seem decent? Doesn’t she seem like the sort of person that other people just can’t find enough excuses to take out their own problems on?

“If all you wanted was for me to make up my mind about Twyla without giving what you wanted a second thought, all you had to do was stay out of my life,” I said.

“Well, I wanted you to think about it,” he said. “You’ve been adrift for so long that without a little nudge now and then you’re liable to just go with the flow, which in this case would be telling her what you know and wishing her well… the thing about going with the flow is that you tend to drift away from anyone who’s not making a double effort to keep up with you. That’s why the people you’re closest to are the ones who’ve grabbed hold of you the tightest.”

So it wasn’t strictly about making friends with Twyla… it was about making different friends than I had now. I could understand him preferring me in the company of a Khersian to an actual divine being… Amaranth’s holy light wasn’t exactly healthy for me, but even mild exposure to it had impeded the man’s ability to infiltrate my mind before.

But I didn’t think for a moment that this was all that was at work here… wanting to separate me from Amaranth and my support network may have been numbered among his long-term goals, but something in particular had made him act now. Knowing about her ifrit blood somehow meant that there was some use he expected that I could put Twyla to… some use he could put her to, using me. I was certain of that.

“You’ve given me some things to think about,” I said, because it seemed like the thing to say that wouldn’t provoke another argument or an interesting side discussion designed to keep me there. I closed my eyes and started to will myself awake.

There was something else, too, that was at the back of my mind… I had been keeping it there, because I didn’t know the extent of access the man had to the front of my mind. As I woke up I found it floating to the forefront of my consciousness, and it filled me with a dark and terrifying rage.

It was something he’d said:

Your mother was like that towards the end.

---

Give the Man a hand! Show your appreciation with a dollar or two.

Contents:

1. Heads or Tails
2. Bill and the Goblins

There is a whole cycle of stories told throughout the region of Blackwater about the figure known as “The Man in the Woods”, believed by most folklorists to be a remnant sidhe. Some of these stories are undoubtedly older ones carried over by Merovian settlers, recast around the local figure in place of an elven noble or other traditional character.

There are many extant variations on the story called “Heads or Tails”. Some omit the detail regarding the escalating coins. Some make the coins themselves the focus of the girl’s needs and the man’s boons. Later versions in particular are apt to give the tale’s heroine a confidante, to explain how her dealings with the Man in the Woods would become known.The following is one of the more elaborate of the traditional tellings.

Lucy was a child when she first went into the woods all on her own. Her father had warned her not to go out of sight of the house, but she was a willful girl and one day, feeling she’d exhausted all the possibilities for play in those familiar environs, she resolved to explore further. She found a single beech tree that marked the boundary of the edge of the familiar woods behind her family’s cottage, and made careful note of it.

“I can see the house from this beech tree,” she reckoned, “and so, so long as I can see the beech tree I know I’ll be able to find my way back.”

She nodded to herself at her cleverness, and set off to see what adventures might lay beyond it. She was disappointed to find that the woods on the far side of the beech tree were no more enchanting or wonderful than the ones on the near side, however, even when she’d gone so deep into them that she could barely see the beech tree.

“I can go a little further,” she decided. “So long as I keep this fallen tree in my view, I’ll know how to find my way back to the beech tree.”

And so she continued to find new landmarks for herself until, having been walking for some time in deepening woods, she was quite weary and decided there was no adventure to be found in the woods after all.

“Well, then, I’ll simply retrace my steps,” she decided. “There’s the moss-covered rock, and from there I just need to find… was it the crooked elm? No, it was a fallen stone arch. I’m sure of it.”

But when she made her way back to the rock, she could see neither elm nor arch, nor anything else that jarred her memory.

“Well,” she said. “I’ll just walk in the same direction and I’m bound to see something I recognize.”

And she did: trees, and rocks, and ruins, and other things that she thought she had passed before. Even she couldn’t remember their proper order, she was heartened to think that she was on the right track, until one more she came to the moss-covered rock, upon which she collapsed sobbing.

“Now, now,” a voice said, cool and calm and sticky-sweet like molasses, and very close behind her. “What are you crying for?”

“I’ve lost my way,” Lucy said. She had no fear of the man, for she was already lost in the woods and truly she could think of no thing worse than that. “Can you help me?”

“Well, that depends,” the man said. “Do you live in the cottage on the other side of the beech?”

“Yes,” Lucy said. “Yes, that’s the one.”

“And is your father a woodcutter, and a gods-fearing man who praises the brothers every Sunday?”

“Yes, yes, that’s him!” Lucy said.

“Then maybe I can help you find your way back to him,” the man said. “But we’ll have to spin a coin on it. Heads, or tails?”

Lucy did not question the logic of the game, or the consequences for losing, for where an adult might have seen caprice and cruelty, she saw only hope. The man pulled out a shiny copper coin from his coat pocket and set it on his thumb.

“Heads!” she cried as the man sent it spinning up into the air.

He caught it out of the air, and with barely a glance at it, declared, “Little lady, it is your lucky day.” He put his hands on Lucy’s shoulders and turned her about. “Walk straight ahead. Turn aside not an inch. If a rock is in your path, climb over it. If a branch is in your way, duck under it. If a tree is in front of you, fell it if you must, but do not turn aside for anything or you will surely be lost again. If you hurry, you can still be back before you’re missed.”

“Thank you,” Lucy said, and the man slipped the penny into her hand.

“You’ll find me again, when you’re older,” he said.

Lucy found her way back to the cottage just as her father came out to call her inside for her supper. It was a long time before she dared to stray beyond the boundaries again, and longer still before she saw the man again. That came only when her father judged her old enough to play out of sight of the house, when she was too old to search for enchantment or adventure in the woods.

It was the fall of that year, and there was to be a dance to celebrate the harvest at the count’s manor. Every eligible maiden in the county would be there. It was the first year Lucy was old enough for such a thing, and her father had said that she could go.

“I just wish,” she said to herself as she idly wandered the now-familiar environs on the other side of the beech tree, “that I had a dress worth wearing.”

“Well, now,” the sweet voice said, very close behind her. “I have something here that might suit you better than it suits me, but if you want it, we’ll have to spin a coin for it.”

Lucy turned to see the man holding up with one hand the most gorgeous ball gown she’d ever seen, and in his other hand was a shiny silver coin.

“Heads, or tails?” the man asked her.

“Heads,” Lucy said breathlessly, and the man flipped the silver coin, and again he declared that she was in luck with barely a glance spared at the disk.

“You wear it in good health,” he said, pressing both dress and coin into her hands.

Lucy’s father didn’t question his daughter’s fine new dress. She had grown up fine and strong, and it seemed within the limits of good fortune that she could have attracted an admirer. When she caught the eye of the count’s third and youngest son at the harvest ball, he assumed that the wealthy young man had been her benefactor all along.

It was a long courtship, though, and before the young lovers could be officially betrothed, the count’s older sons died in a duel and a hunting mishap, leaving Lucy’s intended in line for the countship. Questions arose about her suitability as a countess. The count’s relatives put forth other, more obviously worthy candidates.

She knew the count’s son loved her, but she knew that he’d have other duties to obey that might come before his own heart.

It had been more than a year since Lucy had gone into the woods around her father’s old cottage, but she fled there, seeking the comfort and familiarity of her childhood surroundings. She also sought, though she dared not admit it to herself, the man who had twice before helped her.

She found him, or he found her, at the same mossy rock.

“Why so sad, little lady?” he asked her.

“I fear my beloved must marry another,” she said.

“Does he not love you?”

“With all his heart, he says,” Lucy replied. “But if he is to rule when his father is gone, then he must rule over his own heart.”

“Then perhaps he doesn’t understand what it is to rule,” the man said. A glint of gold appeared in his hand. “And perhaps I can explain it to him.”

“Could you?”

“Perhaps,” the man said. “Heads, or tails?”

“Heads,” Lucy said, and though the man explained nothing of his plans to her, she walked away from that place with a coin of gold in the palm of her hand and a great sense of surety that her love would return to her.

Lucy was not disappointed. The count’s heir found his voice and sent his meddling relatives away, declaring that he would sooner be no count at all if he could not have his own chosen countess. His steadfastness won over his aging father, who had always been a bit of a romantic, and so the two were swiftly wed.

When this union did not immediately produce a child, it was not seen as an immediate problem. The lack of issue became more of an issue after the old count died, and Lucy’s husband inherited the title. Three winters melted into springs. Three times the cows calved. Three years the creche in the noble nursery remained empty.

While the count’s relations circled around him once more like vultures, putting forward their daughters and the daughters of their favorite friends, Lucy knew what she had to do. She begged her husband to excuse her while she purified herself on a retreat, and alone, she went into the woods.

“I think I can help you,” the man told her this time, “but I’m afraid I’m out of coins. We’ll have to play a different game, though this one has the same odds as the other. The odds have been good for you, so far, haven’t they?”

“What must I do?” Lucy asked him.

“Not a thing, little lady,” he said. “You just lie back and do nothing. I will give you a child. If it’s a boy, well, then, it’s your lucky day. Your count has his heir, you have your count, and everybody’s happy.”

“And if it’s a girl?” she asked.

“Well, that’s no good to you, anyway, is it?” he said. “So you wouldn’t miss her.”

Lucy was not so sure of this, but she’d always been lucky before, and she could see no other way out now.

“Very well,” she said.

And Lucy walked out of the woods without a coin on her, but very soon after it was found that she was with child. The vultures withdrew to a respectful distance, and for a time it seemed all was well in the county. But nine months passed, and tragedy struck.

First came word that the countess’s child was a girl. Then before that news could even be properly disseminated, word came that the child had been born dead. And then, as though the bill all the good luck the county had ever experienced came due all at once, word went around that the countess had hanged herself in her chambers.

That was the story that circulated. Some say that the babe was born alive, and the countess smothered her in her grief at the thought of giving her up to the man in the woods, then took her own life in remorse. Others suspect that the man came to collect his due, and an empty box was placed in the family crypt.

No one save the man himself knows the truth of the matter.

While tradition holds that the culture hero known as Bill Springstep traveled the length and breadth of the world and generally found people like himself everywhere that he went, no variety of gnomes has ever been identified as being native to the westering lands. Tales such as Bill and the Goblins that chronicle his supposed adventures in the vicinity of Magisteria have no clear antecedent among the old world canon, making them very obviously a latter-day invention.

While the typical lore of the insular gnomish folks is not known for either the modesty of its claims or the flattering of non-gnomish people, these tales tend to stand out in both regards, and are not well-established outside the Blackwater region.

When the world was still quite young, the boundaries among its regions were much sharper than they are today, having been much more recently drawn up and settled. The trees remained in the forest. The sand remained in the desert. The borders of each were straight and sharp as a razor’s edge, and regular as a square.

It did not rain in those days, owing to a strong belief that water should remain in the lakes and oceans and rivers where it had been placed. The rivers did not flow, for there was nowhere they were desirous of going, and the waters of the oceans did not beat themselves upon the shore, for they felt a great contentment within themselves and desired no more than the portion of the world they had been given to cover.

And while traveling across the oceans or down the rivers would have been much harder in those days than it is now, with neither current nor wind to aid the sailor, it was a very pleasant time for walking around, which is what Bill Springstep liked to do best. He walked through the forests. He walked over the deserts. He walked in the highlands and the lowlands. There were no wetlands, for no god had created any, the thinking being that water should be wet and land should be dry

Wherever Bill walked, he found much to admire in the neatness and orderliness of things, and yet things had a way of untidying themselves in his wake, for Bill did not think anyone would begrudge him one shade tree to rest beneath in the grassy plain, or one pool of limpid water in the midst of the burning desert. The grid of the world acquired more sides as Bill traveled, until it lost its lines completely.

But the day came when Bill found a great river blocking his path, and he found himself with no means of crossing it, having judged both the bridge and the boat to be too revolutionary for these tame times.

“If only,” Bill said to himself, “the river were a bit less rivery, then perhaps I could walk across it.”

And having determined that this was the best solution, Bill set about to find a way to make it happen. He first tried to enlist the aid of dwarves in digging out channels to spread the water of the river, but they would not be persuaded to dig where they knew there to be no profit and they would not be tricked. So he went to their rivals, the kobolds, and told them that he knew of ground that the dwarves would dare not dig, and said he would wager the kobolds wouldn’t, either.

“We’re no shrinking dwarves,” the chief of the kobolds said, and he ordered his crews to prove it.

And so Bill marked on a chart for the kobolds all the places where he thought the dwarves were not brave enough to set their picks, and the kobolds set to work, and soon they had created an immense network of channels all around the mighty river. Finally, there remained only a thin sliver of dry land separating the channels from the water, and when Bill told the kobold chief that no one would think any less of him if he were not brave enough to take his pick to it, the chief knocked it down with a single blow.

