And why shouldn’t it? He was the single biggest connection I’d made outside my own dorm. Or the biggest one that had been made with me… it had been more his own initiative and Amaranth’s prompting that had put us together.

Maybe years of being isolated had made isolation a habit for me.

At the start of the school year I’d expected my heritage to disqualify me from friendship or even coexistence with anyone who knew about it. That hadn’t proven to be the case, but I still acted like it was. While Two and Shiel were meeting people based on shared interests despite the obstacles they seemed to face, I still mostly worked under the assumption that no one would share mine. When I thought about the people I’d started to get to know outside of class, or even noticed in class, the names I could match with faces were the people who annoyed me the most.

I felt a stab of impatience with myself and realized that I’d spaced off and lost myself in thought while Ian was watching me, waiting for me.

“Ian, hey,” I said, coming up to him. I had an impulse to give him a kiss on the cheek, but as I got nearer it turned into a desire to kiss him full on the lips.

It seemed like it had been a while since I’d felt so self-conscious about displays of affection with Amaranth, and I wasn’t exactly embarrassed… or that embarrassed… by what I was doing with Ian, but I was surprised by my actions. The feeling of connection, of belonging, that I felt to the crowd behind me meant I couldn’t have pretended that we were alone even if Winnie hadn’t been standing right there in the periphery of my vision.

As soon as I became aware of her standing there I felt another impulse, and lifted my leg up. My thought was to wrap it around Ian’s waist, but it turned out that I wasn’t that flexible, especially in my tight jeans. All I could manage was to sort of rub my leg against the side of Ian’s. He ground his approval against me. I was suddenly very conscious of the way my jeans bound to and squeezed my ass when I moved. That thought seemed to summon Ian’s hand, which showed me what squeezing really felt like.

Winnie cleared her throat beside us, and Ian reluctantly separated himself from me.

“What… uh, what brought that on?” Ian asked.

“Don’t know,” I said honestly. “Just felt like it.”

“I think I like your feelings,” he said.

“I feel I like your thinkings,” I said.

Winnie gave an obnoxiously high-pitched sputtering laugh that seemed to shatter my skull like glass, somehow driving each individual shard right into my brain.

“Oh my kosh, you guys are way too cute to be allowed,” Winnie said. “You should forget about dating anyone else and just get married and have a lot of babies.”

“Yeah, no, I’m never having babies,” I said.

“Never say never!” she said.

It wasn’t a joke, but it was the sort of thing that I just knew she would follow with another peal of painful laughter, and for a moment it really seemed like she would. Then, mercifully, she clamped her mouth shut, a slightly confused look on her face. She shook it off, then waved at someone she knew and headed off without another word.

“Do you mind if we… go off somewhere?” I asked Ian.

“I wouldn’t mind that at all,” he said, looking at me with an expression on his face that made me feel both possessed and coveted at the same time. I blushed. It was a humbling look, both in the sense that it humbled me to realize that Ian could feel that strongly about wanting me, and humbling in the sense that it seemed to say, be humble… lower yourself before me.

Looking at him, I couldn’t really sort out how it said that. Had I always been that good at reading his looks? Probably I was just imagining things… it was far more likely that I was just seeing what I wanted, because I found I really did want to do that, to go down on my knees before him right there in the nexus…

I pushed that thought away. From the way Ian’s head cocked back, it seemed like he was fighting off a similar impulse. There were things that we had to discuss.

“I meant to talk,” I said. “First, I mean. We can also… though, I don’t really want… I mean, I kind of want to do some hanging out down here.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “We’ll just tell everyone we need to run upstairs for a minute.”

“I don’t think that’s a great idea,” I said. “Relying on the privacy and security of dorm rooms, I mean.”

“Okay then… um, I guess we could talk outside?” he suggested.

“Oh, right, because the problem with the dorm room is it has too much privacy and security,” I said. “As compared to the open air, in the dark.”

“We’re not going into the dark,” he said. “We’re just going to step outside.” He gestured towards the glass doors behind him, where there was a pretty broad paved expanse lit up. “See? We’ll be well inside the protective glow and in clear view of the public, of which there are a lot of members here, including a giantess with a big magic spear.”

“I suppose that’s true,” I admitted, and he opened the door to usher me out ahead o fhim.

I shrieked and jumped as soon as the blast of cold air hit me… I’d been so focused on the other reasons not to go outside that I hadn’t even been thinking about it. My wonderfully long, warm coat was upstairs.

“Oh, here,” Ian said, shrugging his jacket off and holding it out to me. I was too stunned by the cold to be expecting the gesture, to say nothing of being ready to react to it, and so its soft leather sleeve just brushed against my arm.

Suddenly I wanted to be wearing it, to be wrapped up in the smell and memory of the warmth of Ian’s body, even if such notional warmth would be no match for the actual cold outside.

“Thanks,” I said. I put it on and found that it was heavier and warmer than it had looked. I quickly worked my way through my protective spells.

Ian’s jacket didn’t make for quite as good a focus to hang them on as my own coat did, but they would be better than nothing. Fortified as best as I could be, I headed out into the cold air. If nothing else, I hoped that the frigidity would make it less likely that anybody would come out to see what we were up to, or linger outside if they were just getting back to the dorms.

The eyeless fish-beast was continuing its silent patrol of the sky over campus. Seeing it slither unsupported through the air was unnerving, but at least it didn’t seem to be paying us any special attention.

“Man, that thing is…” Ian said, then shook his head and shivered. “Makes me feel weird.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“Vulnerable, you know?”

“Okay, I guess I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “It’s creepy looking but I doubt it’s going to just attack… it’s supposed to be an ambassador or emissary of some kind, I think.”

“Do we know what that job description entails in the under-realms?” Ian asked. “Anyway, I don’t mean vulnerable like that. More… naked. Unprotected.”

“I do see what you mean, then,” I said. “Pala seemed to think that it can read minds, even extraplanar ones.”

“So it could be hearing our thoughts right now?” Ian said.

“Well, at the point where she said it was doing that, it had actually stopped right above us and was pretty obviously paying attention to us,” I said. “Not just circling around the general area.”

“On that subject, it does seem to be sort of hanging out around here,” Ian said. “Didn’t Dee’s people move her out of Harlowe? Was that just her, or the whole underground contingent?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s getting a read on things while they think about moving back?”

“Could be,” Ian said. “Well, there are two disconcerting ideas right there.”

“What do you mean?”

“The chance that it can hear our thoughts,” he said, “and the somewhat larger chance that it can hear our voices.”

We were kind of looking up and talking at it.

“Do you want to go inside and find somewhere?” Ian asked.

“Let’s talk quietly,” I said. Somehow I didn’t think that the nagging feeling that it could be listening in would vanish just because it was out of sight. At least outdoors, I could tell it wasn’t perched in the air directly above me or anything.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s just move a bit away from the building, all casual-like.”

I leaned into him, clinging to him and let him saunter-walk us over to a point nearer to the edge of the grass than the doors.

“So,” he said, “I think I know what you want to talk about… and I’ve got some things to say, too.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Yeah… about the uh, whole ‘teeth’ thing,” he said. “If anybody else recognizes them, they’re obviously not willing to come forward… at this point, I think you’ve got to act. Morally.”

“I did,” I said.

“I mean you’ve got to tell someone,” he said.

“That’s what I meant, too,” I said. “Through Lee. I shouldn’t really be talking about the specifics, but I wanted you to know that I’d done something… that I made sure the authorities know what’s going on.”

As I said that, it occurred to me that I didn’t actually have any proof of what Mr. Embries had chosen to tell the Imperial investigators. He’d looked so pleased with himself at the press conference… was he playing his own game of some sort?

“Then you have to do it in a way that can’t be ignored or overlooked… and you’re not sure it hasn’t been, I can tell,” Ian said. “This round-about shit isn’t going to cut it, Mackenzie. I know you don’t want to stick out your neck, and believe me, the last thing I want is for you to take any more stupid risks this semester. But you’ve got to get the powers that be to pay attention to your information.”

“They did,” I said. I didn’t know much about the vice-chancellor, but he definitely qualified as a power that be. He definitely had some kind of power and he certainly was. “They are. They are doing so now.”

“They just got done announcing that it was a random monster attack,” Ian said.

“Did you watch the press conference?” I asked, figuring it would make it easier for him to understand why I was sure that something more was going on if he’d been caught in the vice-chancellor’s influence field or whatever. I knew he’d brushed up against it once before, when we’d gone to the administration building to talk to the investigators.

“No, I just heard people talking about it.”

“Well, the vice-chancellor’s got something up his sleeve,” I said. “Remember him?”

“The old guy?”

“Yeah, ‘the old guy’,” I said.

“He didn’t make much of an impression on me,” Ian said. “I only remember that we met him because Amaranth asked me about it a bit later. I guess he made a bigger impression on her… the ‘sexy grandpa’ thing doesn’t do much for me.”

“Ian, you were gasping at him like someone had sucked all the vital force out of the air,” I said. “Your exact response was something like, ‘What was that?’”

“My response was exactly something like that?” Ian said. “I guess I was just curious who he was, since he knew Jenkins.”

