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Even without any cliched catapulting into an upright position, it would have been hard to jerk myself awake without disturbing Ian given how close we slept.

“…who was it this time?” he said groggily.

“Him,” I said.

I slipped my legs out from under his and got a little shakily to my feet. The cold was bracing, or that’s what I told myself. I was moving with a purpose, if not a lot of balance. I’d told the man that I would make an alliance with anyone to keep him out, and apparently it was true.

The next time I saw the owl-turtle thing I would talk to it… not necessarily about any forays into hostile territory, as I thought that was likely to go nowhere, and it had probably been responsible for my restless nights. But if it could interfere with his visits into my head and help me shield things from his knowledge… well, that would be a start.

I wasn’t going to wait for it to pop up again, though, especially since that would require me to be asleep, and then it would be beyond my control whether it showed up, or if he did. If I could make a problem for the man in the physical world, it might just put enough of a stick in his spokesto keep him out of my head for a while.

“Who are you reflecting at this hour?” Ian asked, realizing that I was going for my mirror on top of the dresser.

Or I had been.

The transition from my dream… where I’d been fully awake… to the waking world… where I’d been asleep… had left me with a serious case of jelly-legs.

“You remember last year after Leda’s murder when I gave myself up to those guys from Law?” I asked, stretching out an arm to steady myself against the wall.

“No, actually that totally slipped my mind,” Ian said. “That was you?”

“Smart ass. The guy who delivered me to Embries. His name was Kent… Art,” I said. “Short for Arthur, I think. He has some stuff on my father I think might be useful.”

“Do you have his contact info?” Ian asked.

“No, but I know that as of last year he was a Law agent,” I said. “And he worked in the central provinces regional office, or however they’re organized. I think that would be enough to find him.”

“You’re not going to reach him in the middle of the… well, I guess it’s technically morning,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “But I want to see if I can at least find him in a directory or something… he could have been reassigned, or had his name and face changed, or who knows what. If I can’t find him, I guess I’ll start looking for a Plan B.”

“Why isn’t he Plan B?”

“Because that would leave me without a Plan A.”

My legs woke up enough for me to totter forward, grab my mirror, and then seat myself on the floor with a modicum of something that could almost be called grace. That last part had been more a matter of necessity than part of any plan, but once I was down I decided it was as good a place as any. I forced my breathing to slow again, remembering Dee’s meditation lessons.

The Department of Law could not by any stretch of imagination count as the good guys. They were the greater good guys. They were the order guys. In theory they existed to uphold the tenets of law and order, but in their view the preservation of the Imperial Republic itself was the best bet for preserving law and order, and they themselves were absolutely essential to its protection. Hence, they were somewhat ambivalent on the subject of actually following laws themselves.

But it was liked I’d said in my dream: I’d make an alliance with just about anyone.

And in this case, Arthur Kent would just be the messenger.

“Um… do you maybe want to put on a shirt or something first?” Ian asked.

“I’m not going to be talking to him,” I said. “Anyway, even the thought of dealing with these guys again would be enough to make my knees go weak, if I wasn’t already. I’d rather be as relaxed as I can be.”

I opened my mirror and focused on it. According to the timepiece display it was just a little past five, but I willed myself past that and to the ethernet. Modern communication devices didn’t require a lot of divination talent to operate, or else most people wouldn’t be able to use them. My unusually centered state of mind heightened my connection to it.

“Law offices,” I said aloud to help focus, and though I half expected to get offices where law was practiced, my focus was apparently sufficient to convey the concept of Law rather than the law. “Prax and Blackwater area. Agent Kent, Arthur.”

Mist filled the tiny mirror. I stared at it for half a second before I realized that it wasn’t conjuring up a list of results but connecting the reflection. Half a second later I was looking at the man himself, somewhat battered and weary looking.

“Yes?” he said.

“Agent Kent? It’s Mackenzie Blaise.”

“I know,” he said.

“Sorry… I wasn’t actually counting on getting you,” I said.

“I’ve had a funnel-glyph out in the ether for you for a while,” he said. “I happened to be at my desk when it went off, or you’d be talking to my echo-trap now.”

“It’s like five in the morning,” I said.

“I know, and if we make this fast enough I can still get home in time to get a full hour of sleep before I have to get up again,” he said. “Are you aware that you’re naked?”

“I borrowed my girlfriend’s shirt,” I said.

It was a little late to duck and cover, but I tilted the mirror up more towards my face. Since I couldn’t see my own reflection there was no way of knowing how much difference this made, but I focused on my breathing and ignored my nudity.

“You’re witty for five in the morning,” he said. “I don’t do witty before six.”

“Won’t you be asleep then?”

“That’s the best time to deal with witty teenagers,” he said.

“Fine. Do you know if my grandmother was aware of my father’s involvement in my birth?”

I was pretty sure the man hadn’t meant to feed me on purpose, but it would be good to confirm that it was true.

“Well, she grew up on a farm and she had children herself, so however old-fashioned she may seem I think she’s probably familiar with the part a man plays in…”

“I mean him, specifically,” I said. “Does she know who my father is?”

“I really couldn’t say,” he said. “And yes, I mean I don’t know. Judging by what I know of her, my best guess is that she doesn’t. If she knew at the time, she probably would have intervened. Do you have any happy childhood memories of her?”

“I guess,” I said. “Holidays and stuff.”

“Then I think it’s safe for you to assume she didn’t know back then,” he said. “My best guess based on what I know about her… and I want to emphasize that this is not based on any direct, first-hand knowledge of her… is that if she found out about it later she would have done something with that information, or tried to do so in a way that we would have noticed.”

It sounded like he was going on the same kind of reasoning I’d used. I’d hoped for something more concrete.

“Mackenzie? I do have something I need to finish here.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I thought you’d know something more than that.”

“I do have a file on your grandmother that I read last year, but it was out of date and incomplete,” he said. “It was a pre-recruitment evaluation that my office inherited.”

“It was never updated?”

“We never recruited her.”

“She was an imperial agent,” I said.

“She was a paladin in the service of the empire,” he said. “There’s a bit of a difference there. The White Dragons are an imperial order, and they coordinate their international missions with Law, but they’re not actually under our aegis. Separation of powers, and all that.”

“Like that actually means anything to you guys.”

“No matter how many spheres our interests might touch on, we actually do have certain prescribed limits to our power,” he said. “To say nothing of practical limits. Even if I somehow had a file on every single person in the world, I couldn’t have every one of them in arm’s reach at all times. If you looked me up to just ask me what your grandmother knows… that’s not the reason I had you flagged.”

“That was actually just the preamble,” I said. “What I really want from you won’t make much difference if she already knows and isn’t doing anything. I want you to send your file… the one on him… to her, and identify him as my father.”

“Is that all? You could tell her that he’s your father.”

He could be right… I probably could give her enough information to at least lead her to the right demon. But with no name and so little to distinguish him, it was far from a sure thing… and the lack of an easy identification meant it would be impossible for me to just drop her a postcard. It would have to be a lengthy conversation, at the very least.

And even if she would do it herself for her own reasons, I couldn’t believe my grandmother wouldn’t make me pay for it. She would not pass up the chance to bring me back under her control.

In fact, if she saw an opportunity to do that, she might consider it a higher priority than killing a demon or avenging her daughter’s death. She’d spent almost a decade trying to keep me safe and safely in check.

“This can’t come from me,” I said.

“I like the sound of that,” he said. “But what explanation am I supposed to give her for dropping this information into her lap out of the blue?”

“What sort of explanations do you usually give?” I asked.

“She’ll be looking for a motive.”

“Yeah, but you’ve got an obvious one,” I said. “A demon’s been operating in your beat. He evades your usual methods. She’ll probably figure that you want to get rid of him. And as far as I know, that’s true.”

“A successful demon removed from the plane is a win for everybody,” he said. “But the kind of brawl that it’s likely to take to dislodge him, especially when it’s a fight between a paladin of Brimstone Blaise’s caliber and when she has nothing to lose and he has everything to lose? I know people your age throw around the words ‘epic level’ a lot, but that phrase exists for a reason and an epic level battle is not the kind of thing we want to see. Not in the middle of inhabited provinces. It’s not orderly. It’s not good.”

“But would it come to that?” I said. “He doesn’t fight his battles head-on. You said he likes to keep his head down. If he knows she’s hunting him, he might even go to ground completely… and that will probably take him away from settled areas, if he’s in one now.”

“So this isn’t about killing him?” he said. He sounded disappointed. “I was halfway interested when I thought you were trying to use me to put a hit out on your own father using your own grandmother.”

“Well, it will at least give him something to think about,” I said. “If it does nothing but keep the two of them busy for a while, I’ll call it a double win.”

“And what will you call it if she dies?”

“Her choice,” I said. “I don’t think anybody made her be a paladin.”

“I take it back,” he said. “I’m more than halfway interested. You are one cold daughter of a bastard. But what do I get for doing this?”

“Well, since it’ll cost you nothing I think a fair trade would be… nothing.”

“It’ll cost me time.”

“Minutes.”

“Minutes are how I measure my sleep, kid,” he said. “Which means you already owe me just for listening.”

“You led me into a dragon’s den,” I said.

“And you came out the other side unharmed.”

“I came out the front door, actually.”

“I was speaking metaphorically.”

“Yeah, well, that’s where we’re having a bit of a disconnect, because I was speaking literally,” I said. “It wasn’t a tunnel I passed through or a rite of passage, it was the actual lair of an actual dragon and what happened there was the single worst, most harrowing experience of my life.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I can’t,” I said. “And I wouldn’t talk about it with you. Look… you had a flag out because you were hoping to hear from me. You probably didn’t expect me to turn up out of the blue looking for a job.”

“No, I thought you’d turn up wanting something from me,” he said. “Which gives me the opportunity to ask what you’ll do for me. You see how this works?”

“What I’m asking is not that big a favor,” I said. “It lines up with your interests and it probably won’t require anything you couldn’t do on your lunch break.”

“You’re assuming my lunch break isn’t booked solid as it is,” he said. “And no, you’re not asking for anything big from my point of view. But you said this can’t come from you, and I can’t imagine any situation where you’d be calling on me if you could see another way of accomplishing the same goal some other way. You need me to do this, and that makes it a big favor.”

“Fine,” I said. “You do this and we’re even.”

“That doesn’t get me anything.”

“Yes it does,” I said. “It gets you even. You want me to owe you a favor, right?”

“And you’re saying I won’t.”

“You’ll be one step closer,” I said. “Look, you could watch me secretly and swoop in and save my life the next time I’m in real trouble and I still wouldn’t feel like I owe you a damned thing. You’d just be making up for what you did before. And that should be what it takes to make up for that… something seriously life-or-death. And now that I’ve said that out loud I could never trust any situation where that happened.”