All at once, the great river rushed out of its boundaries with such force that it, and all the waters it connects to, are still moving to this day. It spilled through the channels, uprooting trees and flooding the valleys and creating the wetlands known today. The kobolds who’d come out of the mountains to dig the channels felt so humiliated they dared not go back to their mines, and they settled in the wetlands and became known as goblins.

Bill Springstep was able to cross the much-diminished river with only a very little difficulty, and was on his way.

I went to bed alone, not counting Two’s presence several feet above me… though I also enjoyed that in a quiet sort of way. I liked sleeping with Ian or Amaranth, I liked the weight and warmth of their bodies… Amaranth’s soft and yielding, Ian’s steady and firm… but I’d spent years in solitude. I hadn’t exactly been the most social of butterflies even before my demonic nature manifested for the first time. I hadn’t been a lonely child, before that point… but I had frequently been alone, and with no sense that I was missing anything.

Likewise I hadn’t felt like I was missing out on anything during all the time I spent in the company of others, but having a little time to myself in the dark little nest of my bed was intensely relaxing. I could sit there in the warmth and darkness… warmth I encouraged with the tiniest bit of elemental invocation… and feel a bit of the same wonderful floatiness that I got in the baths.

That was two things I’d have to look at if I did give other dorms any kind of serious thought: how easily I could recreate my cocoon, and if they had bathtubs. Ian’s dorm seemed to have the same type of stackable dorm beds as Harlowe did, but I didn’t know if that was true of all of them. I knew that not every dorm had the same facilities available in the bathroom. The newer ones didn’t have tubs, but a lot of them had rows of single stall showers.

Would it be worth trading away baths for a little more privacy in the shower? That would be a tough call to make. On the other hand, if I started using baths to bathe instead of just soaking and unwinding, I could avoid the public showers entirely.

Or maybe I could go further than that in staking out a little bath-time privacy. Ian had brought up suites… I knew the two towers both had pairs of rooms that were joined by a shared bathroom. After my wildly varying experiences with my neighbors in Harlowe, I wouldn’t want to enter into that sort of living situation with random strangers… but if it were Amaranth and me in one room and Two and her friend Hazel or someone in the other, it would probably work out well.

It was something to think about, anyway… as much as I’d whined about the proliferation of decisions to be made, it was fun to think about the possibilities, for both intimacy and privacy. Showers with Amaranth or baths by myself, with a locked door or two between me and anyone like the snickering Leighton twins, or Feejee, or anyone else I wouldn’t care to be naked and vulnerable in front of.

It would take more than thinking, though, because it would take planning and coordination with the others, and that meant actually talking about it. I didn’t know what kind of demand there was for the tower rooms, either. Probably getting four people into two adjoining rooms was a little more difficult than making sure you and three friends all got into the same dorm. Was there a waiting list?

We had time to figure this stuff out, but Professor Bohd had actually had a pretty good point about how quickly things like that could sneak up on you while you were putting off figuring them out until later.

It would have to wait until morning, at least… relaxing under a pile of blankets in the semi-darkness was good for thinking only up to a certain point. Past that point the thoughts came slower, and grew fuzzier and stranger.

I was asleep before I knew it. After I knew it, though, I regretted it, because I could already tell it was going to be one of those dreams. I was still in my bed, but there were no curtains around me. There was no overly precise and regular sound of breathing from the top bunk. Nothing else in the room’s furnishings was odd or out of place, but everything was too sharp and too real, including the man who was sitting on top of my desk.

As annoying as the ridiculous owl-turtle thing had been, I would have much preferred another visit from him over this.

He was distressingly solid-looking, and dressed in a suit of dark burgundy with a slim necktie. I had to admit that he looked kind of snappy in it, but I also thought it looked like something that might have been found in a thrift store. I wondered if it corresponded in any way to his actual appearance in real life. Did he wear suits like that in the waking world? Where did he get them? Did he blend in to human society somehow, and have a job and a house? Or did he scavenge from around the edges of it?

When I thought about it, I realized I couldn’t even be sure that I was seeing his real face. It was probably a mistake to trust his appearance at all.

“You’re getting cagier,” he said, giving a nod of approval that made me feel dirty. “Don’t worry, though. This is me. I want you to know this face. I want you to recognize me… just in case we ever, you know, pass each other on the street.”

“If I could trust you enough to believe that, I wouldn’t be wondering about your face in the first place,” I said.

“If it’s that important to you, I can arrange to show myself to you,” he said. “When you’re awake, I mean. Not up close, mind you… that wouldn’t be safe for either one of us. Just a glimpse, to let you know I’m on the up-and-up.”

“I’m so not interested in that,” I said.

I saw too much of him when I was asleep. After his rather indistinct appearance in the last dream he’d featured in, I had been hoping he was on his way out. I remembered I’d resolved to find out how to keep him out for good, whether it took mental healing or more exposure to Amaranth’s divine power or what. Faced with him, Ian’s plan on learning mental defense from Dee made a lot more sense.

“So, I’m guessing the thing that happened last night knocked down whatever barriers were in my head or opened up the passages you’d followed before,” I said.

“That’s a good thought,” he said.

“Does that mean that you don’t know but think it sounds plausible, or that you do know but don’t want to give me any information about the ins and outs of mental invasion?” I asked.

“It means that I like that you’re thinking about it,” he said. “You need to think more and react less. Except for the times when it’s the other way around. Your problem isn’t that you don’t think, or that you overthink… it’s that you think about the wrong things. There are only so many hours in the day and only so many thoughts can fit inside a head. Anyway, I told you that I’d teach you how to keep me out if you wanted me to.”

“On the subject of mental intrusion… I noticed you didn’t show up for the party,” I said. “Feeling uncharacteristically shy?”

“Uncharacteristic nothing… I like to keep a low profile,” he said. “I’m much better dealing with people one-on-one than I am dealing with crowds. There’s a lesson for you there. I know you’re all about finding your place and fitting in and all, but a group of people is only a few emotional degrees away from a mob, and mobs are the enemies of any god-fearing monster. And few monsters fears the gods like we do.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think I’m going to be able to arrange my college life so that I’m only with people one at a time,” I said. “That’s a bit harder to manage when you live in the real world.”

“Don’t I know it… don’t you be thinking that your daddy doesn’t have a life outside of you, little girl,” he said. “I’m a busy, busy man… got lots of irons in the fire, and vice-versa. You’re lucky I can find the time to come tuck you in as often as I do. But my point is that if you want to make friends with people, try spending time with them one on one. Get to know who they are when no one else is around, and let them form their own impression of you without anybody else to sway them. There could be three people who would all give you a fair shake if they each met you by themselves, but when you run into them together they just end up upholding each other’s fears and prejudices, or trying to impress each other by sniping at the easy target.”

“What is this, excerpts from Hell’s special edition of How To Win Friends And Charm Persons?” I asked.

“Hell’s got nothing to do with it… I’ve had to learn the hard way how to get along with people in this world, because if I get beaten here I get beaten back to there,” he said. “And I don’t want that. There are those who are content to carve out their own little petty kingdoms down below, but me, I always remember that this is the world we came from, and I like to think of it as home. Besides, if I get myself banished from this plane, how am I going to keep an eye on my precious daughter?”

“You survived at least nine years without doing that… possibly longer,” I said.

“Survived? Survival is for suckers,” he said. “Fish sucking scum off the bottom of a pond survive. Those poor dumb things that Mercy woman calls ‘half-demons’ are surviving. During our long years apart since your mother died, you just barely managed to do more than survive. Don’t you want more than that? Don’t you need it? Don’t you feel the hunger deep down in your bones for it?”

“Any time I feel hunger deep inside me, something’s wrong,” I said. “Am I your only child?”

“As far as I’m concerned, yes,” he said.

“Does that mean you don’t know about any others or you don’t care about them?” I asked.

“One of these days you’re going to learn not to bother with questions like that,” he said. “When I answer a question, I give the answer that I mean, and I stand by it without elaboration.”

“It’s amazing the way you manage to make being an evasive asshole into some sort of virtue of honesty.”

“I know,” he said. “Sometimes I even impress myself. On the subject of impressiveness, that was quite a showing, the other day… you really turned things around with your fighting class.”

“Believe me, it wasn’t for you,” I said.

“Of course it wasn’t,” he said. “I wouldn’t have had you do it for me. It was for you, and there ain’t a single thing wrong with that, as your little friend pointed out.”

“You didn’t ‘have me’ do anything,” I said. “I did it on my own initiative, for my own reasons.”

“Said reasons being all the other people who wanted you to do it,” he said. “Everyone but me. I really admire the way you’re learning to stand on everybody’s own two feet with no help from your father. But in all seriousness… you did good, little lady, and I intend to reward your performance just like I promised.”

“I’m not interested in your reward,” I said. “Or your promises.”

“They’re yours, all the same,” he said. “You can turn your nose up at my offer now, but the day might come when you’re glad it’s on the table. Now, if I’m sorting out your memories of the fight correctly, it seems as though you had three falls… does that sound right to you?”

“I wasn’t actually counting,” I said.

“We’ll call it three, then,” he said. “It’s a good number, for boons or wishes. That’s three times… three separate occasions… where you can tell me to take a hike and a hike I will take. Three days you can tell your old man to give you some space and he’ll listen. How does that sound?”

“Like a good start on the rest of my life,” I said.

“Listen, you don’t have to do anything more, you’ve already earned these days and there are no terms and conditions, or blackout days,” he said. “So why despise the offer?”

“Because it’s a trap,” I said. “If I tell you to leave me alone and you do, then you can turn around and point to that any time in the future that I doubt or distrust you… point to the fact that you kept your word. But it won’t mean that I can count on you to leave when it matters, or to do what you say you’ll do if it goes against your interests. I could tell you to leave and get comfortable when you do, and then save the last one for the time I really need it… and that’ll be the time you break your word.”

“Well, if you know all that, then where’s the trap in it?” he asked. “It seems to me that you’re just too smart to be taken in by the likes of me, and so long as we both know it, why not enjoy what I’m giving you? You don’t have to put so much faith in me that you rely on this little deal to save your skin in the future… if you honestly think I have any designs on your skin… just enough to take advantage of my generosity.”

“Deals have two parties,” I said. “I didn’t agree to this. You just threw it forward and now you’re insisting that ‘we’ stick to it even though I had nothing to do with it. And that right there is one reason not to trust it… or you. You’re not listening to me when I say I’m not interested. You’re already demonstrating how little you care about me and my wishes.”

“So I’m supposed to prove that I’m trustworthy and that I care about your wishes by going back on my word when I said I would obey your wishes?” he said. “You’re not making a whole lot of sense, I’m afraid.”

“There will never come a day when I want you to leave me alone for twenty-four hours,” I said. “Because the only thing I want from you is to leave me alone forever.”

“You want that now,” he said. “But if I honor that one wish of yours, then if you ever want… or need… something else from me in the future, I’ll be stuck and you’ll be out of luck. Isn’t it better to have me checking in like this, every once in a while? I’m not taking up any space in your life. I’m not eating up time when you could be working on homework or having fun with your friends.”

“Before you came along, I was having some pretty interesting dreams,” I said. “They weren’t always fun, but that doesn’t mean I’m not missing out on anything when you come along. If you’d tried this on me at the start of the year it might have worked… but I’ve come a little bit too far to buy the idea that you’re inflicting your presence on me against my will as a favor to me, no matter how hard you try to sell it.”

“I know, and I couldn’t be prouder,” he said. “Listen, you had a point back there a minute ago about the nature of deals… so, okay. You don’t want me to leave…”

“I do want you to leave,” I said.

“…what do you want as a reward?” he asked. “I could answer three questions for you, or send you three gifts, or take care of three problems you’re having…”

“I don’t want you ‘taking care’ of anything,” I said.

“Relax, little lady… you don’t have to worry about me doing anything too unfortunate on your behalf,” he said. “I care a lot about you, but I’m not going to risk my ability to keep looking out for you by sticking my neck out with a lot of conspicuous violence.”

“Thank heaven for small favors,” I said. “But I do want you to leave. Seriously. If you’re not willing to do that just because you know you’re not welcome here, though, I’m not going to trust you to do it because you say I have three… magic bean vouchers, or whatever… that you’re giving me as part of a unilateral ‘deal’.”

“How about questions?” he said. “You like asking questions. An inquisitive mind should be encouraged. Ask me three questions, and I’ll answer them truthfully.”

“I’ve been asking questions,” I said. “You could have answered them honestly at any time.”

“And now I will,” he said. “Here, just by way of demonstration, you asked me about other children. The truth is this: I had a son before you. He was on an airship when the artifact that powered it blew up in his face. It was magic, and he… well… he never recovered.”

