As much as anyone could, Hazel had been able to teach Two the value of things like spontaneity, and going with the flow. It was probably the way she managed to sound authoritative about it. Hazel had so much confidence in the nuggets of down-home, folksy wisdom that she frequently made up that she could state them with the force of being a rule, which was exactly the sort of thing that Two needed to hear. It was enough to get Two to accept other ways of doing things as valid, even when she still clung to her own.

That was probably the only way the two of them could work together in their cooking classes, since Hazel preferred to do things by feel and intuition where Two by her nature required precise measurements and exact recipes.

There were artistic golems who had been instilled with the spark of creativity and the essence of intuition needed to be naturally comfortable with those kinds of leaps. Probably some of them even worked in kitchens. For that matter, some of them probably worked as enchanters… if Two’s creator had intended for her to to assist more directly in his enchantments rather than providing spare energy and supporting him by taking care of the practical matters, he would have needed to give her a much different mind.

In any event, it wasn’t that I was in love with the idea of having my day micromanaged, but I really did prefer following a firm plan of action to drifting aimlessly through the market following Hazel’s much more leisurely lead. I had nothing against wandering around and browsing, when I was looking at things that interested me. When the aim was fashion, I really preferred to have a definite beginning and end to things… an efficiently plotted path through the marketplace, a route from Point A to Point Bookstore with no room for misunderstandings along the way.

The stall we began with was a square canvas tent with the sides rolled up, making an open air pavillion of sorts. Upon closer inspection, the tent was actually made of denim, as were most of the goods on sale. Two started by going to a rack of jackets and pulling out a few dark denim ones for her inspection.

They looked small to me… not in the sense that they wouldn’t fit me, but I was used to bulky coats that had a loose fit. My mother had always bought them in larger sizes when I was a small child, to give me room to grow into them. My grandmother had always got them secondhand, and had also erred on the large and shapeless side.

The jacket didn’t look like it wouldn’t fit me, though… it just didn’t look like what I expected a jacket that fit me to look like.

“Are we really shopping for outerwear?” I asked Two.

“We’re shopping for outfits you can wear,” she said. “Removable layers will make the ensembles more versatile temperature-wise, which means we will be able to buy less new clothing overall.”

I couldn’t argue with that… or rather, I wouldn’t have wanted to argue with that. The temperature range even within a season in Prax could be fairly extreme. A single wardrobe that would work for everything but the depths of winter would be preferable to a new set of clothes for each season.

I tried on a couple different styles of jacket, to varying levels of approval from the rest of the group. Hazel seemed the most skeptical.

“I can see what you’re going for,” she said. “But Mack… she’s got a belly like a balloon, you know?”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“I don’t mean big, I mean… well… inflatable,” she said. “That is, you’re small enough in general that it’s noticeably bigger or smaller depending on what you’ve eaten and when. If we put you in something that’s tight across the middle now, you’ll be sucking in your tummy to fit into it later.”

“That is a good point,” Two said. “Oh… I know!”

Then she pulled out a black denim jacket of a type that seemed more ornamental than anything else… it was like someone had taken an actual functional coat and thrown away everything but the shoulders and sleeves. Though it had buttons, there was no way to close it, and it wouldn’t have covered much even if you could button it up.

“Put this on, Mack,” she said.

“Where’s the rest of it?” I asked, and she turned it around and showed me the back.

“Oh, that’s a bolero jacket,” Nicki said. “It’s supposed to look like that.”

“I think that might be going too far in the other direction,” Hazel said.

“What’s the point of a jacket that doesn’t cover anything?” I asked as I took the alleged jacket and slipped an arm into the sleeve.

“Well, it helps create a look?” Nicki said, helping me get my other arm into it.

“Hey, if nothing else, it’ll keep your arms warm when it’s a little cool but not cold enough for bundling up,” Steff said.

“What is this ‘little cool’ you speak of?” I asked.

“Come stand here,” Two said, taking me by the arm and guiding me in front of a three-piece folding mirror thing.

“Do I really need to know what I look like?” I asked.

“No, but I do, and now I can see you from multiple angles,” Two said.

“Oh, that’s a good look,” the stallholder said.

“Thank you,” Two said.

“My cousin sells hats that would go with it perfectly,” she added.

“I don’t think we will be needing any hats, thank you,” Two said. “Mack is pretty rough on accessories.”

“Yeah, she has enough of a problem with clothes that fasten onto the body somehow,” Steff said. “Giving her a hat to wear would be a bit like attaching a great bit sail to a couple of coins, just to watch them blow away.”

Nicki giggled and the merchant laughed while I sputtered and tried to think of a response that wouldn’t lessen my chance of seeing the inside of a bookstore. Yes, I had on a few memorable occasions had a wardrobe fumble in places that could be described as public settings, but Steff was making it sound like I couldn’t go a whole day without my clothes just falling off.