I could tell he was being utterly sincere, which was sort of disconcerting. He clearly remembered the incident, so it wasn’t like there was a hole in his memory that his mind was paving over, as Amaranth’s had done when my pitchfork messed with her mind. On the other hand, it was kind of reassuring to know that the effect Embries had on people could be so short-lived… especially if everybody who had been in a class at five got caught in it.

“Well, anyway… the official statement is not going to be the end of it,” I said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I’m sure they’re not actually washing their hands of everything and walking away.”

“And you’re okay with being part of an imperial cover-up,” he said.

“That’s pretty melodramatic,” I said. “But if it is a cover-up, what happens to me if I go public with the information they obviously don’t want getting out?”

“But why don’t they?” Ian asked. “Who benefits by keeping it silent, except the killers?”

“All of them, maybe?” I said, waving my hand back at the nexus. “Us? Everyone who gets to enjoy a relatively peaceful campus instead of more fear and hatred?”

“Things look quiet now, but people aren’t satisfied,” Ian said. “They’re going to want real closure, and that means real action.”

“It’s not a perfect situation, but things are better than they could be,” I said.

“So that’s the moral,” he said. “It’s okay to protect killers if it keeps things nice and cozy for everyone who hasn’t been killed.”

“I’m not formulating a moral here, Ian.”

“Well, maybe you should be,” he said. “What’s the point of all this happening if we can’t learn something from it?”

“I think the possibility of a moral kind of goes away when you start involving actual murder and government machinations and anything more complicated than like a hen who wants a shiny rock, or something,” I said. “The bad things that happen to people aren’t fables, and they’re not cautionary tales.”

“Is it wrong to learn something from it, then?”

“We shouldn’t be treating it as something to be learned from,” I said. “That’s… creepy, and kind of gross.”

“There are a lot of things about this situation are creepy and kind of gross,” Ian said. “I’m not sure that this really qualifies.”

“You don’t want Leda’s death to be ‘in vain’?” I said. “Would using it to… to… provoke a riot make things better for her, somehow?”

“Would it be so bad?” he asked. He seemed to be very weirdly enthralled by the idea, once it was out of my mouth. “Everybody on campus has weapons… everybody’s got a little training. Would it be so terrible to put that into action, to get out there and do something?”

“Yes,” I said. “It would be a riot. It would be terrible for everyone involved, no matter how tangentially, on both sides, by definition.”

“Okay, granted, some people might get hurt in the process, but better to have injuries from a fight than more deaths from a killer whose existence is being hidden,” he said. “People want to do something… they want action. Before the announcement, there was at least the possibility of closure, but now people are thinking that the thing that killed Leda is still out there… and they’re right about that. You could give them some direction.”

“Direction? Riots aren’t exactly known for their ability to pinpoint targets with elven accuracy. And even if nobody gets hurt, they still will have gone through a riot,” I said with growing conviction. “What do you imagine that’s going to be like? It’s not a battle, it’s not warfare… whatever those things are like. It’s getting swept up in anger and bloodshed… and that’s not even getting into the violence they’d inflict.”

“On killers,” Ian said.

“On anyone they perceived to be killers, or anyone who seemed to be in league with killers in the heat of the moment, or anyone who was in their way, or in arm’s reach,” I said.

“How exactly are you such an expert on riots? Did you see a lot of them?”

“No,” I said. I was unprepared for the question, though I also sort of felt like I’d seen it coming. I was unprepared because I really didn’t have an answer. “I don’t know, Ian… it’s just stuff that’s sort of coming to me, you know? But it all makes sense to me. I mean, this campus has been literally torn apart before… it doesn’t seem too hard to imagine that it could happen again. And anyway, even historical riots where a mob was focused on a single actually convicted killer usually wound up having more victims.”

“So we’re back to doing nothing,” Ian said.

“We’re back to leaving it to people who are equipped to do something,” I said. “We’re not heroes, Ian… we’re first year students. We barely know what we’re doing with our own lives. We’re supposed to take responsibility for things that could affect the lives of everyone on campus?”

“You’re already making that sort of decision,” he said.

“I’m deciding to put my trust in people who are more capable,” I said. “The justice system, or at least the government… okay, yes, I admit that it’s already not going quite the way I’d envisioned it, but that’s all the more reason to let someone else handle it. Things are already out of control enough.”

“If you’re not going to act, you’re not going to act,” Ian said. “But believe me when I say that people want action, and there will be action. It’s just up in the air what kind, and who it’ll be against. You could maybe swing that around so it’s at least facing the right direction.”

“Where are you getting this from, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Ian said. “The mood on campus? I wasn’t really prepared to say all this before I came over, but it seems kind of obvious now that we’re talking about it.”

“Well, let’s not talk about it, then,” I said. “Because it seems like we’re just digging up more reasons to disagree… and…”

I blushed as the words that were meant to follow that conjunction caught in my throat. I was thinking of the look Ian had given me before.

“And?” Ian prompted.

“I don’t like to disagree with you,” I said.

“Yeah? You could have fooled me.”

“I have a… habit… of arguing,” I said. “But I don’t know that actually enjoy it, in the sense that it makes my life better or happier or anything… and anyway, that’s not really what I meant.”

“What did you mean, then?” he asked, but I had a feeling he’d caught onto my meaning.

“I don’t like to disagree with you,” I said. “Right now, I’d much rather be… agreeable. Really agreeable.”

“Mackenzie?”

“Yes?”

“Just how much do you trust in the privacy and security of your dorm room?” he asked.

“Enough,” I said.

“Then let’s go inside.”

Soon: Stuff!

Discuss this story on the Livejournal community.

Maybe it was the fact that the nexus hallway was a narrower space than the lunchroom or the venues for the dances I’d been to, and less formal a gathering than the classes I attended… but then, I hadn’t felt this way when Hazel’d had her community potluck on Sunday. I’d been aware of a spirit of togetherness, but it had felt like something external to me… something I could see and maybe touch, but not something I could be included in.

Even when a good number of other students had come together in protest or whatever they’d been feeling when I got banished to the labyrinth, I’d felt more surprised and overwhelmed by the surge of support than I’d felt any real kind of connection to those who’d turned out.

Maybe that had been a mistake… maybe if I’d reached back out more, followed up on that a little bit, I might have been able to carve out more of a place for myself.

“You go to a human university, you can’t expect everything to be your size unless you’re a human,” Oru was saying as we approached.

“Actually…” Pala began, a little bit hesitantly. She seemed eager to speak up, but uncertain of her right to do so… it was easy to see how less invested she was in the topic than the two principal combatants.

“Is it a human university?” Shiel replied. “I mean, it’s definitely human-owned and human-ran, and naturally it’s very humanocentric…”

I could understand Pala’s hanging back from the conversation and her look of mild amusement. The problems of the shorter races might interest her in the abstract, as she had her own version of the same issues to deal with, but she’d have less reason to be emotionally involved than the goblin or kobold.

“Well, naturally. So what are you even arguing for?” Oru asked.

“I didn’t expect… hi, Two!” Pala said, seeing us.

“Hi, Pala. Hi, Hazel,” Two said.

“Hello, Two,” Hazel said. “Pull up a floor and join the, er, fun.”

“As I was…” Pala started to say as we sat down, but Oru and Shiel were too engrossed in their debate to notice.

“Well, the fact that it remains a de facto human institution doesn’t matter,” Shiel said. “The moment they started accepting enrollment from other races, they’ve defined themselves as a university for all of those races, but by not making their facilities and services equally accessible they’ve done so poorly.”

“To hear you speak, I’d think you don’t want them to let anyone in at all,” Oru said.

“No, explicitly excluding other races is its own failing,” Shiel said. “The most that could be said for it is that it’s honest. Here, they’re saying that all races are equal, but they’re rating our needs differently. Their actions have proven…”

“I didn’t expect things to be my size, is what I was saying,” Pala said. “I just said that I would like for them to be so.”

“Well, there you go,” Oru said.

“Wait a second,” I said, adjusting my position… sitting on the floor could be uncomfortable enough, but the sloped floor in the nexus made it even more awkward. “You’re all talking about how big Pala is?”

“I was talking about how small the buildings are,” Pala said.

“Not specifically about her, no,” Shiel said. “She’s merely serving as a convenient example of how humans have prized their own accessibility over others.”

“When I mentioned it, I thought I was talking specifically about me,” Pala said. “Did I say it wrongly?”

“You said it fine, love,” Hazel said. “Goblin-type ears just have a lot of room for words to echo around in.”

“Oh, don’t you start,” Shiel said.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Hazel said.

“I know what you meant, Pala,” Oru said. “And I’ve been inconvenienced for my size, too. But like I said, there’s got to be a practical limit on the amount of special accommodations they can make.”

“I think it’s more of a special accommodation when everything around you,” Shiel said, “the buildings, the doorways, the furniture, the lifts, the bathroom facilities… literally everything is designed specifically to accommodate you and people like you.”

“Isn’t that what you’re asking for?” Oru asked.

“Not for buildings made for any one type of person, no,” Shiel said. “For everyone. If they made a building that was truly accessible to everyone, each accommodation that was made to achieve that goal would be less ‘special’ and more routine.”

“Wouldn’t that get really expensive really fast?” I said.

“Buildings are really expensive to make, I would imagine,” Shiel said. “But people come up with the funds for it if a building needs to be built. That kind of money on a building is considered reasonable, right? Normal. But who defines what’s normal?”