“I bet you were broken up about that,” I said. “Look, just leave. You said I could tell you to leave and you would, three times. Leave. When you show up again I’ll tell you to leave again, and when you show up again after that I’ll tell you to leave again, and if you show up again after that… then I’m going to the diabolism department, the Universal Temple, the IBF, and anyone else I think who’ll listen and who might be interested in trapping, banishing, or destroying you.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have answers?” he asked.

“I’d rather have solitude,” I said. “I’d rather know that when I close my eyes I’m not going to see anything creepier than the bottom of Sooni’s shoe.”

He threw back his head and laughed.

“Well, now… I guess your mind is made up,” he said. “I tell you what, I can tell when I’m not wanted…”

“The fact that I’m sitting here telling you that is kind of a big hint, isn’t it?” I said.

“So, I’ll go, and I’ll deduct one telling from your bank,” he said. “That leaves you with two. I won’t be back tomorrow. I won’t be back next week. I’ll let you sit a while, give you some space to figure things out… and by and by, I’ll stop back in and see how you’re doing. If you still don’t want to talk to me then, you know what to do.”

“Every second you sit here talking at me instead of leaving is another reason not to trust you,” I said.

“Listen, I said I was going to go and I’m going to go,” he said. “But there’s just one thing I really need to tell you… something you need to know.”

“You’re really not impressing me with your incredible word-keeping abilities right now,” I said.

“This is important,” he said. “It’s the whole reason I dropped by.”

“You said you’d go.”

“I’m willing to completely lose any trust or goodwill I might ever get from you to tell you this,” he said. “Doesn’t that give you some sense of how important it is?”

“It gives me a sense of how important your word is,” I said. “But since we’ve pretty much established that you’re going to leave or stay entirely based on what you want, let’s just drop the fiction that I have any control over whether or not you tell me this one super important thing.”

“You know the vice-chancellor? The one they call Embries?”

“Yes, I know ‘the one they call Embries’,” I said. “If the message is that he’s not what he seems, or that he has some kind of mind control aura, or whatever… well, you can save your breath.”

“No, that’s not it,” he said. “But I’m glad you’re paying attention to him, because he’s worth paying attention to… just not so much that he starts paying attention to you. I’ve got a feeling you might not be able to avoid that, though, so I wanted to give you some advice. Don’t be alone with him if you can help it, don’t spend much time in his presence, don’t let on that you don’t think the sun shines out of his backside, and above all else, don’t let him see that you know what he is.”

“I don’t know what he is,” I said.

“Well, that’s a start,” he said.

“What do you mean, you don’t think I’ll be able to avoid him?”

“His attention,” the man said. “It’s not a good thing to have, but I think you just might be stuck with it.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re interesting,” he said. “In a couple of different ways, but one in particular that makes any room with ‘Mr. Embries’ a very bad place for you to be. This wouldn’t be an issue, if you weren’t all mixed up with those sea devils.”

“You mean the mermaids?”

“If that’s what you call their kind these days,” he said. “The point is they’re going down, and if you’re not careful they’ll drag you down with them.”

“So am I supposed to stay away from the mermaids or from the vice-chancellor?”

“Girl, if we started making a list of everyone you’d be better off avoiding, we’d be here all night.”

“I do plan on being here all night,” I said. “But on the subject of people I don’t want to be around…”

“Hey, I can take a hint,” he said. “Pleasant dreams.”

Discuss this story on the Livejournal community.

Soon: Stuff! And also some things! And events! And it gets posted this Friday.

In her words, it was “the best problem ever.”

The whole hall seemed pretty quiet… and the campus beyond it, or at least the part that stretched between the dining room and Harlowe. I spent a moment reflecting on how nice and peaceful everything was before it hit me that this wasn’t because everybody was wrapped up in a cloud of post-poly-coital bliss but because people were still reeling from the events of Veil weekend and the ongoing investigation. No matter what we did, no matter what else came up, that was still real and still happening. Life had to go on even in the midst of death, but death was accorded the same privilege from life.

It was sobering to think about. I didn’t want what had already happened to obliterate the joy I felt at being with Steff for our “second first” time… but I didn’t want to seem disrespectful. To whom, I wasn’t sure… there were probably people who would declare anything I did, up to and including somehow appearing at a funeral rite for the deceased, to be disrespectful. Gloria for instance seemed to believe I wasn’t capable of doing more than seeming nice.

If behaving somber and grave would be taken as mockery, then it didn’t make much sense to worry too much about “correct” behavior. On the other hand, though, being disrespectful to Leda on the basis that some people who had nothing to do with her wouldn’t appreciate the effort I put into doing otherwise was hardly fair.

But then, Leda hadn’t really liked me either… who was to say she wouldn’t have been among the naysayers if she hadn’t been the one who died?

Or would she even have noticed either way? Was she capable of noticing, from whatever afterlife awaited her people?

No matter how many times I went around it in my head, she was still dead, it still didn’t have anything to do with me, and I still couldn’t do anything about it. Also, I was really fucking tired. I didn’t go to bed early just to try to shut down the mental fencing match that was going on in my head, but I was grateful at the prospect of a few hours of oblivion and freedom from ethical dilemmas.

Of course, it would be too easy for me to get what I want even in my dreams… it seemed like my eyes had barely shut when I found myself beneath a yellow sky, in the middle of the road going through the farm in the labyrinth. It was so much where I didn’t want to be and so very much not like my usual dreams… both in terms of setting and the unusual solidity of the surroundings… that I knew right away what was up.

Hey, I’m not always that slow on the uptake.

I looked around. There was no one in sight… not even the scarecrow or the birds. The farm was in its post-curse configuration, save for a pumpkin patch replacing the field of corn. My eyes strayed towards the haystack, but my pitchfork wasn’t there.

“You might as well come out,” I called, turning around and keeping my eyes open. “Let’s get this over with.”

There was a low chuckle right behind my right ear. I spun around, but my foot kind of dragged on the dirt and I lost my balance, landing on my ass. Yes, it was definitely a realistic dream.

“Smooth, girl,” the man who I believed to be my father said, looking down at me from under the brim of his hat. “You didn’t get that from me, I tell you… your mother, though, she was always falling one way or another.” He was holding a cigarette… it looked to be hand-rolled, for all I knew about cigarettes. It looked kind of sloppy. He held up a fingertip to it and lit it. In the instant that the flame flickered into sight, he… diminished somehow, flickering around the edges. I realized that I could see the sunlight through him. “You don’t look to happy to see me.”

“I’m a little happy,” I said.

“Why’s that?”

“Because I can see less of you,” I said. “I’d be even happier to see the back of you.”

“You should count yourself lucky,” the man said. “You’d like me better than the other thing that’s going around.”

“What other thing?”

“Never mind that,” he said.

“You’ve faded,” I said. “Does that mean your way in has become a little harder to use, or is it because my grandmother’s nearby? Or maybe because of all the imperials hanging around town, checking for demonic activity?”

That was a bit of a bluff, of course… the investigators had already done all the checking for demonic activity they were likely to, since they’d been able to rule out my involvement.

“Picture a demon afraid of an imp… I’d sooner die. Word of advice, daughter of mine,” he said. “When you think to yourself that you’re lying right after you do it, you’re just handing the truth to anyone’s who’s taking a stroll through your head. That’s why most people don’t go around narrating their every last little thought. Well, that, and most people just aren’t that into themselves… of course, that’s the closest thing to self-esteem you’ve got, so maybe I shouldn’t turn up my head at it.”

“I was right the first time, wasn’t I?” I said, choosing to ignore the barbs. He was already inside my head, so there was no sense letting him under my skin. “You didn’t bother me at all after Amaranth… after we…”

“After she near blinded you with her damned divinity?” the man said. “Listen, baby girl, just because I choose not to recklessly expose myself to dangerous energies doesn’t mean I couldn’t have found a way in if I needed to. I don’t want you thinking that she’s the cure for me… if only so you don’t end up overdoing things. You’ve got a real problem with moderation.”

“Don’t call me that,” I said, suddenly intensely conscious of the fact that I was still sitting with my ass in the dirt while he gloated over me. I started to get up, then reconsidered.

This was my dream.

I didn’t fall on my ass.

I was standing up.

“Well,” the man said, nodding in approval that felt dirty against my skin. “That’s more like it… and why can’t I call you ‘baby girl’? Do I sound too much like her? You’re way more my baby than hers, I can tell you that for nothing.”

“Yeah, you don’t mind telling me something I already know,” I said. “But I don’t think it’s exactly true, except in a literal sense, maybe.”

“Only literally true,” he said. “You don’t have unreasonably high standards or anything, do you?”

“You’re not a father to me,” I said. “You’ve never done a thing for me.”

“Aside from the obvious, you mean,” he said. “Listen, I’ve been watching out for you. If I can’t take care of you myself, I’ve made sure you’re taken care of.”

“So you admit to hiring my lawyer?”

“You spit that out like it’s a deadly accusation,” he said. “Only it’s not going to poison me. I’m already the ancient enemy, remember? The one creature on this chaos-blasted rock who can’t be tarred by association with a lawyer. Do you really want me to answer your question, little lady? Or would you rather be able to say with a straight face and a clean conscience that you don’t know where the gold came from?”

“Except I won’t be able to, because you’ve all but told me it’s you,” I said.

“Yeah, we’re gonna have to work on that,” the man said. “The truth is your enemy, fire-child… that’s why your granny taught you to cleave to it. The truth exposes you, it weakens you, it takes away your natural advantages. It’s like a sword… only good to touch when you’ve got the right end of it and you’re doing the swinging. But I know better to think I can undo a decade of harm with a moment of common sense, so I’m going to give you a gift.”

“I don’t want anything from you,” I said.

“A minute ago you complained that I’ve never done anything for you.”

“That wasn’t a complaint,” I said. “I don’t want to be your child.”

“Well, I’m going to give this to you anyway, because you need it,” he said. “It’s the gift of doubt.”

“You don’t need to give me any more doubts,” I said. “The ones I already have are plenty.”

“Ooh, sass,” the man said. “I do believe I’m rubbing off on you. Now here’s the thing: even if I weren’t the one who paid your lawyer, wouldn’t I let you think I was?”

“Are you trying to convince me that you’re a liar who does nothing for me and tries to take credit for it?”

“No, I’m giving you doubt,” he said. “Before you were pretty well sure it was me, because that felt like the truth and you’ve been raised to stick by the truth… and now, when you think about what I told you, you’ll realize that feels true, too. So if someone asks you where the money came from, you can honestly say you don’t know. What have you got tomorrow?”

“What do you mean, what have I got?”

“Your classes,” he said. “Your schedule.”

“So you can stalk me?”

“I’m taking a fatherly interest,” he said.

“If you don’t know then you’re not in as deep as you were before,” I said. “I’m not going to tell you… I’m not even going to think about it.”

“Or maybe I’d rather have a conversation than just pull facts out of the ether,” he said. “I suppose that’s a bit unheard of, to your generation… it’s among the things that I liked about your mother.”

“You had a lot of conversations with her, did you?” I asked.

“Skeptical?” he asked. “That’s good. Of course it would be better if you’d be skeptical of more people who aren’t me… it seems like you never let anyone in unless you let them all the way. Oh, yes… if you ever want to, you know, get to know her a little better, I’d be pleased to tell you about them sometimes.”

“If I want to know more about what my mother was like, I’ll ask my grandmother,” I said.

“Ouch,” he said, clapping a hand over his heart. “Little girl, that hurts like praying.”

“My grandmother’s not my favorite person in the world, but she’s better than you,” I said.

“Of course she is,” the man said. “That is, after all, the function of a paladin… knights exemplar. But I think you were about to tell me what classes you’ve got?”

I sighed. I couldn’t really see any point in not telling him, except for sheer contrariness… and that didn’t seem like enough. Okay, maybe I had plenty of reasons not to tell him anything and maybe I didn’t need a reason to tell him to go to hell, but it seemed like if I wasn’t acting petty on top of my good reasons then it would be harder for him to turn anything around on me.

“Elementalism,” I said. “And applied enchantment. And my mixed melee class.”

“Elementalism,” he said. “Your teacher. What’s he like?”

“She,” I corrected. “I don’t know. She’s a good teacher. Very professional.”

“You should stick close by her,” he said.

“Why?”

“You might learn something,” he said. “Isn’t that what teachers are for? Now, your melee class…”

“What about it?”

“I get the feeling you aren’t trying very hard there,” he said.

“Why’s that any business of yours?”

“I’m looking out for you,” he said. “I can’t take care of you all the time. You need to take care of yourself.”

“I’ve got enough people looking out for me,” I said. “And they’ve given me this same lecture, better than you have.”

