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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you actually enjoy that?”

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

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

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

“So you are into it?” she said.

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

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

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

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

“No,” I said. “It was all his idea.”

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

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

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

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

“Oh,” she said. “Um… oh.”

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

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

“Why not?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you making fun of me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You gave me this shirt,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ian gave Amaranth a meaningful look, and she smiled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s our pseudowench,” Steff added.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Like what?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I like your top,” Two said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thanks, Two,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is ‘Mouse’ a… um…”

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

“I like Mouse,” Two said.

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

“It’s true,” Two said.

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

“That’s submission,” Amaranth said.

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

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

“Is Shiel her dom?” Nicki asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So… you noticed?” she said.

“Nicki did,” I said.

She laughed.

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

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

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

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

She sighed and took the paper from me.

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

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

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

“What?”

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

“Okay,” I said.

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

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

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

“If that happens, I’ll ask,” I said.

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

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

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

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

“I’ll have it back to you tomorrow.”

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

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

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

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

“I will,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”

“And screaming, of course.”

“Of course.”

My dear friend Two,

I appreciate the diligence with which you have undertaken to write to me. Receiving your letters with such regularity has enabled me to keep a firmer fix on the passage of weeks than the routine of events at Ceilos would normally allow.

Though to write with all due honesty, the truth is that I have not been allowed to participate in anything resembling a normal schedule. My shifts are given over to whatever labor is both necessary and appropriate for the position I currently occupy. I do not mind the labor. I am accustomed to work, even that which might be counted as drudgery. But I am accustomed to doing it in accordance with some greater purpose, and with greater regularity. My governors here tell me that they wish to impose order on my life in order to prevent further mischief, yet order is exactly what I crave and exactly what I lack.

Incidentally, I find the use of such words as “greater” and “lesser” obviates the difficulties inherent in moving between differing vertically-oriented relational schemes.

Please convey my regards to your friend Hazel and her parent.

Your friend,
Delia Daella ^xd’Wyr, ~Dee

Postscript:

I would greatly appreciate it if you could tell me more about the amphibian/avian hybrid figure who used to appear to you within your dreams. Please do not ask me why.

“How was that?” Two asked when she had finished reading. She sat in a hand-carved wooden chair at an old oak writing desk in the bedroom she was sharing for the time being with her friend Hazel.

“I take it back,” Hazel said from atop the pile of quilts piled on what was for her an outrageously oversized bed. “It’s better when you don’t do the voice. That was just… unsettling.”

“I think I did a pretty good job.”

“Too good. That’s what was unsettling,” Hazel said. “Anyway, it’s nice to be remembered. I’ll tell my father she asked after him… and that she’s stopped calling him ‘the former consort of my deceased mother’.”

“Hazel, she never called him that,” Two said.

“Not in so few words, no,” Hazel said.

Two carefully refolded the letter along its creases before slipping it back inside its envelope and filing it away. She would answer the letter promptly, of course, but she had no need to refer to it again. She could not perfectly recall every page of text she’d ever seen as some of her classmates at Magisterius University had assumed, but she did have the ability to hold an image in her mind perfectly while she was still using it.

She took a sheet of paper and began composing her reply.

Dear Dee, I am afraid you are mistaken. A turtle is technically a reptile and not an amphibian…

“So, how’d she spend a year walking around in the sunlight and never manage to hear the word ‘father’?” Hazel asked after a while.

“She knows what a father is,” Two said. “But she has loss of privacy and I do not think all the clerics who read her letters do. She avoids talking about things that will confuse them because that just delays the mail.”

“But evidently ‘vertically integrated organizational themes’ doesn’t give them any problems, does it?” Hazel said. She sat up and slid off the pile of quilts towards the edge of the bed, where she didn’t catch herself so much as briefly interrupt her fall to ensure a safer landing. “What do you want to do today, love?”

“I am a guest in your home, so I should be deferring to you,” Two said.

“Eleven to one that the etiquette guide you pulled that out of says that as hostess I’m supposed to find out activities that you like and suggest them,” Hazel said. “Don’t know who goes around giving golems advice like that… seems to me like a perfect recipe for a fatal staring contest. Anyway, I’m as much a guest here as you are, aren’t I?”

“Are you?” Two replied. “I know you chose to stay here with me instead of in your father’s apartment in town, so I’m confused about the etiquette.”

“Lot of that going around,” Hazel said. “Which is why I’d rather stay here in the lodge.”

The lodge had originally been an imperial staging inn, but once modern enchantments obviated the need for horse-drawn mail coaches it had been privatized. The way modern coaches revolutionized overland travel had proven to be a bonanza for hostelers who operated at important junctions along the major imperial roads. The road that passed through Logfallen Shire was not such a hotspot, and the inn had quickly folded.

Whether or not the Imperium was aware of the treaty that had allowed the gnomes of Logfallen to claim the building as their own was an open question, but it was unlikely they would have cared as they had already been paid for the property when the stage network was shutdown. The little folk of the shire kept the property well-maintained and made it available to outsized guests, or more often as overflow housing when another shire came to call and space was at too much of a premium for comfort.

That is to say, the residents themselves would move into the lodge for the duration of the visit while offering their guests beds in their own holes. Asking a guest to sleep above ground would have been terribly gauche.

Hazel had no trouble sleeping above ground. The only time in her life that she’d lived in a burrow had been when her mother’s family had donated one to them, during the last stages of her illness. Before that point, the Robert Willikins family had been boaters, and proud. Well, Robert had been proud. Hazel had spent enough time around the children of more respectable families to start wondering if boating really was anything to be proud about, which had served to make her all the more proud at times, and terribly insecure at others.

She twitched, brushing aside an unpleasant memory of that feeling… and found the fierce pride lurking behind it.

“Well, if you’ve no preference,” she said to Two, “let’s go swimming.”

“Is there anywhere to swim?”

“Well, we should avoid the river proper, because I’m rusty and it’s sure to have changed on me,” Hazel said. “But there’s a nice sheltered pool just south of the bridge, and then there’s a pond out by the north crossing.”

“Swimming in rural ponds isn’t safe,” Two said. “There can be all sorts of hazards under the surface.”

“What do you mean, rural?” Hazel said. “Just because it’s not a big square pool full of conjured water doesn’t mean it’s full of merrows and ghouls… though we will might to be on the lookout for freshwater crabs. They take a lot of killing, and they’re not very good eating by the second week.”

“Hazel, I don’t think the folks here approve of swimming,” Two said.

“We wouldn’t be doing it for their approval,” Hazel said. “Is that so wrong?”

“No,” Two said. “But would we be doing it for their disapproval?”

“Might as well do something to earn it,” Hazel said. “Something more than existing. Or not being Hon… Heather. Or stopping her from having a goblin friend. You know, I have a goblin friend. Sort of, anyway. Sort of a goblin and sort of a friend, I mean.”

“I don’t think Shiel would like being called sort of a goblin,” Two said.

“A kobold is a sort of goblin.”

“I am not certain that she’d agree.”

“You’re a good friend, Two, but you’re rubbish at arguments,” Hazel said. “Not like Shiel. And does anybody care that I have a sort-of goblin sort-of friend? No. They just want to know why I didn’t stop her… I’m supposed to keep her from making friends now? They just told me to keep her out of trouble. Well, I can’t imagine anywhere she’d get into less trouble than a goblin village. There’s nothing to drink, and no suitors to suit her. Anyway, it’s not like she went straight from uni to the bogs or ran away in the middle of the night. She came back here and announced her plans. Her mum helped her pack her bags, and as soon as she was bundled onto the coach, she turns to me and she says, ‘I hope you’re happy.’”

“I was there,” Two said. “And what she actually said was, ‘I hope you are well-pleased with yourself, Hazel Willikins.’”

“That’s what I said.”

“It’s semantically similar but not identical to what you said.”

“And I’m not happy,” Hazel said. “I’m not. I’ve never been happy in this town, save when I had a boat to leave it on. You know, I almost wish we’d been sent to keep an eye on Heather in goblin-ville, as dull as that’d be. Oru’s family has to be better than hers.”

“You have family here.”

“Just my father, and he’s… I’d like to get him out of here, but I’m not sure how much of him’s left that’s ‘him’ and not ‘here’,” Hazel said.

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Yeah, well, if you’d have lived my life, it would,” Hazel said, and Two had no argument for that. “What day is it, today?”

“It’s Tuesday.”

“Tuesday the what-th?”

“The sixth,” Two said. “Andreas is visiting in two weeks and three days.”

“Don’t see why he couldn’t come earlier, or stay longer,” Hazel said.

“He has business to take care of.”

“What kind of business can’t wait a couple of weeks?”

“Most kinds,” Two said.

Hazel sighed.

“I’m not really mad at him, you know,” she said. “Or even missing him in particular, though I do miss him. What I really miss is different people… people with different thoughts, different ideas, different experiences. Even the ones I didn’t get on with. Especially the ones I didn’t get on with.”

“You miss Shiel,” Two said, nodding.

“I don’t mean just her,” Hazel said. “Everyone here gets on with each other, and that seems nice enough until the day comes when you don’t get on with just one of them… especially if they are a Callaway and you’re from off the river. And there’s less and less river folk all the time. Hardly anyone’s been through so far. When they sent me off to university, I thought… well, I thought I’d come back all worldly. Cosmopolitan. I’d have learned things and seen far-off places. I thought the Callaways would look at me like I was an adult, or even a person… or, you know, their kin. Not on the same level as they are, but in the same neighborhood.”

“You do want their approval,” Two said.

“I’m not greedy,” Hazel said. “I’d be happy with an ounce or two of it.”

“Do you approve of them?”

“Does it matter if I approve of them?” Hazel said. “I’m nobody here. They’re well-off, they’re respectable, and they’re going to be living it up under the high hill no matter what I think of them.”

“Isn’t the reverse also true?”

“Yeah, I’m not going to be living in the high hill no matter what they think of me.”

Two frowned slightly, her forehead wrinkling and her face twitching as she thought through what she was trying to say.

“I do not mean the exact reverse,” she said. “I mean that you will still be Hazel and you will still be all worldly and cosmopolitan and have a university education and friends no matter what they think of you.”

“Right,” Hazel said. “And that’s fine enough for me, out there in the wide world. But then every time I come back here, I’m right back in their little world and what I think doesn’t matter.”

“And out there, what they think doesn’t matter.”

“Right, but I’m just going to end up back here.”

“Why?” Two asked.

“Because… well…”

Two sat patiently while Hazel grappled with the realization.

“You know, I’ve decided what I want to do,” Hazel announced at length.

“What?” Two said.

“Open up some more rooms and get some of the other windows open, air this place out.”

“You said we shouldn’t use more rooms than we need for the two of us, since that just makes more work for the caretakers when we leave,” Two said.

“We will clean up after ourselves,” Hazel said. “We’ll leave everything better than we found it, and we won’t care that the Callaways of the world will want everything cleaned again anyway without so much as a glance, because obviously we wrecked the place… and if they don’t think that now, they will most definitely think it after the party we throw.”

“What party?”

“The one where we invite everyone in the shire, and everyone in the next shire, and put the word out up and down the river that everyone’s welcome,” Hazel said.

“That could be a lot of people to feed.”

“We won’t empty the stores,” Hazel said. “The kind of party I’m thinking of has more food the more people show… and honestly I’m not sure how many people will. There are less and less folk on the river, and even though everyone loves a party, the disapproval of the Callaways counts for a lot. Folks they wouldn’t give the time of day to will line up to lend the Callaways their pocketwatches.”

“I don’t know what that means. Hazel, do we have permission to do this?”

“Sign out front says ‘welcome travellers’. We’re just putting those words into action,” Hazel said. “You start opening shutters, I’ll go down to the banks and put up some riversign. If I remember it. Let the shire scowl… we might be throwing a party for the two of us, but by Owain, they’re going to know we threw one!”

A seasonal meditation from your author:

Winter snow arrives, my hoodie/shawl combo fails. I need a new coat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, actually, I was,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How much difference can that actually make?”

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

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

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

“And you can’t draw some rectangles?”

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

“You mean the one you broke?”

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

“Does he know you broke it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then why do you need me at all?”

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

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

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

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

“When do you need it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steff laughed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It seemed more like a restaurant than a cafeteria, at least compared to the one in the student union. It was still buffet style, but more of the food was self-service, kept in heated or cooled trays on islands in the middle of the floor. The line of counters in front of the prep area were only for made-to-order stuff, which had been added to the menu as a solution to the problem of students with more specialized diet needs.

Goblinoids and reptilians can’t digest milk and its products. Neither, for that matter, can a lot of mammalian humanoids. Some races have traditionally preferred food that was quite a bit more or less cooked than local human cooking methods traditionally leave it. Vegetarians… whether by nature, divine edict, or inclination… also found themselves with a lot more options at the Arch.

We all had more options. My dietary needs weren’t being served, but I had them well enough in hand that I wasn’t going to ask the food services folk to procure a bit of human virgin blood every month for me. The rest of the time, I was happy to take advantage of the sandwich station that would make me a grilled chicken sandwich with a ton of bacon on it.

It had taken some serious prompting for me to rediscover the joys of solid food. I had a bit of a sweet tooth, but I also had a craving for meat that I could use to gauge the approach of my other craving.

“Would anybody have any objection to eating here more often?” Amaranth asked. She had a grilled eggplant sandwich, on bread that had been certified vegan.

“I wouldn’t,” Two said. She had taken a brownie sundae with her plate of food, on which there was an artfully arranged bit of chicken, asparagus, and mashed potatoes that were collectively smaller than her dessert, which she was eating first “to prevent excessive melting”. Two had always eaten… her original function as a living reservoir of magical power was enhanced by her having true-to-life life functions… but she had also only discovered the joy of doing so during our freshman year, and dessert was still one of her favorite things.

“I confess I find myself conflicted on that score,” Dee said. She had the top of some kind of mushroom, as large as a steak and prepared in the same fashion. “While the food here is certainly more palatable… and it is easier to avoid troublesome grains… I do believe that the stated goal of fostering a welcoming atmosphere for all, while laudable, has not been met.”

I had somewhat naively wondered if the reason she’d pulled her cloak around her and lowered the hood over her face was just because the more open construction left her feeling exposed. Now I realized what I… what most of us… had overlooked. I was so used to seeing Dee and Steff hanging out together that it had never occurred to me how uncomfortable she might be in a place where surface elves gathered, or a place that was in part a monument to surface elves and their culture.

I didn’t want to be too conspicuous about looking around, but I didn’t have to be… a group of five elven girls was lounging around just outside the low wall around the dining area, glaring daggers at our group. They were wearing gowns of gossamer-light material in the style that Steff’s more generously cut dress imitated. Two of them had scarves over their mouths, and one had a lacy veil covering her whole face.

“Yeah, I’m not really digging that part of the scenery myself,” Steff said. “I mean, there are reasons I lived in Harlowe and not Treehome, even before I met Viktor, you know?” She put her hands under her breasts and gave them a little shake, saying something else about how the bouncing bits didn’t help the bouncing bits helping the bouncing…

“Close your mouth, baby, your sandwich is falling out,” Amaranth said.

“Wow, I wish I could break her that way,” Ian said.

“I wish I could break her every way,” Steff said.

“I’m sorry, I guess I was staring a little bit,” I said, blushing madly.

“Oh, honey, you weren’t doing that, believe me,” Steff said.