“The people who live there,” Oru said.

“Okay, so if any of you tall folk came back to my warren, or Oru’s village, or the shire of Logfallen, you wouldn’t be able to get around very well,” Shiel said. “You wouldn’t be able to walk through any of the portals, or fit in furniture… well, we don’t really use ‘furniture’… but you wouldn’t be able to stand up in our tunnels. And it wouldn’t be because we did anything to exclude you. We just constructed them the way we normally do. Our definition of normal excludes non-kobolds.”

“Well, again, there you go,” Oru said. “It’s not on purpose, it’s not to keep anyone out… it’s just doing what you’d do normally. Can we ask for more?”

“If we don’t, we deserve what we get,” Shiel said. “My point is that what’s ‘normal’ is entirely up to the people making the definition, so there’s no reason it can’t be defined more broadly.”

“So why not start at home?” Oru asked. “Why not start digging bigger warrens?”

“If I had any input on warren construction… or much of anything else… maybe I would. But our warrens are inaccessible for reasons of self-protection, and self-determination,” Shiel said.

“And humans don’t get to self-determine?” Oru asked.

“‘Human society’, by nature of their imperialistic impulses, is intrinsically pluralistic,” Shiel said. “Their culture touches and envelops a lot of other races. What we do in our mining communities by ourselves is different than what humans do. If we went so far as to put up a sign that said ‘No humans allowed!’, would it make a difference to anyone? Humans don’t have to pass through our tunnels to get anywhere. Humans aren’t surrounded by our warrens. And as a race they’ve shown a tendency to go into other peoples’ lands and do whatever they want anyway.”

“Well, if you’re talking about what’s fair, why does it matter how many humans need to pass through your mines?” Oru asked. “If it’s the principle of the thing you ought to make sure humans and giants and orcs and gelatinous thingies can fit comfortably in your tunnels anyway.”

“If we were inviting humans and ogres and ‘thingies’ into our warrens and these warrens were the only source of certain advantages they would need to get along in a kobold-dominated world, then yes, it would be horribly unfair of us not to accommodate them,” Shiel said.

“Aren’t you maybe overstating the case?” I said. “I mean, I think in general I’d agree with your side over Oru’s, but humans control something like less than twenty percent of the land on the surface of the world, and most of that’s split between two empires that haven’t exactly gotten along that well, historically.”

“Okay, a human-dominated continent,” Shiel said. “Or sphere of influence. The Imperium surrounds or borders every kobold warren known to us in this part of the world. It would take about ten percent of the Imperial military forces to wipe out every one of those communities in under a year.”

“Oh, you’re making that up,” Oru said.

“No… it is just an estimate, obviously, but it’s based on the actual strength of the imperial armed forces, the typical defenses of a kobold warren, and historical engagements between human and kobold forces on kobold turf,” Shiel said. “We don’t have the same capabilities as dwarves. We don’t have their same investment in and knowledge of shielding and secrecy runes, in traps, or fortifications. No matter how much we dig in, we could be dug out. All of which means that humans will never have to worry about us the way we have to worry about them.”

“Why would you ever sit down and figure out something like that in the first place?” Honey asked. “It’s so… morbid.”

“I think about it because they think about it,” Shiel said. “You don’t think the imperial government has done studies and war games and divinations to figure out how to permanently pacify or eliminate the other races that share its domain?”

“You’re looking well, Honey,” I interjected. Up closer, she was noticeably down a little weight and a little sleep, but she seemed relaxed, almost relieved. In fact, it was hard to say how exactly but now that she’d drawn attention to herself she was practically radiating an almost tangible sense of relief.

“Oh, I’m just glad the whole thing… well, it’s nice to know it was just a monster attack, you know?” Honey said. She hiccuped, or giggled. “Not a murder after all.”

Any guilt I might have felt from not immediately divulging the truth was wiped out by seeing how much calm the idea gave her. Perhaps that was a good sign for the campus mood. After contemplating the implications of a horrible murder, “just a monster attack” didn’t seem so bad.

“Look, the thing we’re overlooking is that this was an all-human university,” Oru said. “They made the choice to open it up to all races. Doesn’t that say something? About their willingness to accommodate? About their intentions?”

“I think inviting members of every race to come to your university but not making it fully accessible to them says something, alright,” Shiel said. “It says that it’s all still yours. I mean, apart from the university’s actual owners, who do you think has the greatest sense of ownership, of belonging: the human students, or the non-humans?”

“Is that a real question?” Oru asked. “This university was built and founded and run by humans, and it’s in the middle of a human empire. Obviously humans are going to feel more at home. Not that I feel particularly unwelcome… I mean, I can be made to feel unwelcome in a room with no humans in it as easily as one that’s full of humans. I just think it’s more a matter of… economics, I guess you’d say. I think a lot of it is.”

“A lot of what is?” Sheil asked.

“The stuff you talk about,” Oru said. “All the racism you think is everywhere. Doesn’t it really come down to money and power?”

“Well, yes… it comes down to power, and money is a form of that,” Shiel said. “Racism without power would just be prejudice. Ugly, but irrelevant.”

“Except I don’t think it’s about race,” Oru said. “I mean, okay, yes… some people don’t like goblins. I call that racism. You’d probably call it prejudice. But it’s not like I care what some hairy, round-faced breast ape thinks I look like, right?”

“But human attitudes matter because they’ve got the power,” Shiel said. “Including most of the money.”

“Okay, yeah, right now there’s a lot of money in human hands, but they’ve got a lot more hands than we do, and they’ve been collecting money for longer,” Oru said. “As a race, I mean. But a rich goblin who didn’t want to live in the lowlands could go and buy a house on a hilltop, or a townhouse in the city…”

“Or a cityhouse in the town,” Hazel added.

“…or whatever… and there are poor humans, who are way worse off than anyone in my village,” Oru said. “I mean, everybody there has a house. I doubt the humans treat them any better than they treat us.”

“So there’s classism and racism,” Shiel said. “I don’t know why you think this is better than just racism.”

“I don’t think it’s racism and… classism,” Oru said. “I don’t even think there’s that much classism, unless that’s a fancy word for ‘some people have more money than you do’. But I also just don’t think there’s as much racism as you think there is.”

“Um… didn’t you tell me that you didn’t like going out at night because you were afraid of being attacked by fighter students?” I asked her. I had to wonder how much her current stance was being informed by her desire to disagree with the extremity of Shiel’s position. I had a hunch that left to her own devices she’d be less sanguine about the general state of human race relations and on-campus equality… but when Shiel said something too extreme for her to support, she ended up arguing against the whole thing.

“Yes, but… that’s just people being stupid,” Oru said. “Thinking ‘goblin equals monster equals kill it!‘ But it’s not like I walk into a sweet shop and the shopkeeper says, ‘Oh, you’re a monster. I can’t take your coppers because monsters are for killing.’”

“So you’re fine with the idea that you might get randomly killed for your race as long as you can buy sweets?” Shiel said.

“I’m not ‘fine’ with being killed, but it’s dangerous outside for everyone,” Oru said. “More humans get killed by ghouls, so I suppose that ghouls are racist against humans?”

“Hold on, now,” Hazel said, in a surprisingly serious voice. I could almost feel something shifting inside her, like a card had been flipped over or a puzzle piece had locked into place. “I think you’ve got a point, Oru, but I don’t think it’s the one you mean to make.”

“What do you mean?” Oru asked.

“Oh, this should be good,” Shiel said.

“I mean, we’ve the same sorts of problems in my shire, only we’re sort of an insular lot, so it’s all one race, see? But there are definitely what you’d call ‘class divisions’, and you see the same sorts of things you’re talking about across the classes.”

“Not really,” Honey said. “I think our society’s really very… egalitarian. I mean, we did away with most noble titles before the Imperium did, and peasantry before that. I think it’s like Oru said: some people just have more money. You have to expect that, unless you do away with money entirely… but it’s not like money plays favorites.”

“Just because we stopped naming the classes doesn’t mean they went away, Honey,” Hazel said. “Or that people don’t know them. Look at your family. Look at mine.”

“We’re cousins, Hazel. We are family.”

“You know what I mean,” Hazel said. “Your folks. My folks. You could put them in a line, with you at the front, us at the back, and most any random folks from town falling somewhere in between us. That’s class.”

“If you think the folks in town looked down on you, Hazel, it might be because of the way you walked around like you had a chip on your shoulder all the time,” Honey said.

“Are you saying your folks didn’t look down on my dad and me?”

“Well, if you want to bring that up… but if that’s a matter of class, Hazel, it’s that your father didn’t have any class, of the other kind, and you didn’t have the chance to pick any up from him,” Honey said. “And that’s sad, but that sort of class is something a person of any station can acquire, not a… social… division… thingy.”

“Except…” Shiel said. “Except that it’s not really a different sort, is it? It still refers to social standing.”

“It is,” Honey said. “I meant class as in classy, as in… classiness.”

“Yes, but that means ‘having class’,” Shiel said. “You see, ‘classy manners’ are manners associated with people ‘of a certain class’. Anybody can learn them, but if your parents have them, you learn them growing up. If everybody else around you shows them, then that becomes like your idea of what normal default behavior is. The fact that it’s a special advantage you possess that others don’t doesn’t even occur to you.”