“Not good enough,” he said. “I tell you what: whoever you end up fighting, if you knock her on her back, I’ll give you a gift. For every time you do it.”

“I don’t want anything from you,” I said. “I just want you to leave me alone.”

“Then that’s what I’ll give you,” he said. “Each and every time you knock someone down, I’ll leave you alone once, for twenty-four hours.”

“So if I knock someone down three times, you’ll leave me alone for three days?” I said. “Fine with me. I’m going to be trying as hard as I can, but not for you. I already settled this with my teacher. She’s moving the class indoors for me, but I have to pick up the pace.”

“Listen, you don’t understand the deal I’m offering,” he said. “You knock someone down three times, you don’t get the next three days, but any three days. Three times you tell me to back off, and each time I’ll back off for a whole day… it doesn’t matter whether I’m just stopping by to say hey or if I’m doing something dastardly that I’ve had planning for eons and my whole evil plan’ll be upset if you send me away, I’ll go.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Maybe because I don’t have any plans that can be so upset?” he said. “Anyway, that’s the offer… and just like you’re going try your damnedest no matter what I do, it’s a valid offer no matter what you do.”

“This sounds like a plot to make me think twice before telling you to fuck off,” I said.

“Sharp,” he said, shaking his head. “Why aren’t you this sharp with anyone else?”

“I’m getting sharper,” I said. “First thing I do when I wake up, I’m looking for a way to keep you out. I’ll stay away from divinity if I can help it, but there’s got to be something… meditation training, or maybe the mental healers that Amaranth was talking about can do something for me… fill in the holes you made.”

“I’ll teach you how to shield your mind myself, if that’s what you want,” he said. “Anything that makes you less of a pushover.”

“Like you’d really show me,” I said. “How would I know it was working? Because you’d stop showing up just long enough for me to start trusting you?”

“How long would that be, exactly?” the man asked. “Maybe I’d rather give up the easy way in to make sure nobody else could take it, either.”

“Or maybe you’d give up this advantage to stop anyone else from getting a look at my mind,” I said. “Why? What are they going to find… your fingerprints? A trail that leads back to you? Something else that you’ve done to me?”

“Maybe I’m trying to spare you some heartache,” he said. “Maybe it’s not anything I’ve done that I’m trying to keep from you.”

“Or maybe you’re trying to get me to do this,” I said. “I mean, I wasn’t tremendously inclined towards the idea in the first place… the fact that you seem so dead-set against it is the best thing it’s got going for it, really.”

“You think I’d be so crude?” he asked.

“It’s a pretty crude attempt regardless,” I said. “The only question is which direction you’re going in.”

“Maybe I don’t really care one way or the other,” he said. “Maybe I just want you to think about it, have all the options laid out. You could take your nymph-friend’s suggestion and kick up a fuss until the school digs up a psychic demon-wrangler… and it’s worth reflecting on the circumstances under which such an individual likely gained such expertise… or you could let me take a crack at teaching you how to run your own mind. Now, you’re not entirely inclined to trust me… and that’s good, you can be a mite too trusting at times… but you’re not thrilled about the other plan… and really, given the current state of your mind, either plan’s better than doing nothing.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Like I said, you’re not looking quite as there as you were the last time you were here… I don’t think your foothold’s quite as strong as it was. I don’t know if that’s because of Amaranth or if my mind’s just healing…”

“Right, you don’t know,” he said. “You’re operating in unknown waters here. The currents can be treacherous.”

“Better treacherous waters than a treacherous guide,” I said.

“So why don’t you want to see a healer?” he asked.

“It’s not that I don’t want to… I think it might do me some good just to talk to someone who’s got experience helping people with, you know, issues and stuff,” I said. “If it comes down to it, I trust the people in the healing center over you, even after all the fuck-ups there. But as far as letting someone poke around inside? That just strikes me as a bad idea. It wasn’t just Hissy touching my mind… my mind reached out and touched her back. It seems like any kind of contact’s going to turn into a battle. Even if it’s possible to make that safe, I’m not convinced it’ll be pleasant.”

“Well, maybe I’m advocating for the wrong side here, but don’t you think that maybe if you were letting someone poke around in your head on purpose you wouldn’t do that?”

“It wasn’t exactly under my control,” I said.

“Unlike everything else about that situation, I suppose,” the man said. “That’s your problem right there: you aren’t in control. You try to keep a whole half of yourself locked away and never give it any exercise, and the other half of you can’t do anything but run and hide… fold at the first sign of trouble.”

“I’ve seen what happens to half-demons who exercise their demon halves,” I said, thinking of Mercy and her bestial boys.

“They act anything like me?” the man asked. “I act anything like them? No? What you saw wasn’t the demon side ascendant… it was everything that’s worth anything beaten down into the ground. Believe me, baby girl, that’s the last thing I want from you. Demons, humans… both are reasoning beings. The reason might be different but it’s there.”

He dropped his cigarette on the ground and stepped on it, grinding it out with the toe of his shoe.

“You think on that a little,” he said, turning and walking away. “I’ll let you get back to whatever it is you usually dream about… whips and chains or whatever.”

“I will find a way to keep you out,” I said.

“I’m looking forward to it, baby girl.”

Discuss this story on the Livejournal community.

Next: Professor Bohd gets political. Coach Callahan gets religious. Tune in next Wednesday.

A few minutes passed in silence, the man absently fiddling with her hair, and then he spoke.

“How you feeling now, sunshine?” he asked her.

“Perfectly at ease,” she lied. She was rarely at her ease around the man, and never when they were touching. But she didn’t want him to think she didn’t like it, that she didn’t like his attention or that she didn’t like him… and she’d seen the phrase in a book and it had impressed her.

Perfectly at ease. It sounded airy and sophisticated, like something a well-educated adult would say.

“That’s good,” the man said. “Can I ask you something about your mama?”

“I’d rather not talk about her,” Laurel Anne said. She slid her legs around, turning herself sideways so that less of her was in contact with him.

“Oh, I’m sorry… I shouldn’t have brought her up,” he said. “You come out here to get away from her, don’t you?”

“I come out here to be alone,” Laurel Anne said.

“Oh, well, excuse me, then,” the man said. He shifted her off his leg and started to push himself up off the ground.

“Alone with you,” the girl said, shoving herself forcefully back onto his lap.

“Oof!” the man grunted in an exaggerated fashion. “Alright, then… you come out here to get away from all the myriad and diverse people whom you might encounter at your home. I’m sorry I brought up one of those individuals.”

Laurel Anne scowled, and then laughed.

“Oh, ask your silly question,” she said.

“Well, she seems like an old-fashioned kind of lady,” the man said. “But you’re so young…”

“I’m not that young,” Laurel Anne said.

“I stand corrected once again,” he said. “I was just wondering how someone so modern, then, could have such an old-fashioned mother. Did she have kind of a late start?”

“I suppose so,” Laurel Anne said. “She was thirty, thirty-two or so when she met my father, if I have it figured out right in my head.”

“I’d trust your head,” the man said. “It seems fairly trustworthy, so far. How’d your folks meet?”

“On an airship.”

“Taking a cruise, were they? Oh, no, wait… you told me your daddy was an airshipman in the Imperial Navy.”

“Yes,” Laurel Anne said. “He was a crewman on the ship that carried Mama into the Shift.”

“You mean the Khazarus?”

“That’s dirty,” Laurel Anne said.

“What is?”

“That name is,” Laurel Anne said. “It’s blasphemous. The Shift isn’t holy… it’s all messed up. It’s the only place so wicked the gods themselves won’t walk there.”

“Is that a fact?”

“I… I don’t know,” Laurel Anne said. “It’s what mama says.”

“Do you suppose the gods could walk in… the Shift… if they wanted to?”

“I guess so. But it’s wicked there, so they don’t.”

“That’s interesting,” the man said. “Don’t you think the gods… the good ones… would want to go where it was wicked, so they could do something about it? If they were good, I mean… and if they were able.”

“I don’t know.”

“But what do you think?” the man asked.

“I really don’t know about this stuff,” Laurel Anne said.

“But you’re sharp. I respect your opinion,” he said. “I’d like to know what you think about this.”

“I think… I think they must be able to,” Laurel Anne said. “After all, they are gods.”

“So then you don’t think they’re good?”

“I didn’t say that,” Laurel Anne said.

“But you think they’re able to go into the Shift, this supposedly wicked and messed-up place, but they don’t go in there to fix it?”

“Well… maybe they could fix it, but it would take so much time that they’d rather spend it doing things to watch out for folks who don’t live in such wicked places in the first place?” the girl said.

“That’s interesting,” the man said.

“What is?”

“What do you think a god is, little lady?”

“The gods made the world that is,” Laurel Anne said.

“They made the world as it is,” he said. “But that’s what they did, not what they are, and anyway, you’re only talking about one race of them.”

“The gods aren’t a race. They’re… they’re the gods.”

“Alright, little lady,” he said. “Then one tribe, or kind, or pantheon.”

“My mama says that only the gods who were there in the beginning are true gods,” Laurel Anne said. “The children of the Great Star Drake. The others are all either their children, or are false gods.”

“False gods,” the man echoed, shaking his head.

“What, do you think you know better?”

“I wouldn’t say that I know better than you do,” the man said. “So let’s just say that I have a few different ideas about gods than you do.”

“Like what?” Laurel Anne asked.

“Well, the first thing you’ve got wrong is that those gods of your mama’s, I don’t think they can be the children of the Great Star Drake,” the man said. “I’d say dragons are more likely to be the children of the Great Star Drake.”

“But that doesn’t…”

“Make any sense?” the man said, quirking an eyebrow at her. “You mean, it doesn’t match up to what you’ve been told. But stop a minute and think about it. What is the Great Star Drake? Don’t tell me what the Drake did or what the Drake does, tell me what the Drake is.”

“He’s… a big crystal dragon?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the man said. “A big crystal dragon. Though you’re only half right. Kind of surprising, for someone as sharp as I know you are.”

“How am I only half right?”

“Well, you said the Star Drake’s a ‘he’,” the man said. “Tell me, what kind of a ‘he’ have you ever heard of that went around laying eggs?”

“Are you saying… are you saying the Great Star Drake is a girl?” Laurel Anne asked.

“I’m not saying a word about things I know nothing about,” the man said. “I’ve never been in a position to judge… not sure I’d be able to, on a dragon. I’m just saying that if the Great Star Drake laid those eggs, then maybe it’s time to rethink a few pronouns… and if not, then something else did and maybe we’re putting too much credit in the wrong place.”

“I can’t believe you’re saying that,” the girl said, shaking her head.

“Listen, darling… I’m glad you don’t believe me,” the man said. “I don’t want your belief. I’d like it just fine if you hear what I say, and you think about it, and you make up your own mind. You’ve got a good one, after all, and I think you’re old enough to use it.”

“Well, I should hope so,” Laurel Anne said. “So… what do you think about it?”

“’bout what?” the man asked. “What in particular, I mean?”

“Well what do you think the gods are?”

“That’s about a question and a half, isn’t it?” the man said. “Are we talking about your mama’s ‘true gods’, or gods in general, or what?”

“Whichever,” Laurel Anne said. “I just want to know what you think.”

“Well,” he said. “Let’s separate it out: what is a god, and what is it that the gods your mama recognizes actually are.”

“What is a god, then?”

“It’s like this,” he said. “Imagine you’re walking alone through the woods, and you meet someone. He looks like a man, like an ordinary man. And he tells you: ‘Kneel, little lady, for a god am I. Kneel before me and pay me homage.’”

“Why would a god be walking through the woods asking g… women to worship him?” Laurel Anne asked.

“Well, let’s say you ask him that,” the man said. “Instead of kneeling and homaging. And let’s say he snaps his finger, and a bolt of lightning strikes you dead.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s a god,” Laurel Anne said. “A wizard could do that.”

“Sure could,” the man said. “How much would that matter to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re dead, aren’t you?” he said. “He said he was a god, you denied him, and yea, he smote your ass verily. Pardon the language. How can you say that’s not a god?”

“How can I say anything, if I’m dead?”

“Well, that’s a point,” the man said. “But I think you see mine: either you worship him, or he destroys you. Isn’t that godlike?”

“A real god’s like a thousand times more powerful than that,” the girl said.

“So if our man in the woods found a crowd of a thousand young ladies and either cowed each of them into worshiping him or obliterated them, you’d call him a god?”

“Not much of one,” Laurel Anne said. “More of a bully.”

“But if this bully were real and not all hypothetical, who could say he wasn’t a god?” the man asked.

“Someone more powerful than a bunch of little girls,” Laurel Anne said. “Paladins. Wizards. Heroes. Maybe he could get some people to call him a god, but then someone would block his stupid lightning spell and then kill him.”