“There’s nothing wrong with honest and open appreciation of your lover’s physical form,” Amaranth said. “Anyway… I guess I wouldn’t want to make you two have to choose between being uncomfortable and dining with us.”

“Why give them the satisfaction of letting them know they can run you off?” Hazel said.

“Hazel’s right,” Steff said. “Fuck those bitches right in their vaginas.”

Across the crowded floor, the elves visibly stiffened, their own sidelong conversations skidding to an abrupt halt. As vulgar as it was to anyone who understood Pax, among elves it was a bit like accusing a gnome’s mother of having sex on a boat while wearing shoes. Even in mixed-sex relationships, elves avoided procreative intercourse as a way of managing their unaging population.

“That isn’t quite what I said,” Hazel said.

“Whatever,” Steff said. “If they’re going to glare, that means they’re uncomfortable, and if they’re uncomfortable they can leave.”

“For the present time, I am inclined to agree,” Dee said. “I may find that my resolve weakens as my desire to eat in peace grows, but for now I say let them scowl as they will. We are as welcome here as they are.”

“You know what would really give them something to scowl at?” Steff asked.

“No, but I greatly fear that I am about to learn,” Dee said.

“If you and I just started making out in the middle of the room,” Steff said.

Dee gave this suggestion the response she thought it deserved, which is to say that she ignored it completely. Our audience, which could hear every word we were saying, was not as good at controlling its reaction… they all looked a mixture of revolted and embarrassed and were starting to slink off, giving as much of an impression as they could muster that they were leaving of their own accord, because they had better things to do.

“I’d expect elves to be more grown-up,” Hazel said. “Aren’t most of those folks in their fifties or so by the time they go off to school?”

“Yeah, but elven kids don’t get to join grown-up society until they turn a hundred,” Steff said. “It seems pretty awesome for the first decade or so but then you run out of stuff to do. Some of them end up joining human society, since they’re technically adults under Imperial law… but their own folks will treat whatever they’re doing as a childish hobby, sometimes even after they come of age. Like, ‘Oh, you’re still playing at being an investment banker?’”

“Ah, see, dwarves aren’t anything like that,” Hazel said. “My Andy had to work for a living for better than eleven years before they’d let him come here. Dwarves don’t get anything for free. They owe their clan service for every year they’re raised. Not a bad system, to my mind. Let kids be kids, let grown-ups be grown-ups, and in between they get plenty of time to find out how the world really works while their noses are to the grindstone.”

“Would you really want to do more than a decade of hard labor before you got to do anything you wanted with your life?” I asked.

“Can’t say how it would have suited me, since it didn’t happen,” Hazel said. “But, I mean, it seems like a better way of making sure everyone goes out into the world with her head screwed on straight than what most kinds of folks do. If Andy and I ever do have a kid… and we have given it a fair amount of thought, since, you know, last year… I’m not sure I’d mind raising them the dwarven way. At twenty-eight, he’d be just about grown-up anyway.”

“Really personal question,” Ian said.

“Ask it,” Hazel said.

“What would happen if you two had a girl?” Ian asked. “A little half-dwarven girl. Would Andreas go all grrr-smash on her when she grows up?”

“Well… that’s one of the reasons we’re still thinking,” Hazel said. “Neither one of us would mind a boy… we both have our reasons to not prefer a daughter… but so far as I know there isn’t any way to work that out in advance.”

“There isn’t,” I confirmed.

The slaver with the hilariously ironic name of Mercy had once offered me an almost unfathomable sum of money if I would have a girl with one of her “pet” half-demons, so she could breed even more of them. This was her back-up plan… her own preference was that I sell myself to her. As horrifying as the whole thing was on the surface, it would have potentially required me to have as many children as it took to get a girl one.

“Mother Khaele hears prayers on that score, but it’s an area where it’s really hard to say if she ever really answers them,” Amaranth said. “There’s definitely no mortal power that can force the matter.”

“Doesn’t dating a dwarf get awkward when you’re rooming with a kobold?” Ian asked Hazel. “Or two kobolds, I guess.”

“Closer to one and a half,” Hazel said. “Granted Shiel’s just a bitty slip of a thing to begin with, but Nae’s downright, what do you call it, diminutive. And quiet, too… I could almost forget she was there most of the time.”

“Did you say Nae?” Amaranth said.

Nae… that was why the tiny kobold in my class had seemed slightly familiar. I’d only seen her once before, and that time she’d been fully ensconced in bondage gear, but her size was very distinctive.

“Yeah,” Hazel said. “You know her? Guess I shouldn’t be too surprised… I guess you’re sort of into her scene, aren’t you?”

“We’ve met her in passing,” Amaranth said.

“Anyway, she’s obviously got nothing to say against dating a dwarf, and as long as she is, then Shiel can’t say anything against Andy without it getting all awkward-like,” Hazel said.

“So she and Caron are still together, then?” Amaranth said.

“In a manner of speaking,” Hazel said. “Obviously Caron can’t visit her here… dwarven men and women mix like oil and water, if ‘water’ means ‘fire’… and this is men’s territory, in their eyes. Nae said that Caron is letting her have her liberty while she finishes her education, though she doesn’t seem to be in any real hurry to chase after anyone, or be chased.”

I exchanged a look with Amaranth. We both knew… or strongly suspected… that the “liberty” in this case was more literal. Nae’s education had been previously interrupted by Caron’s entirely legal enslavement of her, as punishment for trying to steal from her store on a dare. Caron claimed to have offered Nae freedom papers many times since then, but Nae had always torn them up. If she’d re-enrolled in the university it meant she must have finally accepted them.

The realities of slavery in the Imperium were brutal. We’d come all the way up to the point of nearly abolishing the institution about half a century before, when it had become apparent that legally and philosophically an entity could either be a person or property but not both. The improvements in enchantment and automation had helped bring us to that point by making slave labor less economically feasible… golems were expensive, but so were slaves, and golems lasted longer and could be made to fulfill specific purposes better.

With demand for slaves slacking, universal rights activists had pushed for legal abolition. Unfortunately, the entities that were in favor of the status quo wielded more power and influence, and so when the question had come before the Dread Tribunal, they had ruled that yes, a person could not be property… but rather than ruling the institution of slavery untenable, they had ruled that slaves weren’t people.

That was the end of any legal protection slaves had enjoyed. They now had fewer rights than a hunting dog or a draft horse… the notion of trying to get animal cruelty laws to apply to intelligent, free-willed beings had been too bitter a pill for many abolitionists to swallow.

There was now a slave welfare movement separate from the abolition one, but the fact was there wasn’t a lot of opposition on either front. The changing economic situation meant that slavery had become a plaything for the rich and powerful. Out-and-out slave labor still existed in places where modernization was seen as too expensive, and those places tended to be remote and far removed from the public eye. There was no public face of slavery any more because the public in general rarely had to face up to it.

I’d had plenty of opportunities to think about it in the past year, having been targeted for slavery by Mercy, but for most people it didn’t even impinge on their consciousness. It was easy to forget that slaves existed, or to accept their lack of personhood as a matter of actual and not just legal fact.

Even my passing acquaintance with Caron was tied up in the issue… she had tried, albeit somewhat half-heartedly, to trap me in a position where she could sell me to Mercy. She used the Imperium laws on slavery… which allowed shopkeepers with clearly posted signs to take thieves as slaves… to basically enforce her own legal death penalty, since that was what usually happened to people Mercy owned.

She shrugged it off as no more than people who try to steal from her should expect or deserve, but it was impossible for me to think of her as a good or even decent person. That made it difficult for me to know what to think of Nae, at once her victim and loving partner.

It had been Nae’s disapproval that had made Caron’s efforts to snare me half-hearted, but Nae stayed with her knowing that she was the sort of person who would sell another into bondage and death. She’d accepted her legal slavery as a point of pride until it became inconvenient and then she’d cast it off, an option most slaves didn’t have.

The appeal wasn’t completely foreign to me… after all, I enjoyed the feeling of being objectified through play. I found it relaxing to yield control. During my first year with Amaranth, I had encountered the idea that what I was doing was disrespectful to the people who really were used as toys and treated as objects under the law.

It had gnawed at me, but I’d come to understand the comparison was false. I hoped one day to have the resources to make a real contribution to the cause of abolition, but for the present time… regardless of what I did or did not do with Amaranth… I wasn’t condoning or participating in the institution of slavery. We treated each other with decency, and we tried to do the same for others.

Of course, for all that I condemned Caron, there was the fact that I enjoyed the benefits of citizenship in a country that had been built with slave labor and that still gave cover to atrocities. It was something I’d always known about… well, not always. We were all children once.

My adolescence and what followed had not given me much room to believe that the world was a fluffy place full of bright shining golden lights… I knew there were ugly things in it because I’d been told that I was one of them, and I feared what golden lights there were as things that would only harm me.

My grandmother had always believed the Imperial Republic of Magisteria’s government was only flawed insofar as all mortal governments are flawed. She’d made it clear that she believed it was the next best thing to governance by the divine hand of Lord Khersis himself. I’d been pretty willing to accept the dichotomies of good versus evil that she had set up for me when they impugned my soul, but to my credit I’d sometimes been less willing to believe her when she started talking about the faults and failings of others.

Oh, sure, I swallowed quite a bit of her prejudiced bullshit… I was nine when she first took me in, and I was taken in as only a child can be. I was still unraveling the assumptions she’d planted in my head after more than a year of freedom. But I’d never been willing to believe that the plight of slaves was something they brought on by themselves, or that it was the will of Khersis.

“Wow, I guess Nae’s not very popular,” Hazel said, misattributing the sudden silence around the table. While Ian and Steff hadn’t been present for our interactions with Caron and Nae, they knew the story. Dee probably did, too. She was the model of discretion, but she was also a telepath and empath with elven hearing who had lived in the room next door to me for my entire freshman year.

“Nae seemed like a sweet girl,” Amaranth said. “Or young woman, I suppose. We just don’t know her very well.”

“Ah, I know what you mean. She’s an odd duck,” Hazel said. “Wears a collar and sleeps on the floor. It can be hard to get past that sort of thing.”

“We probably just need to spend more time with her,” Amaranth said.

“Well, you’re welcome to come over any time,” Hazel said. “She seems like she could use a few more friendly faces around… she jumps at everything. Even her own shadow’s afraid of its own shadow. Anyway, we’ve a bit more room for entertaining than you do, I expect.”

“Yeah, I’m already planning on coming over this weekend,” Ian said. “If not sooner… but I’ve got my first battle of the year on Saturday, with all my own soldiers for the first time.”

“Oh, right,” Hazel said. “Shiel said you’d started carving.”

“Well… most of them I bought or traded for,” Ian said. “I did carve some of them myself. Granted, they’re all earth elementals and stone giants, but still, it’s a start.”

Even though Ian had worked his way through his gladiatorial aspirations, he hadn’t given up the idea of play-fighting… he’d just taken it to what was either a larger or smaller scale, depending on how you looked at it. Even if it was just because big hulking creatures that happened to be made out of rock were easier to make than little finely detailed humanoid soldiers, I thought it was kind of fitting that his army was skewing towards the plane of earth. Despite his pyromantic father’s hopes for him, Ian had a lot of earth influence in him.

While I couldn’t bring myself to be excited over massive war games involving tiny playing pieces, I was glad that a topic of conversation had presented itself. I knew that serious issues like slavery or the lurking menace that people like Mercy posed to me personally weren’t about to go away just because I didn’t acknowledge them, but they also weren’t going to be solved by stewing over them.

I’d just made it through the first day of my second year. It was a small accomplishment, but big accomplishments… like finishing a year of school, or graduating… were made of little ones. If I’d learned anything in my first year, it was that getting small things done was better than waiting for big ones to happen. It was how they happened.

And so… surrounded by friends, enjoying better food than we’d come to expect, I looked back on the close of my first day, and forward to the next one.

Friday: Another familiar professorial face or two, and more refugees from the other side of the story.

Despite my whole worldly and wise “I never left” thing, I did feel pretty accomplished at having made it through the first day of classes without anything dire or completely embarrassing happening. I guess it was probably a sign of how far I had come in a year that I didn’t consider my performance in class to be a failure.

Yeah, I’d lost my first fight but so had half of the class. I’d stumbled, but I’d also impressed Coach Callahan… and I’d done that by doing what I needed to do. That felt like an achievement. I was in a bit of a celebratory mood when I headed for dinner at the Archimedes Center.

I’ve never been a huge fan of architecture in general. That’s not to say that I turned my nose up at it or anything… it wasn’t like I went around going, ugh, another building or anything. I just didn’t really notice it all that much. The buildings on campus mostly ranged from what I thought of as big, blocky institutional-style… like Harlowe Hall… to a slightly more modern and sleek institutional-style, like the student union and Weyland Hall, where Ian had lived the year before.

The Archimedes Center was noticeably different. It was more like something you’d find in a zoo or museum that just got a bunch of money for building modern, exciting exhibits than anything that screamed “I belong on a school campus.” It was a circular building with a dome on top. The whole thing had been devised as a marriage of elven and dwarven building methods and sensibilities.

The walls were made out of stone and the dome was made out of wood… of great big twisting tree limbs as thick as trunks that had been grown in place. The “timbers” that supported the dome on the inside were made of stone carved by dwarven crafters, and the stone blocks that made up the wall were held in place not with mortar but with a kind of vine that the elves used for joining things… when put under pressure it released a sticky sap which then hardened even as the vine remained alive and continued to produce tiny white blossoms and leaves.

The whole metaphorical image was of elves and dwarves putting aside their differences and coming together, but the truth was that for all their differences, the animosity between elves and dwarves was a little overblown in the minds of humans. That’s not to say that they were naturally the best of friends or anything, but it wasn’t like they were competing for the same land or resources. There was a rivalry there, and a lot of ancient insults, and even in modern times there was friction caused by differing values, but mostly elves and dwarves didn’t exist in the same space.

The Arch addressed that by functioning as a sort of embassy in “human territory”. Elves and dwarves both maintained their own lodgings near campus, but they very much stood as worlds apart. I’d actually managed to see the more public parts of the dwarven one, and even that had involved a private invitation and a blindfolded trip through secret passages beneath the school.

As we had observed at breakfast, there were some interesting things going on with the Arch’s message… it was, in theory, a monument to harmony among all the races on campus but the two races it reached out to explicitly were two that were already pretty accepted as part of Imperial society.

There could be many different reasons for that, but one of them was that the person who gave most of the money to build it had been an elf who wanted to see elven students more connected with campus life. Making the center about the dwarves in equal measure had, from his point of view, been an expansive gesture of tolerance. The university had shaped his vision to at least tacitly encompass all races… was it that their dedication to equality causing them to leverage the boon they were being given to do the most good, or was it them lazily using something that was happening already in order to exert the minimal effort and say they’d done something?

There was no way to know what their intentions were, or what the results would be in the long term.

Even though I shouldn’t have had far to go at all, the others were all at the Arch ahead of me… I kind of took the long way around to it, since I had forgotten that we had agreed to eat there until I was coming up to the entrance to the student union.

Again, it was kind of astounding for me to realize how little I cared about that. Taking a wrong turn or overlooking something had always made me feel like a big awkward failure in the past, and considering how absent-minded I can be that meant I had pretty much always felt like a big awkward failure. Now it happened and I just sort of enjoyed the stroll about campus.