“Some advantage,” Honey said. “It’s just… one way of behaving. So what if Hazel learned other ways? Is she really worse off because she doesn’t know how to fold a napkin?”

“Hey now! I fold them better than you do,” Hazel said.

“She is pretty good at that,” Two added.

“Well, yeah, because you practiced it every day all summer long after my mum said something about it,” Honey said.

“After she snapped my head off, more like, ” Hazel said.

“The point is that you practiced it and you got better at it, and anybody could do that,” Honey said.

“The point is that your ‘classy’ behaviors act like a filter,” Shiel said. “Keeping the ‘right’ sort of people above the ‘wrong’ sorts… it can be used to sort out who gets dinner invitations, who’s allowed into the ‘respectable’ establishments… if the class stigma’s strong enough, that becomes self-policing as people who don’t know the etiquette end up staying away for fear of embarrassment…”

“Is it anybody else’s fault if they do?” Honey said.

“Yes. It’s the fault of people who would use social stigma as a weapon,” Shiel said. “These are just some examples of how people of a lower class end up with reduced opportunities.”

“Oh, yes, right,” Hazel said, nodding. “I could talk all day about ‘reduced opportunities’ compared to Honey.”

“That’s not ‘reduced opportunities’, that’s just being poor,” Honey said.

“Trust me, Honey, that reduces your opportunities,” Hazel said.

I found myself nodding along with Hazel. Growing up with less money than everyone else in your class was an almost daily lesson in “reduced opportunities”. I wasn’t sure how much of it came down to class… my grandmother was respected and “the right sort of people” in the eyes of most, and she owned her own home even if she’d never exactly rich, but her respectability hadn’t in any way been passed down onto her daughter the single mother.

“Alright, then, so it’s reduced opportunities to spend money,” Honey said. “If you’ve got one gold and I’ve got ten gold, then I can buy ten times as much. Stands to reason.”

“Yeah,” Oru said. “Stands to reason.”

“Yeah, only maybe there are more things in the world that will do you lasting good that and cost ten gold than cost one,” Hazel said. “Maybe we each need one gold for food to live on and here comes a thrilling investment opportunity that costs nine more. Or even one more. I couldn’t… if I couldn’t afford to come to university, you’d have an opportunity I don’t.”

“So? You can make a good living without a university education,” Honey said. “I was thinking about being a teacher, once. You just need to know your figures and your letters to teach the young ones.”

“You think anybody ‘proper’ would have let me teach their children?” Hazel said. “Assuming I could even live on what they give the schoolteachers.”

“Well, money’s not everything.”

“No, just food and shelter and decent clothing and anything else,” Hazel said.

“Miss Ruth told me the best things in life are free,” Two said.

“Yeah? Did she say that as she took money out of your pockets?” Hazel asked.

“No,” Two said. “She said ‘Best I hold onto that for you’ when she did that.”

“Is she keeping a lot of your money safe, then?” Hazel asked.

“Not anymore,” Two said. “I donated it to Hearts of Clay.”

“I’d ask another question but I don’t think I’d like the answer,” Hazel said. “Anyway… my point is that there’s class, and it’s real, and it doesn’t need race to make a mess of things. Though I’m pretty sure race is in there, too… tallfolk don’t even know about river people, and they still look at me like I’m not there.”

“It’s all real and it’s all related,” Shiel said. “Lower class correlates with less money, which is less power, and class tend to correlate strongly with races, even intraraces.”

“Whatra-races?” Oru said.

“Like hobgoblins and goblins,” Shiel said. “Or arguably, hobgoblins, kobolds, and goblins.”

“Oh, sub-races,” Oru said.

“I don’t like the connotations of that word,” Shiel said. “I am not sub-goblin.”

“I didn’t say you are,” Oru said. “It’s just a word… the proper one. Hobgoblins, kobolds, and goblins are all sub-races of the same race.”

“And what race is that?”

“Well… goblin, I guess,” Oru said. “That’s why we’re called ‘goblinoids’.”

“We’re called ‘goblinoids’ by humans because they met you first,” Shiel said.

“Yes, and so if they’d met you first we’d be koboldoids,” Oru said. “Do you think I’d be complaining?”

“Honestly? No.”

“Well, there you go!” Oru said. “And you don’t have anything to complain about. ‘Teeth and claws may rend my flesh’… is there a way to make that rhyme in Pax?”

A couple of human girls, one with sandy hair and freckled skin… and maybe just a trace of La Belle ancestry in her face, though that could have been my imagination… and the other with dark hair in long, tight braids… had wandered over and were standing a few feet away, listening to the conversation.

“Oh, hello, Irene,” Shiel said when she noticed them. She said the name with a long e audible on the end.

“Hello, Shiel,” the darker-toned girl said with a distinct Metropolitan accent. It was so weird hearing those vowels coming out of a person over three feet tall. “This is my friend I was telling you about, Jeanie?”

“Hi,” the other girl said.

“Oh, right, you wanted to trade soldiers,” Shiel said. It seemed like such a random thing to say, until I realized she was talking about her game.

“Well, yeah,” Jeanie said. She gave a nervous little laugh. “The only thing is, I don’t have any soldiers, yet…”

“Oh, well, I do sell them, but I’ve kind of got a backlog for that,” Shiel said. “I’ll do a trade if it gives me something I can use immediately, but otherwise I’d end up selling my way right out of the game, and I’m not prepared to do that for any price.”

“Oh, yeah, I can respect that. The thing is that I don’t have any soldiers,” Jeanie said, “but I’ve been making… landscapes, I guess… for Irene and she said you might like them?”

“What kind of landscapes? Do you mean battlefields?”

“They’re painted mats,” Jeanie said. “You can roll them up like a poster… I made the first one for a class. I use memory parchment, so you can switch it between two different pictures I made, one that’s more open and one that has a lot of trees, and if you touch two points with fingers on different hands it’ll show you the distance between them. The next one I got fancier… it does that, and you can also turn on a grid if you just want to be able to eyeball it.”

“Interesting,” Shiel said, and to my shame I almost agreed with her. Interactive maps were a lot more interesting than make-believe warfare. “Detailed maps are awesome, but the problem is that even if you can toggle between two of them, that’s two identical maps that you’re going to be fighting on again and again. It might be nice to be able to re-fight the same battle with different forces, but I like being able to change things up more.”

“Oh, well, that was just my first attempt,” Jeanie said. “My second one had three maps stored in it, and I copied the shape of a skirmish field for it… so you can rotate it and get six different starting positions. I had another brainwave while I was working on it… too late to work on it… but for my third map I cut the memory parchment into smaller sections and then attached them together, so you have a bunch of different sections that you can change independently of each other.”

“How long have you been working on these?” Shiel asked.

“Three days,” Jeanie said. “I get an idea in my head and it tends to take over, you know? I use the clone and stamp brushes a lot, but I have a good variety of trees and things because each one I have everything I’ve done before to draw on plus whatever new I make. Anyway, each section of my newest map has five different landscapes… I couldn’t make them too different because the edges have to match up or it looks all blocky.”

“Couldn’t you get around that by not permanently attaching the sections?” I asked. “Just leave the pieces separate and let people put them where they want. If you did it that way, you’d have an easier time trading, too… you wouldn’t have to finish a whole five-way map for each person you wanted to trade with.”

“I don’t know how thick this memory parchment is, but it seems like that might be messy,” Shiel said. “It seems like they’d be easy to move or scatter.”

“I guess I could attach them to cardstock or board or something,” Jeanie said. “I’m trying to find a way around the sectioning, though, because I’m looking at ways of putting more special effects in, like fires and poison clouds and things… that’s going to be hard enough if I’m not enchanting a hundred sheets individually for each map or whatever.”

“Well, then you either make a transparent overlay that you put over the whole map, or a baseboard enchanted to display the effects a short distance above it,” I said. “I don’t think I could do it, but I can see how it would be done. You’d just need a bunch of conditionals and tiny little illusions, or something. Illusions are generally pretty cheap. It would still be a lot more work than just storing paintings in memory parchment.”

“True,” she said. “And honestly, if I made all of them do that I’d never have any finished for trading. If I could figure out a way to copy them without losing the quality.”

“What about that clone brush you mentioned?” Shiel asked.

“Oh, it’s good for picking up a few inches from here and putting it there,” she said. “But I’d need something a lot more heavy-duty to retain a whole painting, even a square foot at a time, with the level of color and detail I use. The school’s autoscribes just aren’t set up for that kind of thing… I mean, nobody outside of publishing houses has that kind of equipment just lying around.”

“Or bored enchanters,” I said. “Hey, Two,” I said, right at the same time that Hazel did.

“I believe I could copy your paintings, Jeanie,” Two said.

“She wants twenty-five percent,” Hazel said. “Cash goes to her, any figures you get in trade you can give to me and I’ll pay her for them.”

“I’d have to see what you can do first,” Jeanie said.

“Yeah, that goes for me to you,” Shiel said. “But if they’re workable I think we could come to an arrangement.”

“They’re more than workable,” Irene said. “Believe me, she paints like you carve.”

“With a chisel?” Pala said.

“You two are in the apartments out on west campus?” Shiel asked, and they nodded.