“Well, if that were the case, he wouldn’t be much of a god, no,” the man said. “But what if our would-be god never runs into anyone with the power to defy him? What then?”

“That’s just dumb luck,” the girl said. “Not godhood.”

“Maybe it’s careful planning… but even if it is dumb luck, don’t you suppose your mama’s ‘true gods’ are lucky to be who they are?”

“Who else would they be?”

“Anybody. Nobody. Some people are born to positions of great wealth and privilege, little lady… and some people are born on a hardscrabble farm in the middle of a dangerous part of the world that’s shunned by goodly folks like your mama because their gods won’t have anything to do with it. Don’t you think luck’s got something to do with that?”

“I thought you were going to tell me what you think a god is,” Laurel Anne said.

“I am.”

“You’re going all over the place and running around in circles.”

“That’s quite a trick,” the man said. “Well, I’ll say it simple: a god is someone with enough power to say ‘I am a god’ and make other people agree. Mortal wizard, lich, emperor, dragon, giant, leftover bit of chaos… it doesn’t really matter what it is underneath. What matters is that it has the strength to enforce its claims.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” Laurel Anne said. “Things are what they are. If a dragon lands on a hilltop and tells a shepherd that it’s one of his sheep, that doesn’t make it so.”

“Maybe not, though I expect the shepherd would prefer the fiction,” the man said. “And I agree. Things are what they are. Words mean things. If I tell you I’m a table or a tree, that’s a load of nonsense even if I am stronger than you are. But you’re assuming that ‘god’ has a meaning beyond what I’m saying. If a strong and capable man bullies his way into an organization of weaker ones and says ‘I’m the boss’… well, if the others wanted to refute that, they’d have to do something about it, they couldn’t point to the definition of ‘boss’ while he’s bossing them around.”

“Well, yeah, but ‘god’ isn’t something you can do,” Laurel Anne said. “You can’t ‘god’ someone around.”

“It’s not something that most people can do, certainly,” the man said. “But you asked me what I thought a god is, and that’s my definition… and a more inclusive definition of godhood you will not find. Your mama’s gods are included in it. The things the elves call gods, they fit in just fine with it. If you asked the gnomenkind about their god or gods, they’d give you one definition, but it would probably fit. If you asked the goblinfolk about their gods, they’d tell you something completely different, but they’re included, too.”

“I thought goblins worshipped demons,” Laurel Anne said.

The man sputtered a bit at this, and then started to laugh.

“What’s so funny about that?” she asked him.

“Oh, nothing in particular,” he said. “But, no, they don’t worship demons. They worship gods, or so they call them, and who am I to say they aren’t? They fit my definition.”

“What are they, then, if not demons?”

“Leftovers,” the man said. “Moldy old leftovers someone forgot at the back of the cosmic fridge. Things older than demons, older than your mama’s ‘true gods’.”

“But they’re as old as time,” Laurel Anne said.

“If you say so, I won’t argue it,” the man said . “But these things are older still.”

“You know… your definition is not actually all that different from my mama’s,” Laurel Anne said, an impish tone in her voice.

“Oh, no? Were you not listening?”

“I was,” she said. “But the true gods are more powerful than anything. So no one can stop them from calling themselves gods… and if anyone wanted to say they were a god, the true gods could stop them.”

“What if the ‘false’ god lived in the Shift?”

Laurel Anne didn’t have an answer for that.

“So, do you want to know what I think about those ‘true’ gods?” the man asked her. When she didn’t answer, he said, “Well, I guess we can talk about something else. I understand if you don’t want to go against your mama.”

“I didn’t say that,” she said. “I was thinking. You said you wanted me to think, didn’t you?”

“That I did,” he said. “So, do you think you want to hear, or not?”

“Yeah, I guess,” she said.

“Well, I think you had it about right,” he said. “They are about the most powerful folks around… and they’ve been lucky or clever enough to avoid anybody who could challenge them.”

“Who could challenge them, if they’re the most powerful?”

“Do you know who’s stronger than the strongest man in the world?” the man asked instead of answering.

“Who?”

“The second strongest and just about anybody else working together,” the man said. “And all three of them could be killed by someone who’s a good archer, or a powerful wizard. There are all kinds of power, you see, and all kinds of ways of being powerful. If there was someone or something somewhere with no power but the power to kill the gods, for instance, wouldn’t you say that’s pretty powerful?”

“The gods are immortal,” Laurel Anne said.

“Sure, and so are the elves,” the man said. “Doesn’t mean they can’t be killed, does it?”

“Are you saying… are you saying that there’s something in the Shift that can kill gods?” Laurel Anne asked.

“I’m saying that’s as likely a theory as any as to why they won’t go there,” the man said. “Of course, the real question is, what was a pious and saintly woman like your mama doing in a place so wicked and godless?”

“I don’t know,” Laurel Anne said. She shrugged. “Mission work, I guess.”

“Carrying the word of the Lord of Humanity to a place with few enough humans and the gods fear to tread,” the man said. “Oh, yes, that makes sense.”

“Well, I don’t know what else she would have been doing there,” Laurel Anne said.

“What else indeed,” the man said.

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That night, I received another visit… or maybe “visitation” would be the better word.

I found myself dreaming of the practice field, a place I had thought I was done with for the year now that Callahan had moved classes indoors for the winter. It was empty, but I could hear and almost see someone past the far side of the field, back by the trees. It sounded kind of like someone was splitting wood.

As I drew closer, it looked that way, too… I saw the man from my previous dream standing in front of a big tree stump, with an axe raised over his head. He brought it down… and an arm rolled off the stump and onto the ground. There was most of a body, missing only the head and an arm, draped over the stump.

Other bodies… some intact, some completely dismembered… littered the ground. They were all people I knew, mostly from Harlowe: Puddy, Mariel, Trina, Iona, Leda… it was Kiersta on the chopping block, though I only realized that when I spotted her head on the ground.

I felt strangely blank at the sight of it all… there was neither revulsion nor an awful hunger nor anything else. It was a surreal sight, and I was surreally apathetic about it. The fact that I knew it was a dream might have helped.

“Well, good morning, sleepyhead,” the man said. He took his hat off and mopped his brow. His hair underneath it was dark, like mine, but very short. It receded a bit at the temples.

I couldn’t think of him as my father… while I could acknowledge that in all probability he was, I just couldn’t apply the label to him as though it were a name or a title. I didn’t know him. He’d had nothing to do with me for my whole life.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Waiting for you to show up,” he said. He looked down at the carnage and grinned. “Guess I got a little bored.”

“Are you possessing me?” I asked. “Is that how you can keep showing up like this?”

“Do I seem like the possessive type?” he asked. “No, listen… when you let your friend with the tines get the best of you, it left a tiny little hole in you. To anyone… anyone like us… that hole would be an opening, a point of vulnerability. To me, it’s like a tunnel. Until it heals, I can crawl through it any time I want.”

“And how long will it take to heal?” I asked.

“Oh, it never will, as long as I keep coming along and wriggling through it,” he said. “So you don’t bother your head over it, you hear?”

“I’ll find a way to shut you out,” I said.

“Why would you want to do that? I haven’t done anything.”

“Yeah, and I want to keep it that way.”

“Suit yourself,” he said. He shoved Kiersta off the stump with his foot and then sat down, patting his lap obscenely. I ignored the implied invitation. I kept my eyes fixed on his face if only so I wouldn’t have to see what was on the ground all around us. It was my mind… if I ignored them, they might go away. “Suit yourself,” he said again. He nudged Kiersta’s body with the toe of his shoe. I winced as I looked down at it… so much for that plan. “You’ve got a lot of hate in your life, you know that?”

“Says the one with the axe.”

“I didn’t chop them up because I hate them,” he said. “I did it because they were here, and they were here because you hate them. Do you know how unproductive it is to go around carrying people you hate in your head?”

“I’m working on getting rid of them,” I said.

“You might work harder,” he said.

“I mean, on getting them out of my head,” I said. “You’re not helping.”

“The devil you say,” he said. “You didn’t care one way or the other until I made them uncomfortable to look at. So, that’s progress.”

“You said you were bored.”

“So? Silver lining,” he said. “Anyway, there’d be no harm in you taking out a little of your own aggression sometimes… if imaginary violence was against the law, they’d have to lock your boyfriend up, wouldn’t they?”

“That’s different,” I said. “It’s not like he’s a member of a race that’s known for actual lethal violence.”

“Oh, of course not. He’s a human.”

“There are human murderers, but not every human’s a murderer,” I said.

“No, but everyone’s got to eat.”

“Demons don’t just eat,” I said.

“Of course not,” he said. “We all have our little hobbies. Humans, demons, otherwise. You know what Jillian Callahan does in her spare time?”

“No, and I don’t want to know,” I said. “Though if you tell me she’s a serial rapist or a serial killer, I won’t be terribly surprised.”

“Not in this lifetime. Jillian Callahan writes a letter to the administration on a weekly basis asking for permission to kill you as part of an in-class demonstration,” he said in a don’t-that-beat-all tone. “She and the school butt heads over this at the start of every year… every year since they banned it in the first place… but this is the first year she’s stuck with it, and with such a focus on a particular student.”

“Why would she spend so much time trying to get me to learn how to fight if she wants to kill me?” I asked.

“Because she’s got to do something about you, I suppose,” he said. “She likes to kill, that’s the bottom line… but she’s focused on you, and she’s just one. Have you forgotten about the Widow Einhorn? She hasn’t forgotten about you.”

“If your point is that a tenure system ensures a certain number of lunatics will be able to hold down jobs, then point taken,” I said. “If your point is that I should feel free to murder people in my mind because they’re doing the same, you’ve got a ways to go.”

“Oh, well, let’s talk about students, then,” he said. “Do you think Miss Delia has never meditated on what she’d do with you if she decided you were too big a threat to be left alone? Let me tell you, she didn’t have to meditate long on it. Any other race… mortal ones especially… are barely more than animals to her, and you’re a dangerous animal.”

“You think you’re shocking me,” I said. “But I’m glad Dee lives next door to me… I’m glad there’s a psychic priestess with warrior training who can stop me if it comes to that.”

“If you’re glad of that, you’ll be thrilled to hear what your sweet little roommate’s been up to,” he said. “Why do you think she’s been doing so much demon research?”

“To help me, she said.”

“Yes, well, your golem friend sure has some different ideas about what things mean, doesn’t she?” he said. “She helps mend your clothes and clean up your messes, but what has she done with her newfound demon lore? Anything helpful?”

“So? I didn’t think she’d be able to help me much,” I said.

“She’s been taking precautions,” he said.

“Good,” I said.

“Do you want to hear what they are?”

“No,” I said. “I want her to be safe. I don’t care how she does it.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “That mostly takes care of the friends who might want to someday kill you for your own good. You want me to start on the ones who want to do it for fun? Or should we move on to the enemies and perfect strangers who would be happy to see you go?”

“You think this is going to faze me? I’ve been dealing with this shit for nine years. It’s internalized now. I spent years sitting in a desk in a corner of the classroom, even after they decided to ‘re-integrate me’, because I was as terrified of what the other kids would do as they were of me,” I said. “There were parents demanding my execution at PTA meetings. That’s not even getting into what it was like living with my grandmother, who never missed an opportunity to tell me that she’d ‘do what needs doing, if it needs doing’.”

“Let’s talk about your grandmother,” he said.

“Let’s not,” I said.

“Could be important.”

“Not likely,” I said. “She’s my past. If she comes into my present, it’s going to mean I like her company better than yours.”

“Family’s family,” he said. “I would never make you choose, if it were up to me. But would you like to hear one interesting, useful thing about your grandmother?”

“No,” I said.

“I can swear to you the information will be useful,” he said.

“Then I really don’t want to know,” I said. “I don’t want to owe you anything.”

“Owe? I think you got me confused with a dwarf, little lady,” he said. “If I’m not pressing the point, it’s because I don’t want you having anything else to worry about when you go into town tomorrow. I want you to be focused on getting through this thing.”

“So supportive,” I said.

“Oh, don’t think you’ll be getting off the hook that easily… I’ve got a lecture waiting for you when it’s all over,” he said. “There’s being gutsy, and then there’s just plain stupid, and betting your ass over some cheap jewelry is just plain stupid. Risk versus reward, baby girl. Risk versus reward.”

“It wasn’t cheap,” I said. “If it was cheap, I wouldn’t have had to make the deal to get it.”

“Yeah, when you’re poor, you think anything that costs more than you can afford to spend is sheer luxury,” he said, shaking his head. “Rich folks will throw themselves away over the strangest things, but poor folks will do it over the cheapest.”

“So what, I should have bargained her up to something more valuable?” I asked. “That would just give her more incentive to screw me over somehow.”