“Okay, well, let me know if you need anything else,” the saleswoman said.

Two asked me to take off and put on the bolero jacket a couple times before she decided it wasn’t going to work for me. She then pulled out a slightly less ridiculous black denim jacket, one that had a bottom half that did not taper so drastically inward as it approached the waist. It had some weird straps with snaps on them up across the shoulders that served no discernible purpose, a description that could also apply to the pockets that might as well have been painted on.

“I don’t know how anyone is supposed to use those pockets,” I said.

“You aren’t,” Two said.

“Then why do they have them in the first place?”

“Because jackets are supposed to have pockets there,” she said. “It would look wrong if it didn’t.”

“Then why aren’t I supposed to use them?” I asked.

“It would look wrong if you did,” she said.

“I think that one’s super cute,” Nicki said, “but I’m not sure that it’s her.”

Hazel nodded.

“I think we can just about get her to care about the form, so long as we leave her with the function,” Hazel said. “There’s nothing wrong with practical clothes, if it comes down to it, nor any reason she can’t be practical and slightly more in step with your idea of fashion.”

Two didn’t say anything in response to that, she just stood there looking at me with her head slightly tilted as her face went through the twitches of cogitation. With her sunglasses on, her wordless appraisal felt cold enough to make me shiver. Then she went back to the rack and returned with a different jacket that had similar lines to the one I’d been wearing. The outer pockets weren’t really big enough for more than a glove each or a set of keys, but the inside had a large pouch-like pocket sewn into each side.

“You can put things in here and it won’t create as noticeable a bulge as stuffing them into the outside pockets,” she said. “We could get you a handbag but I’m afraid you would just lose it.”

“Um, thanks,” I said. I could really see anything wrong with the jacket, and it did come closer to suiting my style than the others had, so I paid for it and we moved on.

By early afternoon, I’d acquired three new t-shirts and two sweaters that Two had picked out, with assistance from Nicki and Steff. I called them t-shirts because they weren’t blouses, but they had only a small resemblance to most of what I thought of as t-shirts. They were tighter and more fitted to my form. They had scoop necks. They were decorated with things other than logos or characters… not that most of my clothes had any kind of decoration at all on them, though. In the time I’d spent with my grandmother, my wardrobe had pretty much shifted purely to unadorned solid colors.

Two had not exercised her temporary authority over me to lead me into anything with spaghetti straps or otherwise lacking in sleeves, a fact for which I was exceedingly grateful. Since I was paying for the clothes, I would have put my foot down and invoked my safeword if necessary to avoid anything I really would never have worn, but she seemed mostly concerned that I would have objected to everything if she didn’t have a way of controlling me.

In fairness to her, I might have… at least by the third or fourth vendor we visited, when my patience was beginning to fray.

I understood the benefits of having more than one set of wearable clothes, in terms of things like preventing wear and tear or saving on laundry runs. But if I needed new shirts, plural, and I found one that suited me, why did I have to keep looking for another one? Crazy little boutiques like Madame Selene’s aside, clothing was a mass-produced item. It wasn’t art. Creativity could be exercised in the creation and selection of clothes, but at the end of the day it was just something to keep weather out and nudity in.

I’d started the day a little more enthusiastic about the idea, and had been downright open to it the day before. But the longer I spent among the shelves and racks and hangers, the more I felt completely out of my element… like a fish who’d been dragged up onto the shore of a lake by her amphibious friends. No matter how exciting it was for them, I still couldn’t breath in that kind of environment so I just sort of flopped around and gasped and waited for the inevitable end.

Also… as we went from stand to stand and stall to stall, my appreciation for Two’s brisk, business-like manner was starting to wane, replaced by growing doubts. The impression of coolness that had so impressed me when we first set out was beginning to worry me. She seemed so… distant. Obviously we’d grown apart over the summer, but I’d thought part of the point of the day was to reconnect.

Or had that been me projecting my desire on the situation? If that was the case, then had there ever been any real closeness between us? Or had it just been my imagination, my own desire for companionship? Maybe I’d just seen what I’d wanted to see in the face of a frightened golem girl who lacked the wherewithal to assert any differently.

It seemed hard to believe that our relationship could have been one-sided, but I knew I’d managed to fool myself about other things, possibly… bigger things… before.

But I’d seen with my own eyes that Two friends everywhere she went, that implied that she was likeable, and that implied warmth… so was she just being cool to me? Had the bond between us really been so tenuous that all it took to snap it was a few months apart?