“Yeah, in the senior housing. We’re crashing in Pelinor tonight, I think,” Irene said. “You could walk back with us with tomorrow morning if you want, or we could make a time to bring one of the maps over?”

“That’s a long walk for me, and I’ve got class in the morning,” Shiel said. “But I should be in my room from three on… it’s top floor, east side, last door on the right before the lounge.”

“Cool,” Irene said. “I also wanted to talk to you about this meeting that some of us are brewing up for a new campus group… we don’t have a faculty sponsor yet so it’s not official, but this is just kind of a planning thing…”

“Oh, there is Ian,” Pala said, pushing herself up and craning her neck uphill. I looked up and saw that Ian had indeed entered through the doors at the back of the hall. He was with Winnie, Puddy’s cousin with the annoying laugh. “Did I tell you he said he was coming?”

“No,” I said, trying not to scowl at his choice of company… or the fact that he had any. I wanted to talk to him about what had happened in the bathroom with Iona, which would necessitate going off alone with him. “It’s okay. Excuse me, I’ve got to go tell him… hi.”

I’d given up on trying to make up an excuse at the last moment, when it had occurred to me that I could just say I was going to say hi to him and it wouldn’t be suspicious at all. That information had arrived a few seconds too late to be useful, and I blushed at the awkward sentence that had fallen out of my mouth.

“Ah… young love,” Irene said, grinning. “Fresher, right? Were we ever that young?You go run and tell him ‘hi’, then.”

Apparently awkwardness was the perfect camouflage in some settings.

Soon: Ian and Mackenzie quibble over word meanings. And there’s sex. It’s almost like something that might happen in Tales of MU. Later: Puddy.

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“Is everything okay?” Ian asked her.

“So far,” she said. “I need to talk to my Mack later, about something… but you guys have fun, okay?”

“About what?” I asked. As if I didn’t have enough to be worried about already without one more thing hanging over my head… well, okay, so it was probably statistically likely that what she wanted to talk to me about was just one of the things that was already hanging over my head. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing!” she said. “Nothing new, I mean… I just think that maybe we might want to have a talk with Ian about a few things, before… before tomorrow.”

“Before tomorrow?” Ian said. “That would be tonight.”

“I mean, before tomorrow night,” Amaranth said. “I want to talk to Mack about some things so that we can talk to you, probably sometime tomorrow during the day, before it’s too…morrow night.”

“Before it’s too ‘morrow night’ for what, exactly?” Ian asked.

“Nothing, probably!” Amaranth said. “Hopefully… probably. Almost definitely. But I don’t want to just blurt it all out, I need to talk to Mack about it first.”

“Wow, you all have some complicated lives,” Winnie said, and then she giggled nervously. I winced. I was getting a headache.

“Can you excuse us?” Ian said. “Mackenzie wanted to dance.”

“Oh, sure,” Amaranth said. “Please, go on… enjoy yourselves.”

We moved away from Winnie and her, but instead of putting his arms back around me, Ian said, “So what is it she wants to talk to me about, eventually?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Could be a couple of different things…”

“Oh, that’s good to know.”

“I don’t want to talk about anything right now,” I said. “I just want to dance, okay?”

As I said that, the nice slow love song that was playing hit a long sustained note and then faded away. A peppy faux-elven song with a fast crystal bell beat started playing… it wasn’t my kind of thing at all, but I tried moving my arms a little bit. Ian made a valiant effort to get into the groove, but his heart just wasn’t into it, and I was just not enough of a natural dancer to keep it up without someone to dance back at.

As we were not talking and I didn’t have anything else to distract me, my eyes took in the crowd. There was a group of girls… Argenti, or probably Argenti-Imperials… sitting on one of the couches by the nearer the edge of the dance area. They were wearing feathered and beaded masks and stylish dresses, like it was a real masquerade ball and not a Veil party full of college students.

I felt a twinge of envy… they’d obviously spent some time planning things out, and then selecting just the right masks and outfits to set them off. Ian had made a good effort at coming up with a costume, but it was cheap and gaudy and while that was very much in the spirit of the occasion I felt like if I’d just made a little effort a little earlier, I could have come up with something more… well, just something more.

I made up my mind not to leave it to the last minute, next time… whether “next time” was another costume party or whatever. I’d be ready.

They looked poised and confident… one wearing black just radiated the kind of cool self-assurance that normally left me feeling tiny and insignificant. Maybe I was maturing a little, but it didn’t bother me. If anything, I caught a little of it myself. I felt a bit less self-conscious and started moving a little bit more.

I felt kind of good… dancing felt kind of good, and it was better than standing there moping about stuff I couldn’t do a thing about at the moment. I had the weirdest flash of deja vu at that feeling, but it didn’t last long.

“Guess you caught the bug finally,” Ian said, as we both picked up the pace a little.

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. I gave him a smile, raised my hands and shook my hips a little bit… it felt weird, but it must not have looked terrible because he moved in a little closer.

“Somebody slip you a potion?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I just… maybe it’s the fact that it’s Veil? It was my favorite when I was a kid. My mom said…” I trailed off, something connecting in my head. “I guess that’s it.”

“You guess what’s what?”

“Why I felt so good all of a sudden,” I said.

“Because it’s Veil?” he asked.

“No, because… well, it’s kind of silly,” I said.

“What?”

“I just kind of feel like I did when I got home from school and I wasn’t feeling so great, but my mom would give me a smile and… well, it was hard to be sad around my mom. I don’t know if that makes any kind of sense.”

“Sure it does,” Ian said. “She was your mom.”

We danced our way through a few songs. People came and went, the occupants of the couch changed a couple of times, but eventually we’d moved out more towards the middle of the floor.

I was doing a pretty good job of avoiding looking at Puddy, but in doing so I caught sight of Trina and her body-painted friend, half-dancing next to each other while Trina ran her mouth… I really couldn’t understand the appeal of body paint, in a school full of glamour students. I might have supposed that Semele just plain didn’t know anyone who could glam her, but I thought Trina and Mariel were semi-tight. I couldn’t imagine she wouldn’t have tipped Gladys off.

And it was a lame costume. I might have been wearing a fur bikini, but at least I was something. She was just… naked and green and glittery. There was a whole crowd of guys dancing around her. Some of them weren’t even dancing, just standing there and ogling her.

“Who are you staring at?” Ian asked. He started to move around me.

“I’m just looking, not staring,” I said. “At Gladys, the painted girl… and don’t you look, she’ll think we’re staring.”

“Oh, we wouldn’t want that.”

“How come she gets all those guys hanging off her, anyway?” I asked.

“Do you want more guys hanging off you?” Ian replied.

“I mean, compared to Amaranth,” I said. I looked back over at her and saw that since we left her, she had attracted a guy or three, but they weren’t staring at her body with as much open interest as Gladys was attracting, and one of them actually seemed to be looking at Winnie for some reason. “When there’s a completely nude and incredibly gorgeous nymph around, why would anyone…”

“You’re doing it again,” Ian said. “Or maybe still.”

“What?”

“Do you even know that girl?” he said. “Or are you just ragging on her because you don’t like her friend?”

“They don’t like me,” I said.

He stopped dancing and just stared at me.

“What?” I said.

“Mackenzie, I don’t mean to be… mean, but… did you have any friends in high school?”

“Yeah, everyone wanted to be friends with the cool demon girl,” I said. “I didn’t.”

“How about elementary school?”

“I don’t know, I guess I was just pretty much normal, I guess,” I said. “I wasn’t, you know, the super-popular one, but I kind of turned around the age that stuff gets really pronounced, anyway. But I had friends. School friends, anyway.”

“You were, what… nine when it happened?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh,” he said.

“What?”

“Well, you kind of act like a third grader about this stuff sometimes,” he said. “I just wonder if maybe that’s got something to do with it.”

“You really think I act like a third grader?”

“Um… sometimes,” he said. “About certain things. Don’t get all mad…”

“I’m not all mad,” I said. “I’m hurt.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t be,” he said. “I’m not just saying this to be a dick, Mackenzie.”

“Yes, the fact that you really mean it makes it less hurtful,” I said.

“I just thought that maybe if I pointed out what you were doing, you could learn to recognize it when you do it yourself, and that could be the first step in, you know… not doing it,” he said.

“So now you’re trying to fix me?” I said.

“No,” he said. “I’m not that stupid. But I am stupid enough to think I can help you, if you want to fix yourself. Or, you know, make a personal improvement… maybe that’s a better way to put it.”

“Just answer me straight up,” I said. “Do you even like me?”

“I like you plenty, a lot of the time,” he said. “I’d like to like you more often. But what I’d really like is if you were…”

“If I were what, exactly?” I asked.

“Happier.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. Righteous anger had been ready as my default, but that wasn’t going to work.

“Mackenzie, I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have…”

“No,” I said. “You’re right. It isn’t fun being like that… I guess my first reaction is to defend whatever it is I’m doing, but if I stop and actually look at it, I’m not really proud of myself.” I sighed. It didn’t seem likely that I’d be able to recapture the same feeling I’d had before I spotted Trina. “Maybe I should go.”

“Well, you shouldn’t be proud… but you don’t have to beat yourself up over it, either,” Ian said. “I mean, punishing yourself for it isn’t going to change what happened… is it going to actually change anything next time?”