“Believe it or not, you aren’t important enough for me to engineer a rescue for,” he said. “You are one of several potentially interesting candidates I have an eye on.”

“You put a trace on me,” I said.

“That only took a minute,” he said.

“Whatever lengths you would or wouldn’t go through to get me to forgive you is beside the point,” I said. “The point is that you can either do this one relatively simple thing and the next time I need a favor from you I’ll agree that it is a favor, or else it doesn’t matter what you do, I’ll never want to deal with you.”

“How do I know there’s going to be a next time?” he asked. “You could just shake me off and never give me a second thought.”

“That’s my plan,” I said. “But you already know how good my plans are, because I told you last time I wouldn’t be contacting you.”

“Hold on,” he said, and before I could respond the mirror went back to swirling mist. I barely had time to be irritated before he came back. “Okay, I’ll do it. But I want you to know, I’m doing this more because I’m amused by your attempts to negotiate than because you’re any good at it.”

“Whatever you have to tell yourself to get the file in the mail,” I said.

“If you want to have a look at it yourself, I’d be happy to arrange a meeting.”

“Maybe next time,” I said. I flipped the mirror shut. It was beyond brusque, but he was the one counting his minutes.

I stretched out my legs before trying to get up. I looked over at the bed, where Ian was sitting up watching me at rapt attention.

“What?” I asked.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said. “But I’m trying to figure out if something else could have crawled into your head while you were sleeping and grabbed the reins.”

I laughed, not so much because it was funny but because all the tension I’d been holding onto for the past several minutes just sort of broke at once and left me first laughing and then shaking. I felt like I used to feel every time I’d had half as much attention focused on me… that is, like I was going to throw up.

“It’s me,” I said. “I promise.”

“I know,” Ian said. “I watched you almost bash your head into the corner of the dresser. No entity could be as graceless in that body as you are without a lot of practice.”

Knowing that he was putting on a brave face for her, she had no choice but to put on a braver face for him. However bad the news was, she’d take it in stride and make the best of it.

There was the niggling thought at the back of her head that if Danny really wanted to fool her he wouldn’t do it halfway, but then surely he wouldn’t be so devious as to fool her into thinking he’d tried to fool her just to actually fool her into a more optimistic frame of mind?

Of course he wouldn’t, she told herself right after she sorted out what exactly it was he wouldn’t do. Anyway, what would it say about her, if he’d go that far to avoid setting her off? Sure, Dell had a temper. She’d been Bob Corvir’s girl for longer than she’d been Lord Robert’s daughter, hadn’t she? But that didn’t mean she was unreasonable, or in any way out-of-control.

In the off chance that Dan Harris thought otherwise, of course, she’d be happy to prove him wrong by greeting his bad news with grace and good cheer. But since she was quite sure he didn’t think that and was really quite sincerely putting forth an effort to be cheerful for her sake, she’d do so anyway.

“What’s the news, my love?” she asked him as she took his hat. “How goes the battle?”

“A near-total victory,” Dan said. “Complete capitulation.”

“Oh?” she said. She held back the natural response of So you mean they’ll be leaving Aidan alone? or even Things will be going back to the way they were? because she already knew that neither of those things would be the case. Raising them as possibilities and forcing her husband to deny them would undercut the totality of his victory.

“The enemy has agreed to a phased withdrawal from the field of battle,” he said.

She couldn’t help narrowing her eyes at the phrase.

“Meaning?”

“The inspectors will return next month, and if all looks well, they’ll skip the next month and if things are fine then we’ll be back to the quarterly cycle after that,” he said.

It was nothing like what Dell wanted to hear, but she knew that Danny would have fought hard for the concessions he’d been given and she didn’t believe that any man could have talked the imperious bureaucrats down any further.

“Well, that’s alright, then,” she said, and she gave him a kiss, though he still had the aura of one who was holding his breath despite regular exhalation and inhalation.

“Is that all?” she asked.

“There is… something else,” he said. “Where’s Aidan?”

“Asleep,” Dell said. “He said he’d stay up to meet you, but you know how sleep overtakes him.”

“Gets that from his father’s side,” Dan said.

“What’s the matter, then?”

“There was a man on the sky coach,” Dan said. “Talking about a school of sorts that he represents.”

“Oh?” Dell perked up at this. Maybe Dan didn’t think she considered schooling him outside of Lefton to be an option, but she was beginning to see the virtues of it. “Did it sound like a good one?”

“He, er, wasn’t talking in general-like,” Dan said.

“He knew about Aidan?”

“All about him!” Dan said. “Or near enough. And no, I don’t think he’s connected to the ministry. They wouldn’t have needed to plant somebody on the coach to talk to me when I was headed to their offices. And they could have made the pitch as part of their negotiating. No, this bloke was well-connected, but not officially. I think he or whoever he works for is more of a collector.”

“You make it sound like a menagerie for exotic creatures.”

“Maybe more like a stable for racehorses,” Dan said. “You know, more useful and valuable than just rare and colorful. He wanted to impress upon me how many alumni of his academy are uniquely placed to help us with our bureaucratic troubles. Though I’m not clear on whether he ran it or just represented it. I doubt very much that he’s the top dog, but my hunch is that he’s higher up the ladder than he’d want to let on in a first meeting.”

“What’s his name?”

“Stanley,” Dan said. “Don’t know if that’s first or family. I didn’t much feel like chatting.”

“The whole thing sounds like bad news,” she said. “Whatever my feelings towards the Mother City, we can’t afford to be mixed up with a subversive group.”

“It’s less subversive than diversive, I think,” Dan said. “They don’t want to interfere with the normal functioning of the government, they just aren’t averse to channeling it in directions they find favorable. Mind, this is just my impression from a single sales pitch, but the arrangement he spoke of sounded too cozy to be revolutionary.”

“Well, I don’t trust it for anything, anyway,” Dell said.

“Nor do I,” Dan said.

“Though… it isn’t too soon to turn our thinking towards the boy’s education, you know.”

“Has something happened?”

“…nothing worth speaking of.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“It’s to do with Mrs. Cribbins next door,” Dell said.

“She’s certainly not worth speaking of,” Dan said. “But go on.”

“Her Michael saw you on your way to the coach stop.”

“Through eyes bleary enough to make it an accomplishment.”

“She’s just such an awful gossip…”

“You do her no credit, love… she’s dead brilliant at it, and you well know it.”

“…and it just got me thinking again that when Aidan starts school, he’s going to be there with her children and everyone else’s,” she said. “There are good people in Lefton, but there are also…”

“Cribbenses,” Dan said. “And Martindales, too.”

“I’ve nothing against the village,” she said. “Or the school. But I’d rather Aidan be schooled somewhere where he isn’t…”

“My son,” Dan said.

“The son of a demonblood,” Dell said. “Or of anyone in particular. It’s nothing against you, Danny, neither. I want our Aidan to be able to sit down in a classroom as just one out of a dozen boys and either stand out or not on his own.”

“You know he’ll stand out. He won’t be able to help it,” Dan said. “But we do have options. All sorts of options. That’s the main thing. Expense is not an object, if it comes to it. We’ve the money to have him schooled down in Augustinium. He has money enough of his own to go to any school anywhere in the isles. Our choices aren’t so narrow as sending him to Lefton Common or shipping him off to this Middlestone place.”

“I’d rather not ship him anywhere, though!” Dell said.

“Wouldn’t have to be far,” Dan said. “There are good schools in Augustinium, just down the main road. I took some time to check them out. Couldn’t get anyone to show me around of a Saturday evening, but I wouldn’t want to do that by myself anyway. He could be home every weekend.”

“He’s too young to ride the coach by himself,” Dell said.

“He’ll be older, next fall,” Dan said.

“Still too young.”

“He wouldn’t have to travel by himself,” Dan said. “You could ride down Friday morning and bring him back with you in the evening, and either or both of us could take him back on Sunday.”

“That would make the weekend all the shorter.”

“Then we could go down on Friday evening, spend two whole days together as a family,” Dan said. “And ride back Sunday evening.”

“Taking out a suite every weekend would get expensive,” Dell said.

“So we’ll get a flat in town,” Dan said. “And have an agency let it out to business travelers during the week. Augustinium’s the regional capital. We might even come out ahead, in the long run.”

“How long have you been thinking about this?”

“Just since this afternoon,” Dan said. “To tell you the truth, I was out of the ministry not long after lunch time and I had some time to kick around the old town and plenty to think on. I knew there’d be problems with Aidan going to the L.C. but I didn’t want it to seem like this Middlestone place was the only alternative. So I thought my way through some of the possibilities, what the likeliest difficulties we’d encounter would be, and how we could meet them. I really think we could have our pick of schools, though.”

“Oh, sure,” she said.

“Love, I’m not saying you should make up your mind now. I’m simply saying that we do have options… and we have time to explore them. Next time something carries us down Augustinium way, we’ll make a day of it and visit some of their schools in person… just to see, like. Anything catches your eye… and Aidan’s… and we can explore a little further. Alright?”

“Alright,” she said. “You know I’m going to worry about him no matter where he goes.”

“Of course you are,” Dan said. “He’s our son. And he’ll be cross if he’s not awake enough to greet me tonight, so why don’t you go start the process of rousing him while I have a quick shower, a late tea and maybe a gin and tonic, and watch the news.”

“Oh, it will never take that long,” Dell said. “Your food’s in the warmer, though. Feel free to take it in front of the telly.”

“Oh? I know I must have done something right today to get living room eating privileges.”

“Aye, you came home after I’ve wiped down the table and before I’ve done the carpets, you daft devil of a man,” Dell said, giving him a swat on the rear as he headed for the kitchen.

The subject of Aidan’s schooling did not come up at all for the rest of that week. It was midway through the next when Dan Harris received word that his wife was in the mirror for him. It was with more than a touch of concern that he tied a string around the crystal rod he’d been inspecting to mark his place in the array and hurried to the office that served mainly as a place to store his lunch pail safely out of reach.

“What’s wrong?” Dell asked before he could.

“Nothing,” he said. “You don’t reflect me at work, normally.”

“I didn’t mean to worry you,” she said. “I just needed to check… you said the name of the place that had men snooping around us was Middlestone?”

“Was and is, unless they’ve changed it.”

“I thought so,” she said. “But I didn’t get the feeling they were the sort to send out brochures.”

She held up a glossy-looking booklet showing a tower of gray and white stone blocks backed by blue sky, with a logo up top that read “MIDDLESTONE INSTITUTE” in big bold letters with “& Academy of Personal Achievement” in smaller ones underneath.

“I don’t believe they are,” Dan said. “But they are at least flexible, if nothing else. I asked them to send out literature and they did.”