“You shouldn’t have done it in the first place,” he said. “Your invulnerable skin is a blessing… the only kind of blessing we get. You willingly let it be defaced with magic needles? Back in the day, a magic weapon was something rare and precious and terrible… now it’s something you use for decoration.”

“Yeah, back when dragons ruled the world,” I said.

“Oh, they still do,” he said. “At least compared to us. Do you know what the legal term is for when a dragon kills a mortal?”

“What?”

“Death by natural causes,” he said. “It’s not a crime, you see… not a tort of any sort, not what they call an actionable complaint. At the lower end of the spectrum, a dragon’s little more than an animal… an animal unlike any other your dear old mother-out-law ever dreamed up, but an animal… and at the other end, well, you might as well be suing a god. And we all know how well that turned out. Dragons… they burnt the whole damned world down once, you know… and are they anybody’s ‘ancient enemy’? No, they get treaties and conservation groups and imperial recognition and cushy office jobs.”

“Cushy… what?”

And us? We are forevermore rendered as hostem humani generis. Sort of rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? Poetic, isn’t it? ‘Enemies of all mankind’,” he laughed. “They admire dragons, from a distance… but they kill us on sight.”

“They kill dragons, too,” I said. “Or at least they used to. The really big ones get left alone because they do less damage on their own devices than they’d do in an all-out war… and besides, the prevailing thought is that having dragons around prevents something worse from rising up. I don’t think the same thing can be said about demons.”

“Don’t you?”

“Demons only exist to hunt humans,” I said. “That’s the only reason you come back to this plane.”

“That is a fact,” he said. “And for our trouble, we are ‘hostem‘.”

“Are you implying that humans are as bad as what comes out of the chaos?”

“Not at all, little lady,” he said. “I’m suggesting that dragons are to demons as those… aberrations… are to humans. If humans didn’t have so many enemies, they’d cover this tiny sphere…”

“…like ants on a piece of fruit,” I said.

“Right you are. Every generation since Khersis first incarnated, there have been less and less of us, and more and more of them,” the man said. “And look what’s happened. Sea travel. Air travel. Even planar travel’s starting to take off in ways the folks who laid out the boundaries never anticipated. Healing has gone from something miraculous to something so cheap they can practically give it away. Magic weapons have gone from being the legendary artifacts that whole wars hinge on to being trendy accessories.”

“Seriously?” I said. “I mean, are you serious? You have all of human history you could be using to convince me that humans are evil and you’re actually the good guy who’s fighting against them and you choose to talk about progress?”

“There’s nothing in nature… or in supernature… that humans haven’t found, tinkered with, taken apart, and put back together,” he said. “Who knows where it will lead next? Who knows where it’ll end?”

“So we should just wipe them all out, I suppose, instead of waiting to see,” I said.

“Nah,” he said. “Perish the thought. I’ve got nothing against humans. I consider myself something of a humanitarian.” I snerked, against my will. In my defense, it was mostly scoffing at the literal meaning and only a tiny little bit of ingrained appreciation for the stupid pun. “See? I thought you’d like that. No, seriously, no one’s talking about wiping anyone out… well, humans are, maybe, and they’re doing it even when they’re not talking about it… but us? No. There’s a balance to things. They’re part of it. We’re part of it. The Big Kh really stepped in it, when he stepped in and started re-ordering creation because he couldn’t stand to see a few of his creatures who strayed out of bounds being eaten.”

“Oh, right, the fact that he pitched you all into hell was a terrible mistake,” I said.

“It was,” he said. “He threw us across the planes because he couldn’t destroy us… didn’t have the right, didn’t have the power. If passing through the flame couldn’t destroy us, what else could it do but make us immortal? We’re more powerful now than we ever were… more limited in certain ways, but more powerful. And that brings me to the reason I’m here.”

“Oh, so you’re not just killing time, then?” I asked.

“No, not just time,” he said. “The thing is, I know what you think you came here for: you want to be powerful.”

“You don’t know me at all,” I said. “I’m here to get an education. Knowledge might be power, but a four year education… even a graduate degree… isn’t exactly the sort of knowledge that people fight and die to control.”

“True enough,” he said. “That’s true enough. But what I said is true, too. You want to be an enchanter. Why? Because you heard they make good money, and you think if you have enough money, you’ll be able to do whatever you want and people will just leave you alone. That’s your ultimate goal, isn’t it? And everything along the way: education, career, even money… those are just steps towards it.”

“Yeah, okay, granted… but you can put ‘power’ in that chain, too,” I said. “Comfort and security are what I want. Education gets me a career, career gets me money, money gets me power, power gets me left the fuck alone. That’s what I want. I’m not interested in hearing lamentations or ruling the world from top of a big pile of skulls or anything like that, so if you’re going to launch into some big tempter speech, you might as well save your breath.”

“Why should I?” he asked. “I can afford to waste some breath. It’s not like I’m apt to run out. But do you really think industrial enchantment’s going to get you what you want?”

“It’s a lucrative field,” I said. “Everybody knows that.”

“Right, that’s exactly right,” he said. “Everybody does know that. You know, your little girlfriend likes to take exception to you saying things like that. She likes to take exception to a lot of things, it seems, but if she was here now, I don’t think she could argue with that: everybody knows there’s money to be made in enchantment, which is why everybody and her brother are looking to get into it. By the time you graduate… well, so will lots of other folks, equally qualified for the same jobs. Supply and demand, baby girl… supply and demand.”

“Yeah, and right now demand for enchanted goods outpaces supply,” I said. “Newer things like crystalware cost so much because there’s not enough enchanters out there producing them. Older devices like fridges, warmers, and simple TVs are only affordable because of the secondary market. As more enchanters enter the workforce, the supply will increase, the prices will drop, and demand will rise as more and more people see them coming within their reach.”

“Right,” he said, nodding. “Your fancy enchanted toys will go from luxuries to commodities… and so will the people who make them. Oh, you’ll have a career… a career as a drudge, as a drone. There’ll be gobs of money being made, and it’ll pass on right by you. You’ll get an hourly wage and you’ll pay out the ass for healing benefits and you’ll still have a big ol’ target painted on your forehead, only if you think you have a hard time here at a liberal arts university just wait until you get out into the workforce…”

“Hey, I have a few advantages other enchanters won’t,” I said. “My energy reserves, for one thing.”

“Right, so you’ll be able to pick up more shifts,” he said. “You’ll earn slightly more gold but you’ll have less time to do all the things you want, less time to keep up your little interpersonal relationships… and of course, you’ll be drawing over that target in brighter colors by flaunting your advantage in front of your fellow drones. Of course, someone could decide it’s more cost-effective to just use your energy reserves to power more skilled enchanters… in which case you might make more money in less time, but what’s your fancy education doing for you, then?”

“Well, there you go,” I said. “I just need to figure out a way to market my energy surplus. I can do that for a couple years and I’ll be set to set up my own shop, or I do that part time for the rest of my own life and have money to goof off.”

“See, now you’re thinking,” he said.

“Oh, please,” I said. “You were trying to convince me I was making a mistake, now you’re acting like you’re giving me advice to do what I just thought up on my own.”

“I was trying to convince you to embrace the power you already have,” he said. “Now you’re thinking about how to leverage it. That’s good. I taught your mother a thing or two about that, you know.” He stood up and picked up his axe. “I’m going to let you get back to what you were doing, but I want you to think about this some more.”

“That is such a lame mindfuck,” I said. “You tried to make it sound like it would be lame and horrible to sell my energy, and you failed, and now you’re trying to turn it around me. I will think about it, but because I recognized that it’s a good idea.”

“Of course you did, baby girl,” he said, heading back into the trees. “Because you’re sharp like that, just like her.”

I ignored the bait, just like I’d ignored the previous reference to my mother. He was clearly smart enough to know that the only thing he could ever offer me was information about my mother, if I was stupid enough to trust him.

On the subject of things that were ignored, the body parts on the ground hadn’t disappeared. Nor did the scene disappear or change any after he left.

I closed my eyes.

A few seconds later, I awoke to the sound of knocking.

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I was at the farm… the farm in the labyrinth, only it wasn’t in the labyrinth. The barn was the same and there was the haystack and the field of corn, but it wasn’t bounded by maze walls… the field of corn stretched on, and a little ways away on the other side of the little road there was some gently rolling pasture land.

I was a little disappointed. I might have hoped, after so much love and affection from Amaranth, to have had a dream that reflected that in some fashion. I also could have dreamed of my mother, after digging up some buried feelings and memories.

I was also disappointed to see that my pitchfork wasn’t in the haystack… I would have liked to feel it in my hands again, if only in a dream.

There was no pitchfork, but there was something bright and orange and round resting near the base of it, like a child’s ball. There was nothing more interesting than that around me… no scarecrow hanging on the pole over the rows of corn and no crows, monstrous or otherwise… so I went over to get a closer look.

It was some kind of big melon or something, and there was a bug crawling on its rind… a little wiggly one, like the tiniest kinds of ants. Actually, there was more than one… another joined it, and two more. A lot more were crawling around from the other side of it. The bugs were swarming all over it. It was practically covered before long.

“Remind you of anyone?” somebody asked.

I looked up to see a man there, sitting on top of the haystack. I thought at first he might have been the scarecrow, out of the shadow at last… he was skinny and lithe looking, and he had a hat with a wide brim, but it wasn’t the right kind of hat. The scarecrow had been wearing something more like a floppy straw hat, a farmer’s hat. This guy was wearing a suit, kind of retro-fashionable, in a turn of the century kind of way, and the hat was straight-up cavalier chic. It was only missing the feather.

He got to his feet and began a graceful shuffle down the side of the stack, sending bits of hay tumbling down in tiny avalanches but keeping his feet.

“A bunch of insects crawling around on the skin of a fruit,” he said when he reached the ground next to me. He shook his head. “Who’s that remind you of?”

“Um… other insects?” I said, and he laughed.

He looked about my age, maybe a little older. His eyes were dark under the brim of his hat. His face was smooth, very smooth… almost elven smooth. I didn’t know him, but I thought I recognized him somehow. He was a bit specific to have come from some kind of central casting office in my head. He might have been any of the dozens of guys I’d seen in classes and not paid any attention to, I supposed.

“You were expecting the fox girl, weren’t you?” he asked.

“I don’t dream about her that much any more,” I said.

“Don’t you?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“You know… when humans first landed on their island, they didn’t know what to make of the people,” he said. “There are ‘beastmen‘ all over, but humans expect beasts to be beastly, not to build beautiful shrines and drink tea. The locals didn’t know what to make of them, either… so after a brief spell, they mostly made corpses of each other. The humans decided they were just another type of monster, but one that mocked humanity’s culture and achievements. There was a serious debate among the temples as to whether they were infernal, or just, you know… wicked that way. There was more than one lexicon written where their word for themselves, for ‘being‘ or ‘person‘, was translated as ‘demon’.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “Really. It’s fascinating the nonsense I can come up with when I’m asleep.”

He knocked the melon with the toe of his boot and it rolled over, barely disturbing the swarm.

“That really doesn’t remind you of anyone?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Huh,” he said. “What if they started building cities? Laying roads? Think that might jog your memory a little?”

“Oh, I get it,” I said. “Very clever. Very allegorical. We’re like a bunch of tiny bugs crawling around on a piece of fruit.”

“We?” the man said, cocking an eyebrow.

“Okay, I am,” I said. “You’re just some dream guy giving me a random, generic piece of insight. You know, this isn’t at all like my normal dreams… this standing around and talking and stuff. I usually get more like flashes of emotion and movement that I don’t really make sense of until I wake up.”

“Yeah, that’s a dream, alright,” the man said. “If you want insight, what you need to realize is that none of this,” he said, pausing as though for dramatic effect, “is real.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “I kind of worked that out for myself, though. I mean, that’s what dreams are, mostly. Not real.”

“I’m not talking about this in here,” he said. “I’m talking about all that out there.”

“All of what out where?”

“Everything you’ve got going on when you’re awake,” he said. “Your little girlfriend with your picnic lunches. Your little boyfriend. The other one. Your academic career. Your little fight for equality. Your hopes. Your dreams.”

“I thought you weren’t talking about dreams,” I said.

“I’m not talking about this dream,” he said. “I’m talking about your plans for the future.”

“What makes you think I’ve got any?” I asked. “Plans, or future.”

“Oh, I know you’ve got a future,” he said. “It’s going to be a piece of glory.”

“You’ve seen it, I suppose,” I said.

“I’m seeing to it.”

“I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re my guardian angel,” I said sarcastically.

“You’re not as sharp as she is,” he said, and he turned and started walking away down the road.

“As who is?”

“Who do you think?” he asked without stopping or turning around.

“I don’t know, tell me,” I said.

“Sharpest woman I ever met,” he said. “Hard to believe you came from her.”