As we continued on our quest, I searched my memories of the trip for little hints of any real feeling towards me. Yes, she’d stepped up to stand between Selene and me, but that might have been a sense of responsibility more than anything. There’d been very few smiles and no hugs… but now that I was thinking about it, there had been plenty of hugs in the past. Two liked hugging. So again I came back to the thought that Two was not an unfeeling lump of clay made flesh… she was just displaying very little feeling towards me.

So was it just me?

Or just today?

Had something changed?

Was simply being on a mission enough for her sense of purpose to block out her other emotions, or had she grown so much, so fast that she’d left me behind? Was this shopping trip just her going through the motions and fulfilling an obligation, or her doing a favor to the people in our life that she still felt some fondness towards by helping me out?

Second-guessing whether someone really liked me or just tolerated me wasn’t anything new for me, but of all the people in my life I might have felt insecure about, I never would have expected it to be Two. Maybe that was the problem, though. Maybe I’d taken her affection for granted. Maybe I’d acted like she’d always be there when I needed to feel liked, when I needed to feel needed… maybe on some level I’d treated her like an automaton, and this was my reward.

We were heading towards one of the last stops she had planned before lunch when suddenly she stopped in the middle of the market aisle and lowered her shades to peer over them a bit. The darkness covering her eyes parted and there was the subtle green flash of some other spell coming into play.

“Everything okay, love?” Hazel asked her.

“Yes,” Two said. “Mack, do you still have the receipt for your jacket?”

“I think so,” I said. “Why?”

“Unless you want two jackets, you may need to return it,” she said. “Follow me, please.”

She didn’t wait for a response, but headed off briskly in a slightly different direction.

“Ooh,” Steff said as we set off on Two’s heels. “Leather! I approve.”

“What’s she talking about?” Nicki asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

At first, there seemed to be a pottery stand directly in our path, but then Two moved around it. Leather? I knew Steff was a fan of black leather, but I couldn’t see it being Two’s thing. I didn’t want to see it being Two’s thing, in fact.

The stall we ended up at was a bit more vanilla than Steff’s taste, though, selling belts and hats and bags of leather, along with contemporary street armor and the jackets that had apparently caught Two’s eye. It also seemed to be in the midst of a clearance sale.

“Here,” she said, pulling two slightly different black riding jackets off a rack. “You should try these on.”

“I’ve never had a leather jacket before,” I said, which I had to admit wasn’t exactly a reason not to wear one now. There was something appealing about them. The ones she’d gone for looked roomy enough, though they were far from shapeless… they were definitely women’s jackets and showed a decided favor for form… though leather practically had utility as an intrinsic property, didn’t it?

“I think they will suit you,” Two said. “They are warm, and resilient, and suitable for holding armor enchantments, which will help you when you get into trouble. Also, they look like something that someone pretending to ride a motorcycle would wear.”

“I think she’s got you nailed,” Steff said. “The other metaphorically speaking.”

“Yeah, I can see you in that jacket,” Nicki said, pointing to one that had some folded over bits and a bit of a collar like a trench coat. “Honestly, when I picture you in my head, that’s kind of what I picture you wearing, anyway.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yeah, maybe with a long scarf or something?” Nicki said. Then she added, a little bit embarrassed, “I mean, in the winter or whatever.”

Nicki’s heroic or dangerous or whatever image of me should have been amusing and a little bit embarrassing, but as I reached out and took the coat she favored from Two, I could almost believe in it myself… I wanted to believe in it. I lowered my bags to the blanketed ground and put the jacket on. Then instead of turning to the full-length mirror to see how I looked in it, I turned to my friends to see how I looked in their eyes.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“Totally you,” Nicki said.

“Totally hot,” Steff said.

“It makes for a nice change,” Hazel said. “How do you feel in it?”

The weight of it was noticeable… not oppressively so, not with my strength. It had a good solid presence to it, though. It would take some getting used to, especially the texture of it against the bare skin of my arms, but I thought I could get used to it.

“I’m not sure that it’s me,” I said. “But… I think it could be?”

“Do you like it?” Two asked me.

“Yeah,” I said. “I really think I do.”

She clapped her hands and jumped in place. I jumped at the unexpected sound of her delighted squeal.

“I’m so glad,” she said, throwing her arms around me in an unexpected but very welcome embrace. “I’ve been trying so hard to find something you really like, but you can be very hard to please.”

Even with the worst parts being temporarily elided, I still expected Nicki to react with horror to what she was hearing… and while her eyes did go wide at the idea, she seemed more horrified on my behalf than she was horrified to learn that she’d associated herself with someone who’d found herself becoming such a target.

“That’s really awful, Mack,” she said.

“It isn’t awesome,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t think to tell you…”

“Why would you?” she said. “I mean, it doesn’t really affect me , and you’ve got so many things like this going on in your life…”

“I don’t think any of the other things that have happened to me are exactly like this,” I said. “Though I guess I’ve had my share of things happening to me that are alike in the sense that they would be hard to categorize otherwise…”

“Yeah,” Nicki said. “I guess while I really can’t say I expected this… it’s the sort of thing I expected happened to you. Anyway, I’m amazed at how calm you are, considering what almost just happened.”