“I don’t like it,” Dell said. “Makes me wonder how badly they want him, and why. And what else they’ll do.”

“A man who will put out paper that glossy will stoop to just about anything,” Dan said. “I suggest you don’t let the little monster see anything of theirs until we’ve had a chance to look through it and see what exactly they’re going to promise him… I mean, if they had those made up just for his benefit, it might be a little slanted towards his particular interests.”

“I don’t want to think about how they’d know what his interests are,” Dell said. “But you’re right. The package arrived in a shiny black wrapper with a bow design done on it and was addressed to ‘Master Aidan Harris & Family’… he saw his name and thought it was a present, so I told him it was for Aidan, Senior, and we couldn’t open it until you were home.”

“He’s still going to expect a grand unveiling.”

“I know,” she said. “I slit the wrapper carefully enough and I can seal it back up so he’ll never know. But this thing… it’s not just written for him, it’s written to him. The captions in the pictures are all talking to him. He can’t read without sounding things out yet but when he sees his name he’ll stop and do it. It’s all terribly flattering, is the problem. How is any school in town going to compete with that?”

“Literally,” Dan said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, they’ll literally compete with it,” Dan said. “We’ll make them. When I unwrap that booklet you have there, we’ll put on our least impressed faces and just be like, ‘Oh, well, I guess it’s started then.’ and ‘Look at how hard this rubbishy school is trying to impress you, Aidan. Wait until the others get their licks in.’”

“Then what? We fake up brochures from the other schools?”

“No, I’m fairly certain they’ll just post them to anyone who asks nicely.”

“But no one’s going to… to court him like Middlestone.”

“Listen, you want to see courtship? You’re talking about the son of a knight and a the grandson of a peer,” Dan said. “How often do you think they see one of those down in Augustinium? We’ll write to the schools in town that Sir Aidan Harris, Senior, and the Lady Ardellia Corvir Harris, daughter of Lord Robert…”

“…am I a lady?”

“You’ll never hear me say differently,” Dan said. “Anyway, I’m fairly certain you are one… that’s what you call the wife of a knight.”

“I’m certain that’s a dame.”

“It was, but then they started knighting women,” Dan said. “And now that’s what you call a dame. So now the wife of a knight is a lady.”

“But ‘lady’ is what they call women who’d be lords,” Dell said. “I’m pretty sure a lord outranks a knight!”

“And speaking as a knight, I’m pretty sure his wife outranks him, too,” Dan said. “But if you want to insist otherwise, I can’t argue with that. Listen, you’re definitely a something. We’ll look into it. There’s a manual somewhere. I think it’s holding up the back leg of the sofa?”

“Oh, right,” Dell said. “This would be the sofa that was fine until you sawed the back leg to fit the book underneath.”

“Dell, my dear, you know that my art is my life, and vice-versa,” Dan said. “I don’t ask you to explain what you’re getting into in the spare bedroom all hours of the day.”

“Tax preparation!”

“I know, love. That’s why I don’t ask you to explain it. Do you have any idea how bloody dull it is?”

“But you’re not even anything like a proper knight, Danny,” Dell said. “We aren’t the least bit posh. You don’t even own a suit.”

“I have parts of one,” Dan said. “In fact, come to think of it, I have parts of several suits, including a collection of amusing ties, most of which are bound up in even more amusing knots. Anyway, we’ll want something tailored, not something off the rack. We want something that looks like it’s never been on a rack and wouldn’t be caught dead with one.”

“Sounds like most of the things you own,” she said. “All these years living on solid ground and you still haven’t learned the use of a wardrobe.”

“You mean the big box-like thing you keep next to my pile of clothes?” Dan said. “That’s a kind of a very large duffel bag, isn’t it? I just haven’t found the drawstrings.”

“And you’re going to present yourself as a gentleman of leisure.”

“And hero of the empire, remember that,” Dan said. “I’ve a famous name if I bothered to use it. Anyway, my hands are soft enough for a gentleman of leisure… I’ve never yet managed to raise a blister on them, much less a single callus. Nobody who shakes these hands would ever accuse me of working for a living.”

“But you do work for a living.”

“Madam, you offend me,” he said. “I’m an inspector of airsips. What’s that? Not even a proper job. You just look around every once in a while and nod, and that’s on the days you even bother to show up. It’s a pure sinecure if I’ve ever heard one, and as a knighted hero of the empire and gentleman of leisure, I can assure you I have heard plenty.”

“But, isn’t this the opposite of what we wanted?” Dell said. “When you started talking about schools, the idea was to find a place where he could just be another boy, not… anyone’s son.”

“Well, we have to make do with the cards we’re given,” Dan said. “We can let it be known that Sir and Whatever Aidan Harris, Senior, wish for their son to be given no special consideration and treated like any other student. I’m pretty sure I can figure out the wink that means no, seriously when we say that. The fact that we live in such a small unassuming house in a small unassuming town will help there.”

“And what do we tell them about Aidan’s nature?”

“That… not to worry… he isn’t my actual descendant, strictly speaking,” Dan said. “More than that we don’t need to say. And Aidan won’t have to know there’s anything unusual about children being chased by schools. I mean, that’s really the idea behind recruiting other schools to recruit him: make him think it isn’t unusual.”

“And we accomplish this by splashing our titles… whatever they may be… around, accompanied with generous cash gifts, I suppose?”

“Of course not,” he said. “We’ll make perfunctory cash gifts,” Dan said. “The kind that say, ‘We have not settled on you, we just have so much money that we think nothing of giving this away up front.’ If we’re generous right up front, then there’s less incentive for anyone to chase after us.”

“You know I hate the thought of invading Aidan’s legacy like that,” she said.

“As do I,” Dan said. “But it’s for his benefit. His education was one of the specific cases we decided it would be acceptable to spend a little.”

“I was thinking more his higher education, when he’s old enough to decide for himself.”

“As was I,” Dan said. “What a stroke of luck that neither of us said so, or we’d be in a real bind… anyway, we’ll take his preferences into account. We won’t send him anywhere he doesn’t want to be.”

“What if he doesn’t want to go anywhere?”

“Then he won’t go to Middlestone, either,” Dan said. “And if Lefton Common School doesn’t work out… well, if we can afford to board him, we can afford to tutor him at home for a few years”

Dan winced as soon as he’d said that, not because of how Dell reacted but because she didn’t… she remained still as a stone statue, staring out of the mirror at him.

“Why didn’t you say that before?” she finally shouted.

“I thought it went without saying,” he said.

“Well, it did until you said it,” she said.

“It couldn’t be a permanent solution,” Dan said. “Lythander wanted him to be brought up right, and that means a certain amount of being out and about in the world.”

“But it gives us a few more years before we have to put him outside our reach,” Dell said. “And his father wanted him kept safe, you can’t forget that.”

“We still need to look at schools,” Dan said. “In the first place, we still need something to distract him from Middlestone, and in the second place, we should be considering all the alternatives. And as much as the idea of tutoring might assuage your inner mother bird’s fear of fledging, there are still some concerns there.”

“Well, obviously I wouldn’t let just anyone teach my son,” Dell said.

“Right, and if not just anyone turns out to be not anyone from Lefton, that means we’re not just letting someone teach our son, it means we’re letting someone live in our house,” Dan said. “Which means you’re losing your office.”

“Or we turn the cellar into a flat.”

“That wouldn’t just be a flat, dear, it would also be a shallow and a narrow,” Dan said. “They say good things about gnomish teachers, but I think I’d prefer someone the boy could look up to.”

“Then I’ll turn it into my office,” Dell said.

“We’ll have to talk about this more later,” Dan said. “I think that the prospect of sending your son away has rendered you temporarily more keen on the prospect of taking a stranger into your house than you would truly otherwise be.”

“How can you say that, Dan? This is the clear choice,” Dell said. “It’s the only one that makes sense. Name one downside to it.”

“They’d be living in the same house as Aidan.”

“Well, there are good points and bad points all around,” Dell said. “Clearly we should talk more about this later, once I’ve had a chance to consider them.”

“Then I’ll see you when I get home, love.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A father knows,” he said.

“So how did you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I kept breathing. Slow, steady.

“What?” he asked. “What do you know?”

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

“What were you doing?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not so far as she knows.”

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Didn’t think so,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you staying in tonight?” I asked her as we rode the lift to our floor.

“No, baby,” she said. “I have to circulate… I was thinking about going to one of the male dorms, since I’ve been taking on a lot of women lately. But there’s something I want to give you first.”

“What’s that?”

“A surprise,” she said. “Though nothing too out of the ordinary. I’m glad you got Nicki to come to dinner. I think we’ll probably be seeing more of her, now that she and Hazel are talking. It gives her a reason to hang out here… another reason, I mean. Not that you aren’t reason enough, but you know some people will always need an excuse.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

The bell chimed, the doors slid open, and she led me by the hand to our room, where she sat down on the bed.

“Pants,” she said, and I got my pants off as far my shoes before I realized the problem and started to kick my shoes off. “Oh, for my mother’s sake, baby, you’re going to mess up the carpeting. Bend over and take them off properly.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and I stooped down to undo my shoes.

“Actually… turn around first, and I said bend, not squat… keep your knees straight. Undo both of them, then take one off and then the other, then step out of your jeans. Stay bent.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, my cheeks flushing as I complied. The actions in question were harder to perform than they’d been for her to describe, especially when I was so focused on keeping my knees locked and so mindful of the way my cotton-clad rear was sticking out in the air.

Gilcrease Tower had better environmentals than Harlowe Hall, and even this early in the year the rooms were pleasantly cool… or cool in a way that was pleasant for people who didn’t have ties to the elemental plane of fire. It wasn’t a horrible ordeal for me, but rather bracing… it kept me fully aware of every inch of exposed skin.

I left my socks on because Amaranth hadn’t said anything about them, and I stayed where I was, bent at the waist and facing away from her.

“We’re going to have to do something about your socks,” she said. “The rest of your wardrobe has been slightly more refined, but most of your socks are so… functional. I know you’re inclined to think that anyone who pays too much attention to clothes is shallow, but you can acknowledge that things have a surface even when you’re looking beneath that surface. You know, I think Nicki could be a good influence on you. She’s fashion-conscious, but not… well… fashion-beholden.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. More so than just obeying her directions, holding such an uncomfortable position was sharpening my submission.

I heard the bed shift as Amaranth got up off of it, though her bare feet made no noticeable sound on the plush carpet. I thought I could feel her standing behind me. Her warmth was not so great that I should have been able to feel heat radiating off her body across the open space, but I was a trained elementalist with an affinity for fire, and so when I opened my senses up a bit I could in fact follow her as she moved back and forth a couple of times, admiring for whatever reason the shape of my ass.