The fact that no one else seemed to mind or consider me to be late helped, too. Everybody was kind of spread out around the floor, checking things out. Two and her friend Hazel were over by the dining area, looking at the origins of certain typical elven and dwarven dishes. Ian was sitting on a couch, fiddling with his lute… not playing it, but doing some sort of maintenance with the strings.

Tightening them? Tuning them? I couldn’t say. He was all bent over it, looking very serious and attentive about it, whatever it was.

The Center had a very open-air floorplan, with low walls dividing it into different sections but not obstructing the line of sight. It was something like a museum combined with an elaborate lounge… it was meant to be educational, but its designers had been wise enough to realize that students would learn more from it if there were plenty of reasons to spend time there. One day into the new semester, more students seemed to be passing through to see what it was all about than actually looking at any of the exhibits. If that was all there was to it, most of them would never come back.

So there was food, in the form of the second sit-down dining hall on campus, and Melina’s… an elven bakery chain that also served coffee. There was music from crystals suspended in the ceiling, there were places to sit and talk or sit and think, and there was a raised area in the center of the floor where people could give performances or cultural demonstrations.

Amaranth was among those who were actually interested in the displays, in particular a botanical arrangement of small flowering trees, and some kinds of fungus and moss growing on rocks shaded by the trees.

“Hi, baby,” she said. “You have a good first day?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I really think I’m going to like both of my classes… both of my classroom classes, I mean. I think I had a good start in my melee class, too.”

“That’s good. Just don’t go thinking it isn’t a ‘real’ class,” Amaranth said.

“I’m taking it seriously,” I said. “I’m just… if I think of it in terms of whether or not I like it… well, I don’t like it, so I’d rather not think in those terms. I’m in it. I’m committed to it. And, like I said, I think I had a good start.”

“How did it go?” she asked.

Trying to describe it did diminish my enthusiasm a little. It was awkward, as Amaranth liked violence even less than I did. She’d managed to get an exemption from both the weapon-carrying requirement and the class requirement on moral grounds, and that wasn’t easy. Her status as a nymph probably helped her there… Mother Khaele was one of the more active deities in the mortal sphere, and she considered nymphs and their male counterparts to be under her protection. Being the goddess of nature meant there was no shortage of reasons to avoid pissing her off.

“It sounds like she just wasn’t ready,” Amaranth said, after hearing of ponytailed Meaghan’s plight.

I was surprised to find that my first inclination was to respond that she had no one to blame but herself. I stopped myself from saying that… I couldn’t imagine feeling good at all about scorning someone’s lack of preparation for fighting. In the pause I realized that Amaranth wasn’t talking about fault, she was just empathizing with the girl’s position… and that was something that I could do, too.

“So, how was your day?” I asked.

“Good,” she said, but the way she frowned when she said it wasn’t exactly subtle. “Good, but busy… I may have taken on too much. This early in the semester it’s hard to say, but some of my classes seem like they’ll be pretty demanding.”

“Well, you still have time to change your schedule, if you decide it’s best to postpone one of your classes for a semester,” I said. It would have been shorter to say “you still have time to drop a class”, but that seemed like the sort of thing that would make her dig in her heels. Maybe she wouldn’t need to drop a class, but it would be better if she looked at it with clear eyes.

I’d learned a lot about how to deal with someone who had that kind of short-sighted stubbornness… mostly over the summer, when I’d been by myself.

“You shouldn’t try to compete with your toy, Amy,” Steff said, appearing right next to us. “That’s not a good look on anyone.”

“I’m not competing,” Amaranth said. “I just saw a bunch of classes that I was interested in, and they all fit into my schedule. Anyway, I think I’ll be able to manage. It’s really only one more full-sized class than I took the past two semesters and then one hour a week of Dwarvish poetry.”

“Oh, yes,” Steff said. “Roses are red, violets are none of your business… back the fuck off or I’ll break all your fingers.”

“Dwarves don’t write many poems about flowers,” Amaranth said. “It’s really more about practical things and the joy of craftsmanship. That’s not to say that there’s no feeling in it… dwarves can be very sentimental. Like ‘The Song of the Smith’… the poet regretted that he would not be able to teach his daughters metalworking himself, so he crafted a poem that conveys both his instructions for them and the feeling and sensation of working metal as he experiences it, so that they can share in it.”

“I bet their love poems are hilarious,” Steff said. “How do I love thee? Let me count the paces.”

“It’s not like elven culture’s much less gender-segregrated,” I said.

“No, but elves have the good sense to have sex with each other when they’re shunning the opposite sex instead of periodically getting together for a baby-making brawl,” Steff said. “And anyway, that’s mostly a middling thing… young elven boys have this whole extreme machismo/girls-have-cooties things going on that a lot of them grow out of by the time they start century number two.”

“It’s not that I have any special affection for Dwarvish poetry,” Amaranth admitted. “I mean, I’m curious about it, but I really wanted to take the Elvish poetry survey. But… well…”

“Surely you do not doubt the ability of our resident Elvish poetry expert to remain impartial in her grading?” Dee asked, drawn over to our conversation.

“I couldn’t say that she would treat me unfairly,” Amaranth said. “But it seems like taking one of Professor Ariadne’s classes might seem a little… unnecessarily antagonistic?”

“So you count on her to treat you fairly just as long as you’re nice enough to never put her in a position where she has to,” Steff said.

“Well, it’s not like any of us has had any trouble with her for almost a year,” Amaranth said. “Even if she still harbors some resentment towards Mack, that doesn’t mean she’s kept up on campus gossip or would otherwise know that we’re together.”

“Amy, doll, I know you think you’re defending her, but ‘maybe she wouldn’t think to penalize me for dating her nemesis because she doesn’t know we’re dating’ isn’t a defense,” Steff said.

“I suppose not,” Amaranth said. “Anyway, I think we can all agree that it’s better to avoid trouble than provoke it.”

“Yeah, as long as you have the luxury of taking another one hour fluff course,” Steff said. “What if completing your major depended on a class that was only being taught by a raging bigot?”

“That would be something I couldn’t avoid, and I’d deal with it,” Amaranth said. “But for a one hour class that’s completely elective, it didn’t seem worth it.”

“To take another passageway,” Dee said, “if one wished to learn the extent of the professor’s bias or hostility, adding a one hour class to one’s schedule might be a good way to gauge that. It could be taken and dropped… or even completed at a disadvantage… with minimal impact on one’s academic career.”

“I suppose,” Amaranth said. “But I don’t really… what would that prove?”

“A point,” Dee said. “I believe I may add that to my schedule for next semester.”

“You’d really take a class with her just to prove a point?” I asked.

“Not solely,” Dee said. “I initially signed up for her class last year out of a desire to learn more about the surface elves from their own perspective. I would be… charitably hesitant… to conclude that I learned a larger lesson in that area. If Professor Ariadne should prove to be better than I suspect her of being, I will still achieve one goal.”

Two and her friend Hazel ambled over to joins us. Hazel had a box of some kind of little pastry bites in one hand and a cardboard coffee cup in the other. This was the first I’d seen of Hazel since the past spring. However frosty a reception she might have received back in her hometown, it looked like the summer had agreed with her. Her brown hair that had been a mess of curls before was shorter, as curly as ever, but more sort of styled up. She’d traded her floor-length farm dress for something a bit… wenchier, for lack of a better word.

She had a white peasant top that was tight enough and cut low enough to reveal that she actually did have curves… maybe one more curve than would have been fashionable for a human woman, but I believed gnomes appreciated a bit of belly.

Her long-pleated skirt did stop just above her ankles, to my surprise, and they showed off an odd sort of adornment: she had a red string with a single clay bead on it, wrapped around her left ankle, and a silver chain with bells on her right one. The furry hair on her feet wasn’t gone completely, but it had been very neatly trimmed and shaved into heart shapes.

“Hi, Mack,” Two said.

“Hey, Two,” I said. “Hazel.”

“Hello,” Hazel said. She held up the box, offering it around. “Anyone want a lembit? They’re pretty good.”

“No, thank you,” Dee said. “Wheat products disagree with me.”

“I kind of avoid baked goods unless I know they’re vegan,” Amaranth said.

“Not likely,” Steff said. “It probably has about a pound of butter in each one.”

“Nothing has to die to make butter, last I checked,” Hazel said. “Granted I haven’t kept up on the latest trends in extreme milking.”

“It’s still an animal product,” Amaranth said.

It was hard to say because I hadn’t exactly made a habit of peeking at Hazel in the shower, but it seemed like she’d filled out a little bit, and I didn’t just mean in the belly. She’d always had a womanly figure, underneath those dresses, but she looked a bit more… more. Though it might have just been that she had a more flattering support system in place.

“Oh, you, go ahead and stare… I’m secure enough in my what’s it called,” Hazel said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just… you look nice, Hazel.”

“Darn right I do,” Hazel said. “So, we doing this dinner thing? Not to be all impatient, but I’ve already been here more than an hour.”

“She’s been eating the whole time,” Two said.

“Snacking isn’t eating,” Hazel said. “It’s a stopgap measure at best, and there’s a danger in that if it goes on too long you won’t be hungry at all, and where’s that leave you?”

“Satisfied?” Dee suggested.

“Full isn’t satisfied,” Hazel said. “Full just means your hunger has been accommodated.”

“Baby, go tell Ian we’re ready… oh, never mind!” Amaranth said, as Ian, having finished whatever he’d been doing, had put his lute in its case and was heading over towards us.

“Hey,” he said, giving me a kiss on the cheek. “We all here now?” He looked around. “Two, wasn’t your friend Hazel here?”

“Was and am,” Hazel said.

“Alright,” he said. “Let’s go see what tolerance tastes like.”

This meant that every time I came out of my spellbinding lab, I could easily spend an hour or two working on what I’d learned before and after lunch if I needed to, or wanted to. Okay, there would be some days I’d need to give up some of that copious free time for my assignments for my other classes, or to practice stuff for Callahan’s class… but the five-credit impact on my GPA of the fighting class and Amaranth’s first task notwithstanding, spellbinding was really going to be the centerpiece of my schedule.

Instead of heading back to Gilcrease immediately, I found an empty lab room that had suitably rune-reinforced targets for destructive evocations in order to get a jump start for Wednesday. I expected it to be empty on the first day of classes, but there were about a half dozen kids in there messing around. It was kind of surprising to me that my brain instantly coded them as “kids”. It had to do with the way they all were startled when I walked in and assumed various shades of we-weren’t-doing-anything. The fading sparks and smell of smoke in the room argued otherwise, but then, that was what the room was for.

Ah, freshmen… or sophomores who still hadn’t quite shed the freshman mindset. The college experience often lacked clear signposts for what was within limits. The lab had a paper sign taped up outside that clearly stated when it was open and free for student use, but it lacked an adult authority standing there and saying, “Yes, this means you. You can come in and use this room. You don’t have to check with anyone. You don’t need to be told by your teacher to come here. You don’t have to show a pass.”

I wasn’t going to look down my nose at or laugh at anyone who was still all furtive and cautious about using the resources that were set aside for them. I’d pretty much been the same way all the way up through the end of my freshman year. If I hadn’t been kicking around a much less densely populated campus with none of my friends there all summer, I probably would have still been in the same boat.

I ignored them and got down to my work, and eventually they went back to their kind of sloppy magical missile-slinging.

When broken down to its components, the spell we’d done in class was nothing but a series of elemental invocations, and I was good at that. My infernal heritage gave me an affinity for pulling fire out from where it lurked inside other elemental matter. That had given me an insight on dealing with the other elements, and things like light or sound that behaved in a pseudoelemental fashion.

It only took a little thought and a few tries for me to make a tiny little thunderclap without using a spell formula. It was just a matter of working out the discrete steps that went into it and writing it out in my workbook.

Step one was to invoke air. That was both easy and hard. Air was all around me. Compared to something like the earth in a brick wall or the unexpressed fire in a candle wick, it was reasonably pure, as elemental manifestations in the physical world went. But air was also nebulous and hard to get a “hold” on. The real trick in invoking air was to pick out a particular bit of it and isolate it.

Step two was to impel it into motion… basically, call forth the elemental air from the extant material air in a particular direction. To push air away from one’s body, an invoker had to be able to “pull” it from an external point. That was a little trickier. Trickier still was making it snap. I didn’t want a breeze or even a gust, I wanted a clap… air bursting through air. It was like the difference between a wave and a slap. I could do it, but it took a few tries and then the spell didn’t travel very far. Well, the stock version hadn’t had much range to it, either.

Things like this were why formal spells were useful, even if they lacked versatility. I could invoke elements in any way I could imagine all day long, but if I wanted to do something complicated it really helped to have a formula to follow. When I found the trick to making the air snap, I jotted down a rough draft of it in the symbolic language of spells and then followed that. It was pretty satisfying to make the air crack like a whip.

I had a feeling it would be a useful trick in its own right, if I found myself in a tight spot… painful and distracting, but not terribly dangerous. I wasn’t planning on finding myself in situations where I would need to be able to deliver a painful smack from across a small room, but after my experiences of the previous year I decided it would be good to be a little more prepared.

I took one of my empty wands and managed to layer five charges of what I was thinking of as the whip-crack spell into it. I used up two of the charges testing it… one to make sure it had worked, and then another one after adding an accuracy enhancement that was sustained by the stored charges. That last flourish would mean that I’d have to periodically recharge the wand even if I never used it, but I really wasn’t much of a natural battlemage. There was little point in having a self-defense spell that I couldn’t hit with.

A little bit after I started producing the crack, I became conscious of the sensation of eyes on me. I don’t know what triggered it… possibly it was the awareness that the room had gone quiet even though I hadn’t heard anyone leaving. I didn’t look over… my newfound semi-confidence did not extend to enjoying being the center of strangers’ attention, and looking over would probably invite conversation.

I realized that while they were zapping and blasting sparks and flames at the rune-lined bullseyes, I was just shooting puffs of air. Before I managed to produce the snap, it must have looked like I was doing approximately nothing. My brain wanted to wonder what they thought I was up to, but I didn’t let it. It didn’t matter what they thought, I told myself. I didn’t even know if they thought anything bad. It wasn’t like they were audibly snickering or anything.

I started focusing all my attention on the center of the bullseye when I wasn’t looking at my notebook, even though my spell was stopping well short of it. Having something to focus on let me narrow my world to just me and my task. It was how I’d dealt with the torment of classmates in high school. I wasn’t exactly being tormented at that moment, of course, but I really had hoped to find a room that was either empty or containing other people who were equally focused on their own tasks.

Even with the audible snap, I was still doing only half of the spell… the stock one had ended with a spark or flash. I could make a flash of light or fire easily enough, and I could string that together with the little mini thunderclap, but that hadn’t been what we were doing. The snap was supposed to end in a spark… sort of the reverse of a lightning bolt splitting the air to unleash thunder. That was the really tricky part.

It took me the better part of half an hour of trying to realize that I wasn’t going to unlock the secret all by myself right then and there, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that I’d identified where the real problem was. I had another day to work on it before the class met again, and even if I made no further progress I would go in armed with this insight into the problem. The less time it took me to unravel the basic spell, the more time I would have to work on making it my own.

And of course, if I knew where I needed help I wouldn’t lose much time if I had to ask Acantha for assistance. I found that I liked her. It was pretty obvious she wasn’t used to leading a class… it wasn’t so much that her massive verbal outflow style of speaking would have been any better one-on-one, but I imagined it came from inexperience with addressing her instructions to a large group. She had done much better when dealing with individual students.