“I’m more amazed at how calm Two and Hazel were, since they’re the ones who handled it. I think I would have been shaking if I’d said anything… but only because I was upset and don’t like confrontations,” I said. “Mercy can’t really do anything other than let people know she’ll pay for me… which is more embarrassing and inconvenient than anything else. Selene might have been unclear about my legal status, but Mercy isn’t. Even if my friends weren’t awesome people who have my back, it’s not like any of you actually could sell me into slavery. Not in a way that would hold up.”

“I don’t know… rich people can get away with a lot sometimes,” Nicki said.

“Yeah, but I think Mercy’s already using up her allotment of a lot on other things,” I said. “She likes to brush right up against the line in as many ways as possible… which I suppose makes her more dangerous in general than someone who was careful to stay out of gray areas, but I don’t know. I think it would really only take one sensational enough irregularity in her slave acquisition channels to bring the whole thing down, because there are enough people waiting and watching for an excuse to do that anyway.”

“Still, it would suck if that irregularity were you,” Nicki said. “I mean, what if she were able to get you out of the country with her before it all came crashing down?”

‘I… hadn’t actually thought of that,” I said.

I knew that Mercy wouldn’t give up her freedom to get me, because there would be no point in that… but if the value she placed on me ever exceeded the value of her operations in Magisteria, nothing in the world would likely prevent her from absconding with me. It was a sobering thought.

I suddenly wondered about the status of the surviving female half-demon I knew she’d acquired.

Was she still surviving?

It might be good to find out.

From a distance.

Somehow.

“There are some benches around the corner,” Hazel said. “I think some of us could maybe use a few moments to collect ourselves.”

I nodded in gratitude, since the part of my brain that was in charge of my mouth was still working its way around the new perspective Nicki had given me.

“That’s a good idea,” Two said, and we headed for them.

“Thanks,” I said to Hazel as I got my tongue back. “Thank you. And you, too, Two… for, you know…”

“Oh, you would have done the same,” Hazel said. “I’m sure of it.”

“You’d be right,” Two said. “And you are welcome, Mack… but you should be more careful. Your friend Nicki is right, and also, there are legal ways you could become someone’s slave. Otherwise, Mercy would not bother to tell people about it.

“Yeah, but all the legal ways pretty much all involve me agreeing to it,” I said.

“That’s why you should be careful,” Two said, and she had a point.

“Anyway, it was a distinctly satisfying pleasure, for me,” Hazel said, and she appeared to mean it. I could easily imagine any number of bigger and tougher-looking people withering under the weight of Madame Selene’s hate, but Hazel looked like she was absolutely fireproof and standing firm on her own two feet, even if she would have blushed to hear me say it. The woman’s words had somehow washed over her without touching her.

I knew there was no way I could have been as cool under pressure as she had been, but even on the rare occasions when I’d been able to halfway fake such a thing, I’d been left shaking and drained as soon as the immediate need for coolness was over… like I’d drawn on an advance line of steadiness that had to be paid back with interest.

We sat down on a long bench, Steff on the end and me next to her, with Nicki on my other side.

“Can I ask another question?” Nicki asked, this time directed at Hazel.

“Nothing wrong with an inquisitive nature,” Hazel said. “Ask anyone.”

“Is, um… I mean… well, Two said that Selene said the h-word… well… I’d always thought that was just a kind of old-fashioned word for gnomes,” Nicki said. “Is it… bad? I mean, she said it like it was, but I’ve read it in books and heard it… that is… I’ve heard it…”

“From your grandparents, right?” Hazel said.

“My parents, actually,” Nicki said, chagrined. “But they didn’t say it like they meant anything rude by it, so I didn’t think… well, I didn’t know. So I’m asking.”

“Do you think I’m worth half of you?” Hazel asked.

“I think I’d like to be worth half of you!” Nicki said.

“That’s a compliment, and I’ll take it as one, but the truth is you aren’t half of anything,” Hazel said. “You’re an entire human. You’re all you. Even with an elf parent and a human parent, Steff here is entirely herself.”

“Some days more than others,” Steff said.

“The h-word is something that tallfolk… humans, mostly… call us because when they can be bothered to think of us at all, they do so in terms of themselves,” Hazel said. “So, I’m not average height, I’m short. The strongest gnome fighter is weak. We’re not just small, we’re diminished… in every way. Half as big. Half as smart. Half as good. We’ve half as much right to anything.”

“Not under the law, though,” Nicki said.