“You’ve always seen spankings as a punishment,” she said. “Which is inconvenient, since they’re also one of your favorite things in the world… they have been from the beginning. You had your first conscious orgasms from spanking, after all. If you were at all naughty by inclination, you would have evolved into a perfect brat by now, but no amount of physical pleasure is worth the shame of being bad for you. That’s why I’m going to try my best to teach you to enjoy it as a reward.”

She carefully pulled my panties in back just enough for the top half of my ass to be hanging out of them, and then she stroked the back of her hand across the now-exposed skin.

“I know you like just about any kind of attention down in this neighborhood,” she said. “So we’re going to start with that. Just some good, affectionate, loving attention.”

She hooked a finger under my waistband and then started to pull me back towards the bed.

“Straighten up, missy!” she said with a giggle, and I did. “Backwards, march!”

She led me back towards the bed and then pulled me onto it, arranging us in the middle of the bed. She closed the curtains around it, leaving us not exactly swathed in darkness but at least enclosed. It made a difference in both the air temperature and my less material comfort levels. Small spaces were comforting. A small space with my loving owner holding me tightly against her body was even more so.

“Okay, you’re going to lay yourself out… face down, head towards the foot of the bed,” she said, and she helped me position myself the way that she wanted, then she laid her own body down on top of mine. I was only mostly naked from the waist down, so while I could feel her chest against my shoulders the primary point of contact between us was the exposed curve of my butt.

She slid her way down my body, hugging me from behind. Her hands caught on my panties and she pulled them the rest of the way off. Then, kneeling between my legs, she began to massage my backside, firmly kneading it with a hand on each cheek.

“I want you to understand this and everything that follows as a reward,” she said. “You did so good today, baby… Ian was impressed with how confident you were. He likes it when you’re confident, you know. It makes your submission to him more meaningful.”

“I didn’t feel particularly confident,” I said. “I wasn’t really nervous, because I wasn’t the newbie at the table, but I didn’t feel especially confident.”

“You’re not new to any of us, but you weren’t worried about impressing Nicki… and you barely made faces when they were talking about their game,” Amaranth said.

“I was trying not to make faces at all.”

“Someone who didn’t know you as well as I do probably wouldn’t have picked up on it,” she said. “I was watching for a reaction, in case you needed a reminder to behave… but you didn’t. Now, you mustn’t count on getting rewarded just for common civility, but this is for the whole package, you might say.”

She slowed the rubbing, and then stopped it. The bed shifted as she bent down and deposited a pair of gentle kisses, one on the outside dimple of each side of my rear. She straightened again, and then there was a pause and I held my breath, guessing the general shape of what was coming.

I was not disappointed.

Amaranth was a relatively large girl, not overly muscular in a bulging way but with the muscle of an athlete or a farmhand underneath her soft curves. She could put a lot of force behind the swing of her hand, and she did. She followed that first hard smack against my bare and unprotected ass with a gentler slap using just the tips of her fingers, then she bent to kiss me and did the whole thing over again.

Masochist or not, pain hurts. I don’t want to give the impression that the repeated impact of her hand against my backside was anything but painful. But it was a pain I could relish, and what sprang up in its wake was undeniably pleasurable. The massage had felt nice, but the spanking felt good… so very, very good.

The tears that welled up in my eyes weren’t purely from the pain, though. Amaranth was right. This was too close to a punishment for me. I thought it probably always would be, regardless of her expert ministrations. The tender kisses did something to quiet the voice inside my head that wanted to tell me that I was bad and I deserved it… as did Amaranth’s voice urgently cooing that I was good and I deserved it.

Amaranth knew how to work me to build up to a climax without anything more than repeated strokes across my backside… okay, with the occasional shot going meaningfully astray… but she wasn’t doing any of that tonight.

“I don’t really have a dramatic stopping point in mind tonight,” she said. “So I’m just going to wind things down. Ian talked to me while you were talking to Steff. He’s been taking charge more when the two of you are together, hasn’t he, baby?”

“Yes… ma’am,” I said, as she gave me a still firm but somewhat gentler stroke.

“Like I said, he liked seeing you a little more poised than usual,” she said. “It makes him want to take a, uh, firmer grip on you. Specifically, he asked me not to get you off for the next few nights. I told him it wouldn’t be a problem, because I probably would be spending my nights out anyway, but once I started thinking about it more, I thought it would be more fun to work you up a bit every day… I mean, there’s not giving someone an orgasm, and then there’s withholding an orgasm. I pass by lots of people every day without getting them off… at least not directly and right at the moment… but you’re special, baby, so I should be doing something special for you. To you.”

She giggled.

“It’s going to be a challenge, given how tightly your bow is strung,” she said. “But I look forward to meeting it. I can’t tell you exactly what Ian has in mind, baby, but I’d get ready for some intense frustration.”

She couldn’t tell me, but I thought she probably knew, or had a good idea… when it came to sex, a nymph was the next best thing to a mind reader. It was possible that Ian’s desires didn’t correlate perfectly to his plans, but they would be in the same neighborhood.

Amaranth bent over and planted delicate little kisses all over my bruised-feeling backside. There wouldn’t be a mark on it, because my invulnerable flesh would not do more than momentarily dimple a bit after a non-magical, non-sanctified impact, but invulnerability to harm was not the same thing as invulnerability to hurt. I felt everything the same as anyone else would.

I figured we were probably done, but after helping me upright and giving me a long, lingering kiss on the lips, Amaranth started to take the rest of my clothes off me.

“You don’t have any reason to go out tonight, do you?” she asked.

“No, ma’am,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “Then tonight is a naked night. I don’t know when Ian’s planning on coming over, but I want you to be naked when he does. If someone knocks on the door, you can put on a robe. Same thing if Two needs to talk to you. Don’t cover up for Dee, though, since your nudity doesn’t mean anything to her.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I blushed at the thought of going about my business buck naked, while people came and went through the hall just outside my door all evening long.

The thing about dorm life was that sounds in the hall carried everywhere. I could hear doors opening and closing all the time. People hanging out and talking anywhere in the vicinity of my door sounded like people hanging out and talking right in front of it. I’d learned to block out such things as the ordinary sounds of dorm life, but the thought of sitting naked and exposed… not just incidentally or momentarily naked in the course of changing or getting dressed or doing anything that made nudity appropriate, but just… being naked…

“There,” Amaranth said, smiling radiantly at my growing embarrassment. “Now you’ll be ready for Ian. Don’t hide in bed, either… still do whatever homework or other things you were going to do. Just… like that. Now give me one more kiss goodbye, and wish me luck.”

“Good luck, ma’am,” I said.

“Goodnight, baby,” she said.

I stayed in bed until I heard the door close and lock, and then it was only the force of orders that got me out of it. I did my best to forget that I was naked, but the cool air made that impossible. My piercings in particular made me acutely aware of my nipples… sometimes the fact that I’d literally risked my ass along with the rest of me to get enchanted ones but hadn’t thought to have some kind of temperature-moderating spell layered onto them struck me. I did have homework to do, though, so I focused on that.

I wasn’t expecting Ian to come over until near bedtime, but I’d barely started revising spells for my grimoire for Acantha’s class when I heard a knock on the door. Any question that it wasn’t Ian was all but dispelled by the way it happened: one slightly quiet and uncertain knock followed almost immediately by a firmer one.

Ian had his own insecurities. One of the reasons we worked well together was that we had complementary ways of dealing with them.

I went up to answer the door and immediately realized there was no space for me to stand behind it while pulling it open. So instead I unlocked it and then stood on the other side, saying, “It’s open.”

It was only a second later that I realized I hadn’t checked the peephole, and my confidence in my ability to recognize Ian by his knock plummeted into the pit of my stomach. I felt the splash when it hit bottom.

Luckily I had been right, though.

“Hey, what’s… oh,” he said, when he saw me. He closed the door and held up his backpack. “I, uh, actually wanted to bring my homework over, if it’s not going to distract you… but maybe you have other things on your mind?”

“I was actually doing my own homework,” I said. “But… Amaranth…”

“Loaned you her favorite outfit?” he said. He kissed my forehead. “I approve. So… if I sit here and do homework and talk to you, you’ll just… you’ll stay…”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the idea.”

“Okay,” he said. He put his book bag down on the little two-seater couch that Amaranth had replaced one of our desks with. “Is this… something you’re going to be doing often?”

“If you want me to,” I said. “Amaranth said it’s a ‘naked night’, so I don’t think it’s going to turn into a new rule or anything.”

“I do really like the thought of you meeting me at the door naked all the time, but it’s kind of… a dorm’s not a great set-up for something like that,” he said. “You know?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. I had to admire Amaranth’s ability to set it up so he’d get what he’d want without having to orchestrate it for himself. She did sometimes misjudge the gap between sexual desire and reality, but she was generally pretty good at it.

I realized that Ian was focusing his attention rather intently on the book he’d pulled out of his bag.

“You… you know you’re allowed to look at me, right?” I said. “I mean, this is basically… I’m basically here for your benefit.”

It turned me beet red to say that, which is another way of saying that it really turned me on.

“I know,” he said. “But… I really do have homework to do, so I think I’m just going to enjoy the fact that you are naked and almost shivering for my benefit for a while. I mean, that’s the fantasy, really. Availability. Willingness. Convenience. At the end of the night we could still end up in bed even if you were fully dressed right now and I was sitting in my own room. This is just like foreplay. Anyway, it’s good to practice a little self-control.”

“Okay,” I said. And for a while, we sat in relative silence, him scratching words out in pen in a notebook and me writing lightly in pencil the lines of symbolic runes I would trace over in ink. A grimoire was meant to be permanent, but because it was permanent, it also needed to be perfect.

“So, what do you think about Nicki?” Ian asked after a while, which surprised me… it seemed like something I should be asking him.

“I like her,” I said. “She’s fun.”

“I mean… never mind.”

“No, what?”

“I mean, do you like her?” Ian asked.

“I don’t… not… like her,” I said. “I mean, she’s… cute.” I blushed. “I’m really not used to talking about girls… or guys.”

“Well, you spent most of your life not really seeing yourself as a sexual person,” he said. “You know you are now. I don’t think that means you have to start checking people out and talking about them, but I just thought… you know… if you wanted to but maybe didn’t have anyone you knew you could talk like that with… in theory, being able to talk about girls is supposed to be one of the perks of having a bisexual girlfriend, so I just wanted you to know I’m cool with that.”

“Honestly, I’m not looking to date anyone else, and I’m not interested in casual sex,” I said. “I mean, with people I’m not dating. I don’t think sex between us should always be formal.”

“Good thing we’ve apparently relaxed the dress code, then,” Ian said.

“What do you think about her?”

Ian stuck his pen in the spiral of the notebook and set it down on the arm of the loveseat.