I especially liked her grading system, and the fact that she’d articulated how it would work for the day… an average grade for efficiently duplicating the spell, higher grades for improving on it. I wondered what would count as an improvement. Things like longer range, a louder snap, and a bigger or brighter spark were obvious improvements. Obviously they would count towards a higher grade, but I had a suspicion that going for less obvious choices might count for more.

But what would qualify? Would something cosmetic, like adding color or other visual highlights, be considered an “improvement”? I didn’t know much about fashion, but the way Acantha dressed and the fact that she colored her hair made me think she was probably pretty conscious of things like personal style. Would putting something like a personal stamp on the spell count as an improvement?

To play it safe I figured I should probably try for at least two technical improvements in order to secure my grade and then throw in a flourish to try to earn teacher-impressing-points.

If I wanted any chance of reaching that goal during the hour of allotted class time, that would mean trying to crack the secret of the spell before Wednesday’s class. That wasn’t a big deal. I’d had a somewhat rocky transition from the point where I was able to get most of my classwork done in class to spending as much or more of my own time on it, but at least this was for something related to my major.

Making cheap offensive spells and charging up wands with them was the least of what I wanted to be able to do as an enchanter. These were such easy and basic techniques and they had been around for so long that the catacombs and caves of the world were basically littered with discarded wands, staves, and rods with a handful of charges for some random spell in them.

But it was real enchantment, and I’d be doing it.

Acantha had talked about parallel sequences… that meant that by the end of the semester, I’d be able to load my blank staff up with one instance each of a bunch of spells and dump a ton of energy into it as charges I could expend without burning off any of the spells. I realized as I thought about it that even if I couldn’t get a permanent size-changing spell on it, I would be able to put shrinking and expanding spells in it and just recharge it from time to time.

I realized I couldn’t do parallel charges yet, but there didn’t seem to be any reason I couldn’t load up a few instances of size changing in each direction. I’d only be able to trigger them off in sequence, but that was no problem… I knew what order I’d want to use the spells in: shrink, grow, shrink, grow. I decided to let my energy levels regenerate a little over lunch and then I’d go try it out. It might actually impress Callah… Coach Callahan… if when I showed up at her class at the end of the day, I could demonstrate that I was actually carrying my weapon with me at all times.

This wasn’t the sort of modern stuff I wanted to do with my life, but it was an important first step and… well, I had to admit that part of me found the wizardly trappings pretty cool. I would never put on a robe and hat like Ian’s dad or the more traditionalist professors.

When we all met for lunch in the old dining hall… somehow nothing more than the plan to check out the Arch’s dining facilities for dinner had transformed this one into “the old dining hall” in my mind… everyone was excited about their morning classes. I was, too, but where Amaranth’s excitement made her talkative, I just kept thinking about the possibilities… the possible applications for what I’d learned, the possibilities for what I would learn.

Ian was quiet, but it was obvious he felt relieved. Not necessarily happy… it seemed he wouldn’t know the results of his audition until some time later, but at this point it was over. He’d made it through it. The world hadn’t ended. He hadn’t been laughed out of the room. His lute hadn’t caught fire or turned into a fish, and neither had his audience or himself. I don’t know that he’d actually worried about those things, but whatever worst-case scenario he’d envisioned had not come to pass.

Dee was also quiet, but she seemed to be content. Something about her seemed softer than it had the year before. Maybe I was better at reading her facial expressions, or maybe she’d grown more expressive. She was definitely covering up less, at least when she was indoors. Her cowl was hanging down her back and she was wearing her cloak up off her shoulders. The voluminous priestess robes underneath didn’t exactly show off skin, but the fact that she was showing off the robes made her seem a lot more open to the world.

Steff was sketching in her notebook. Seeing this made me happy, because she was an incredible artist… but her full-blooded elven teachers had made her really self-conscious about her artistic endeavors, so I didn’t want to call attention to it.

Also there was a good chance that whatever she was drawing wasn’t something anyone else would want to see while we were eating. She was an incredible artist, but her tastes tended to run dark… and red.

Strangely, after Amaranth, the most sociable one at the table was Two. She seemed to pick up her friend Hazel’s outgoing attitude for a period of time after they hung out. She also made friends easily, or else people easily befriended her… she kept saying hello to what I assumed were classmates and former classmates who went past. She also greeted at least one former floormate of ours.

“Hello, Belinda!” she said as the half-ogre stopped at the edge of the seating area, an almost empty tray held in her massive hands.

“Hey!” she said, suddenly smiling a big tusky smile and striding towards us. “Do you all mind if I join you?” She sat down without waiting for an answer, but from the way she was talking a mile a minute it seemed like it was more absentminded nerves than presumption. “I saw you this morning but I was already sitting with the Skirmish guys and I’m on my own right now, and I saw you all and I thought, you know, it’s kind of how last year started, all of us Harlowe peeps eating together… not that you’re in Harlowe, anymore. That was a crazy year, wasn’t it? We really kind of got off to the wrong foot, I mean on the wrong foot. Or to a bad start.”

“Hello, Belinda,” Amaranth said. “Sure, feel free. We’re all friends here.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Oh, and it’s Bel. I’m going by Bel now. I mean, I think I am. It’s something I’m trying.”

“Okay, Bel,” Amaranth said. She squeezed my hand under the table.

“Hey,” I said, hoping I was smiling. I felt like I was smiling, but the half-ogre made me nervous. She’d done a complete one-eighty around the time of Leda’s death, but first impressions can be a powerful thing, especially when they’re pressed in with seven feet of craggy muscle.

She was one of the people I’d shared a table with a few times in the first few days of the previous fall semester and then never again. She’d landed a position as captain of a squad in the school’s Skirmish team on the strength of being a half-ogre, with emphasis on “strength”. I guess she’d seen the presence of a supernaturally strong half-demon as an unacceptable challenge to her position… the fact that I had no interest in recreational or real fighting hadn’t mollified her at all. It had only made my existence in proximity to her all the more insulting somehow.

To say it charitably: she hadn’t exactly dealt with her insecurity well… but who could say they handled everything with perfect grace in their first year at college? I sure couldn’t. She’d managed to get over herself.

She was also long over any need to prove herself the biggest and baddest one on the block. She’d toyed with dropping out of Skirmish, but it seemed she had come to realize that despite being only the second or third strongest person in the Harlowe girls’ freshman floor, she was a better fighter than Puddy or I were… and while there was a limit to what she could do about her strength while staying within Skirmish rules, nothing stopped her from becoming the best fighter she could be.

“How are things on the hex?” Amaranth asked her, referring to the six-sided field where the Skirmish matches were fought.

“Pretty good,” Belinda… Bel… said. “I think we’re going to have a great year, especially with Rocky as co-captain of the squad. We’ve been working on strategies over the summer. We’ve also been working with the other squad captains more. You know last year they mostly tried to use us as a sort of secret weapon, but that only really works once. This year we’re really working more as an actual part of the army.”

“I thought you really pulled things together nicely at the end of the season, last year,” Amaranth said. “Granted I wasn’t watching the whole battle from the healer’s tent, but I picked up on the highlights.”

“We’ll do better this year. We’ve lost our air support and our skeleton herder, but they weren’t exactly team players to begin with, you know?”

Steff had given no sign that she was paying attention, but I heard her let out a derisive snort. If Bel heard it, she didn’t react.

Ian joined in the conversation as it continued along the same lines, and I zoned out more. Even if I was taking five hours of melee class, mock combat still wasn’t my thing.

After lunch I hurried back to Gilcrease and up to my room so I could see what I could do with my staff. I still couldn’t reliably shrink it down to a handy pocket size for very long, which was my eventual goal… but halving it was no problem, and going a little further wasn’t that hard. I settled on a length of about two feet, which was short enough that I could have it hanging off a belt loop like my paddle, and also long enough that I could possibly use it as a weapon if I had to.

I’d played around with changing its size enough that it only took me fifteen minutes to write up a workable shrinking spell. It was no different than enhancing the attribute of an item… in this case, the attributes were its dimensions and I was “enhancing” them negatively. I couldn’t have effected such a drastic alteration for long with anything else, but my staff was made to be enchanted. It was, in fact, enchanted to be enchanted.

The spell to restore it to full size was even easier, because it just had to undo the shrinking spell… and that was where I hit the first hitch in my plan. I’d been thinking of it like a toggle, because I’d always be switching back and forth. But the shrinking spell was a temporary alteration. It could last a good long time given the staff’s base enchantment, but it would wear off eventually and every time it did wear off on its own I’d be stuck wasting a charge of the reversal spell before I could shrink it again.

It was possible I could have contrived a shrink spell that would sustain itself like the seal, but that would be getting really complex. It would be weirdly recursive… the charged spell would be sustaining itself before it was cast, and when it discharged it would have to become self-sustaining, too. I couldn’t begin to wrap my mind around that.

So in the end I decided to do it halfway: I stacked five copies of the shrinking spell as charges in the staff. When I needed it big, it was no big deal to just peel them off. In fact, I realized that when I got to the point where I was ready to do the spells in parallel it would make more sense to have a shrinking spell and a general purpose enhancement-dispeller… then I could use the same stored spell to cancel the shrinking one or to strip away an opponent’s buffing effect.

All the work I’d done during my break felt kind of clumsy and had probably taken me much longer than it should have, compared to what I hoped to be capable of after a little bit more training. I imagined I’d find myself redoing all of it more than once as I learned better ways of doing things.

The funny thing was, I didn’t mind that one bit. Considering that my remaining two classes for the day were both things that had nothing to do with my major and that I was being required to take, it felt good to be able to put my lessons to a hands-on use already.

Soon: Mackenzie’s in a delving class? One taught by a semi-familiar face?? Declarative sentences end with question marks??? Come back Wednesday and find out why!

It was a weird kind of normalcy, granted, given that instead of waking up underneath Amaranth in a tiny little bed, I woke up underneath her in the middle of a great big one. The new furnishings really did have the effect of making it seem like I was waking up in an entirely new place, not the room I’d spent the last week in.

I didn’t mind that little mental reset one bit. The summer housing dorm I’d stayed in for the preceding three months had never felt anything like a home. The room in Gilcrease had felt like that: just somewhere I was staying. Somewhere with a place for me to sleep and room for me to store my stuff. Amaranth’s arrival might have been enough to turn it from “some place” into “home”, but turning it into a cozy and comfortable home with little resemblance to the crowded and strictly utilitarian place it had been was even better.

It also gave me the sense that it was more her room than mine, which I also didn’t mind… it had been years since anywhere had really felt like it was mine. While I’d made a lot of strides in dealing with it, feeling out of place was still one of my bigger sources of anxiety. How could I feel out of place in Amaranth’s room? It was where she kept her belongings. She even had a place for me.

When we unpacked her books, it occurred to me that she had a practical reason for delegating the shelving to me… it wasn’t just a matter of giving me a task for the sake of doing so. She seemed almost inherently incapable of picking up a book and just putting it on the shelf. Each one that she took out of the trunk, she ended up at least flipping through, if not sitting down to read. I like books, and I can’t pretend that none of them caught my eye, but a lot of them were things like old natural history or philosophy textbooks from the 160s or 170s… fifty, sixty years out of date and looking like they’d felt every day of it. Amaranth cooed over each and every one of them like they were children, which meant I got a dozen or two books up on the shelves for every one she took out.

“You have your class with Coach Callahan this semester, don’t you, baby?” she asked me, while paging idly through a large book about wildflowers. “The additional one you promised you’d take when she gave you a pass/fail grade last year?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. My replies were more likely to come out “yes, ma’am” than anything more conversational when I was actively working on not sounding snappish. She knew this already. We’d gone over my whole schedule before. “It’s my last class of the day, every day.”

“A five credit-hour class,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I’m taking 17 hours this semester, but don’t worry… I’m still ahead of where I need to be, credit wise, and I’m not going to slack off just because I got extra classes in over the summer.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about you slacking off in that regard,” Amaranth said. “I’m just thinking about what a bad grade in a five hour class would do to you. What grade do you think you would have earned in your last melee class, if you hadn’t been given a pass?”

“Probably a C,” I said. “That’s what Callahan thought I would end up with when she made the offer.”

“Coach Callahan,” Amaranth said. “I want you to start practicing proper respect for her.”

“I don’t think that’s going to affect my grade,” I said, then added, “ma’am.”

“No, but it will affect your attitude, which might affect your performance, which would affect your grade,” Amaranth said. “Say it.”

“Coach Callahan,” I said. “Coach Callahan told me she thought I could end up with a C.”

“If you get a C this time, it will be a third of your grade,” Amaranth said.

“Not quite a third,” I said. “Ma’am.”

“More than a quarter of it,” she said, and I couldn’t argue with that. “So we’ll have to make sure that doesn’t happen. Therefore, one of your tasks will be to get an A from her.”

“Yes, ma’… wait, you mean to get my collar, I have to get an A from Ca… Coach Callahan?”

“Whose collar?”

I lowered my eyes.

“Your collar,” I said.

“Do you not think you can get an A?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Honestly, her grading system is kind of… well… arbitrary.”

“Do you think it’s unfair?”

“I couldn’t say,” I said. “She says she assigns the grade she thinks students deserve. Anyway, even if I do get an A, that means it’ll be winter break at the earliest that I get to wear your collar.”

“I didn’t say they would be short tasks,” she said. “You’ve been mine for almost a year. If you don’t think you can wait one semester to make it ‘official’…”

“I can wait!” I said. “But… what if I don’t get the A?”

“Let’s just focus on getting the A, shall we?” she said with a broad smile, and that was all the discussion she would allow on the subject.

I sort of understood why she wouldn’t discuss alternatives. If she told me that failure would mean she’d give me some other task, that would be the same thing as saying that if I didn’t mind waiting longer I didn’t have to try to ace Coach Callahan’s class. But it felt very much like she was telling me I had to do something impossible and I wouldn’t get to wear her collar after the inevitable failure.

Still, even when she was proposing that I should scramble up the dome of the sky and peel the moon off of it for her to use as an umbrella, I loved being in her presence again. Amaranth was warmth incarnate, and I basked in her. It was like the sun had put on flesh and was now sitting on a battered sofa that looked like it was missing at least three inches of height in the form of legs.

Other than getting Amaranth’s things in order, it was an utterly routine day. We ate all of our meals in the cafeteria, we went and hung out in the library in the afternoon. It was what had become a typical Sunday in my life.

Steff and Ian went to the library with us, but they didn’t stay very long. None of us had any homework or studying to do, obviously, and the others wanted to go check out the newer additions to the campus facilities. Amaranth seemed content to just enjoy being with me in a familiar place for the moment, and of course none of the additions were new to me anymore.

I took an odd kind of comfort in the knowledge that by staying over the summer I had spent more time living on campus than about half of the undergraduate student body, assuming an even distribution of students over the four years. In our little group, Steff had been at MU longer than I had but she’d missed out on the changes over the summer.

“It’s kind of a shame we won’t be here when the library gets remodeled,” Amaranth said, in between flitting between books. “It’s part of the five year plan, but there are no funds allocated for it yet, which means it probably won’t be done in the next two years.”

“I’m kind of glad,” I said. “I like the library the way it is.”

The multistory school library was one of the biggest and the nicest library I’d ever been in. The municipal library in downtown Enwich was bigger and more impressive looking on the outside, but its inside was kind of dingy and institutional-looking. The MU library was very modern in its design. Its floor plan was very open and well-lit, with skylights on the top floor and a lot of glass in the front that illuminated all three stories. I couldn’t imagine a building on campus in less need of renovation.