I didn’t take the bait, though the hook it was dangling on might as well have been shoved into my guts and yanked around a bit for good measure. He was talking about my mother.

“This isn’t a normal dream, is it?” I asked.

The man stopped and turned around, grinning a way-too-broad grin.

“If it makes you more comfortable, we could take off our clothes,” he said. “Or I could belt you one… throw you to the ground, kick you in the face. Would that be a normal dream?”

“Who are you?” I asked him. “Did… did my mother send you?”

“Nobody sent me,” he said.

“You’re real, though,” I said. “I mean, you’re not somebody I dreamed up… you’re doing something, magic or something.”

“You’re getting sharper,” he said, tipping his hat a bit. “Keep it up and we just might not be here all night. What makes you think it’s magic?”

“Because if this were a divine visitation… which I wouldn’t believe it was anyway… I’d be in a lot more pain and if you were using telepathy, you would.”

“Sharp as a tack,” he said.

“You knew my mother,” I said.

“Once upon a time.”

“Is that why you’re here?” I asked.

“I’m not here because of your mother, Mackenzie,” he said. “I’m here because of you.”

“What, are you supposed to set me on the right path or something?”

“No,” he said. “Nothing like that.”

“What, then?”

“I guess I felt like stopping by and seeing you,” he said. “It seemed like it was about time we got acquainted, you know?”

“I don’t know,” I said, a little irritated at the seeming assumption that I’d know what he was talking about. “Who are you?”

“An old friend of your mother’s,” he said. “I guess you might say I was her teacher.”

“You look kind of young to have taught her anything,” I said.

“Well, I can’t do anything about that,” he said. “It’s your dream.”

“Fine, let’s get acquainted,” I said. “Tell me about yourself.”

“Isn’t much to tell,” he said. “I thought maybe we could talk about you for a spell.”

“What about me?”

“I saw you out on that field today,” he said. “You didn’t do so hot.”

“That’s because I didn’t feel so hot,” I said. “I felt cold.”

“That was a big problem until you decided to throw a little power at it,” he said. “You know, that’s one of your biggest weaknesses, Mackenzie.”

“Cold,” I said. “Yeah. I know.”

“No, not the cold,” he said. “The cold is an inconvenience. The cold is something you can overcome. Your weakness is accepting it, not fighting it, not pushing back… and not just against the cold. You cowed the mermaid once, when you thought to dig in your heels and give her a good hard shove back.”

“You were watching me then?” I asked, creeped out.

“No, but I can see it now,” he said. “We’re in your head, after all. Cold or no cold, you should have been able to lay that elfblood out flat. Do you know why you didn’t?”

“Because she’s a better fighter than me?”

“Better, nothing… you could have swung that stick like a dwarf with a hammer and anybody who was in its path would have no choice but to get out of the way quick. But you let it take control, you let it guide you, and it didn’t want to do anything but defend, defend, defend. It didn’t have anything to say about attacking.”

“It’s a defensive weapon,” I said.

“So you should have took charge on the attack,” he said. “You wield a weapon, you don’t let it wield you… that’s where things went wrong with the pitchfork.”

“What do you know about my pitchfork?”

“Yours?” he said. He laughed. “Maybe if you show me you can handle it.”

“Does that mean you have it?” I asked.

“Maybe I do,” he said. “And maybe I’ll think about letting you have it back, if you can give me some kind of indication that things won’t just turn out the same way they did the last time you got a hold of it.”

I started to ask what I had to do, but then I stopped… I was being way too calm and accepting of some guy I didn’t know standing inside my head, looking at my memories, and trying to get me to sit up and beg like a damned puppy. Didn’t I have enough people doing that already? And then there was the claimed connection to my mother… my mother had never mentioned anybody like this guy. I didn’t remember seeing any pictures of him.

In fact, I couldn’t remember my mother ever talking about guys.

“Look… just how stupid do you think I am?” I asked.

“Well, now,” the man said, scratching his chin. “I don’t normally like to lie without a powerfully compelling reason to…”

“There’s only one man I know of who would have been a part of my mother’s life,” I said.

“Right, only one you know about,” he said. “So I could be one of any number of other men who passed through her life.”

“But you aren’t, are you?” I said. “Because that explains why you’re so young, and how you could come into my mind without frying your own brain, and why you look so familiar…”

“Say it,” he said, leaning towards me and grinning a great jack o’ lantern leer of a grin. There was a fire behind his dark eyes. “Say it out loud.”

“Deny it,” I said. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

He held out his hand, two fingers up in a V sign, and lit them on fire.

My mouth went dry.

“The question is, what are you going to do about it?” he asked.

“Wake up now,” I said.

“Yeah, good luck with that,” he said. He extinguished his hand. “I’m your family, baby girl… the only real family you’ve got. Maybe I haven’t always been there for you, but then, how could I be when you were living in that woman’s house? As soon as I found out you were out on your own, I came looking for you and now here I am… well, not exactly here, really. But I can still keep an eye on you. I can still watch out for you.”

“I don’t need watching out for,” I said.

“No?” he asked, raising an eyebrow again. “Listen, baby girl… I know about your deal on Saturday, and you don’t have to worry. If things go badly for you, I’ll take care of it. A man like me can’t do much in a world like this without attracting too much of the wrong kind of attention, but a person like ‘Tender’ Mercy… well, no matter how legal her operation is, nobody’s going to look twice if she ends up a bloody smear.”

“I don’t need your help,” I said.

“Not yet,” he said. “I’m just telling you that if you do, you’ll have it… unconditionally, unquestionably. That’s what families do. That’s what family’s for.” He tipped his hat again, then turned and started walking down the road. “I’ll be seeing you. We’ll talk about your pitchfork some more.”

Discuss this story.

A few weeks back I said the reason I wasn’t doing a bonus story showing what’s been going with Barley was that this question was going to be resolved elsewhere… for those of you who missed it, that’s gearing up over in More Tales of MU.


Laurel Anne had always been a fast reader, but it took her almost two months to finish the man’s book.

It wasn’t just that it was big, or that she could only read it when she was alone… after all, she usually did her reading when she was alone, and she was better than most people at finding a secluded spot with no one around.

But she found herself lost when she tried to pick it up. Starting from the same place was no good… she figured out right away that even though it had all the same characters in all the same places, and had long passages that were exactly or nearly the same, there was so much added that it wasn’t the same book she’d been reading, and she got lost trying to pick up from where she’d been.

So she went back to the beginning of the book… and at first, at least, she was just as lost. There were passages in the book… long ones… that she just didn’t understand. She pored over them line by line, reading them over and over again, putting them together with bits of things she’d heard, small things she’d glimpsed, until she thought she understood them.

Then she read them over and over some more.

The book made her feel strange. The same lightness she’d felt looking at the cover came over her when she read the scenes that had been excised from her original copy. They played out in her head at odd moments when she was in class, or in her bed.

Her inability to finish the book deviled her, because the best place to read on her own was the woods but she didn’t want to bump into its owner before she’d finished it. The book became a guilty secret in more ways than one.

Eventually, she did finish it. She wasn’t quite surprised when the first time she took a stroll through the woods, the man reappeared. She wasn’t sure why she expected to see him. Of course, he might have been looking for her, since she had kept his book for weeks and weeks… when she first spotted him coming through the trees, her first thought was that he might be angry, but then she saw him smiling.

“Hey, sharp lady,” he said. “You finish the book?”

“Yeah,” she said. She swung her backpack, a faded hand-me-down from Jo, off her shoulder, demonstrating its weight with the book inside it. “I did, and brought it back.”

He waved a pale hand dismissively.

“Oh, keep it,” he said. “I’ve got more copies.”

“I couldn’t,” she said. “It’s kind of big… Mama would find it, sooner or later. But thanks.”

“You know, I notice you don’t talk about your daddy nearly as much as you talk about your mama,” he said.

“Well, he isn’t around much to talk about,” Laurel Anne said. She added, with a touch of pride, “He’s an airshipman.”

“Well, that’s a fine thing for him to be, but what about you?” he asked. “Do you ever get lonely with no daddy around?”

“Maybe,” she said, dropping her head a little. “But he loves me, and he’s doing important work for the emperor.”

“Sure he is,” the man said. “So, you didn’t have any problem with the book, did you? Understood everything okay?”

“Mostly…”

“Oh, some parts can be confusing, when they’re new. I can show you some pictures that might clear up the hard parts, if you’d like.”

“Maybe,” Laurel Anne said, her face turning pink. She felt hot, even though it was a cool autumn day.

“But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself… I didn’t even ask how you liked it.”

“It was fine,” she mumbled.

“Fine? That’s not an answer,” he said. “That’s what you say when you don’t want to think of an answer. Hey, we’re friends… if you didn’t like the book, you can tell me… I’ll give you back your copy, and maybe we’ll wait a few more years before we try you on any other grown-up books.”

“No, really, I liked it fine!” Laurel Anne said. She blushed furiously. “It just… it made me feel things.”

“Good things, I hope?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Yes. But…”

“But you don’t know how to handle them,” he said, nodding sagely. “Because nobody ever talked to you about these kinds of feelings. Just like nobody ever talked to you about those other feelings you have.”

Her eyes went wide, her red cheeks going white.

“How… how…” she stammered.

“You aren’t the only sharp one,” he said. “That’s why I like you, in fact… most people are so dull, you know, and not only that they aren’t any fun. Listen, Laurel Anne, those feelings you have… all of them, they aren’t anything bad, but most people wouldn’t understand them.”

“Don’t have to tell me that,” Laurel Anne said.

“They’d tell you you’re wrong for feeling them, if they knew about them.”

“It isn’t something I do on purpose!”

“Of course not,” the man said. “It just happens, and really, that’s a beautiful thing. You’re a special little lady, Laurel Anne, and don’t ever let anybody tell you otherwise.”

“So why can’t I feel you?” she asked.

“Well, because I’m special, too,” he said. “Not like you are, of course… that’s the beauty of being special. Nobody’s special the exact same way as anybody else. Now, can you tell me, is there anybody else around right now?”

“No,” she said. “There isn’t.”

“You sound real sure about that.”

“I am,” she said.

“You don’t even have to think about it?”

She shook her head.

“I just know,” she said.

“Interesting,” he said, scratching his chin thoughtfully.

“What?”

“Well, it seems to me like that ought to be harder than it is,” he said. “If you can do that much without even trying… I wonder what sorts of things you could do with a little effort?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, some folks… special folks, I mean… can look inside people’s heads and see what they’re thinking,” he said. “And some can do more than that.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, different things,” he said. “We’ll talk more about them later. But right now, you’re sure that nobody’s nearby?”

“I’m sure.”

“Good,” he said. “Because I want to talk about your other feelings for a bit. If you aim to keep reading at a grown-up level, you’ve got to learn how to get them under control, you know?”

“I tried,” Laurel Anne said.

“Of course you did, but you can’t be expected to handle something like that on your own,” he said. “There are some things that I do when I get all ‘het up’ like that. Maybe if I show you, we can figure out something for you to do.”

“Why can’t I just do what you do?” Laurel Anne asked.

“Well, this is getting into the ways men and women are different… I know I don’t have to explain that to you, after you read the whole book,” he said, and she blushed again. “Come on, let’s just go a little deeper in the woods… I’ll show you those pictures, and we’ll see what we can work out for you.”

Two years later, Laurel Anne was still meeting the man in the woods. Sometimes he’d give her a magazine, sometimes a book. A couple of times he’d shown her some illusion crystals. As time went on, he brought these little gifts less often, but he always had something new to teach her… and whether it had to do with being ‘het up’ or what she’d come to think of as her special gift, she did her best to listen to her older, wiser friend.

She’d been uncomfortable with the physical contact at first. In fact, she was still uncomfortable with it, two years on, but she wouldn’t give up the thrill of it all for anything. The secrecy was exciting, and it was flattering having an adult who listened to her and showed such interest in her. He’d been right about her mother not understanding… right about her mother being a hypocrite… and he always had time for her.

“You were right,” she told him, as they lounged on a gentle slope beside the Sykekill. “All I had to do was give Jenny a little ‘push’ and she told Becca how she really felt about her new shoes.”

“How’d that make you feel?”

“Well…”

“Come on,” he said. “You don’t keep secrets from your friend.”

“A little bad, actually,” she said. “They were both screaming at each other when I left.”

“She was lying,” the man said. “You told me yourself that Jenny was a two-faced lying bitch. You just shot a piece of honesty inside her empty head. How can honesty be a bad thing?”

“I guess it can’t,” Laurel Anne said.

“You should never feel guilty about using your special gift, so long as you’re careful about it,” he said. “Just think about what somebody like Jenny would do to you, if she had your power. You know what kind of a person she is… what goes through her head.”