“Well… I’m honestly not surprised that Steff wants to nail her,” he said. “And when I started that sentence I was going to say because her ass is her best feature, but now that I’ve said it I’m trying to think of someone or something I would be surprised about Steff wanting to nail, and I’m not really coming up with anything. A bucket of cole slaw, maybe?”

“I meant as a person,” I said.

“Well, she seems a little desperate,” Ian said. “For approval, I mean… and not in a way that makes her annoying. She’s not like clamoring to be the center of attention all the time. She’s almost wary of it, in case she screws up.”

“That seems pretty perceptive,” I said.

“Yeah, well… it’s not like she’s a simulacrum of you, but you’ve got elements of that,” Ian said.

“We’re definitely not simulacra,” I said. “She’s more sociable, even if she feels like she’s faking it. And I think Steff’s way off base in thinking she’s, um, hot for me.”

“Do you?”

“You think Steff’s right?”

“I think Steff’s wrong in thinking it’s going to happen,” Ian said. “But I’d say from the way she looks at you that you’re her type. But I think she’s more actually interested in making friends.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She seemed pretty interested in getting a girlfriend. I mean, she asked me how to meet girls. I’d think if she was interested in me, she’d cut out the middle… lesbian.”

“A lot of people who aren’t nymphs can look at someone and say, ‘Yeah, I’d fuck that’,” Ian said. “Or some more tacitly respectful version of that. And maybe if the opportunity came up they would, but ‘the opportunity’ doesn’t just mean you’re both in the same place and willing to have sex, because there’s so much baggage and expectations and stuff that goes along with sex… and honestly, not all of the baggage is bad.”

“So your non-professional opinion is that Nicki wants to have sex with me, but wouldn’t,” I said. “Because what she really wants is a girlfriend.”

“Yeah, exactly,” Ian said. “I mean, it’s not like she’s burning a hole in your clothes with her eyes, or groping at you all the time.”

This made me think about my deal with Steff, and I started to blush.

“From the looks of things, you wouldn’t exactly mind that?” Ian guessed.

“I’m actually thinking of something else,” I said. “Anyway, I think she’d be too shy to do that.”

“But dancing with you would have been the perfect cover,” Ian said. “I think the bottom line is that when she looks at you she doesn’t see someone she could have a relationship with.”

“Yeah, my life is pretty complicated already.”

“Well, that’s why you wouldn’t have a relationship with her,” Ian said. “From her point of view, I think it’s more a matter of reach and grasp.”

“You think… you think I’m out of her league?”

“Well, if you weren’t naked and mine I’d probably feel the need to lie and say totally,” Ian said. He shrugged. “I like you, but I have to defer to Amaranth’s Principle here. You have nifty shapes, but a random person could easily find one or the other of you hotter than the other because that’s how it works. The thing is, she thinks you’re out of her league, and that’s what matters.”

“I… you may be right,” I said, when I thought about the fact that she’d needed to work up courage to talk to me. “So, what do I do with this information?”

“You’re not looking for another girlfriend, right?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t really need to do anything,” Ian said.

“But… if she thinks I’m so much better than her, she could probably stand to have a higher opinion of herself.”

“She’s got some confidence issues, yeah,” Ian said. “But I don’t think it’s a matter of a precise amount of self-esteem. It could go up and down without affecting how she sees you in relation to her, or she could decide you and her are more on the same level without it affecting her opinion of herself.”

“Did you turn into a subtle artist when I wasn’t looking?”

“No,” he said. “I’m speaking from a long experience of thinking girls are out of my league,” he said. “Since you’re hanging out together, there’s about a fifty-fifty chance she’ll get over it eventually, but by that time you’ll be firmly cemented as good friends… though if she’s anything like me, she might still jerk off over you every once in a while.”

“I don’t think that all of your experiences apply,” I said, blushing again at the thought.

“Well, maybe in translation,” Ian said. He’d been looking at me throughout our conversation, and the effects were starting to show in his lap. “Though, um, on the subject of jerking off: if you’re at a good breaking point…”

“You want to do that again?” I asked, remembering how he’d made me watch while he pleasured himself, in lieu of allowing me to. It had been a surprisingly maddening punishment, and I’d loved it.

“No, actually, I want to come in your mouth tonight,” he said. “But somehow, it’s hotter when I think of it as jerking off with your head.”

“Do I… do I get anything in return?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said with a smirk that just about skewered me on the spot. “If you do it three nights in a row… I’ll fuck you. But if you get off before then, with me or without me, we start over… and you pay a forfeit to be named later.”

So that was what he had in mind. I counted nights in my head. That would just work out with my arrangement with Steff if he gave me my reward on the third night.. Assuming I could withstand whatever Amaranth wanted to do, the other chance I had of failing was if my dreams took a sexual turn, and that did not seem to be in the cards.

“Steff has me, from Friday night,” I told him.

“Do you want to tell me I can’t get it up twice in one night?” he said, still smirking.

“No,” I said. “And I have to go the next two days without an orgasm?”

“You have a problem with that?”

I had to think about it, but I didn’t have to think long. The prospect of placing myself more fully into Ian’s hands… and Amaranth’s… for a few days was more appealing than straightforward sex.

“No,” I said.

I laid my grimoire aside, Ian stood up long enough get his pants down, and I became a masturbatory aid.

All in all, there were far worse ways to pass the time.

“Why, what’s wrong with the chair?” he asked, looking at it suspiciously.

“Nothing,” she said. “This isn’t the first time I’ve asked you into my office.”

“No,” he said. “But you’ve never asked me to sit down.”

“Well, this time I want to have a conversation,” she said. “When I’m looking for, say, an explanation, I prefer to keep things brief.”

“Fair enough,” he said. He folded himself into the chair. “What did you want to talk about?”

“You,” she said. “Me. Boundaries.”

“I feel like we’ve had this conversation before,” he said.

“I’ve had it,” she said. “I’m not sure you’ve ever really been present for it.”

She opened a desk drawer and pulled out an old, tattered red envelope. She set it on the desk, face down.

“This is what you were looking for when you ‘accidentally’ tipped all the contents out of my handbag,” she said. “That was a really incredible accident, especially considering that you’re an elf. And it was zipped.”

“Surely in all the world there must be at least one clumsy elf,” Xylon said.

“I understand that among elves, a boundary is seen as a challenge,” she said. “That a person sets a boundary with the expectation that attempts will be made to circumvent it, and this is part of the day-to-day dance of negotiation. I also understand that being a natural telepath on top of having elven senses means you’re accustomed to knowing everything that’s going on around you, or thinking that you do.”

“Your understanding overwhelms me,” he said. “You know, I think you just might have some kind of psychic empathy power.”

“The thing I want you to understand is this: I know you don’t mean any harm,” she said. “I know you don’t pry into my life with any goal except to know one more thing today than you knew yesterday, and you don’t have any use in mind for that information than to brag about it. And I know there are worse things a person can do with that kind of information, that there are worse reasons to disregard the lines that someone draws around their life.”

“So you asked me here to tell me that it’s okay that I’m a gossipy little bugger?”

“No, Xylon,” Lorellon said. “I asked you here to tell you it’s not okay. Crossing lines is what you do best. As far as I can tell, it’s a big part of why you work here. For all the things that I can do that you can’t…”

“There aren’t that many things.”

“Don’t kid yourself. For all the things I can do that you can’t, there are things you will do that I won’t,” she said. “But I want you to listen when I say that I’m drawing a bright red line around my life and my business, and if you cross it, you will be burned.”

“Listen, Lorellon… as long as we’re cutting proverbial shit, we both know that we’re both too valuable to let go,” he said. “And we both know that you’ve complained about me before, and it didn’t go anywhere…”

“I’m not talking about another Personnel Resources complaint,” she said.

“What are you talking about, then?”

“Xylon, do you think you’re the only one who has eyes and ears?”

“I don’t follow you,” he said.

“Press me, and you’ll find out.”

“You don’t… you don’t really have anything on me, do you?” he said. “And anyway, there’s nothing for you to have! Anyway, you can’t blame me for being curious when you’re so damnably mysterious about everything.”

“Curiosity is beyond your control. Actions aren’t,” she said. “And you’re still not listening to me, Xylon. I didn’t ask you here to argue about what you did, or what it means. I’m telling you that you have crossed a line, and the next time you do it will be the last time.”

She picked up the envelope, carefully holding the blank side of it towards him, and just as carefully put it on the paper disintgrating plate in the corner of her desk. She waved her hand over it, and it disappeared in a green puff.

“I’ve carried that with me for a long time,” she said. “My reasons for doing so are my own, but I’m sure you can imagine that it was important to me… though I know you can’t feel it, no matter how hard you try. My privacy is the most important thing in the world to me, Xylon. There is nothing I won’t do to protect it.”

“You’ve certainly demonstrated your willingness to put office equipment to its routine use,” he said.

“Xylon, I want you to think long and hard about my particular area of expertise,” she said. “I know you spend at least fifteen minutes of every work day thinking sloppily unguarded thoughts about my past… or rather wondering about it. I know you’re an arrogant little son of a bitch, but I want you to ask yourself honestly if you think you’re the worst I’ve ever had to deal with. And before you think you’re my better or even my equal, I want you to think about how the envelope you knew I carried with me came to not be in my handbag the day you decided to make your move for it.”

“Well, fine,” Xylon said, getting to his feet. “See if I bring you your mail again.”

“If you stop touching my mail, I’ll consider it a small miracle,” she said. “And Xy, I do want you to remember that: you’re not the worst I’ve dealt with. That’s why if you never stick your nose into my business again, I’ll be able to keep on thinking of you as that slightly annoying work friend. If you do, though…”

She shrugged, and looked meaningfully at the vanisher.

“That only works on paper, though,” Xylon said. “Oh, you’re being metaphorical, aren’t you?”

“Do us both a favor and don’t find out.”

“You know, turning into a hardass and talking about what you dealt with before me isn’t going to make me any less curious…”

“Again, your curiosity is not my problem or responsibility,” she said. “It’s what you do with it. There’s a whole world out there full of things you can be curious about. It doesn’t have to be this one thing.”

“But see, I am curious now I’m curious about what you think you know about me, and what you’d be willing to do with it,” Xylon said. “I’m curious about which one of us is better…”

“If it were you, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Lorellon said.

A lifetime before…

“I told you not to come back,” Laurel Anne said when she found the man sitting in her kitchen once more.

None of the runes she’d spent precious extra coins to have inscribed on the windows and doors had gone off. In her heart, she’d had little faith in their ability to keep him out, but she hadn’t seen the exercise as entirely pointless.

If he had to circumvent security measures that were clearly aimed at him, her thinking had gone, he would not be able to play innocent. When she saw the placid smile on his face when he saw her, she knew she’d been fooling herself. Nothing would stop him from playing innocent.