“Well, I look at it this way,” Amaranth said. “If they expand it, it’ll have room for more books. Anyway, it’s hard to say what will happen in the next four years… Bethany Davies is laying out all these big changes, but she’s not staying to see them through.”

“You seem really up on this stuff,” I said.

“I got the Gazetteer, the alumni newsletter, and the Enwich Times in Paradise Valley so I could keep up on it,” Amaranth said. “Last year none of us really came here with our eyes all the way open… I didn’t want to make that mistake again. Anyway, it’s obvious Chancellor Davies is concerned about the legacy she’s leaving now that she’s retiring. I just hope she’s thinking about more than buildings and landscaping projects.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, it’s not like we’re not giving her plenty of opportunity to get her name attached to something positive.”

My case against the school for the little matter of one of their employees warding me inside a room with a divine seal and another one accidentally dumping me into the ancient magical labyrinth used for delving exercises was still pending, though a settlement offer was on the table that would let them off the hook without much financial hardship or metaphorical egg on their collective and equally metaphorical faces.

They’d have to admit wrongdoing, of course, but since what we were really looking for was improvements in the handling of racial matters there was plenty of room for a moderately skilled P.R. department to spin the whole thing into something good for the school.

“I keep wanting to ask if Lee knows you’re back,” Amaranth said. Lee Jenkins, of course, was my lawyer, who was handling my arbitration case against the school and who had helped me out in some of the bigger trouble spots of my freshman year. “But of course you didn’t leave.”

“Yeah, we’ve been in touch,” I said. “He’s inviting us to the wedding reception, by the way. It’s in the first weekend in Polyantha, so if you want to go you’ll probably want to make arrangements to stay past the end of the year next semester.”

“I would have thought it would have happened already,” Amaranth said. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised they’re opting for a longer engagement, with his career and all.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “His wedding’s been pushed back by his in-laws-to-be again… something about an insufficient bridal gift. They want time to put together a better offering.”

“I can’t imagine he cares about that,” Amaranth said.

“I’ve got the idea that it would be insulting for him to tell them that,” I said.

Lee didn’t talk about himself very much, but when he did he was really talking about his fiancee, K’thindi. She had a half-orc mother who’d raised her orcish, and they were a close-knit family. The stereotypical view of orcs wouldn’t lead one to imagine they could approve of someone with a white collar job, but most cultures tend to view someone who makes a good living in high regard. If anything, orcs had a higher regard for lawyers… trial lawyers, especially… than humans typically did.

Orcs didn’t practice trial by combat. They viewed trials as combat. Two people standing up in front of an audience of their peers and a respected authority, making contrary claims and trying to show the other up as a liar or trip them up on a point of traditional protocol? That was the kind of thing orcs could understand. It was more or less how they’d settled disputes of honor for ages, during times when a lot of humans were still dueling.

“Anyway… in my mind, it felt like during the summer you went somewhere else,” Amaranth said. “I know I was writing to you here, but it was like you left MU and went to some other school and then came back. I’m sure that doesn’t make any sense…”

“It kind of does,” I said. “The campus feels different during the summer. It’s the same buildings, a lot of the same people, and the same place… but somehow it adds up to something different. I can’t explain it.”

“I think you just did,” she said. “As much as I can, anyway… it seems like we both understand what we’re talking about, and that’s what matters.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, smiling so wide that my cheeks blushed out of apparent belief that I couldn’t possibly be so happy without having something to feel self-conscious about.

It was nice in some ways to be put in my place, to fall into the familiar rhythm of yes, ma’am/no, ma’am with my Owner in her room… but it was also nice in other ways to just have a quiet conversation with my girlfriend in one of our favorite places to go together.

The next day we went back to the union for breakfast… myself, Amaranth, Ian, Steff, and Two. Despite how familiar the buffet-style cafeteria was, this felt a good deal less routine, because it was the first day of class. I’d been through this three times before but each time it was different. I was less than an hour away from starting a new class with a new instructor.

“Lot of new faces,” Amaranth said as we sat down at a pair of tables in the middle of the room.

“Yeah,” Ian agreed.

“Thirty-three that I can see from here,” Two said. “No, thirty-two. I’ve seen the girl with the green earrings before.”

I took their word for it… Two’s, particularly. I wasn’t really good at faces, and I’d never been much of a people-watcher. I tended to keep my head down. When I did look around the room… which I did reflexively since the others were talking about it… my eyes gravitated towards the faces I recognized. They were mostly non-human.

There was Belinda, the half-ogre, who was sitting with some of her human teammates from the Skirmish team. She saw me looking and waved. I returned it, a little awkwardly. We weren’t exactly friends, but she’d been friendly enough towards me after the beginning of the previous year.

Celia was sitting with a couple of lizardfolk… one who I thought was Hissy, our floormate from last year… and the gorgon who’d been in the room beneath me in Harlowe.

Twyla, a quiet girl who looked completely human except for a pair of pointy little horns jutting out of her forehead, was sitting by herself at a two-person table, her head down low over a notebook. I didn’t know much about Twyla. She’d hung out with the Leighton twins, who seemed to have managed to make it from junior high to higher education without maturing at all… but that was probably more due to bad luck in the roommate lottery than any personal preference.

“I wonder how many people are coming over for meals as opposed to the Archimedes?” Ian said.

“We call it the Arch,” I told him.

“That’s how you can spot the cool kids here at the Mag Univ,” Steff said. “They’re up on the newest campus slang, or ‘camp slan’, as they call it.”

“I’ll bet a lot of the new freshmen in Harlowe are going there instead of here,” Amaranth said. “It’s so much closer to those dorms. I mean, I don’t think I see any obviously non-human students I don’t recognize here.”

“They must be going there,” Steff said. “The school quietly dropped their Food For Freaks program… no more catered meals to keep us from upsetting the normals.”

“Huh,” I said. “Kind of works out nicely for them that the new student center with the whole racial harmony message is so much more convenient to Harlowe.”

“Yeah,” Ian said. “A human who’s got a big problem sharing eating space with other races wouldn’t go to the dining hall that’s all in-your-face with the tolerance. So they come here by default, while most of the people they’d object to go to the new place.”

“Well, to be fair,” Amaranth said, “the new dining facility is designed to cater to more diverse dietary needs. Considering how many people had problems finding adequate nutrition in the cafeteria options before, putting it close to Harlowe seems like a goodwill gesture, really. It’s not a perfect solution, of course, but you have to remember the whole campus is getting overhauled. Presumably when the student union gets its own re-do, this place will offer similar options.”

“I’m not saying it’s all bad,” Ian said. “I mean, I don’t think there was some conspiracy by the school to trick Harlowe people into going one place and not the other. But… well…”

“It’s complicated,” I said. “There’s good and there’s bad in what they’re doing.”

“I agree,” Amaranth said. “I just don’t want the good to be overlooked.”

“I’ll tell you one good thing about dining at the ‘Argh’,” Steff said. “They do take-away boxes. You swipe your card like normal, but instead of all-you-can-eat, it’s all-you-can-cram. Not that I don’t enjoy a little mealtime social fun, but I’m looking forward to that for those nights I just want to be alone, or alone with Viktor… popping out and bringing back something resembling real food is going to be a lot better than trying to make a meal out of the stuff they carry at the little hallway store in the Nexus.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “I wonder if this place is going to start doing that? The Arch would be a bit out of our way for food, but that would be nice.”

“Oh, Little Ms. Here All Summer didn’t know about the take-away boxes?” Steff said. “I guess the chosen one hasn’t penetrated all of Magisterius University’s secrets, after all.”

“Who’s the chosen what now?” Ian said.

“It’s really not worth asking,” I said. “And no, I didn’t realize they let you do takeout. If I had…”

I was cut off by a whooshing sound, a flash of light, and then the clattering of a chair and several screams. We all turned and looked. Twyla had jumped up from her table, several things on which seemed to be burning… it looked like the whole tabletop had burst into flames but most of it was already dying out.

Two very calmly pointed a finger at the table and the rest of the flames went out with a puff. A wave of her hand dispersed the acrid smoke. A couple of people who’d been in the verge of running towards the burning table stopped mid-stride. Other people who’d been running for the exits kind of stumbled to a stop as awareness that the emergency… such as it had been… was over caught up to them.

“Gesundheit!” Steff yelled to mixed chuckles as Twyla grabbed her bag and made a very hasty exit.

“A spell must have run away from her,” Amaranth said. “That’s why you’re not supposed to mess around with fire magic outside of labs. I wonder if someone should go after her and make sure she’s alright?”

“She wasn’t burned,” Steff said. “That look on her face was embarrassment. I don’t think there’s anything you could say or do that would make her less embarrassed, Amy. If you want to be kind to her, I’d say the best thing to do would be to never mention it. That girl’s got a serious case of Really-I’m-Normalitis.”

“I suppose not saying anything is safer than saying the wrong thing,” Amaranth said. “But it feels like there should be some right thing I could say, that would let her know it was okay.”

The cafeteria manager was surveying the damage and shaking his head by this point. He wheeled a trashcan over and began disposing of the damaged tray and silverware and table accessories, and the burnt paper goods.

“Anyway,” Amaranth said, “getting back to the previous subject… if you had known about the takeout boxes, baby, you would have turned into a hermit the day they opened their doors. That’s something I am not going to permit you to do now.”

“Okay, yes, I probably would have taken food back to my room a lot of time,” I said. “But when I was here by myself, it’s not like I was sitting and talking with people at meals anyway.”

“No, but you were getting out for them and sitting somewhere where there were other people around,” Amaranth said. “That’s something. If it’s not a step forward, at least it’s not a step back. Now that we know we can do takeout, we’ll use it sometimes, but only when we’re going to be being sociable back in one of the dorms or for a picnic or something, or when there is an ironclad academic reason you need to be eating alone somewhere.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“In fairness to Mackenzie,” Ian said, “we’re acting like the new dining hall is the first time there’s been an alternative to eating in the cafeteria. But she could have got food from one of the burger stands and taken it back to her dorm, and she didn’t do that. So it’s not like the Arch thing would have given her a new and exciting opportunity to withdraw from the world if only she had known about it.”

“Oh,” Amaranth said, her cheeks coloring slightly. “I completely forgot about that. I’m sorry, baby.”

“I actually forgot about it, too,” I said. “We went to the food court so rarely that it didn’t even cross my mind as an option. Otherwise, I probably would have been eating chicken sandwiches and burgers by myself in my room all summer, and that probably wouldn’t have been a good thing.”

“Thank you for saying so. In any event,” Amaranth said, “how about we go check out the Arch for dinner tonight? I’m kind of curious to see it.”

We all agreed, and after that the conversation turned to more academic subjects.

As apprehensive as I was about all the unknowns involved in starting my first class of the year, I was really looking forward to it. ENC 217: Spellbinding For Enchantment was going to be a major step along the way to my major. Thus far in my education as an enchanter, I’d learned how to manipulate the inherent properties of an object. I could make a sword sharper, a coat warmer, or a door stronger… for a little while. I’d learned how to prolong the effects of such enhancements, though I couldn’t yet make them permanent. I could even make a person faster or stronger or more perceptive, though that didn’t last nearly as long.

I’d also picked up as a necessary skill in all of my lab classes the basic art of spellbinding, of taking magical techniques that worked for me and shaping them into a formula that could be repeated at need. It was very much an art, and there were a lot of trade-offs involved in taking powerful and useful magic and reducing it to something that could be more or less relied upon.

But that was what my major, Applied Enchantment, really consisted of. Humanity and other races of the world had been using cooling magic for millennia. When you took that magic and stuck it inside a box in such a way that it was always there, you had a refrigerator, and something like a refrigerator could change the world.

ENC 217 would focus on how to craft spells with an eye towards attaching them to objects. I still wouldn’t close out the semester any closer to being able to make a permanent magical item, but my spells would be a lot tighter and I’d be able to store them as charges in an object. I was really looking forward to that, especially considering how often during the winter months I’d had to repeat the insulation spells I put on my coat.

In fact, that was why I’d decided to take it during the fall semester. By the time the sunny, summer-ish weather left us I’d be able to deal with the cold in proper wizardly fashion.

Ian was a bit less sanguine about his first day of class.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said quietly to himself near the end of breakfast. “I am so not ready for this.”

“Relax, sweetie,” Amaranth said. “It’s the first day. I’m fairly certain you don’t have to be ready for it.”

“What’s there to be ready for?” Steff asked. “I’m sure your syllabus-receiving skills are still in top form even after a summer without so much as an agenda.”

“Okay, maybe you all don’t have to do anything for a grade today, but I have to play an audition in front of my professor and the music department head,” Ian said.

“Isn’t that the sort of thing they should have you do before they let you into the class?” I asked. “If they’re going to be picky about it, I mean.”

“They did,” he said. “This is… I got a notice over the summer that I’ve been ‘selected’ to give an additional audition.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” Amaranth said. “I mean, I can’t imagine how it would be bad.”

“It’s bad in that I already made it through the process once without blowing it and now I have to do it again,” Ian said.

“It sounds to me like you’re under consideration for some honor or advanced class,” Amaranth said. “So the worst thing that would happen is you’d be in the class you signed up for and nothing would be different, right?”

“Except my professor, who had thought I was worthy of consideration, would now know he was wrong,” Ian said. “Seems like that would be worse than never having caught his attention in the first place.”

“Well, if that’s how you feel, you could just tell him that you’re comfortable where you are and decline,” Amaranth said.

“And give up without trying?” Ian said. He sounded borderline offended by the suggestion. “You’re kidding.”

That seemed to make up his mind, like he’d decided to go in and give it his best shot out of sheer stubbornness. Amaranth had always been the sort of person who would encourage people to excel, but she’d become a little more nuanced in her approach.

“What do you have today, Two?” Amaranth asked.

“My friend Hazel and I are taking Small Business Management together,” Two said. “And then I have a pastry class, and then I have The Art of Presentation.”

“Does this small business thing have anything to do with your friend Hazel’s three or four plans for making money?” I asked. I was long past my initial suspicion of Hazel taking advantage of the easily-disadvantaged Two, but that didn’t mean I was thrilled at the thought of her rearranging her curriculum around Hazel’s pipe dreams.

“No,” Two said. “My friend Hazel says it’s planning for the future.”

“I think it’s a very good idea,” Amaranth said. “I mean, college only lasts a few years… if you don’t want to live at Hearts of Clay for the rest of your life, you do need to be planning ahead.”

“My friend Hazel says she is pretty sure she can get the money to open an inn,” Two said. There wasn’t a hint of doubt in her voice, but I knew from experience that this didn’t mean she believed Hazel’s claims. She had no problem blithely repeating the things the burrow gnome said, because she was confident at least that Hazel had said them.

I knew there were a lot of things that could change between sophomore year and graduation. Two and Hazel could have a falling out, as hard as that was to imagine. They could drift apart, especially given Hazel’s growing friendship with Shiel and the fact that they weren’t even in the same building anymore when they had used to be just a few doors away from each other. I knew, too, that they didn’t have anything like a firm plan for post-college life, but I envied that they had as much figured out as they did.

In theory it was easy to make money with an enchantment degree, but I didn’t have anything firmer than that theory. I knew I wanted to stay with Amaranth, but I had no idea how that would work. Making a living as an enchanter would probably require me to live in a city, and she was bound to a plot of land in a farming commune. Her divine nature wasn’t much of a hindrance to me at school, but back home she acted as something like a priestess. Then there was the fact that her home was the field of amaranth that was her “other body”… how could we live together there?