“The law isn’t what people consult before deciding if someone is entitled to take up a bit of space in their view,” Hazel said. “Anyway, that’s what ‘halfling’ means. Just half. Not whole.”

“Wow,” Nicki said. “I can’t believe she just said it to you, then. I mean, she’s nasty and a slaveholder, but she seemed… not nice, but… proper, I guess?”

Hazel shrugged.

“I’ve been called worse, by my own… my mother’s kinfolk, and they’re as ‘proper’ as you could ask for,” she said. “Before last year, even. If they thought I was half of anything worth being, it would mean I’d risen in their estimation… and that’s not anything I have any real ambition to do.”

“What happened last year?” Nicki asked.

“That’s private, Nicki,” Two said.

“No harm in her asking, love,” Hazel said. “Or in me answering. Nobody has a right to know, but I have a right to tell… what happened was I didn’t have a baby.”

“They wanted you to?”

“Not particularly, I can’t imagine,” Hazel said. “Especially not this one. But once a body of folks decide they know what’s best for you, there are few things that will drive them around the next bend faster than you making up your own mind about anything that actually matters.”

“Oh,” Nicki said, in a way that suggested she didn’t quite understand.

“Oh,” she repeated again a moment later, in a way that suggested that she now did, right about the same time that I figured it out, too.

“Yep,” Hazel said, nodding. “There it goes.”

“How…?”

“The usual way, I expect, at least among humans,” Hazel said. “Though since it was just the once for me, I couldn’t say… it took me a while to wrap my head around what was happening, but once I had it sorted out, I… got it sorted out. I came into town one weekend. Andy, my man… he’d offered to come, but I thought it was best handled by myself. Shiel begged me to take him, thought I’d need a well-armed and muscular lad, for some reason…”

“Wait… Shiel thought you needed a man’s protection?” Steff asked. I wouldn’t have put it quite as bluntly, but I was thinking the same thing.

“Yeah, she seemed to be in fear for me from the moment she learned what was up. I didn’t think much of it until I got to the women’s clinic and found it surrounded by a picket of folks with warhammers and signboards and things,” Hazel said. “Made me a bit nervous, but whatever they were there for, they didn’t pay me any mind. There were some papers to fill out and I had to do some talking to convince anyone I was of age to make up my own mind about my own body, and then I took an herbal preparation and that was it. I had to come back for a follow-up in a week since Andy’s a dwarf and apparently that makes the whole thing a bit less predictable, but… that was it. You want to ask another question, I think.”

It was written all over Nicki’s face, right under the line that spelled out how embarrassed she was to be thinking whatever it is she was desperate to ask.

“Go on,” Hazel said, giving her a small smile. “I told you, there’s no harm in asking. I know you’re good folk and if I don’t want to answer, I’ll say so, politely, and expect that to be enough.”

“Okay,” Nicki said. “Do gnomes… know about those things?”

“What, you think we’re too old-fashioned?” Hazel asked. “Okay, I did pick up some, er, bad information regarding the facts of life along the way, but it takes a ‘modern’ kind of woman… someone like Shiel, or Mack here… to not know what you do when you find yourself in a certain condition. We call them the facts of life because it used to be that if you didn’t know them you could catch your death of ignorance.”

“Oh,” Nicki said.

“Listen, let me tell you something about old-fashioned, because gnomes remember what humans forget,” Hazel said. “Not a couple centuries ago, if a human woman found herself inconveniently late, she could pop down to any apothecary for an herbal restorative to put things right and no one would say ‘boo’ about it.”

“Restorative?”

“To restore her cycle,” Hazel said. “Her monthly… you know. Her monthlies. It wasn’t ending anything, it was just… correcting an irregularity.”

“They didn’t know…?”

“They knew,” Hazel said. “They just had a different perspective. Some gnomes still do, though there is no principle held so firmly nor fondly it can’t be set aside to more conveniently judge others. It isn’t so much what I did about the condition as how I attained it… the fact that I attained it… that they found objectionable, and the fact that I did anything about it just gives evidence of that. You can bet it would be a different matter if any one of them needed to do the same. Probably, for some of them, it already has been a different matter.”

“I’d think they’d be more understanding, if they’d gone through it themselves,” Nicki said.

Hazel shrugged.

“Way of the world,” she said. “Gnomes aren’t tiny humans and humans aren’t giant gnomes, but we’re all people, nonetheless, and people are happy to judge each other according to what they think of as standards, while thinking their own particular case is, well… particular. It’s different for you because you have reasons, everybody else just has excuses. You know? Anyway, it’s not really anything I did that made me persona non grata up in the hill, but what I did is something they can talk about without embarrassing any of their own.”