“She’s horrible,” Laurel Anne said. “She thinks she’s so sophisticated and mature since she spent the summer in the city. I wish I could… could… make her wet herself in front of the whole class. That would show everybody what a baby she really is.”

“Well, that’s not so easy to do.”

“Why not?” Laurel Anne said. “I could just give her a nudge.”

“Could you pee your pants on purpose?”

“I’m not allowed to wear pants,” Laurel Anne said.

“You know what I mean,” the man said. “I tell you what, I’ll give you ten gold and a change of clothes if you can wet yourself right now.”

“You probably don’t have ten gold,” Laurel Anne said. “And I know you don’t have a change of clothes. And Mama would want to know where they came from.”

“Maybe I don’t have ten gold, but it doesn’t matter because you couldn’t do it if you tried,” the man said. “You can make a body decide to up and do anything it might do naturally, but most folks can’t piss themselves on purpose. That’s what comes of spending an entire lifetime trying not to do something.”

“So I can’t do it,” Laurel Anne said. “Oh, well. It was just an idea.”

“It was a good idea,” the man said. “It really would serve her right.”

“But you said I couldn’t…”

“I said it wasn’t easy,” he said. “You’d have to reach deeper than you have before, not just mess around with the surface. It would take a lot of practice and hard work.”

“Just to make Jenny Miller make a fool of herself?” Laurel Anne said. “I don’t know if that’s…”

“Not just for that,” he said. “If you pulled it off, why, there’s no end to the things you could do.”

“What could I do?”

“Sharp lady, the question is what couldn’t you do,” he said. “Let’s you and me have a little fun, and then we’ll get to work on this.”

“Couldn’t we get started right away?” Laurel Anne said. “You said it’ll take a lot of practice…”

“That’s why we should relax a little first,” he said, putting an arm around her. “All work and no play… have I ever led you wrong, Laurel Anne?”

“No… okay,” she said.

It was after the start of summer, after a very interesting school year, that she felt the first signs of sickness. This was after missing her monthly bleeding. Her cycle had never been the most regular thing, but it usually showed up sooner or later.

Her period wasn’t the only thing that went missing… the man who had been a constant presence in her life simply stopped showing up, leaving her to piece together what was happening to her on her own.

She worked it out less than a day before her mother did. Her mother had always been extraordinarily canny about things… that was one reason Laurel Anne had never tried any mental manipulations on her. Maybe it was just her earliest memories of the indomitable woman towering over her, but she always got the impression of solid iron from her mother.

If she could have controlled her mother the way she did her classmates, she might have been able to go on with her life the way she always had, but now there was no question of going back to school in the fall. Mama sent her to live with Jo and her husband before she started showing, “for her health.” Laurel Anne despised the lie as she despised all of her mother’s hypocrisies, and she hated being sent so far away from the woods where she and her man had always met. Though she’d seethed at his abandonment before, she forgot about his previous absence and blamed her mother for separating them.

In the course of time, she gave birth to a son. If she’d known his father’s name, she might have given it to him… it was only then that she realized how strange it was that he’d never told her it. She named Aidan instead, after a character from one of the books they’d shared. Jo had her own child and another on the way, so young Aidan was put up for adoption and Laurel Anne went back to her mother’s house.

She could have gone her whole life without setting foot in that place again, without seeing that woman… but doing so was her only chance of seeing her man again. She didn’t tell him about his son… there were no secrets between them, but she felt sure he’d be tormented by the thought of what had been.

She’d lost Aidan, and she didn’t want to inflict that loss on him.

If Laurel Anne had been eager to learn, eager to please before, now she was driven. The man seemed pleased with the change that had come over her, even if he couldn’t possibly have guessed the source. She spent more and more time with him. Having missed a whole semester of school, missing days didn’t seem like any big thing.

The next time she came up pregnant, she was eighteen… a year older than Jo had been when she’d wed, and too old for Mama to send her off or get rid of her baby. The old woman’d had words to say about that, of course… they’d started with “So long as you live under my roof.”

Well, Laurel Anne could take care of that. Her mother would have to settle for bossing around her younger brothers… she was an adult, and she had a man who lived in a house on the other side of the woods, who thought she was beautiful and special and sharp, who’d be overjoyed to learn that they didn’t have to hide out and sneak around any more.

She just needed to find him, and then everything would be just fine.

He looked the same as she remembered, though he was young enough that this wasn’t more than a little jarring. If he’d been eighteen or so then, he would be in his mid-twenties now, and in Laurel Anne’s limited experience, people who weren’t growing up or growing old didn’t change much from year to year.

“Me,” he agreed. He held the flower out for a few more seconds before seeing that she had no intention of taking it, then stuck it through his buttonhole. “How’ve you been keeping yourself, Laurel Anne?”

“Dry,” she said.

“Sharp as ever,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t come back around for so long, but I thought you might be a little sore over our last meeting.”

“That was a dirty trick,” Laurel Anne said.

“Now you make it sound like I dunked you in the stream on purpose,” he said. “I was in earnest about teaching you, but then your babysitter showed up screaming her head off about something and I thought it was best if I made myself scarce before she got the wrong idea.”

“That was my sister,” Laurel Anne said.

“Your sister?” the man said. “Can’t say I see the resemblance… anybody ever told you that you end up with all the looks in your family?”

“She got the wrong idea anyway,” Laurel Anne said. “She thought I threw myself in the creek. If you’d have stuck around, you could have explained… if you weren’t just trying to drop me in the water, I mean.”

“I promise I wasn’t, but I wasn’t sure I’d get a chance to explain… I mean, the folks around here don’t act too kindly towards strangers,” he said.

“Shows what you know,” Laurel Anne said.

“What don’t I know?”

“My mama says nowhere in the world treats strangers better,” Laurel Anne said loftily. “She says hospitality is sacred.”

“That so?”

“Yes,” she said. “She says she’s never turned a stranger away from our door.”

“Your mama have a lot of sayings?” the man asked.

“I guess.”

“She ever tell you, ‘A place for everything, and everything in its place,’ or something like that?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Well, that one kind of trumps the other one,” he said. “You follow?”

“No,” Laurel Anne said, shaking her head.

“Well, let me put it to you like this… do you actually get many strangers knocking on your door?”

“Not many,” she said. She was trying to remember if there had ever been a stranger that came knocking on their door. Her mama did take a lot of visitors, but she seemed to know all of them. The ones who might have been strangers to her usually came with somebody from town, who introduced them.

“You ever go into the city with your mama?” he asked.

“Sometimes.”

“You see any strangers then?” he asked. “Hungry strangers, poor strangers?”

“Sometimes,” she said, shifting uncomfortably.

“Your mama ever show them much hospitality?” he asked. “She ever offer them a crust of bread or a copper coin? She ever ask them if they need a roof over their heads?”

Laurel Anne said nothing. She had a few vivid memories from when she was younger… as vivid as her ones of plunging into the creek… of asking her mama if they could do something to help the people they saw on the streets, and being told to mind her place.

“Ever?” he prompted.

“They didn’t come to our door,” she said.

“Can you imagine her treating them any better if they did?” the man asked her. “See, I’m sure your mama’s a charitable soul. I’m sure she puts money in the poor box and I’m sure she gives to the food pantry and I’m sure she prays for them, but when all’s said and done she expects them to stay in their place while she stays in hers. You remember that word I told you last time?”

“Yes,” Laurel Anne said. She lifted her book and lowered her face, making a big show of resuming reading it. “I even know what it means, thank you very much, but I don’t think you know as much about my mama as you think you do.”

“Ah, horse feathers,” the man said. He pulled the book out of her hands and closed it, then slipped it inside his jacket.

“Hey, I was reading that!” Laurel Anne said.

“I’ll give it back,” the man said. “Just take a little walk with me first.”

“A little walk along the creek?” she asked, giving him a skeptical look.

“If that’s what you’d like,” he said. “Though I wouldn’t expect the same old conjurer’s tricks to impress you, now that you’re a sophisticated young lady.”

“I am pretty sophisticated,” Laurel Anne admitted. “But I don’t go walking in the wood with strange young men.”

“Strange? Strange? You’ve known me since you were five years old,” the man said.

“The only thing I know about you is that the last time I talked to you I ended up halfway drowned,” Laurel Anne said. “And that you stole my book.”

“Do you really think I wish you any harm?” he asked. “It seems to me that walking through the woods by yourself has got to be more dangerous than walking through the woods with anybody, even a stranger.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Mathematically,” the man said. “Either I mean you harm or I don’t, right? It’s a toss-up, like spinning a coin… fifty percent chance either way. But the same is true for anybody you meet walking through the woods… if you’re alone, you might run into any number of people who mean you harm. If you’re with me when that happens, then you’ve got somebody who might be inclined to help you. My fifty percent cancels out theirs.”

“That’s only if you don’t mean me harm,” Laurel Anne said.

“Right,” he said. “But if I do… well, you can’t be murdered twice, so it doesn’t hurt your odds to go with me.”

“I don’t think that’s right…”

“Well, it isn’t often that girls have a head for math.”

“I do so have a head for math!” Laurel Anne said.

“Then you see my point,” the man said.

“Maybe I do,” she said. “But I’d still say I’m safer right here than I would be walking through the woods alone with you.”

“How do you figure that?” he asked. “I mean, seeing as you’re already alone in the woods with me. Are you safer here than in any other spot?”

“Maybe I am,” Laurel Anne said. “People come through here all the time. Is that why you want to get me away from here?”

“Well, you caught me,” he said, taking off his hat and crumpling it in front of him. “I’m not exactly what you call a ‘people-person’, you see… that’s why I take these walks through the woods. I don’t normally ever approach anybody… I’m too shy, and like I said, the folks around here don’t take well to strangers. But you have such a kind face, and you aren’t like the others… I could tell that right off.”

“Where are you from?”

“I have a little place on the other side of the woods,” he said.

“That sounds like a long walk,” Laurel Anne said.

“It is,” he said. “Last time I saw you was the first time I walked this far. Would you like to see where I live?”

“I’d like my book back,” Laurel Anne said, holding out her hand.

“Certainly,” he said. He reached into his pinstriped jacket. “It is yours, isn’t it?”

He held a book out with a flourish. Though it had a similar cover, and she could see her yellow ribbon bookmark hanging from between the pages, she knew right away that it wasn’t hers. It was much too thick.

“This is wrong,” she said, taking it anyway. Its weight was very satisfying in her hands.

“You weren’t reading Summers in Athanasia?” he asked.

“I was, but this is… different,” she said, looking at the cover. The faded illustration of the elf lord and his human maiden were similar… the figures were the same, but the position was… different. She felt an odd lightness looking at them.

“Oh, silly me,” he said, pulling the book out of her hands. “I accidentally gave you the unabridged edition.”

“Unabridged?” she echoed as the thick tome disappeared inside his jacket. He placed her own book back in her hands. It felt so light as to be almost insubstantial.

“Forgive me, child…. what would you think of me if I had let you read that?” he asked. “I don’t think you’d begin to understand…”

“I’m not a child!” Laurel Anne said.

“Well, certainly you aren’t, but by the same token, you are not a grown woman, and a book like that might confuse…”

“I’ve been reading on my own longer than anybody my age,” Laurel Anne said indignantly. “I’ve read plenty of books with things I didn’t know about in them, and I’ve never been confused by them.”

“Well, you are sharp and sophisticated, for your age,” the man said, scratching his head. “But… well, if your mama found you with a book like that, she might have questions about where you’d got it from.”

“She won’t find it,” Laurel Anne said. “And if she does, I won’t tell… I’m no rat.”

“So, you swear not to tell her about me?”

“Sure I do,” Laurel Anne said.

“Well, I suppose that’s alright, then,” the man said. He pulled the tiny volume out of her hands and replaced it with the heavier one. She looked down at it… the biggest book she’d ever seen, outside of a librum or the big dictionary… like a hungry child looking at a great big piece of birthday cake. “I’ll take a rain check on that walk, for now… I can tell you’re eager to get back to your reading, and after all, now you’ve got twice as much to do.”

“Yeah,” she said, not looking up from the cover of the book. It almost looked like they were doing something… indecent… but if they were, the lady didn’t appear to be objecting much. “You’ll come back, though?”

“Certainly!” the man said. “When you’re done with the book… it’s a favorite of mine, you see.”

“Oh, I’ll take good care of it!”

“I had no fear,” the man said. “But, you see, I’ve never met anybody else who’s read it, and I think it would be fun to have somebody to talk to about it… and of course, I could bring you more books to read, if you like that one.”

“I’m sure I will,” Laurel Anne said.

“I’m sure you will, too,” the man said. He turned and started to walk away. “Happy reading!” he said, then strolled off through the woods, whistling as he went.