“What happened to your excited smile, baby?” Amaranth asked, breaking into my thoughts.

“Just thinking about the future,” I said.

“I thought that’s what you were excited about.”

“I mean the long-term future,” I said.

“Isn’t there a lot to be excited about there, too?”

“There’s a lot to be uncertain of.”

“That’s another way of saying there are a lot of possibilities,” Amaranth said. “I can’t think of anything more exciting than that.”

“Ah, you all are so cute,” Steff said. “It’s just a bunch of sophomore jitters, which are like first-year jitters but a year more advanced.”

“And I suppose you have junior jitters,” I said.

“No such thing,” Steff said. “Or at least there won’t be until next year, when I’m a senior and you’re all juniors, with your junior jitters. Oh, it will be freaking adorable. I can’t wait.”

Friday: Mackenzie’s first class.

My stuff was already somewhat unpacked, but very much not in order. I didn’t have a lot in the way of personal possessions, but those that I did have were mostly still in my suitcase and bag. Only the things I’d used in the last week were out, and they were mostly spread out on my desk.

Amaranth had told me to wait for her to arrive before getting the room all put together. Last year we’d had a pretty cozy set-up, with the lower bunk all curtained off with heavy blankets and stuff. I still had all that stuff, and our curtains. We’d donated the rug since it wouldn’t begin to fit our new room.

There was a knock from the other side of the bathroom door while Ian was out.

“It’s not locked,” I said, then realizing that it was probably Two on the other side I added, “Please come in.”

“Okay,” Two said as she opened the door. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Two was a golem, of the living flesh kind: sculpted from clay in the shape of a young woman, which was then transmuted to flesh in the same arcane act that gave her life. The only outward physical sign of her nature was the faint indentations of the runes on her forehead: the Tree of Life, the Wizard’s Mark, and the Circle of Will with a slash of negation. The first gave her life. The second imbued her with magic power, so she could generate magical energy and perform spells. The third gave her intelligence but had bound her to obey her maker, who had found a way around the troubling problem of intelligent servitors resenting their enforced obedience by creating a personality for her that had only one desire: to do what she was told.

This had worked out well for him… less well for her, when he abruptly freed her at the insistence of a wife who didn’t like him spending all his time in a basement workshop with someone who looked like a blonde waif and had no desire except to please.

She still had the desire to obey, and always would… but she’d learned how to want other things, and how to prioritize her wants so that sometimes her other wants and her needs could come before the obeisance impulse.

It was the runes on her forehead… which bore a slight resemblance to the simplified Draconic letters T, W, and O… that had given her the name her maker had neglected to supply. Living in a workshop where all the other equipment had a label on it, she had decided that it must be hers.

“Hi, Mack!” she said.

“Hi, Two,” I said. “How was the shire?”

“Full of tiny, rude people,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“My friend Hazel said that she’s not going back next summer,” she said. “She said we should look for a house to rent in the countryside here.”

“That could be fun,” I said. “But also expensive.”

“My friend Hazel has a plan to make money,” Two said. “It isn’t a very good plan but she says she has three others just like it. Or she could just get a job. I told her that and she said that was kind of a last resort thing.”

“Ah. I suppose Andreas could probably afford it, but I can’t see a dwarf moving into a rental cottage or whatever.”

“She says that she would absolutely die before she asked a man to support her, and that anyway he said no.”

“Where is Hazel, anyway?” I asked. “Is she rooming in Harlowe with her cousin again?”

“No, Honey is rooming with Oru,” Two said.

That didn’t surprise me too much. The housing people had put the two burrow gnomes together and Oru the goblin with Shiel the kobold, presumably on basis of kinship and racial similarity. But Honey and Oru had hit it off surprisingly well, and Shiel and Hazel… well, they had never actually got along with each other that I had seen, but they’d been at each other’s throats in a fairly amiable way.

“So where is Hazel, then?” I asked. “She’s not rooming with Shiel, is she?”

“No,” Two said. “She and Shiel are suitemates in Paradox.”

“Who are they rooming with?”

“Shiel has another kobold for a roommate,” Two said. “The three of them split the cost of Hazel having her room to herself. The three of them are sharing one room so they can use the other room for games.”

“Wow, that’s actually kind of cool,” I said. It made sense… three people of kobold or gnome size in a room would have more space than two people of human size. “If they could get the furniture out of the second room somehow, they’d have a ton of space.”

“Removing furniture from a dorm room isn’t allowed,” Two said, as though she expected that to be the end of the discussion. She didn’t have a very nuanced view of rules… something was either allowed or it wasn’t. Her dislike of rulebreaking was not connected to any fear of consequences. It was simply a matter of principle.

“Well, I did say ‘if’,” I said. I could sympathize with her view, because I was also uneasy about casual rulebreaking compared to my peers. Part of that I could lay at the feet of my grandmother, who’d been very big on the “fear of consequences”-style laying down of the law, but even before we had become each other’s problems I’d had a very similar wrong-is-wrong approach to things.

“Your door is open,” Dee’s voice said from the other side of the bathroom. “Should I take that to mean that you are at home to visitors?”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “I mean, yes, you’re welcome to come in… I just hadn’t specifically thought about that. We should probably work out some kind of protocol when Amaranth gets here… we’re all going to want our privacy but I don’t want to just see you guys when we’re fighting for time in the bathroom.”

“Agreed,” Dee said, sweeping into the room.

Dee was an elf, of the subterranean kind. Her hair was stark white… not platinum blonde, but white… and her skin was a deep and glossy black. Sometimes when I saw her in really dim light I thought I could see highlights of purple and dark blue, but that was probably just the slightly glossy sheen she had.

She favored loose, flowing garments… looser and more flowing than the surface elven-style dresses Steff wore. When she was going out in public, she tended to cover up completely in a long priestess robe and a cloak with a cowl that she could pull down to hide her face. Her notions of privacy and decency were somewhat complex, though. In some circumstances she would rather be seen nude.

She didn’t like to be called a “dark elf” because that suggested that the pale elves of the surface were the default or normal kind. She had been known to make the same implication the other way around, but it seemed to me like it was fairest and safest to acknowledge both varieties as simply different kinds of elves.

I had been told that there had once been elves of many different colors, but most of them had been bred out or wiped out. The only kinds left with any significant numbers were the palest of the pale and the darkest of the dark.

“I suppose open doors is a good enough sign,” she said, “but given that the corridor between our rooms is also the sanitary chamber, decorum and comfort would dictate that Two and I close your door while performing certain functions. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that in the meantime your status might change.”

“Well, the doors do lock on the room side,” I said. “We could just lock it when we want our privacy.”

“Still, that seems awkward,” Dee said. “I would be hesitant to rattle your doorknob if you were being intimate a few feet away.”

“Dee… wouldn’t you know when we’re being intimate?”

“Yes,” she said. “But I would prefer to behave as though I do not. On a related subject, I have prayed and meditated on the subject, and consulted with some of the elders at Ceilos, and I have determined that it would not be beyond the bounds of priestessly propriety to put a wall of silence between us. Though if I were to do that habitually, you would need to exercise caution when visiting our room, as there could be divine energies lingering just across the threshold, and of course I would not employ this technique in the shared bathing room.”

“Whatever you have to do to be comfortable in your room,” I said. “You two can always come over here to visit. Anyway, like Ian and I were saying, we’ll probably want to do most of the hanging out somewhere else. Can you picture five or six people crowding into this space?”

“Yes,” Dee answered. “Eight novices shared a space like this for sleeping and studying in the temples of Durakesh. That was spacious compared to what eight cadets were allotted, but then, soldiers were expected to be more casually intimate with each other than priestesses were.”

Of course I’d been being a little humanocentric in my statement, but Dee didn’t sound offended that I hadn’t considered the differences between our cultures. She was just being informative.

Before I had to think of what to say to her, there was a knock on the door. I didn’t expect Ian to knock and it was still a bit over an hour too early for Amaranth, so I just called, “It’s open!” I figured it was probably my R.A. or a neighbor, and I’d made up my mind that if I were decent and the room was relatively clean I’d just let people come in instead of standing in the door to talk to them. It seemed to me like that would come off as more sociable and less like I’m some kind of weird perverted half-demon loner.

Yes, I spent time thinking about things like that. I’d had a lot of time to myself over the summer. I’d tried to avoid thinking of what had gone wrong in my freshman year, but I had thought about how to do things right once I was living in a predominantly human dorm.

As the encounter with Marcel had reminded me, there would always be negative reactions to my heritage, but humanity wasn’t a monolithic entity any more than elves or dwarves or half-demons were. I’d encountered people who thought my demonblood was kind of cool, who thought it made me a rampaging monster, and even people who clearly had no fear of me but weren’t above pretending they found me threatening to have an excuse to pick on me.

The knock came again.

“It’s open!” I said a little louder. I’d expected my voice to have carried enough the first time… dormitories weren’t exactly known for their soundproof construction. Maybe I still hadn’t learned the trick of speaking more loudly without sounding like I was angry, or maybe I was just a little exasperated, but either way it came out more harshly than I’d meant it to.

“Now, is that any way to talk to the woman who owns you?”

Amaranth. At the sound of her voice, my heart skipped a beat… but that was okay because the ones it didn’t miss were big enough to more than make up for the loss.

I flung open the door and there she was in all her glory.

That’s not just a euphemism for the fact that she was completely nude, though of course she was. That’s the natural state of a nymph. Well, it’s probably the natural state of most people, but as a daughter of the goddess Mother Khaele, Amaranth’s nudity was enforced by a divine edict that the laws of the Imperium couldn’t overrule.

Her body was that of a pretty substantially built human woman, just a wavy golden blonde hair over six feet tall, with generous hips and a soft stomach and full breasts that suffered not a bit for never having support except when someone was holding them.

The only thing that she wore was a pair of really old-fashioned spectacles with thick glass eyepieces that made her blue eyes look all big and distorted… at least, when she wasn’t looking over them sternly. The glasses were anomalous in another regard, as well: they signified a physical imperfection in an otherwise divinely perfect body. Though, as I thought they looked hot, I wasn’t sure that her need for them was a flaw.

“Hello, baby… my coach made it in a little early,” she said. “Were you good while I was away?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I ducked my head a little as I said it. It was a small motion, purely voluntary. I did it because it felt right. I could look up into Amaranth’s eyes forever, but it also felt nice to not look up at her. As body language went, averting my eyes felt a bit like kissing her on the cheek.

Of course, lowering my eyes away from her face didn’t put all of her body outside my field of vision… I watched her chest swell as she took a deep breath and then let it out slowly. I’d been living on campus year-round, and had been in our room in Gilcrease for a week, but it was only when Amaranth arrived that I was at home.

“And were you good for Ian last night?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and what had been small and voluntary became automatic and all-encompassing. Heat flared up in my cheeks. My body wanted to pull into itself. Part of me wondered how she’d known… if her nymph senses had become refined to the point that she could tell who I’d been intimate with recently, or if she’d just run into him in the hallway or something. That part of me was very distant and very quiet, drowned out by the rush of blood.

“Good girl,” she said. She gave me a hug that included a little pat on the butt… not a spanking, not anything like a spanking, but the closest thing I’d had in over a hundred days. I might have swayed, just a little. “Now help me in with my bags.”

She stepped back and passed her hands just behind her, bending her knees slightly like she was setting things down. Just like that, there was a large duffel bag, a suitcase, two flat-topped traveling chests, a hat box, and a backpack piled up behind her back.

When I’d first met Amaranth, I had wondered at her ability to pull things out of nowhere or tuck them out of sight when she didn’t seem to have anywhere to put them, obvious anatomically-inspired jokes aside. It had turned out that she was literally putting them nowhere, a process she called putting things “away”. I suspected the process had something in common with the kind of extradimensional space used by a bag of holding or a portable hole.

She could have just as easily retrieved them when she was in the room. The fact that she hadn’t meant that she wanted me to carry them in for the sake of having me do something. The first direct orders of the semester. It probably shouldn’t have been as exciting as it was.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. The weight wouldn’t be a problem for me. I did have to be careful, though, handling Amaranth’s things, so I decided to carry them one at a time, starting with the bigger ones.

While I squatted down to lift the first of the chests, she headed on into the room.

“Hi, Amaranth!” Two called out.

“Hello, Two, dear,” Amaranth said. “Your sister is bringing my things in. You may help her if you would like to.”

“Okay,” Two said.

“Was your travel agreeable?” Dee asked.

“It was pretty pleasant,” Amaranth said. “We had clear skies and sun all the way from Paradise Valley. There was a lycanthropy alert outside of Spoken Softly, but nothing came of it. The driver said they get were watches a lot in that area, but it’s usually just because someone saw a canid and didn’t know the difference.”

That seemed odd to me, since canids… dog-like humanoids… really couldn’t be anything less like werewolves. They didn’t switch between an animal and human form, they were simply always themselves, and unless one was afraid of dogs there was nothing monstrous about them. But then, the popular conception of werewolves often stopped at the intermediate form that they passed through when changing from one form to the other… showing a man or a wolf didn’t convey the idea of werewolf as concisely as showing a half-man, half-wolf.

“If canids are common to the region, one would think the other inhabitants would be familiar with them,” Dee said.

“Well, even people who know of the canids won’t necessarily recognize that they’re different from lycanthropes, sadly,” Amaranth said. “Be careful with that, baby.”

Distracted by my thoughts, I had just stumbled sideways through the door with the first of the trunks, banging and scraping my knuckles on the door frame in the process. As an invulnerable half-demon, I didn’t have to worry about cracking bones or abrading skin. I just got all the fun feeling associated with it.

“You had better let Mack get the chests,” Amaranth said to Two, who slipped around me once I was through the door. “They’re full of books. Oh, and so is the suitcase. And my backpack’s a little bit full, it has all of my schoolbooks in it at the moment… I don’t want you to strain yourself.”

“You shouldn’t offer things to people if you don’t mean it,” Two said.

“Um… you can carry the hatbox?” Amaranth suggested. “It only has… that is, it isn’t full of books.”

“Okay!”

This was how far we’d come in the year since coming to MU. Two the living golem, who had been barely able to function without orders when she first arrived, was now being offered tasks as a treat. I did what I was told, and I liked it.

“Where would you like this, Amaranth?” I asked.

“Just stack them along the wall there,” Amaranth said, pointing opposite the bunk beds. “I have three more for you to carry in when you’ve got those… I brought more of my books from home this year, since I missed them, but I didn’t want to block up the hallway.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You can shelve them later,” Amaranth said. “And feel free to use whatever shelves are left for your things.”

She said it so matter-of-factly, like it went without saying that the shelves belonged to her and any sliver of space she gave me was an unearned treat. It seemed like Amaranth had spent the summer cultivating a sort of easy, imperious authority. I couldn’t say that I didn’t like it. I’m sure she knew that, too, just as she knew I didn’t have many of my own things that would require shelving in the first place.

Amaranth could tell what a person was into. She could tell what effect her actions had on me. Sometimes she had underestimated the effect of a thing’s appeal in the abstract versus reasons it might be undesirable in reality, but she’d grown better at that over the course of the last year, especially when it came to reading me.

I got Amaranth’s trunks full of books stacked up against the wall. At her direction, I made sure they were all running the long way, parallel to the wall and to the bunk beds on the other side of the room. Ian arrived as I was carrying the last of them in.