“I don’t know, I like to think that Amaranth’s helped me change some,” I said. “A little, anyway.”

“Okay, but does she do that by making you feel even shittier about yourself, or because she gives you something to aim for?” he asked. “Come on… this is your first Veil party as a grown-up.”

“So I should act like one?”

“So you should enjoy it,” he said. “It’s a party. Dance. Meet people

“You know what?” I said. “I think maybe part of the problem is that even here, even when I go out, I’m not really meeting new people. I mean, you try… but a big campus party, or the drama students on lunch hour… there’s too many people. I’m not good with big groups. So I don’t really connect with anyone.”

“Winnie tried to connect with you.”

“Yeah, well, Winnie bugs me,” I said. “And maybe that’s not her fault, and maybe it’s not fair to her, and maybe I’m a horrible person, but I can’t just turn off a dislike like that.”

“Semele tried to connect with you,” he said. He smiled a little.

“Semele sounded more interested in disconnecting with me,” I said. “Maybe… maybe next week, we should do something together with people. Not like this, going to a place where other people are, but… you know. An activity. You know?”

“Oh, sure, all the kids are doing activities these days,” Ian said. “It’s the hot new thing.”

“Smartass,” I said. “I mean something like that time we played cards, only, you know, pick people you actually like and not, you know, the people who happen to be in your dorm and are antisocial enough to not have anything else to do on the weekend.”

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll do that, and this time, you don’t get drunk and try to eat and/or have sex with anyone.”

“This is it,” I said. “We have concocted the best plan ever.”

We both had a good, only semi-awkward laugh at that… but somehow that seemed to make Winnie’s laugh at something unrelated cut across the dance floor and find my ear.

“Hey, can we just get out of here?” I said.

“What, you want to go back to your room already?”

“No, just for a bit,” I said.

“You mean go outside? Aren’t you going to be cold?”

“Probably, but I just really need to get out of here,” I said. “Not for long… probably just until the cold makes me miserable enough to forget why I left here.”

“Okay,” Ian said, looking around. “Amaranth has your coat?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Could you please go get it for me?”

“Um, yeah, I don’t see her,” he said. I looked over to see that Winnie was talking to Semele, who looked like she’d just got out of the shower. “I could go look for her if you want, but I wouldn’t look very hard because I’m afraid I’d find her.”

“Maybe we can just go hang out in the hallway,” I said… right as a group of latecomers let out a bunch of screams.

“Oh, that’ll be fun,” he said. “Listen, this is a dorm… there’s going to be lounges on the floors, if you want to go up and just sit down somewhere quieter.”

“But are we allowed to just…”

“Oh, don’t do that,” Ian said. “I’m sure if we looked really carefully in the rulebooks there would be some little thing about students who are residents of a hall and hours of visitation or whatever, but… they’re hosting a party. They know there are going to be people who don’t live here hanging around.”

“Okay,” I said. “I just… I don’t like feeling like I’m going out of bounds.”

“Well, if we get up there and see a sign with a skull-and-crossbones on it, we’ll know to turn back,” Ian said. “Or else, you know, proceed with a lot of caution.”

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She shrugged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Winnie Champlain,” she said.

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

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

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

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

“He has brown hair,” Amaranth said.

“Brownish-blond?”

“No, more like a dark chestnut.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”

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

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

“Winnie’s?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“It is a little infectious,” he said.

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

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

“Winnie Champlain is not pretty,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Be serious,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

“What letters?”

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

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

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

“Puddy’s not just slightly annoying.”

“She’s naked.”

“No, she’s… what?”

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

I let go of Ian and he turned around.

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

“Looks like,” I said.

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

There was a commotion out on the dance floor.

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

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

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

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

The rest was unintelligible blubbers.

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

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

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

“Funny,” I said.

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

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

“Yes, but… nymph,” Amaranth said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know anything about that.”

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

I felt a cool hand touch my neck.

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

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

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

Amaranth gave her a pleasant but fixed smile.

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

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

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

“True feelings?” Amaranth said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“I guess I’ll see you in a few minutes,” he said.

“Yeah, it won’t take that long… I don’t actually have to go,” I said. “At all. Ever.”

“Me, neither,” Amaranth said. She glanced at the ladies’ room door. “But you know what? Maybe we should look at this as a social experience, like it is for most girls. We could just go and… freshen up.”

“But you’re basically permanently fresh,” I said. “What are we going to do, go in and wash our hands and then come out? That‘s not exactly a new experience.”

“I don’t know, baby, I’ve seen your fingernails,” Amaranth said. She sighed. “Okay, I guess it would be kind of silly… not every new experience is created equal.”

The two of us ducked inside the bathroom… it was crowded slightly out of proportion with the density outside. Far from it being a social experience, I felt a bit like an intruder or an impostor, since I didn’t really need the facilities and I had never been part of the international sorority of nose-powderers. Rather than taking up a stall, I just turned to face the wall so I could let go of my cape and slip my bikini bottom back on without flashing anyone.

“You still want that slow dance?” I asked Ian when we got outside.

“Yeah, um, now that we’re over here, I do kind of have to go,” Ian said. “Sorry.”

“Well, we’ll just wait here,” Amaranth said, taking my hand and pulling me out of the path of the door.

Ian headed into the guys’ bathroom. From the edge of the room we had a pretty good view of the whole place, including the people coming in… some of them looked pretty nervous about stepping through the wall of shadow, but some of them were laughing and talking like they did it every year. They probably did. If the Veil Ball used a similar set-up every time, it could even very possibly be a class project.

“Oh, will you look at that?” Amaranth said, as a girl… an elven girl, though it was a little harder than normal to tell… came through with a large group of people. She was wearing something skintight and possibly not all that large, but it was hard to tell because she’d painted it and her exposed skin like a cheetah. At least, it looked like it was probably paint… it was a bit too glisteny and not textured enough to be a good glamour.

“That must have taken some dedication,” Amaranth said.

“A glamour would have been easier,” I said.

“Don’t be so negative, baby… sometimes doing things the hard way can be more rewarding.”

“A glamour would look better, too.”

“Maybe she was going for stylized over realistic?” Amaranth said. “It could be that she was going for that specific effect.”

“Well, a glamour could do that, too,” I said. “In fact, it could be a glamour.”

“I want to go meet her.”

“What? Why?” I asked.

“Because she has a cool costume,” Amaranth said. “Because I want her to hear from at least one person who appreciates what she’s done as art and doesn’t just grumble about how a glamour would be better. Anyway, this is a party… we should be talking to people outside our usual little circle.”

“But… Ian,” I said. “And you said we should go talk to people we know.”

“If you see someone else you’d rather talk to… anyway, looks like they’re headed over here,” Amaranth said, and a big cluster of the girls were indeed making a beeline for the bathrooms, including the cheetah-elf and another girl… who I recognized a moment too late as Winnie. I realized who the be-spotted elf was a moment later… right as she was recognizing me.

“Oh, this is just perfect,” I said as Semele did a big theatrical lip-licking and stalked over towards us.

“Oh, do you know her?” Amaranth asked.

“I met her once,” I said. “It was enough.”

“Don’t be rude,” Amaranth said. “She can probably hear you.”

To my surprise and momentary relief, Semele ignored me completely… momentary because she instead grabbed Amaranth by the arm and started pulling her away.

“Hey!” I said, grabbing her other arm.

“It’s okay, baby,” she said. “Just give me… seven minutes and forty seconds, okay?”

I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t as though Semele could do anything to hurt Amaranth permanently… and Ian had suggested that her creepiness was more of a put-on than anything else.

I couldn’t really object to Amaranth doing her job, though… it seemed like people approached her less and less while we were together, the longer we were together. So, I just stood there, waiting for her or Ian to come back. I tried not to look around too much, because the first time I did, Winnie caught my eye and I thought she was about to come over.

Eventually she did, anyway… so gingerly that she was practically tiptoeing.

“Um, hey… that was your nymph-friend that Mel went off with, right?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“And… she’ll, you know, do it… with anyone, right?” she said. “I mean… sex?”

“She’s a nymph,” I said. “It’s not like it means… anything bad.”

“Oh, I know!” she said. “I just mean… she’s not going to turn Mel down?”

“Probably not unless she… actually, I don’t know how to finish that sentence,” I said. “No, she won’t.”

“Oh, good,” Winnie said. “She has… well… she’s not very good at that kind of thing, and it really affects her self-esteem problems.”

“Maybe if she found some new pick-up lines, she wouldn’t have that kind of issue,” I said.

“Maybe,” she said. “Being a copper can’t be easy, though.”

“Copper?” I repeated.

“Yeah,” she said. “You did notice she was a copper, right?”

“Huh?”

“Copper elf?” Winnie said. “You know… reddish-blonde hair, slightly tan… well, slightly less fair, anyway?”

“I actually didn’t notice that,” I said. “And I’ve never heard of ‘copper elves’.”

“Oh, yeah, the old world elves pretty much bred them out completely,” Winnie said. “Even over here, most of the elves are descendants of the silver and gold elves. But there are some small populations of copper elves up north, and even around here there are a few elves with copper features.”