It just made the pretense all the more galling.

“And I told you I would be back,” he said. “How could you begin to trust me if I didn’t keep my word?”

“Your words have never been more than a distraction from your actions,” she said. “I can trust you to do as you please only. That’s how I knew you would be back regardless. If you want to show me that you’re trustworthy, leave now. Because I’m telling you to, leave and never come back.”

“What’s the use of proving my trustworthiness if I never speak to you again?”

“What’s the use, indeed,” she said.

“Stab me for thinking it’s a valid question.”

“If you only respect boundaries as a means to an end, you don’t actually respect boundaries,” she said.

“But what’s civilization itself, if it’s not the end goal of behaving civilized?” he countered. “You respect people so you’ll be respected in return. You treat people fairly so they’ll be square with you.”

“You’re right,” Laurel Anne said. “I’m treating you horribly. You should have nothing to do with me.”

“What if I came back to tell you that you’re right?”

“I know I’m right,” she said. “You came back when I told you to stay away. Your actions are proof enough, I don’t need you to admit to what you’ve already shown me.”

“Not about that,” he said. “My… purpose. In coming to see you in the first place.”

“I knew you were lying about that.”

“Okay, so I didn’t come to you to see about your little Aidan. I would have maybe dropped his folks a line, but he’s been put where I couldn’t conveniently reach him, anyway. Do you know how hard it is for my kind to catch an airship these days?”

“Again, you’re trying to impress me with your honesty by admitting what I already know.”

“Oh, there’s information in there I know you didn’t have,” he said.

“Yeah, you’re dangling information about Aidan in front of me like bait,” she said. “And I’m not biting. Before you pretended you were only interested in him, now you’re trying to entice me with hints about him… the fact that you’re really interested in Mackenzie is nothing I don’t already know.”

“Nothing you haven’t worked out, you mean,” he said. “And sharp as you are, you can’t tell me it doesn’t mean anything to have it confirmed. Listen, I knew you’d be suspicious. I knew you’d be protective of our daughter, and that’s only right. So I thought I’d make you aware of the problem and leave it entirely up to you if you wanted to avail yourself of the obvious solution.”

“That being you.”

“There are things I can teach her that she’s going to need to know,” he said. “And ways she can learn them that would be a good ways worse.”

“What did I ever do to you, really?” he asked.

“You took my childhood from me,” she said.

“I took you from your childhood,” he countered. “A place where you were stifled, where you had no idea what gifts you had or how to use them. You were nothinog more than Martha Blaise’s daughter. Now you’re someone new, someone strong.”

“All thanks to you?”

“Thanks to you,” he said. “I just opened a door for you.”

“And gave me a shove.”

“A small one, maybe,” he said. “A few ones even, here and there. But tell me you’re not better for it. Tell me you’d be happier, living the life your mother wanted for you.”

“I might have found my own door out of that life, eventually,” Laurel Anne said.

“You might have,” he said. “And you might have met a man and you might have had a child, though she wouldn’t be this one. So really, what are you complaining to me about… the fact that you ended up saddled with her?”

“Don’t turn this around,” Laurel Anne said. “I can love Mackenzie and be happy she’s in my life without being happy about how she got here.”

“You know, it seems to me like you’re objecting to what happened on principle, even though in this specific case you don’t have a problem with the results,” he said. “I mean, if you had the chance to undo it all with a wish, what would you do?”

“Word it very carefully,” Laurel Anne said.

“You can hate on me all you want, but you can’t deny that I had a hand in the best things in your life,” he said.

“That doesn’t make what you did right, and doesn’t mean I’m going to let you near my daughter,” Laurel Anne said.

“Our daughter, though I meant what I said when I told you I wouldn’t dream of interfering with how you raise her.”

“Except that was your plan all along.”

“To help, not interfere. What do you think I have up my sleeve, lady? What are you afraid that I’ll do, harm my own flesh and blood?”

“Let me tell you the least of what I fear,” she said. “It’s that she grows up like you, that she grows up to be your daughter, a liar and a trickster and a user…”

The man held up his hands.

“Okay, okay, I get the picture,” he said. “Listen, I’ve been alive on this plane for a long time, and to do that I’ve had to learn to think on my feet. This world hates me. This world rejects me. If I engage in a subtle bit of misdirection or manipulation to stay a step or three ahead of the mob… well, that’s better than the alternative, isn’t it?”

“Now you want credit for being a liar,” she said.

“Well, if someone asks me if I’m a demon, I’d rather tell him no than twist his head off,” he said. “Doesn’t that tell you something about my character?”

“That you’d rather avoid trouble,” she said.

“That’s true enough,” he said. “And that’s why I’m not going to press the point with you about dear little Mackenzie. You want me to leave well enough alone, I’ll leave well enough alone.”

“If that were true, you wouldn’t have come back in the first place!” Laurel Anne said.

“Now you’re getting emotional,” he said. “Listen, you have every reason to be upset, but there’s just no point in continuing this conversation right now. I tell you what, I’ll give you a little while to cool down and think it over, and if, in a calmer moment you still feel…”

“Now you’re in charge of judging whether I’m in a fit state of mind to make a decision,” she said. “And you’re trying to make it sound like you’re doing me a favor by ignoring what I’m saying.”

“Seriously, this is just pointless as all get out,” he said, standing up. “Don’t worry about showing me the door, I know my own way out.”

“You said you’d leave it up to me if I wanted your help or not,” she said. “I’m telling you right now, in so many words, I don’t…”

“Laurel Anne, I respect you too much to listen to you in this state,” he said. “I want to hear your honest thoughts on this, in a moment of cool and sober reflection after you’ve had time to think about it.”

“If you come back again, it will be the last time,” she said.

“See, now you’re making threats you know you can’t carry off,” he said.

“I don’t know how to stop you yet,” she said. “But I’ll be ready.”

“If I’m such a bad guy, wouldn’t that just give me incentive to hurry back?”

“So if I see you soon, I guess that’ll clinch it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Like what?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I like your top,” Two said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thanks, Two,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is ‘Mouse’ a… um…”

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

“I like Mouse,” Two said.

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

“It’s true,” Two said.

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

“That’s submission,” Amaranth said.

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

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

“Is Shiel her dom?” Nicki asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So… you noticed?” she said.

“Nicki did,” I said.

She laughed.

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

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

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

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

She sighed and took the paper from me.

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

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

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

“What?”

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

“Okay,” I said.

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

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

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

“If that happens, I’ll ask,” I said.

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

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

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

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

“I’ll have it back to you tomorrow.”

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

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

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

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

“I will,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”

“And screaming, of course.”

“Of course.”

I didn’t want to go to the extremes of the old timey TV boxes that had indirectly inspired my aquarium theme because that would not tastefully blend in to a modern living room, but I thought maybe adding some kind of trim around the edge of the box wouldn’t necessarily go amiss.

After class, Nicki and I walked out together, since neither of us had anywhere to hurry off to.

“Oh, you want to take the scenic route?” Nicki said as I headed down the long irregular curving hallway that seemed to be the only way out of the Emily Center.

“Funny,” I said.

“Ooh!” Nicki said.

“What?” I said.

“I just had an idea for how to salvage the drawing of you,” she said. “You could make it into a feature of the fish tank.”

“But I don’t want a naked image of me to be a feature of the fish tank,” I said.

“No, I mean, you could say that it will display the owner’s face,” Nicki said. “Then yours is just like a placeholder to demonstrate the concept?”

“So, the idea is that everybody who buys it would have a tiny naked picture of themselves hidden inside their living room whenever they aren’t using the TV?” I asked.

“…it’s possible I didn’t think that one all the way through,” she said.

“Making the entire image customizable makes a lot of sense in the long run,” I said. “If I were making an actual product, I’d be focusing on that as the actual goal and then have a few pre-made ones to choose from. But we’re going to be graded on our design skills, and for the aesthetic effect I’m going for there’s a lot more to work with inside the box than outside it.”

“I guess that makes sense,” NIcki said.

“Speaking of aesthetic effects… I guess you decided to keep your hair orange?” I asked.

She’d glamoured it up for the dance, but while she’d relaxed the shaping and given herself a little trim it was still the same vivid color it had been on Thursday. She’d told me the spell didn’t cost much to maintain, but it did have to be maintained.

“Well, I think it’s more interesting this way,” she said. “I mean, you seemed to like it, so…”

It was weird to think that she was doing things to impress me… it might have been flattering, but I hated to think that she was altering her appearance to suit what she imagined my tastes to be. Okay, as a glamourist, that wasn’t really as drastic as it might have sounded, but I still felt it would be better if she would relax and just do what she wanted.

“Well, it is cool,” I said. “It’s more that I didn’t really notice it before you glammed it.”

“Well, yeah, exactly,” she said.

“I mean, you’re a creative person,” I said. “You can probably do lots of things that are cool with your hair… and you don’t have to all the time. You’re not going to like fade into the background if your head’s not on fire. I noticed you because you talked to me and we got along.”

“Sorry,” she said. “But I do fade into the background? You know a gnome ran into me one time?”

“That’s… kind of impressive, in a way,” I said.

“I mean, she seemed distracted,” Nicki said. “But still…”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Anyway… if it makes you feel any better about the mermaid, I don’t think most would recognize at a glance that the body is yours. I mainly recognized it because I’ve seen you drawn in that style.”

“I didn’t,” I said. “Though I don’t spend a lot of time looking at my body… but, yeah, that’s why I think I’ll be okay if I just alter the face. Even if I make it less distinct… but how many people do you think have seen Steff’s sketches, though?”

“I don’t know,” Nicki said. “She let me flip through it at a rainbow meeting… I said I was looking for tattoo ideas, and I kind of was, but it was really more of a conversational gambit? Like, I’d dared myself to talk to three new people that week, I mean really talk and not just say hi or something, and so I had to find something to talk to them about. I thought being interested in her sketches might break the ice, but it kind of backfired… she handed it to me and said I could look through it if I wanted to and walked away to talk to someone else.”

“She wasn’t trying to blow you off, I’m sure,” I said. “She probably felt embarrassed and didn’t want to show it.”

“Oh, I figured that out, eventually,” Nicki said. “I mean, from what I could tell, it seems like she’s more likely to show off with her knives than with her drawing, which is nuts because she’s crazy good with a pencil.”

“Well, she learned how to fight in a mostly-human class,” I said. “That makes it a little bit easier for her to see her natural grace than competing with a bunch of full-blooded elves. It’s funny, you don’t seem to have much trouble talking to me.”

“Don’t I? Well, I spent the whole first day trying to work up the courage,” she said. “I’m lucky Professor Stone encourages collaboration or else I’d probably still be doing it. Poor Professor… do you think he’s in trouble?”