For a while nobody said anything else, because Hazel had said her piece on the subject and there didn’t seem to be anything for anyone else to say. It was a little sobering to consider that anyone around me could be dealing with their own problems that were also matters of life-and-death. Hazel was one of the most normal people I knew, for several values of “normal”… but even without being a half-demon or having had her life enmeshed with anything more than a usually amorous and virile young man didn’t make her course through life a straight, smooth, unbroken line from one point to another.

“Well, that’s enough rambling about my freshman follies,” Hazel said. “Two, why don’t we see what we can find in the open stalls? Might be safer that way. If we can’t find what we need there, then we can try the larger stores where there will more likely be a crowd of people.”

“That’s a good plan,” Two said, snapping out her hand orb. “Would you like to go get something to eat while I figure out our new route?”

“That’s a better plan,” Hazel said.

The nice thing about the school coaches was that since you needed a matching student ID to board one, the security spells that ran through the walls of Enwich took a more hands off approach with their passengers. The walls were there to keep out monsters. Monstrous people could get in, but the divinations that were performed on us before we were admitted were pretty intrusive.

With the protective aegis of the university covering us I could still discern a slight tingle as we passed through, and if I paid attention with my enchanter’s eyes I could tell that most of what was happening focused on me, but it was nothing compared to the sledgehammer of scrutiny that had come down on my head the few times I’d taken another way into town.

“So where to first?” I asked once we’d disembarked.

The coach turnaround was near the edge of town, close to the open air Endwich street market… but that wasn’t the only place to shop. There where shopping districts in midtown and downtown, and the discount markets that I preferred, though the others disdained them.

“Well, now, that’s the eternal conundrum, isn’t it?” Hazel said. “First breakfast has barely had a chance to settle in, but if we’re already going to be running into the beginnings of the lunch crowd and it’s only going to get worse if we wait. Plus then we’ll be even more off schedule for lunch…”

“We’ll stay in the street market to begin with,” Two said. “There are enough food vendors for anyone who is hungry before lunch, or after lunch, to get something whenever they feel like it.”

“Well, I have been trying to cut down on snacking between meals, but I suppose this once it won’t hurt,” Hazel.

“I have a hard time with not snacking when stuff’s available,” Nicki said. “You must have a lot of willpower.”

“You’re telling me,” Hazel said. “I’ve already had to discover two new meals to fill the gap.”

“Would anyone mind if we stop at a bookstore afterwards?” Nicki asked. “I know there’s one on campus, but sometimes I’d like to read something that’s not a textbook or something off the critical hit tables.”

“That’s not exactly fair,” Hazel said. “They have a whole rack of Troubadour Romances.”

“I think she was being fair by not mentioning them,” I said.

“There’s not a thing wrong with those who enjoy a good hem-twitcher,” Hazel said, with a touch of the same wounded pride she’d displayed earlier in the morning. Her tone softened a bit when she chuckled and added, “Or a terrible one, for that matter.”

“Hem-twitcher?” Nicki asked.

“Bodice-ripper,” I said, guessing at a translation.

“I hope not!” Hazel said. “A lot of work goes into a good bodice, and they’re a demon to tear. Er, no offense.”

“None taken,” I said. “I really wouldn’t mind finishing up at the bookstore, but just for reference, Nicki… the library’s a lot better choice for fiction than the campus bookstore.”

“Better for reference, too,” Hazel said. “They have a whole desk of that. The man there was very helpful in the area of esoteric, foreign, and forgotten mealtimes.”

“Is it?” Nicki said to me. “I guess I thought a college library would be mostly like the bookstore, just with older stuff. Like, tomes and classics instead of textbooks and bestsellers.”

“I’m not saying the selection is comprehensive, especially with modern stuff,” I said. “But libraries do get new books in all the time. The point… part of the point, anyway… is to stock the things that people want to read.”

“Oh,” Nicki said. “I guess I’ve never really been a library person, so I haven’t really checked it out, except for the stuff I needed for classes, and that was mainly in the basement.”

I might have despaired at this, but since she liked bookstores and had deplored the selection at the on-campus one, I thought it was pretty likely that she’d always been a library person and never known it. If I’d grown up in towns that had bookstores, I might not have known I was one. I’d just have to work harder on getting Nicki into the library with me.

“We can go to the bookstore before we go back to campus,” Two said. She was squinting in the bright mid-day sun. A dark screen appeared over her eyes, filming them over so she could open them comfortably. She then covered this up with a pair of sunglasses, possibly just to stop people from being freaked out by her shade spell. “If Mack is good.”

“What?” I said. “Two… you’re not in charge of me.”

“Not normally, but someone has to be, and Amaranth and Ian aren’t here,” she said.

“Wait… why does somebody need to be in charge of you?” Nicki asked me.

“They don’t,” I said. “I am a free and independent person… mostly.”

“Because if she isn’t submitting to someone then she will be too nervous, uncomfortable, and uncooperative about everything to do any real shopping,” Two said.