“Oh, hey,” he said, accepting a kiss on the cheek from Amaranth. “Mackenzie said you weren’t getting in for like another hour.”

“Yeah, we made really good time,” Amaranth said. “I still have to go check in and all, though… but I knew my Mack would already be up here, I thought I’d bring my things in first.”

“Makes sense,” Ian said.

“You all might want to look away for a moment,” she said. “I’ve been told that this can get disorienting to watch.”

“What can?” Ian asked.

“I’m going to put the beds away,” she said. She looked at the desks. “Actually, on second thought, if everyone will leave for a minute I think I’ll be able to get the carpet in place fairly easily.”

“Okay,” Two said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. It might have been gratuitous, but I’d missed saying it.

Ian and Dee said nothing, but we all stepped out… Ian and I into the hallway, Dee and Two through the bathroom.

“You know you’re going to have the cleanest bathroom on campus,” Ian said after a few moments.

“How do you figure?”

“Because Amaranth isn’t going to make any mess, and Two will clean up whatever anyone else leaves,” he said.

“We should probably make up like a chart or something for cleaning it,” I said.

“And then Two will clean it anyway,” Ian said.

“Probably,” I conceded. I didn’t like the thought of sticking her with that task, but it wouldn’t be any great hardship from her point of view. It was just something to do.

There had been hardly any sound from inside the room, but the door opened.

“Okay,” Amaranth said. “I’m not exactly done, but I’ve got everything more or less in place.”

The bare tile floor… which had felt cold at night even in the lingering summer-like weather of mid-Astera… was now covered in a thick, soft carpet that had clearly been picked out by someone who fully intended to have sex on it. At first glance it looked like Amaranth had managed to acquire a single piece perfectly cut to fit the irregularly-shaped room, but then I spotted the place where two pieces had been joined. There was a trapezoidal-shaped piece that stopped just before the alcove, and an even more oddly shaped piece just beyond it.

The carpet was far from the most radical change. One of the two desks was gone, replaced with what looked like a secondhand couch. The bunk bed was gone. In its place was a four-poster bed that looked to my eyes to be brand new, and at least queen sized. The head of it was stuck in the recess the bunk beds had occupied. It took up a lot of the room’s real estate, but somehow the remaining space felt more open for it.

There was a pile of pillows and cushions on the floor, and some curtains and stuff piled up on the bed.

Even knowing in the abstract that she was capable of this sort of thing, I was amazed at the extent to which she’d carried it.

“Amaranth… how did you afford this stuff?” I asked. I knew that the Paradise Valley Farming Cooperative gave her some money for her expenses, but I couldn’t imagine it would extend to getting a major piece of furniture. On the other hand, I could just picture someone giving her a bed. She disdained the thought of “performing” for money but I knew she’d accepted gifts… that was where she’d got most of her books from.

“Oh, I sold a few things,” she said. “I have something for you, too, but it’ll wait until later.”

“What sort of things?” Ian asked.

“Just trinkets,” she said. “I had a small trove of off-world artifacts a friend left with me… nothing important or powerful, just sentimental items, but apparently very valuable to the right sort of collector.”

“You didn’t have to sell them,” I said, marveling at how casual she was about it. “We could have managed with the dorm beds.”

“We could have, but I preferred not to,” Amaranth said. “And unlike our blanket fort back in Harlowe this is something we can take with us and keep from year to year.”

Amaranth opened the bathroom door.

“Two, would you like to help me make the bed?” she asked.

“Okay,” Two said. She scowled at the big bed as soon as she saw it, though.

“There is no rule against bringing in outside furniture,” Amaranth said. “I checked… and I didn’t take the existing furniture out of the room.”

“Oh,” Two said. “Okay.”

“Would you like me to do anything?” I asked Amaranth.

She looked at me thoughtfully, and then said, “You certainly have your uses, but I think it’s best if I just put you somewhere out of the way while I get things in order.” She took me by the hand and walked me over to the closet door, which she slid open. The closet was pretty shallow, and only as wide as the space between the bathroom door and the front wall of the room. My few skirts, my coat, and other garments that needed hanging were already in it. She pushed them over onto one side. “That side can be for your things. This side is for my things.”

So saying, she put her hands on my shoulders and firmly guided me into place inside it. There was just enough room for me to sit down sideways inside it, with my legs stretched out in front of me and my arms folded in front of me.

I didn’t say anything as she slid the door shut and left me in darkness. I was in full-on possession mode… as in, being a possession, not being possessed. It felt good. I hadn’t realized it, since I hadn’t had any basis for comparison, but being treated like an object, put away, and ignored felt relaxing in the same way it had been relaxing to be on my own all summer long. No social expectations, no social pressures.

Outside the closet door, two of my closest friends and two of my lovers continued to chat as though nothing had happened, as though I wasn’t there. With another group, it might have been weird, but to Two this kind of interaction was perfectly normal. I didn’t know if people were put away in closets or cupboards in Dee’s culture, but things in Durakesh were pretty rigidly stratified, and with space at a premium it wouldn’t have surprised me at all to learn that there were people who would have jumped at the privacy afforded by my closet.

I could hear their conversation but I didn’t really listen to it much. It didn’t concern me. Amaranth and Dee were talking about their trips back to school. Two was advising Amaranth on how to assemble the bedclothes properly.

Eventually I realized it was a lot quieter in the room. The closet door slid open.

“I’m going to go downstairs and check in,” Amaranth said. “Two and Dee have gone off to meditate, and Ian’s going down with me. There’s something I need to talk to him about… Steff caught me as I was arriving, so she’s already on board. Anyway, I want you to lock the door behind us and then put yourself back away. You may come out to answer the door if anyone knocks. Got that, baby?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Good girl,” she said. It was almost better than sex, if sex made you want sex instead of relieving the urge for it.

I did as she had instructed, only taking a glance around the room on my way back into the closet. The bed was now veiled with thick red curtains. It blocked the window, but it wasn’t like there was much of a view. Our room just looked out across the way to the externally identical Paradox Tower. Amaranth had not consulted me at all before selecting the bed, but she knew me well enough to have picked out something we would both love even if I would never have thought of it for myself.

She liked being ensconced behind curtains and beneath blankets because it gave her the marvelously naughty feeling of being clothed. I liked it for the same reason I didn’t at all mind being shut up in the closet. Enclosed spaces were safe and comforting to me.

It seemed like I was closed up in the closet for longer that time. Eventually I heard a key turning in the lock, which told me that Amaranth had been successful. I waited patiently for her to take me out. After some rustling of paper and a little rummaging around in a drawer, she did.

“Alright, baby,” she said as I stood on slightly wobbly legs. “I told you that I had something for you… well, I have two things for you. One for now and one for later, if you’re good.”

She reached behind her back and produced the thick studded leather strap we had purchased together in Enwich the year before… my paddle. I had carried it for her convenience and use throughout the previous year, and then she had taken it with her over the summer break.

“Thank you,” I said, taking it from her with a self-conscious sort of reverence.

As much as I’d missed being spanked regularly, the sight of the paddle and the weight of it in my hand made my butt tingle with as much apprehension as arousal. There was no getting around the fact that a good paddling was painful as well as pleasurable. In my limited research into BDSM, I’ve seen people claim that the pain transforms into pleasure, or the pleasure masks the pain, or that the pain is transcended… but my experience has always been that the pain is still there. If it wasn’t, what was the point? It might as well just be regular sex.

“Keep that with you at all times,” Amaranth said. “Now, as for the other thing… we talked about it last year, but we never got around to actually doing it.”

As she said that, my heart leapt… there was only one thing she could be referring to. We’d made the decision early in the first semester, but after that things had either been going crazy all around us or we’d been buried in schoolwork and so we’d never actually done it.

She again reached back and then held out in front of her a collar, a leather collar made out of a wide black strip with a thinner reddish-brown strip riveted to it. It had a sort of triangular metal bit in the center, and hanging from that was a ring like for a leash. On either side of the ring was a row of four white costume jewels.

It was slightly bigger than I’d envisioned, and much more obvious. Maybe not everyone who saw it would know or be able to instantly divine its significance, but there could be no mistaking it for a necklace or a choker. It was what it was, and I wanted very badly for Amaranth to put it around my neck.

“Now as I told you it’s for later,” she said. “If you want to wear my collar, you’re going to have to earn it, properly. I’m going to have three tasks for you. In the meantime, it’ll be your job to keep this safe until the time I put it on you or take it back.”

“What do I have to do?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you as I decide them,” she said.

Soon: Um… how about instead of telling you what happens next, I tell you it will happen on Wednesday of this week? Would anybody be interested in hearing that?

An important note for my sponsors/subscribers about the newsletter:

Previously I told you that if you’re already a sponsor you don’t need to do anything to receive my newsletter. Unfortunately I was mistaken. In my haste to make things as easy as I could for you, I neglected to consider my host’s anti-spam policies and good business practices concerning the use of email addresses. To put it simply, I need explicit permission from each recipient to send out a mass email. So if you’re a sponsor and you want to receive my newsletter, please click here and put in your email address. If you’re not a sponsor and want to see what it’s all about, feel free to do the same… I’ll remove non-sponsors from the list after a month, and that makes this the best month to check it out as I’ve got enough material for two newsletters. (The “I Swear It’s Still March” Edition, and the April Edition.)

The others, now plus Shiel, were playing Shiel’s war game when I got back. I hadn’t been expecting it, but I wasn’t terribly surprised… I had been gone for hours, and others had wanted to play. Two had gone to see if her friend Hazel was back and if she wanted to play. There were two games going at the moment, with Ian playing Shiel and Steff playing Dee.

The questions about how my session went didn’t go beyond “How did it go?” and my answer of “Good, I think.” wasn’t scrutinized, which was nice. It was good to be able to just sort of slip back into things.

“Do you want in on our game, Mack?” Steff asked me. “If you jumped in with a fresh army, you’d probably stand a pretty decent chance of catching up even as a newbie.”

“Yeah, still not interested in playing army,” I said. “Thanks.”

“I’m not interested in war myself, in particular,” Shiel said. “Violence for self-defense and even pre-emptive strikes can be justified to secure rights, but armed struggles and the periods of chaos they cause tend to go poorly for the least powerful groups. I’m more interested in the tactical side of it. Every situation is like a puzzle, and finding the right tactics will unlock the solution.”

“I can see the intellectual appeal of that,” Amaranth said. “Though, I wonder why you couldn’t get the same effect using something more abstract than warriors holding weapons? I mean, I know they’re not actual people fighting and dying, they’re just game pieces. But if it’s just about problem-solving, why not go all the way and just have different game pieces?”

“Well, it’s not just problem-solving,” Shiel said. “Not even for me, and of course other people play for their own reasons. I suppose on a practical level, it keeps things easy to relate to and allows more diversity in choices. I mean, if you changed the generic infantry to Unit Type 1 and the generic cavalry to Unit Type 2 and made their pieces abstract symbols or numerals, there would be nothing about the 2s that told you at a glance that they cover more ground in a move, or why. And there’d be less reason to make up different subtypes. If goblins on wolf-back or riding on giant swamp rats became Unit Type 2.50 and 2.51, what would the point be?”

“Making them people lets you turn it into a story,” Steff said. “I think you’d like that, Mack.”

“Okay, but it’s still big troop movements and all… that’s not what interests me in fantasy or in history,” I said. “It’s the individual stories. I mean, when I did modern Magisterian history in high school, our text books was this super patriotic one that focused on all the ‘adventuring opportunities’ that imperial troops had during the Chaos Wars and all the little conflicts that followed it, but the part that interested me were in the sidebars where they had personal accounts from people who’d served, or people who’d been there during a battle. That’s something I can get into.”

“So give the little people names and make sure you have one of them tell the others about his girl back home just before you move them into arbalest range,” Steff said.

“Maybe you’d be more interested in roleplaying games, then,” Ian said.

“Yeah, can you picture me sitting around on Friday nights playing Subways and Scientists?” I said.

“Yes,” Steff and Ian said at the same time.

“Anyway, Shiel,” I said. “To get back to what you were saying… how does the puzzle-solving approach even work when the movement of the other pieces are controlled by someone else?”

“You have to look at your opponent as being part of the puzzle,” Shiel said. “If I’m playing against a seasoned player, I have to expect that they’ll recognize certain gambits, but because of that I also can predict their responses to a degree. When I play against Hazel, I have more freedom to move but I also have to react more within the moment. She’d probably win half her games out of luck if she played against some of the tournament players in the warrens. They’re too used to playing against people who share the same unspoken assumptions that they do.”

“But even if you’re doing everything ‘right’ and you’re tailoring your tactics to your opponent, you could still lose,” I said. “I mean, they could be doing the same thing, or they could realize what you’re doing.”

“Yes,” Shiel said. “But that’s life. Sometimes you do everything right and you still lose. We call that… well, the word is bolkub, but it translates as ‘cave-in’. Because nobody does any new excavation on a whim. Everything is checked, double-checked, and triple-checked. All the tools and materials used are enchanted as powerfully as the armaments and fortifications we use at the outer layers of the warren. But sometimes, even with all that…”

A tic of sorts passed over her face that gave me the impression that her skin was shrugging.

“Sometimes the best-played game ends in a bolkub,” she said.

“What do you do then?” I asked.

“Lose,” she said.

Two came back, and after exchanging greetings, she said, “My friend Hazel says to say that she’ll be more than happy to come and teach Shiel a thing or two about that game of hers if Amaranth thinks she can keep her mind and her mouth on her own business.”

“Oh, well, that’s terribly mature of her,” Amaranth said. Two was looking at her expectantly. She added, “It’s not like she’s going to be able to avoid this forever. What’s she going to do when she’s ten months pregnant?”

“What happens at ten months?” Shiel asked. “Is that when the fetus becomes public property?”

“What? No..”

“I guess it’s still none of your business, then,” Shiel said.

“I am inclined to agree,” Dee said. “Perhaps you should take into consideration that her recalcitrant attitude towards discussing the matter with you does not necessarily equal recalcitrance in ‘dealing with’ it.”

“But if she won’t even admit to herself…”

“What she admits to herself is known to herself,” Dee said. “It may or may not resemble anything that she admits to you.”

“Two’s still waiting for a real answer,” Ian pointed out.

“Oh!” Amaranth said. “I’m sorry… Two, please tell Hazel that her business is her business, I guess.”

“That’s okay, I forgive you,” Two said. “Please excuse me while I tell her that.”

When she came back with Hazel a minute or so later, I really thought Amaranth’s eyes or mouth were going to leap out of her skull, but she restrained herself.

“That’s right,” Hazel said, and that’s all she said before negotiating her entry into Ian and Shiel’s game. If the miniature stone warfare held any appeal for me, it was the social aspect, and by that I meant it was fun to watch Hazel valiantly try to convince herself, Shiel, and possibly the tiny soldiers that she was winning. She was like a one woman wartime propaganda department.

At least she seemed to be having fun, and maybe that was the key to her outrageous bravado… she wasn’t trying to beat Shiel, she was enjoying the process of losing. In an actual war, there would probably be worse people to be stuck in a desperate situation with than Two’s friend Hazel.

Steff and Dee’s game was a good deal quieter, and had been even before Two brought Hazel in. It was kind of weird to watch the two of them doing something together. With the game in between them, there was a level of comfort they didn’t usually show. There were so many reasons the two of them might not have worked as friends. There was the racial rivalry that Steff couldn’t shed no matter how much she outwardly rejected elven attitudes, and to Dee Steff was not just other but lesser, no matter how much she might protest otherwise. They were both prejudiced, but both were better than their prejudices.