“With the clan or the school?”

“The clan,” Nicki said. “I mean, that’s his mom’s clan, right?”

“I think so,” I said. “But I don’t think they’d hold an attempt against him, when it failed and the thieves were caught. Dwarves can be unforgiving of theft and people who fail to prevent it, but I think they accept the existence of thieves as a fact of life. He might have been in an uncomfortable position between the university or the imperium and the clan about how to deal with the thieves. The fact that they came to a private bond agreement means there was an agreement, but who knows how much negotiation and pressure it took to come to that point?”

“I guess,” Nicki said. “So… see you Thursday?”

“Definitely,” I said. “But, you know, you’re welcome to hang out with me outside of class. I mean, there doesn’t have to be a specific event or anything. We eat dinner at the Arch pretty much every day, for instance… I’ve got the last class of the day in our group, so it’s usually after I get back from my melee class.”

“And it’s okay if I come to?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Like… tonight.”

“Any night,” I said. “You don’t even have to check in or anything… you can just plop down at our table.”

“I might do that sometimes,” she said. “But I wouldn’t want to intrude…”

“I’m pretty sure everybody in the group likes you,” I said.

“Maybe I’ll come by tonight, then!” she said.

“Great!” I said.

At the front door, she kissed the tips of two of her fingers and touched them to the door frame as she went out. It was a weird kind of affectation, but a lot of the G&D majors seemed pretty fond of the unconventional building.

“See you tonight, then, I guess,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

It was only when she started heading off that I started to think about the downside to adding another person to our circle… like, we’d have a lot of backstory to explain if we wanted to talk about the owl-turtle thing or anything else that was going on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Burn my clothes off… in slow motion?”

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re getting a live show,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steff’s grin was priceless.

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

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

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

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

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

Unless that was what someone wanted me to think…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, fuck!” I said.

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

“You didn’t notice?” Nicki asked.

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

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

“It’s okay,” I said.

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

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

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

“Sorry,” Nicki said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fair enough,” I said.

I looked at what he’d written on mine.

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

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

Some of the missing people might have just partied too hard over the weekend to show up for their early classes on Monday, but I had a feeling that at least some of them were more pointedly absent.

Of course, it was possible that there was some overlap there… someone who didn’t take the substitute teacher seriously or wanted to assert themselves against her authority might be more likely to blow off a day’s class. I really kind of hoped that her main critic at least would decide to drop it entirely, because I wasn’t looking forward to the continued disruption to the class if Acantha had to continue to deal with his bullshit.

Acantha acknowledged the absences only very briefly, saying, “I will look into what policies my colleague Professor Leclerc held regarding absences and decide how it would be best for me to deal with them. I will have a handout prepared by Friday that will address this topic, and will be available to discuss it either immediately after class or during my listed office hours. You will be happy to know that under no circumstance will any of your valuable classroom time be devoted to the topic.”

The rest of the class went smoothly and was entirely on-topic, which was awesome. It was amazing but not really surprising how much difference it made to only have people who were ready to listen and learn in the classroom. I hoped it lasted forever.

The class itself didn’t, though, and when it ended Acantha sent a whisper to my ear.

“If you have a moment, Ms. Mackenzie, please nod once and stay at your desk.”

This took me by surprise, but was less shocking than it might have been if I hadn’t been used to dealing with elven whispers. So I nodded and took my time packing up my notebooks and materials. She glided over and closed the door behind the last lingering student who wasn’t me. I’d never really paid attention to the sound of the classroom door closing before, but I thought I heard a second click.

That sent a shiver of apprehension through me. People wanting to be alone with me in a locked room was rarely a good thing.

“Is something the matter?” I said, trying to sound calm. I stayed standing at my table. If she had some kind of problem with me, I didn’t want to do anything to escalate it.

“Possibly,” she said. “Are you acquainted with an Ariadne, called Einhorn?”

So she probably wasn’t going to pull out a wand and blast me, but I still didn’t like where this was going. Ariadne Einhorn was unusually bigoted against demonbloods for an elf, apparently because she’d lost her husband to a demon. From the way Acantha referred to her it didn’t sound like they were friends or even knew each other, but she might have heard that Professor Ariadne had had a problem with me or vice-versa. If she’d heard the story through the elven grapevine she might have got a very skewed version of it.

“Yes,” I said. “I was briefly in one of her classes, but we had a personality conflict.”

“I received a letter from her via intracampus post,” Acantha said. “The subject of this letter was you and the danger she believes you pose. There was no threat or suggested course of action; it was couched as crucial information. I do not know if I received it because I am one of your instructors, or because she expected some greater sympathy from me because we are both elves, or if she has simply taken to writing letters to the entire faculty in the hopes of stirring up some support. I was uncertain of what the most appropriate course of action was, so I sent copies of the letter to the head of the history department and the college of enchantment, and the office of the chancellor. The original is in my dimensional vault… I am afraid I do not know if this is a purely administrative matter, or one for civil or criminal law, so I felt it best to preserve it somewhere safe.”

“Could I get a copy of it, too?” I asked. “I don’t think there’s anything criminal here, but I’d like to show it to my attorney anyway.”

“Of course,” she said. “My vault is accessible only at certain arbitrary intervals, but I will have it for you by the end of the week.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I hope you don’t get any trouble for rocking the boat like this.”

“It helps to not see oneself as a passenger on the boat,” she said. “In my ordinary professional life, I am forced to make certain sacrifices and compromises to get along, never mind getting ahead… here, I have little to gain from playing the game but a small measure of temporary comfort, so it is with some measure of personal pleasure that I take the opportunity to do what seems to me to be the right thing.”

“Well, I really appreciate it,” I said. “Thank you.”

She smiled, and it was the first genuine smile I’d seen on her. Elves have such control over their faces that they can look disconcertingly similar to statues. When she stands in front of the class and puts on her placid smile, it’s easy to see that it’s a put-on.

“Well, I have work to do, and I’m certain this isn’t your last class of the day,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, gathering up my things. Because I felt the need to say goodbye or something but couldn’t figure out a way to say it that wouldn’t sound awkward or force, I added, “See you Wednesday.”

“Yes.”

Before going to lunch I sent an a-mail to Teddi asking for an appointment to see her, which I preferred to reflecting. I always felt so awkward talking to people in mirrors, even more so than talking to them in person. It had taken me several sessions with Teddi to figure out why this was true even though it was in theory a step more removed from an actual face-to-face conversation. The reason was that when I was talking to someone who was there, I could avoid looking at their face. In a mirror conversation, that was really obvious and just looked weird.

I hadn’t realized this because of anything Teddi had said to me or anything that I’d said to her. Rather, it had hit me because her office was laid out in such a way that we could have a conversation without having to be facing each other but not pointedly looking away. It was amazing how much of a difference that made in my ability to just open up and let words fall out of my mouth.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t have been looking forward to my first afternoon class, as I was taking the local hazards course out of necessity rather than preference, but I really liked the teaching assistant and we were in the process of getting a virtual tour of the campus environs courtesy of an interactive geomantic survey map of her invention.

The actual map was large and immobile, but she had a sort of virtual crystal ball set up in the form of an illusion cast over a table that could display a cylindrical section of the map.

She and a white human woman in a modern-style robe were fussing over it when I came into the room. The area over the table was occupied with a solid gray column wrapped in red dwarven runes. A dwarf was under the table lying with his back on a roller, tapping the table with a segmented metal rod.

This didn’t look good, but since there was obviously applied enchantment going on I drew closer.

“No, it still says access is denied,” the wizard was saying into a hand mirror. “Are you sure you’ve carved the new permissions?”

“This is some bullshit,” Eloise said to the dwarf, and at least partially to the world at large. “I hope you know that. I have a contract.”

“Your contract’s not with me,” the dwarf said.

“You’re still being paid.”

“Yelling at me isn’t going to make it go faster,” the dwarf said.

“I’m not yelling,” Eloise said, and amazingly she wasn’t.

The human wizard hugged her mirror in close and said to Eloise, “They want to know, is there anything in your matrix that would possibly be interpreted as hostile?”

“Nothing in my matrix’s been changed,” she said. “This is something on their end, I’m telling you.”

“Well, yes, obviously,” the wizard agreed. “Clearly they’ve changed something in their protections, but we can’t expect them to be forthcoming about their security procedures…”

“Why not? I’m paying them extra for space I can scry into,” Eloise said. “If I can’t scry into it, I’m not getting what I paid for. Don’t dwarves take that thing seriously?”

“She says nothing hostile,” the wizard said into the mirror.

“It could be a compatibility issue,” someone said, and when both women and the dwarf turned to look in my direction I realized it was me.

“Oh, hell, she’s right,” the dwarf said. “This thing is lousy with druid magic.”

“Excuse me?” Eloise said. “My magic has never been a problem before.”

“And it wouldn’t be, if your guys downstairs are only using modern magic,” the dwarf said. “That’s why I didn’t think of it sooner. The older dwarf stuff doesn’t use ‘magic’ as you know it at all for enchantments, and is completely incompatible with druidry. It doesn’t get used a lot any more because the new stuff is more flexible and better designed, but if something spooked them and they wanted to beef their security up in a hurry they might have just thrown up everything they had available, and a lot of it would be badly in need of updating.”

“Oh, yeah, that would do it,” the wizard, nodding.

“And they didn’t think that might cause some problems for their paying customer?” Eloise asked.

“Lady, you’re talking about students,” the dwarf said. “A lot of them are enchantment students, but they’re only a little bit older than you and they haven’t necessarily had a lot of experience in all the messy real-world interactions like this. Hell, I’ve been at this for almost forty-nine years and I almost didn’t think of it.”

“That’s great, but what am I supposed to do?” Eloise asked him.

“I’ll go shoot them a message and let them know that whatever they’re doing, they need to put a hole in it,” he said. “They won’t necessarily be happy about it, but if you’ve got a contract like you say, they’ll honor it.”

“How long is that gonna take?”

“To send the message? Just as long as it takes me to get to a warded room,” the dwarf said. “For them to comply? No idea, sorry.”

“Thanks,” Eloise said. She blew a puff of air out of the side of her mouth to push a dangling lock out of her face. “I’m not angry at you, Fred… just frustrated.”

“Be frustrated at the dumbasses who triggered the alert,” Fred said.

“I’m already beyond frustrated with them, believe me,” Eloise said.

“No, I think we’re done here,” the wizard said into her mirror. “Thank you so much for your help. Bye-bye!” She shook the mirror and looked at Eloise. “Do you need anything else from me?”

“No, and thanks,” Eloise said. “Told you it was on their end.”

“It was worth checking out,” she said. “Tell your professor I said hi!”