“Two, look… this isn’t how it works,” I said. “You’re not even in a relationship with me. I submit to Amaranth or Ian, or Steff, yeah, but there are reasons for that, and they don’t apply here.”

“Steff, may I please be in charge of Mack?” Two asked.

“Today?” Steff said, with a big grin on her face. “Absolutely.”

“Thank you,” Two said.

“You are so welcome,” Steff said.

“Steff!” I said.

“Don’t like it, you can complain to the boss lady,” Steff said.

“Her complaining to the boss lady would undercut the purpose of me being the boss lady,” Two said.

“Okay, you heard the boss lady,” Steff said. “No complaining to the boss lady.”

“Can everybody please stop saying ‘boss lady’?” I said.

“Is it wrong that I find this kind of hot?” Nicki asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Very.”

“Hush,” Two said. “I think Amaranth would not like to hear you say that.”

She held her hand out in front of her and opened her fingers. A shimmering illusory orb appeared in her hand. Her face scrunched up in concentration and the image within it resolved to street map of Enwich, which then focused down the area of the open market. As soon as it had locked onto the immediate area around us, it fuzzed out.

“Hazel, would you mind stepping back a few feet?” Two said.

“What?” Hazel said. “Though now that you mention it, I was actually thinking about getting a bagel sandwich from the stand over there, if we’re not shuffling off immediately.”

“Okay,” Two said. “Thank you, Hazel. That is better.”

The image grew in sharpness in direct proportion to how much Hazel moved. Two located us, and then began to scroll around the map. Her nose wriggled and wrinkled as she worked.

“Did you know Two could do that?” Nicki asked.

“Not specifically, no,” I said. “I know she has a lot of built-in enchantments from her, uh, first job, but she doesn’t use them often unless someone asks her to.”

“What was her first job?”

“Enchanter’s assistant,” I said.

“Office equipment,” Two said, without a trace of self-consciousness or deprecation. “I did not use most of them because they weren’t put there for me, but now that I belong to myself, they belong to me, too.”

I felt weirdly envious of the look on Nicki’s face as she watched Two working. It was similar to but not identical to the way she’d looked at me. I wondered what the difference meant.

I also wondered when Two had become so… well… cool.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d liked her from the start… and I’d been aware of the growing popularity her color-by-numbers approach to friendliness and common courtesy won her.

But it wasn’t just likability that I was talking about.

It was more a matter of style.

…sort of.

She was the same old Two, with a u-band holding her hair back and a baby doll top that I would have called purple but that she probably would have called something like “periwinkle”… I was pretty sure that wasn’t a shade of purple, but I was sure that whatever this color was called it would be something like that. She was showing a bit more skin than usual, but I was sure she had a cardigan that would go with it for milder days.

The change was in how she carried herself, how she took care of things. It was in fact that she unhesitatingly claimed ownership of herself… not as the eventual justification that she reached after several long seconds of intense cogitation, but just as a matter of course. She lacked the fluid grace of an elf, but she had the stillness down pat.

On anyone else it would have been icy, artificial. On Two, it was effortless enough to appear natural.

There was some irony there, of course.

I wondered if this was what it had been like to watch her at work, in her old life. As a free golem, she hadn’t always been like this. Her body was human-modeled, and whenever she was uncertain or unsure it showed in ways that registered to human observers… that is, to observers who were human and to people who made a habit of observing humans. Sometimes it was a little broadly painted or exaggerated or otherwise off, but it had been easy to tell that she’d been scared stiff to be dropped off in the dorm with no one to tell her what to do at the start of our first year.

She’d never been fearless, but she had always been brave… brave enough to reach out and grab hold of one of the few opportunities to get her out of a place she hated, even though it meant the terrifying prospect of independence and the destruction of any kind of a routine.

When I’d been worried about hurting her after a few bad turns, she’d been brave enough to summon a minor demon just to make sure that her own magical protections had been enough to restrain it, so she’d know how to handle me if it came down to it. The answer to that question had proven to be a bit of yes and a bit of no… she had been able to repel and confine the demon, but she’d neglected to account for its fire.

What I was seeing in her now… I supposed it was like the same boldness and certainty of purpose that had always guided her actions looked like when she hit a clear, straight stretch of road in good weather. It was what happened when Two really found her footing, when she was completely in her element.

And it was cool.

“She has come a long way,” Steff whispered in my ear. My jealousy softened a little when I realized we were all pretty much looking at Two the way Nicki was.

“The first thing you need is some new tops,” Two said, frowning only slightly as she increased her concentration. “Because there will be fewer choices to make in the area of jeans, it will be easier to coordinate your lower body with your upper body than the other way around.”

“Good thinking,” Steff said. “Lower body coordination has always been a problem for Mack.”