“Are you making this stuff up?” I asked. “Other than, you know the big above/below split, elves are a pretty homogenous bunch. They don’t really come in ‘types’.”

“Well, not so much any more,” Winnie said. “I mean, they’ve got a very narrow standard of beauty. But they used to come in all sorts of colors… there were gold elves and silver elves, and copper elves and bronze elves and wood elves…”

“All elves are ‘wood’ elves,” I said. “I mean, the surface ones.”

“Well, after the breed disappeared, a lot of people assumed that term just meant ’elves who live in the woods’, which is all of them, but the original phrase referred to elves with a woody complexion. Like the one your girlfriend’s wearing, really.”

“Where did you get all this from?” I asked. “I’ve never heard any of it.”

“Studying history. I love elven history.”

“I read a lot of history stuff… I mean, I did back in high school, and I never heard about this.”

“It doesn’t get talked about a lot, but if you listen to the old elven epics, there are hints that elves used to be a lot more diverse,” Winnie said. “But the whole conformity thing… somewhere along the line they started breeding for a really specific ideal, which was a combination of silver and gold traits. So now most elves are pale and fair, with yellow-white hair and silvery blue eyes… some have yellower hair or even golden eyes, but the further an elf gets from the perceived baseline, the more they’re treated as a weird anomaly. Even someone like Semele, who’s just barely got some red in her coloration… well, that’s probably the most copperish you’ll ever see around here, but the other elf girls won’t touch her.”

“Did you learn about this copper and bronze and wood stuff from her?”

“Yeah,” Winnie said.

“Has it occurred to you that she might be crazy?” I asked. I’d seen a gray elf, of course, but it had been pretty obvious where she came from.

“What’s crazier, that a race of people would have different populations with different ranges of skin tones and hair colors, or that they’d come in exactly two shades that are completely the opposite of each other?”

“If elves came in different colors, how would they have ended up with a cultural aesthetic that prizes a single narrow slice of the extreme end of the scale?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” Winnie said. “But they’re probably not the only race that’s done that.”

“Yeah? Can you name another one?”

“Not off the top of my head… but then, I haven’t studied other races as much as I have elves,” she said. “Anyway, wouldn’t it be more likely that a race of people who were naturally almost identical would end up valuing differences even more?”

“It’s possible,” I said. “I’m just having a hard time believing that there would be whole colors or sub-races or whatever of elves that they just never talk about.”

Ian came back right then, and he jumped in the conversation by saying, “Yeah, I know I go around randomly informing dwarves and gnomes about the existence of other-colored humans.”

“Oh, shut up,” I said. “Do you even know what we’re talking about?”

“Not a clue,” he said. “But, really, Mackenzie… that did sound kind of…”

“What?”

“Well… stupid,” he said. “How often do you talk to elves?”

“I talk to Steff just about every day,” I said. “Every other day, at least.”

“Okay, yeah, but how much insight do you think having a half-elven friend who was… as far as I can tell… mostly raised human… give you into elven society?” Ian asked. “And even if she was a full elf who wouldn’t shut up about her homeland…”

“What?” I asked, when he just sort of trailed off.

“Never mind,” he said.

“Don’t do that.”

“It’s better if I don’t finish that thought, I think,” he said.

“No, tell me.”

“Well… earlier this evening, I watched you look through a group of humans like they weren’t there,” Ian said. “How long do you think someone with no experience of humanity would have to spend rooting around in your head before they realized we weren’t all the same color?”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “It’s not like I don’t think about… I mean, I was distracted by all the elves and dwarves who were out and about and all the costumes, but in my fighting class, I definitely noticed Gloria.”

“Yeah, I notice when a hot girl kicks my ass, too,” Ian said.

“You aren’t actually suggesting that I’m racist, are you?” I asked.

“Well,” Winnie said, “you do seem weirdly hostile to the idea of tan and brown elves.”

“Excuse me, but this is a private conversation,” I said.

“Yeah, I was having it with you,” she said. “About Mel. Remember?”

“Oh, right,” I said. “I’m sorry. I guess we got a little sidetracked… it’s just, I guess if I don’t think about race in terms of color all that often, it’s because it’s not that big a thing to me. My mother raised me to respect everybody.”

“Look, you don’t have to explain yourself to me,” Winnie said, throwing up her hands. “I’m just… there’s more than two kinds of elves and Mel has problems for not looking like the popular kind. That’s all I was saying.”

“Okay, well, I can understand how elves could be dicks to somebody whose hair is slightly reddish-blonde instead of very pale white blonde,” I said. “But she really needs to learn that the threat of being skinned alive isn’t really a selling point.”

“With most people,” Ian said. “Someone could be into that.” I gave him a look, and he said, “Hey, you never know. Um, on a completely unrelated subject… where’s Amaranth?”

“Hopefully she’s busting Mel’s cherry sixteen ways to Sunday,” Winnie said, and then she laughed… we’d made it so far without her doing that, and it was even worse than I remembered. It was like a woodpecker was sitting on my shoulder and thought my eardrum looked like a tasty snack. “That girl needs to get laid, badly.”

“Wait, you’re talking about an elven virgin and the part Mackenzie had a hard time believing was her hair color?” Ian asked.

“It wasn’t her hair color I didn’t believe in,” I said. “It was all the other stuff that was supposed to go along with it.”

“Like I said, it’s hard for her,” Winnie said.

“Easy for you to say,” I said. “She wasn’t hitting on you.”

“Oh, she did… does, sometimes, still,” Winnie said. “That’s among the reasons I’m happy she found your nymph. I just tell her I’m not interested, politely and firmly.”

“And then you still hang out with her?”

“What? I’m not going to shun someone for thinking I’m halfway attractive,” Winnie said. “She’s really kind of sweet, once you get to know her… and when you start thinking of her attention in terms of a generic compliment.”

“You mean if you ignore what she actually says,” I said.

“Listen, she sees other elves being aggressive and she sees it working, so you can’t really blame her for trying the same thing but more,” Winnie said.

“You can blame her a little,” I said. “Especially when it doesn’t work.”

“Yeah, it’s annoying when someone keeps doing the same thing over and over again and not learning anything from her failures,” Ian said.

“Oh, don’t start,” I said.

“Oh, wow,” Winnie said, looking past us. “I guess Mel really did… wow.”

Amaranth was heading back, her hips swaying and a look of satisfaction on her face. It wasn’t the only thing on her face. She had orangish paint smeared all over her mouth, and on her nose and cheeks. There was another big smear between her legs.

“Hey, baby, would you go get me a napkin or something?” she said. “Or I guess they’d have paper towels in the bathroom… anyway, I think you may have had a point about the glamour, after all.”

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Unlike the buildings I had classes in, the Lazar Center had an actual lobby, not just a little foyer between two sets of doors. The whole interior was a lot nicer, too… fancier. Less institutional, more artistic. It was clearly meant to be a performance building in which classes were held, not a class building in which performances were held.

In the middle of the lobby was a bronze statue of the late Professor Lazar, a sylph wearing a ballet outfit that was way less revealing than anything the sylph I knew had ever worn, and a faun playing a set of pipes.

It was kind of interesting to note that while the central figure was of human height, the faun was about the height of a sylph and the sylph was about as tall as a gnome. Actually, I hadn’t noticed at first, but there were a pair of gnome statues, too, that were slightly shorter than she was.

In fact, I also hadn’t noticed that there were a pair of actual gnomes sitting on a bench that ringed the base of the sculpture… Honey and a boy dressed in green, with a little triangular cap of folded leather. He was pulling triple-decker hamburgers out of a brown fast food bag. I wondered how they were going to eat them, but I had enough presence of mind not to stare. She didn’t say anything to me, so I didn’t say anything to her. I just followed Ian around the statue.

“The music program here is pretty multicultural,” he said, with a backward glance at the statue. “There are a lot of Harlowe students who come through here.”

“Like the gnomes,” I said.

“I’ve never noticed any,” he said. “But probably. Less in the theater department… they seem to get more elves than most undergraduate classes, but not a lot of other races.”

“Listen to you being the expert,” I said. “Figuring on switching your major?”

“I’m not figuring on doing anything yet,” he said. “Freshmen year. My major doesn’t even really matter yet.”

“Easy for you to say,” I said. “If I want to walk away with an applied enchantment degree in four years, I’ve got to be focused on the fundamentals from the beginning.”

“Easy for you to say,” Ian countered. “You know you want a highly technical degree with really specific requirements. About all I know is I don’t want that.”

“But you are thinking about dropping the elementalism major.”

“I’m not dropping anything,” he said. “If I change majors, that’s it… I’m changing. Not dropping.”

“Okay, well, obviously you’re taking up a new major to take its place, but you’re still dropping…”

“You don’t have to emphasize that part,” Ian said. “I’m not quitting.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m not trying to… I guess I was thinking about the accuracy more than the implications.”

“Well, if you really want to be accurate, ‘change’ is still better,” Ian said. “Because it conveys one thing ending and another beginning. ‘Drop’ is just ending.”

He was right. I’d been clinging to my word choice mostly because it was mine.

“Okay, maybe not accuracy so much as me being right,” I admitted. “Sorry, I… just sorry.”

“Nobody likes being wrong, but it’s my life we’re talking about,” Ian said. “I’ll frame it how I want.”