“Hi yourself,” Professor Swain said, though the departing enchanter didn’t seem to notice that. I hadn’t noticed the professor’s presence, either. Gnomes had a way of retreating from the foreground like that. “So, are we going to have our presentation?”

“Maybe,” Eloise said. “I don’t know.”

“Well, I’ll be on my way and try to get the carts rolling for you,” Fred said.

“Thanks,” Eloise said to him. She turned to me. “And thanks for speaking up. Who knows how long it might’ve taken otherwise.”

“It was just a shot in the dark,” I said. “A lot of stuff about the history of enchantment talks about the peculiarities of dwarven enchantment before modern wizardry… I wasn’t even sure there was a specific issue with ancient dwarven magic and druidry, I just knew there was a lot of finicky bits about what different things could go together in the old days.”

“Yeah, come to think of it, I do remember all that being mentioned as a reason for why there aren’t many dwarven druids still these days,” Eloise said. “I just didn’t think it would bite me in the ass. Pardon my Elvish… I’ve probably been swearing up a storm in front of you. That’s probably a bad habit for a teaching assistant.”

“Oh, you’re fine,” Professor Swain said. “She’s a grown woman and she’s not a student for another twelve minutes yet.”

“You do have a habit of showing up bright and early,” Eloise said.

“I like to keep my classes spaced out so I never have to run anywhere,” I said. “Running and me doesn’t really mix. What was that about an alert?”

“Dwarven business,” she said. “Nothing that should concern you unless you’re dumb enough to put your hands on something that isn’t yours.”

If she hadn’t put it that way, I might have thought that someone had tried to breach one of the secret entrances to Underhall, the dwarven complex beneath the university… but the talk about people’s hands on things that didn’t belong to them made me think of something else.

There was an important and historical dwarf-made sword on temporary display in the design building. I’d suspected a group of delving students with more ambition than good sense might have been planning to try to snatch it for bragging rights or the sheer experience of it. As much as I had good reason not to like these people, I kind of hoped that I was wrong in my suspicion, or that the “alert” was because someone had overheard them planning rather than them being caught in the act.

Dwarves took their privacy and property rights very seriously.

It took extra effort on her part to steer the shape she bodied against its nature, but the advantages of an owl over diurnal raptors were considerable. A falcon’s eyesight was better over immense distances, but an owl’s was more acute. An owl’s hearing could rival an elfblood’s, could pinpoint the direction of a sound across any axis.

If she had been looking for signs of lost adventurers over a large area she might have gone with a hawk-form, but she was looking for something smaller in the limited environs of the eastern campus and its immediate surroundings.

The other reason she favored owls when sheer utility did not dictate another avian form was that, contrary to their use in iconography, owls weren’t really the big thinkers of the bird world. Compressing her human mind into an owl was more difficult than doing so with a falcon, to say nothing of a raven or crow.

Oh, they weren’t dunces. No predatory birds were. But a falcon could hunt its prey with cunning as well as stealth and speed. Owls simply used ruthless efficiency. They located their prey. They pinpointed its exact distance and direction. They swooped. Once an owl was locked on, what happened next was pure instinct. For an owl on the swoop, the world consisted of nothing but a line rapidly shrinking to a point.

It was easier to be an owl than a falcon or hawk if one simply let go and let nature take its course, but it was harder to be an owl and hold onto oneself. That suited Eloise just fine. She didn’t like forms that were too easy to inhabit.

For some druids, the goal was for the whole process of shapeshifting to feel completely natural… to be at as much ease in the skin of a wolf or a fish as they were in their own. This was usually an act of devotion, seen as a form of communion. It was also risky. If one felt too natural as a wolf, one might forget what it had been like to walk on two legs… and in fact, there had been druids who had sought to reach this state, considering it a form of grace extended from the pristine natural world to the various “fallen” races.

Eloise did not consider humanity to be fallen from nature or even apart from it, and her idea of a heaven did not involve sleeping in a tree or eating mice. So she kept her mind as intact as she could when she wore a wild shape, even though it required constant concentration. The feeling of unadulterated joy she got when she climbed high above the treeline and watched the horizon retreating farther and farther away could not be erased by a little bit of mental effort.

She had heard older druids try to describe the sublime joy they felt when they truly became, but the thing that had always stuck with her was how little they actually had to say about it. The stock line was that it was hard to explain in words, but Eloise suspected they didn’t even retain clear memories of the time they spent shaped. By giving themselves over to their animal forms so completely, they became like the untrained weres who essentially had one mind when they walked on two feet and another when they didn’t.

No thanks, Eloise-as-the-owl thought to herself. I’ll keep my mind and my feathers, thank you.

She spotted a flash of movement along the edge of one of the sidewalks. She adjusted the angle of her wings to fly parallel at a distance and turned her head to fix an immense eye on it. There was a mouse, a white mouse, that was scrambling in the grass along the edge of the sidewalk… her owl-eyes didn’t see colors the same way as her human ones did, but she could tell that it had a uniform light coat unlike the mice of the fields and forests. She also couldn’t imagine a wild mouse trying to get up onto the sidewalk like that, or failing so badly at it as this one was.

If it wanted to get across the path, it would climb up easily and run straight across towards whatever its goal was. This mouse was following the course of the sidewalk and occasionally trying to pull itself up using just its forelegs. It didn’t seem like it wanted to cross the walk so much as be on it. Its hindlegs weren’t hurt, but it didn’t seem to occur to it that climbing was a full-body exercise… or that its forelimbs differed from arms.

Positive identification, she thought.

She’d had a couple different ideas about what would come after that. It might have been possible for her to land nearby and then resume her human form, but there were students hurrying up and down the path the mouse-body was trying to scramble onto. If it succeeded, it might be crushed before Eloise could get to it.

That would be bad.

She banked away from the sight of the tiny scurrying figure in order to gain both altitude and distance, then put herself on a slow approach, her wings billowing out to get as much purchase on the air as possible in order to get her glide as close to a slow fall as possible. She almost paused in mid-air, and in that moment she checked the distance to the tiny white body using both eyes. She judged the wind. She adjusted her wings and went into the swoop.

The part of her mind that couldn’t help but be owl was locked. The body she wore would respond automatically. Her talons were like a springloaded trap and she’d already thrown the trigger.

This is going to suck, Eloise thought to herself.

Less than a second before impact, she forced a piercing shriek out of her throat… hard going, because it wasn’t even halfway close to the right time. An owl on the swoop is silent. She wanted to startle the student, though, she wanted his mind to panic and his body to freeze because she needed him to be perfectly still for this to work. She wrenched her mind up out of the owl and sideways, thinking green eyes and four legs, padded paws, sinuous spine.

The untransformed students who had caught a glimpse of the diving owl and frozen in place rather than scattering away from its path caught a confused glimpse of brown skin in a maelstrom of feathers before a tabby cat materialized out of it, snatched a tiny white mouse up in its jaws, somersaulted across the sidewalk, and landed in the grass on the other side of it, a very stunned but unharmed mouse in its mouth.

Yep. That sucked, Eloise thought. She picked herself back up and began to trot along the sidewalk towards the high sorcery building.

Holy shit, you can talk? the mouse-student thought back.

Not with this mouth and not with you in it, Eloise thought, focusing more strongly on the mouse. I can beast-speak, and you’ve got enough of a beast-brain at the moment to hear me, at least when we’re in such close contact. If you spent a couple of days polymorphed I could have a conversation with you from across the room, but you wouldn’t be able to tell me much more than what’s big and scary and what smells like food, or where all the lady mice are at.

I wasn’t trying to steal the sword. I just wanted to see how hard it would be to remove it from its stand. I figured that either I would fail completely and not trigger anything or succeed so well that I didn’t set off any of the safeguards.

I’m not here to arrest you, I’m just here to rescue your ass and get you to someone who can reverse the transformation. I’m guessing there’s an inquest in your future, though. You had an accomplicefriend?

A what?

That thing where you start to say one thing and then change it to another doesn’t really work so well here. Two students were hit when the ward went off, and it’s your bad luck that you managed to dispel the tracer spells before that happened. So which one are you?

I’m Seth.

What happened to Lacey Beaumont, then? You get separated?

Sort of. A cat got her. That wasn’t you, was it?

Nope. Tough luck for Lacey, Eloise thought.

Hey! Seth thought.

Sorry, kid… there isn’t a filter on this.

Will you be able to find her body? Her dad has a load of insurance on her.

Rich kids, Eloise thought. Always think their money makes them invincible.

Close enough! She’s died twice already.

Three times, you mean.

Fuck you! Are you going to help bring her back or not?

You got a real way with words. It’s probably way too late. When’d she buy it?

Almost right away. Right after we got out of the Em, just outside the tree line.

So this morning. You know, if you would have stayed put you would have been fine. Busted, but fine.

We didn’t know how long it would last… I thought it might wear off if we got far enough away. How long does it last?

Seth, if this had been a lesser polymorph she would have sprung back to her own body as soon as she died, Eloise told him. And apart from being dead and probably having a broken spine and some punctured organs, she’d be fine. Resurrection-ready, even. But your professor wasn’t messing around. A perfect polymorph means the mouse body is your real body until another spell of the same magnitude changes you back. And that means there is no policy or spell or prayer in the world that can do a thing for her in the shape she’d be in by now, if we could even hope to find her.

Shit.

Eventually.

That’s my girlfriend you’re thinking about!

No, it’s cat shit. I feel bad for her, but there are limits to how bad I can feel, she said. You two were committing what would be a serious crime…

We weren’t going to take the damned thing!

I know, Eloise thought. And I believe you, because you ain’t got the skills to lie to me through this. You did it as a lark, thinking it would be taken as a lark, because you’re white and human and have money and you’ve always gotten away with everything before.

I’ve never done anything bad, really.

Of course not. But you’ve probably done shit that would have got someone else turned into a quiver or thrown in prison for a few years. Your joyride is other people’s grand theft conveyance. You’ve probably sassed back to a guard. If I did that, it’d be interfering with an officer of the law or making terroristic threats or something. Your hijinks are other people’s crimes, Seth, and now your girlfriend is dead because of one and you know what the first thing that anybody’s going to say to you if they haul you before a tribune for it?

What?

“Oh, hasn’t he suffered enough? He has such a bright future, why throw it away because of one mistake?”

Bitch, you think I don’t feel bad?

You think this is about your feelings?

I could sue you.

What for, the negligent infliction of the fucking truth? I could swallow you now and say I never found you, but I know the difference between what’s right and what I can get away with.

It’s just that she didn’t want to be there. She told me I shouldn’t mess around with the sword, but she came along with me I guess to try to keep me out of trouble. It’s my fault.

Yeah, well, if you believe in justice, remember that when you’re in front of the trib.