Amaranth, Two, and I were spectators, though Two was engaged with the games much more than Amaranth and I were. There were times where she pointed out a missed opportunity or a rule infraction in the making… though never to Hazel, which made me wonder if Amaranth wasn’t the only one to be given a topical ultimatum. It hardly mattered, though, since Shiel caught Hazel’s errors anyway.

Saturday gave way to Sunday, where a trip to the library helped me slide a little bit closer to normal. Not the old, familiar normal, if there had been one… a new normal, with some comforting features. The very structure of the week did a lot to help people adjust to things, I realized… you did something for a few days and it was new and different and maybe scary or uncomfortable and you kept waiting for it to click. Before it could, though, here comes a break in the rhythm and then you’re back it. Something like going to class didn’t become a routine on its own… it was going back to class after a break that made it feel like one.

I received a brief and apologetic a-mail from Lee that explained nothing but said that he would understand if I would prefer to seek other representation and that he would do what he could to help me find it.

I didn’t respond immediately, because I didn’t know how to respond to it… I thought if Lee were trying to drop me as a client he’d be more direct about it, so it seemed like he really sincerely believed I’d want nothing to do with him. Unless the encounter in Embries’s office had been his idea, and I doubted that, I couldn’t see why.

It was Wednesday afternoon before I knew it, and that meant I’d made very little headway on the sheets Teddi had given me. Teddi was understanding about it.

“Remember what I said about writing?” she asked.

“And not knowing what to write down?”

“Yes,” she said. “Narrowing your gaze like this is a necessary step, but it’s a skill that has to be learned. Have you ever kept a journal?”

“I’ve tried it, in the past,” I said. “I couldn’t really make a habit of it, and anyway, I was always more interested in things that were happening to other people, or things that weren’t happening to me.”

“Like journalism?”

“More like fiction,” I said.

“Well, let’s try something else then,” she said. “Between this session and the next one, I want you to make a note… mental note, or a written one if necessary… any time you find yourself saying or thinking something like ‘Sometimes, it just feels like…’ or ‘I don’t understand why…’. Those are the sorts of things that might make good starting points. They seem to work for other people.”

“So, is there anything we can actually do now besides just talking?”

“You seem to expect me to tell you that it’s pointless to be here,” she said.

“I guess I have low expectations,” I said. “Not about this, or you, specifically… just in general. I can’t exactly get away from the fact that you’re working at a handicap with me.”

“Well… I’ve already told you how we can try a mental contact, but your… conscientiousness… about that has me researching other alternatives,” Teddi said. “For instance, there are spells that allow communication through thought.”

“Wouldn’t they have the same problem?”

“As it happens, no,” Teddi said. “If a spell picks a word out of your head and conducts it to mine, it’s no more a direct mental contact than when you do the same with your voice. It still wouldn’t be the same thing that I’m used to doing, but I’ve been told by my colleagues in the College of Communication that if such a spell is properly attuned… or rather, improperly attuned so as to suit our purposes… it can pick up stray thoughts, things lurking beneath the surface, bits of memories, and so on.”

“I’m not sure I want to be the test homunculus for someone’s mind-magic,” I said.

“Alright,” Teddi said. “I just wanted to show you that there are possibilities out there. Do you mind if I keep looking into them?”

“No,” I said. “Feel free.”

“Okay, so if you don’t have anything specific you want to address, how about we go back to something you said last time?”

“Okay, sure,” I said.

“You said you could do a lot of damage, if you were careless,” Teddi said. “And that you had done ‘some’ damage already. Would you mind if we explore that?”

“The damage?”

“The feeling,” she said. “The fear. Do you see yourself as a threat, Mackenzie?”

There was a cold prickle of suspicion in my stomach, as involuntary a reflex as Amaranth’s need to help Hazel sort out her troubles or Steff or Dee’s reactions to each other. I could imagine someone from Law or the IBF poring over my file and saying “Gotcha!” or “Aha!” or something when they find the part where I admit I think I’m a threat to others.

“I’m not sure that I’d say it in those words,” I said.

“Noted,” Teddi said. “Or, unnoted.”

“My girlfriend… she’s immortal,” I said. “Not just ageless but immortal. I mean, it’s sort of situational but nothing I can do here could harm her in the long term. But I can still hurt her. She’s… been burned. Anybody else, any of my friends… some of them could defend themselves if something went wrong, but if I just lashed out with all my strength at the wrong moment…”

“How often do you use all your strength?”

“Never, that I can think of,” I said. “But I’m clumsy, and I’m kind of impulsive. I’ve been known to overreact.”

“Physically?”

“Not so much, I guess,” I said. “But if I can’t control my emotions, it could happen anyway.”

“Let’s follow that, then,” she said.

I did my best to explain to her how violence made me feel… the practiced disdain I put on for those who reveled in it, and the very real and very visceral churning of my gut at being involved in it… and even the perverse hunger for it I’d felt when under demonic influence, notably my own. That was difficult to talk about. It took up a lot of the session without actually going anywhere or resolving anything, but getting that out still felt… well, it wasn’t an accomplishment, exactly, but it was something.

“The really awful thing is,” I said, “is that if I’m honest with myself… what worries me the most is what would happen to me if I did something bad. The consequences to me. I mean, I’d be devastated if I killed someone, but… I’d also be dead, most likely.”

“It’s not easy to face that as an eighteen-year-old,” Teddi said.

“But other people do,” I said. “It’s a dangerous world.”

“It is, but a surprisingly large number of people go for years without giving a thought to how dangerous it can be,” she said. “It sounds like you can’t avoid it.”

“Well, it’s not like I spend every day thinking about death,” I said. “Or that it even comes up that often in so many words… my grandmother sort of managed to instill in me a generalized terror of it. Of… messing up, and then being killed. She made it very clear that she’d be the one to do it, but she also made it clear that if she didn’t someone else would. She used to keep buckets by my bed, two with regular water and one with holy water, in case I had an ‘accident’. When I got better at controlling my fire, she got rid of the regular water, but the holy water stayed. When I left for good, I thought about kicking it over out of spite, but… well, I gave it a wide berth. I’m honestly surprised I don’t have a bucket phobia.”

“That’s pretty poor parenting,” Teddi said. “To put it mildly. Could you feel the sanctity of the water?”

“It didn’t exactly radiate divine energy, no,” I said. “I figured it’s sort of inert. I might have, if I’d held my hand over it or something, but I didn’t ever do that.” I thought about the demonstration my grandmother had given me, with her own hand and the hot oil, but I wasn’t ready… wasn’t able… to share that yet.

“My understanding is that water doesn’t hold sanctity any better than it holds magic,” Teddi said. “Outside of a specially consecrated vessel, it becomes just plain water pretty quickly. Even a holy vessel can’t keep it in if it’s open… that’s why clerics reconsecrate the fonts in the temples so often.”

I realized as she said this that I knew it… that was pretty much a fundamental property of water. It was pure. It washed things away. The very reasons that so many religions liked it symbolically made it a poor choice for a sacramental liquid.

“Even if she was bluffing about that, I don’t think she was bluffing in general,” I said. “And even if it was just regular water… well, maybe she didn’t want me to be killed or maimed accidentally. She could have blessed it herself as she dumped it over me.”

“True,” Teddi said. “And I don’t want to minimize what she did to you, either. The effects were the same, regardless.”

“So, yeah… I grew up with it being pounded into my head that tomorrow or the day after I would probably go on an evil rampage and be slain,” I said. “And I still have that in my head, even when I’m trying to plan for the future… which I am. I mean, I’m in college to try to have a life and a career, and I’m making plans for the summer, sort of.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Not going home, for one thing,” I said. “I mean, back to my grandmother’s. I have the opportunity to stay on campus, helping one of my professors and going to classes during the summer, but… well… I’m starting to appreciate the importance of breaks in life.”

“What’s that?”

“They let you come back to things,” I said. “The funny thing is that I’ve gone from thinking I’m mostly going to be killed in my sleep one night to facing the prospect of living halfway to forever. I’d never really thought about how long half-demons live. Half-elves can live for centuries, if not millennia, and they probably inherit more of the ‘mortal failing’ stuff since both of their parents are from this plane. If I don’t die tomorrow, I could live a thousand years… but all I really want is to have a life. A lifetime. And now that I’m thinking about it, it almost feels like these few years could be the most dangerous ones of my life.”

“More dangerous than living with a woman who threatened to kill you in your sleep?”

“Well, back home… when I was in high school, I mean… she sort of protected me, too,” I said. “She made it clear that she would ‘destroy’ me, but she was also going to wait until I did something to deserve it. Here, I’m more on my own. Whatever consequences would or wouldn’t fall on someone who messed with me, there’s no… well, I mean, I’d like to think that if someone out-and-out murdered me there’d be a criminal investigation and all, but for someone who sees me as a threat or a monster or a non-person it’s all really diffuse and abstract compared to having someone specific in their face saying ‘no, you can’t kill her’. Back home, my grandmother was a force in the community. No one would mess with her. Here, if someone looks at me and thinks, ‘I could make the world a better place by taking her out of it,’ what’s to stop them?”

“Have you been attacked often?”

“Not on a daily basis,” I said. “And more often by the people in Harlowe than by random human students. But it would only take one person who doesn’t think there will be any consequences for killing a half-demon or doesn’t care.”

“Wouldn’t that have been true back home, too?” Teddi asked. “It must have crossed your mind that someone might not have had as much respect for your grandmother.”

“My world was smaller there,” I said. “I’m pretty sure there are more people living on campus than there were in the town I grew up in, and that includes the outlying farming communities.”

“So it’s a matter of odds,” Teddi said. “But the world is a bigger place than MU… why do you think you’d feel safer outside it?”

“Fewer people would know I’m a demon,” I said. “Okay, yeah, I’ve attracted a bit of attention, but if I keep my head down for the next three years, then who out there is going to know who I am?”

“Do you think hiding would feel safer”

“Not hiding, so much as not revealing,” I said.

“Do you regret revealing yourself as a half-demon?”

“It happened,” I said. “It wasn’t really my choice. Circumstances just sort of piled up on me…”

“And these circumstances are unique to a college campus?”

“Possibly,” I said. “Possibly not. I guess I don’t really know if I’ll be able to keep the secret any better out in the ‘real world’… but it’ll be another chance to try.”

“And if it doesn’t work out, will you pick up and move? Keep your head down for another four or five years? Like you said, you could live a very long time… if you don’t get this right the first hundred times, you might have a chance to try again.”

“Yeah, I see your point,” I said. “Really, I don’t want to live a life in hiding or on the run… and that’s why I think I’d probably be dead if I did screw up. Even if I could run and get away, I wouldn’t be a college student, I wouldn’t grow up to be an enchanter, I would never have a good house and a good life… I’d be another monster hiding in the wilderness, skulking around the edges of civilization… which I suppose means that in a really fucked-up sense I’m afraid of turning out like my father.”

“That isn’t particularly ‘fucked-up’,” Teddi said. “It’s a good thing to be concerned about, as long as you’re doing so healthily. Did you ever meet your father?”

“Yes and no,” I said, then made the decision to not talk around this at all. There were enough impediments in our conversation as it was. “He comes to me in dreams sometimes… I know it’s actually him, or actually someone and not just me because they aren’t like my regular dreams. They’re more coherent, lucid.”

“That’s actually pretty common with dream visitations, when one mind is sharply stronger than another,” Teddi said. “There are no hard or fast rules about anything relating to dreams, but if one party is asleep and the other party isn’t, the conscious party can usually exercise a fine degree of control or impose a viewpoint.”

“So much for the ‘this is my dream’ thing,” I said. “I suppose that only works in television shows.”

“If it is your dream, then you do ultimately have certain powers, usually including the ability to wake up,” Teddi said. “Lucid dreams are often fairly easy to wake up from. If it happens in the future, you might try that.”

“That’s… really kind of obvious, in retrospect,” I said.

“Well, it’s why they pay me the shiny bucks,” Teddi said. “What does your father do in your dreams?”

“He tries to give me advice, mostly,” I said. “At least, that’s what he tries to pass it of as. Just fatherly advice… but he does things like refer to people as insects, and one time he was dismembering people, which kind of undermines his whole ‘really-I’m-just-a-concerned-father’ routine. He’s… not the sort of person you’d want to take advice from. But even when he’s not really hiding the fact that he’s evil, he’s still… well, there’s something compelling about him. I’d really like to be able to shut him out for good.”

“That is something I might be able to help you with. I’ll have to do some research. It’s a difficult situation,” Teddi said. “You probably realize that things could get complicated for you if you sought any official help in dealing with him, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m hoping that he’ll lose interest, but I’m not sure that’s worth hoping for. It seems like he was already willing to wait until I moved out from my grandmother’s house.”

“So, you think he has plans for you.”

“I’m sure he does,” I said.

“Do you have any idea what they are?”

“No, and I don’t want to know,” I said. “If he offered to share them with me, I’m sure whatever he’d tell me would just be like a wriggling bit of bait on the end of his hook. Steff, my… well, you know who Steff is. She said something like, when you’re dealing with someone you know is untrustworthy, you don’t figure out if each thing they say is worth trusting or not. That’s what untrustworthy means.”

“I’m not sure I would endorse that absolute a view as good advice when dealing with people in general,” she said. “But there is some truth to it. A person… and I’m talking about denizens of this plane in particular… is not categorically trustworthy or not, but there are points where you have to go, ‘This isn’t worth my time. This isn’t worth the grief.’ And I have the impression that you’ve been learning that.”

“Yeah, I suppose I have,” I said. “If there’s a big moral to my first taste of semi-adulthood, I suppose that’s it.” I realized then that I knew where I needed to start. I realized right after that realization that we were getting near the end of the session. “Um, in case I forget, could you please make a note to ask me about Puddy next time?”

“Duly noted,” she said, and because she picked up her tablet when she said that I realized that she hadn’t written anything down before that. “On the subject of noting things, I’d like to ask you to try something for next time.”

“Okay,” I said. “What?”

“When I said you should write it down if you find yourself thinking ‘sometimes it just feels like…’, I was only half-joking,” she said. “I’d like you to forget about the sheets and try to keep a journal. Write down what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling. This isn’t homework. You’re not going to be graded on it. You don’t even have to show it to me, but if you do it, it might help you see patterns that you’re missing, or pick up on threads that you’d want to address if only you knew they were there.”

“If therapy and writing are so much like each other, what makes you think I’ll be any better at dealing with a blank page?” I asked.

“Nothing in particular,” she said. “But when one thing doesn’t work, you try another one.”

“I’m sorry I’m so difficult to work with,” I said.

“None of that,” Teddi said. “I told you that you’re not my challenge for the year. You know, a lot of people end up doing the ‘Oh, by the way, here’s what’s really on my mind.’ thing as they’re on the way out the door, and they don’t commit to talking about it next time.”

“I guess I did commit to talking about Puddy, huh?” I said.

“Oh, you can still back out,” Teddi said. “This early in the process, if it comes to a question of you showing up versus staying away in order to avoid dealing with something, I’d rather you show up… and I mean that. Mental healing can be a struggle, but sometimes we have to ease our way towards a place where we have the strength to conduct that struggle. As long as I can tell you’re easing, I’m always going to think it’s worth your time to be here.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll try to remember that.”

“I’ll send you another reminder.”