“I’m trying to get better about the whole reflexively arguing thing,” I said.

“It’s okay… if I was wrong about stuff as often as you are, I’d cling to the possibility of being right like a life raft, too,” Ian said, his lips tweaking into a gently mocking smile.

“Except you wouldn’t cling to a life raft. You might cling to a life preserver, but you’d get up on a raft,” I said. “And who has life rafts? Wouldn’t a life boat with an actual keel be better?”

“What was that part about reflexively arguing, again?”

“Hey, your life choices are all yours… your analogies are still fair game,” I said, then stuck out my tongue.

“You know, most people would accept an analogy as long as it got the basic point across.”

“Well, I guess I have higher standards,” I said, and he laughed. “Um, so where are we going, exactly?”

“I thought we’d barge into a classroom that’s in session and act like we own the place,” Ian said. “Come on, Mackenzie… relax. I thought you’d be more at ease here than you were in the athletic center. I figured drama and music would be more your thing.”

“I was never a drama geek,” I said. “Just the regular type. Drama is for extroverts. I’m mostly verted in the other direction.”

We passed in front of a closed box office and an open concession stand… the girl behind the counter waved and Ian waved back… and to a pair of heavy-looking bronze doors that were propped open. Above them was a marquee awning.

“So, we can just…” I started to say, then stopped myself.

“Yes, we can just walk into the theater,” Ian said. “People sit and study in here when nothing’s going on. They take their lunch in here. They goof around and they rehearse stuff or work on blocking.”

“How about our lunch? I was going to the cafeteria when you grabbed me…”

“Um… I think we should be done with the costume stuff before you get any food in your hands.”

Ian was actually greeted with scattered applause when we came into the theater, from five or six girls. I couldn’t help notice that most of the two dozen or so humans who were in the theater were girls. Most of the guys were down towards the front. Three of them were making minute adjustments to a fake castle wall at the back of the stage. Two others were throwing a bean bag back and forth in the space right in front of the front row of seats. There were maybe four others scattered throughout the room.

The elves in the room were more evenly split male and female… though they were also more split. The guys on stage had a pair of girls working with them, and the guys seated throughout the theater were seeded into groups of girls, but the elves seemed to have self-segregated: there was a group of four girls and a group of four guys, on opposite sides of the room.

Two of the girls were wearing flowing, airy gowns like what Professor Ariadne favored. Another had gone all tomboy, at least from the neck down… flannel over a t-shirt, and faded blue jeans with a masculine cut. The fourth was also wearing human-style clothes, but more feminine… off-the-hip type jeans that she was holding in place with one hand and a tube top. She and one of the be-gowned girls were both wearing gauzy veils over their lower faces. The other one had one, too, but she’d pulled it down like a scarf to eat a hamburger.

“Don’t stare at them,” Ian said. “They’ll kick your ass.”

“I’m not staring,” I said, turning my eyes to the carved lions’ heads over the stage. “Maybe humans are afraid of elves, but they’re more afraid of me.”

“You realize they can hear you,” Ian said.

“Yeah, well, they could also hear you say I was staring when I wasn’t, so just to set the record straight…”

The fact that they all started giggling in unison was probably a coincidence, but I let the subject drop, especially as one of the human girls was coming up the center aisle towards us and I didn’t really feel like bickering where even more people could hear. She was maybe an inch or two shorter than me, with curly red hair and a kind of round face, and she threw her arms around Ian, almost knocking him off his feet.

“Ian!” she said.

“Uh, hey, Winnie,” Ian said. He patted her on the back awkwardly, but when she didn’t release him he eventually returned the hug. As soon as they broke apart, he very quickly slid up against my side and put his arm around my waist. “This is Mackenzie, my girlfriend.”

The tiny part of me… the part that everybody probably has but that most people don’t acknowledge as often as, say, Steff does… that dreamed of ruling over the world from on high with an iron fist decided that when total power was mine, he could live but she might not be so lucky.

“Oh, hi!” she said. “The demon girl from Harlowe, I’ve heard so many stories about you. But then, I suppose everybody has!” She laughed at this, an annoying woodchuck laugh.

“So, how do you know Ian?” I asked.

“Oh, my roommate plays the flute… I tell her flautery will get her nowhere, but does she listen?” She laughed again. I would have paid her not to. “But, anyway, she likes to jam, so she carries her flute everywhere she goes, especially when she’s coming to the ‘Zar, and any time she hears people playing, she whips it out.”

“She’s really pretty good,” Ian said. “Passionate. I mean, you wouldn’t think a flute could really wail, but… it does.”

“Uh huh,” I said, suddenly seeing the downside to dating a musician. Jamming with passionate women.

“Of course, Ian doesn’t spend half as much time here as he used to,” Winnie said.

“I have to practice if I’m going to become a better fighter.”

“Hey, no complaints from me,” Winnie said. “Do you think you can talk the arena director into finding skimpier outfits for the unarmed fighters, though?”

“They already wear practically nothing,” I said, putting my arm around Ian’s back.

“Yeah, so why not just round down?” she said… and once again laughed at her own joke. So annyoing.

A delicate cough grabbed our attention… the elf girl in the jeans joined us so quickly and quietly that she might have teleported in. She was sitting on the back of an aisle seat in the back row, perfectly balanced with her butt on the top and her legs drawn up in front of her.

“Ceridwen… are you going to introduce me to your new friend?” she said, in heavily accented Pax.

“Ugh, I told you, call me Winnie. Anyway, I’ve just met her, but this is…”

“Is it true that demons never tire?” the elf asked, her lavender-blue eyes fixed on me.

“Um… I get tired pretty easily, actually,” I said. “I mean, not worn out, but I have to sleep. But I’m not a demon, I’m half-human.”

She didn’t say anything to that. She just sat there, perched like a gargoyle and leering like one. Ian shifted uncomfortably beside me. I started to draw us away, then I realized what the elf had said to Winnie.

“Wait,” I said. “Your name is Ceridwen?”

“Please don’t laugh… I know it’s horribly old-fashioned and ugly, but it’s a family name,” she said, rolling her eyes and waving her hand. “I’ve got cousins all over Prax with the same stupid name.”

“How many of them go here?” I asked. I was beginning to form a new theory about why everybody at MU seemed to have their heads up their asses: they were all related to Puddy.

“All of them, pretty much,” she said. “I’ve probably got over a dozen cousins who are here right now, and three of them have the same name. Even more, if you count second cousins and further… we’re a big family, and MU’s kind of a tradition for us.”

“I can kind of understand that,” Ian said. “My mom’s family has history here.”

“I thought you said it was your dad’s side,” Winnie said.

“No, I said my grandpa studied under Professor Lazar,” Ian said. “But he was the black sheep. The rest of my dad’s family were all old-fashioned tower wizards.”

“Wait,” I said to “Winnie”. “Aren’t there other schools you could have gone to?”

“Not if I wanted my parents to pay for it,” she said. “Believe me, if I could have gotten away from my extended family, I would have, but like I said, it’s a family thing.”

“Just so I’m clear,” I said, since I’d got myself into trouble for jumping to conclusions before, “you’re another some-spelling-of-Ceridwen LaBelle?”

“I’m Winnie Champlain,” she said. “My mother was a Ceridwen LaBelle until she got married.”

“Turn around,” the elf said.

“What?”

“I wish to see the seat of you.”

“I’m not showing you my ass,” I said. “Look, I have a girlfriend.”

“I have a dozen of them,” she said. “But don’t worry. Only one of them is jealous.”

“Well, she’s got nothing to be jealous about,” I said.

“She told me she would remove the skin from every part of you that touches any part of me,” the elf said with a creepy but riveting intensity. “And I told her I could live with that if she let me keep it.” She giggled. It was the coldest sound I ever heard. “Now I have an incentive to touch you all over.”

“Look, Semele… no one’s touching anyone and no one’s skinning anyone,” Ian said. “We’re just here to hang out and scrounge for costumes.”

“Oh, Mel can help there!” Winnie said, putting a hand on Semele’s shoulder. “She’s worked in the costume department for years.”

“Yeah, um… no,” Ian said, and mercifully, he pulled me away down the aisle. Even more mercifully, Winnie stayed behind to talk to Semele. “The thing about hanging out with the full elf kids is the more you do it, the more you come to realize Steff isn’t quite as creepy by comparison.”

“Uh, they can still hear, right?” I said.

“They know they can be creepy,” he said. “Some of them play it up. I mean, Semele’s not actually ‘with’ any of the other elfmaids who are here right now. Aoede and Irene are crazy in love with each other… they’re the ones you really don’t want to stare at, especially since it’s well known that you like girls… and Penny’s elf-gay.”

“Elf-gay?”

“Yeah, you know… straight,” Ian said. “Really, you don’t want to stare at her, either. The point is that Semele made up that thing about a jealous girlfriend on the spot.”

“Why?”

“To impress you? I don’t know. I guess sometimes it works, or else hope springs eternal, because I’ve heard her do it to other girls,” Ian said. “Some people are attracted to weird things. Some people are turned on by the thought of a dangerous lover.”

“But that’s just stu… uh, I mean, to each their own, I suppose,” I said, blushing. Of course I had little room to talk there, in several different directions. “Let’s just do what we came here to do, before she tries to impress me again.”

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