“That is funny,” Two said. She shot a look sideways at Steff, who nodded in confirmation, then she turned her attention back to her virtual ball. “I have located the shops we will need to visit first.” She lowered her hand and the ball blipped away. “Hazel?”

“Right here, love,” Hazel said. She held up her hands. Each one had a cheese bagel sandwiching layers of bacon and eggs. “I was only after the one, but it happens they were having a special: two for the price of two.”

“Hazel, you are going to spoil your lunch,” Two said.

“Yeah, but why go borrowing trouble?” Hazel said. “Anyway, where are we shoving off to now, Cap’n?”

“The first shop is this way,” Two said, pointing. “Mack, hold Steff’s hand while we’re traveling.”

This might have been slightly less humiliating if she hadn’t obviously been pointing to a storefront just diagonally across the nearest intersection of market aisles from us. I didn’t complain, though, because I didn’t mind holding hands, and it gave Steff a reason to cling closely to me that wasn’t obviously about her.

Actually, on second thought, Two might have done it for Steff’s benefit in the first place… she wouldn’t tell Steff to hold my hand, so she had to go through me. She still couldn’t pick up on every nuance, but she seemed to understand the gist of what Steff was going through in the present, even if she didn’t fully understand the whys and wherefores.

Not that I could say I fully understood them, either. And just like not knowing all the finer details didn’t stop me from being there for Steff, neither would it stop Two. She was more than an old hand when it came to doing things without knowing or caring about the reason. She could have taught classes on it.

For that matter, she wouldn’t necessarily have needed to pick up on anything on her own. With her assorted superior and additional senses, Dee probably knew what Steff was going through as well as I did or better. She would be absolutely discreet about other people’s problems, but I didn’t think she would have been above discreetly putting a word or two in Two’s ear if she thought it would make things easier for Two and Steff both.

Also, while I’d been a bit annoyed by the unexpected exercise of authority, it was more the unexpectedness. I’d been taking charge myself more than I was comfortable doing. It was kind of nice to fade back into the background a bit.

Whatever Two’s reasoning may have been, I found that I really didn’t want to argue with the results.

The sign over the store she’d selected was a mosaic of inlaid tile pieces that caught the eye but was very hard to read. When we got a bit closer, the blue and yellow chips resolved themselves into the words “Selene de Lune” and an image of a crescent moon.

A giggling fairy bell chimed when Two opened the door, letting out a blast of freezing cold air that hit me like a physical wall.

“Come along, Mack,” she said, without even looking back. “It isn’t that cold, it only feels colder because it is so hot outside.”

“Don’t you believe it,” Hazel said. “Cold like this is enough to drive a decent woman to… er… leg warmers.”

She had stolen a doubtful glance at Nicki before finishing the sentence, as though she were considering her word choice more carefully in the presence of a relative outsider. Hazel knew that we could be a fairly coarse and didn’t mind. She just had a very different idea of what exactly constituted coarseness.

The shop interior was brightly lit. There were no racks of clothes of the sort I would have expected in a clothing store. There were clothes hanging from the walls, but rather than rows of the same shirt or skirt they all seemed to be one of a kind, with similar pieces grouped together. The floor was occupied with island displays that had mannequins, mostly wearing what I would call fancy clothes for casual occasions. They were animated, holding a pose for a few seconds and then flowing into a different one.

Unsettlingly, every time they settled into a position a different set of illusory full-color facial features appeared on their blank white oval heads.

“Bonjour!” the woman behind the counter said. “Comment allez-vous?”

“Bien, bien,” Two said, with what sounded to my ears to be a flawless accent. “Et vous, aussi?”

“Oh! Parlez-vous Kharoline?”

“Non, je suis très désolé, mais je ne parle pas Kharoline,” Two said, just as smoothly.

“Ah, well, then I shall switch to the so-called Pax,” the woman said. “Do not stand in my door, though… come in, come in and let us get to know each other!”

She had one of those unevenly preserved faces that might have looked smooth and youthful all over if she could have got away with wearing a domino mask everywhere. She had black feathered bangs and her hair was up in some kind of a bun with a pick in it. The look on her face was warm and genuine when she looked at Two and Steff, though her eyes went wide when she looked at Nicki’s riot of red hair and her smile turned into the static smile of customer service when she looked at me.

Then she did an almost literal double-take, glancing at something behind the counter in between looks at me, and her smile became a lot wider.

“Bienvenu, which means welcome,” she said, stepping around the counter and spreading her hands out wide, palms out. “I am Madame Selene, and I would be very happy to show you my latest, exclusive creations.” She turned towards me and said. “I happen to have a gown that would suit you perfectly, and a selection of matching jewelry that would set off your eyes.”

I could only imagine how much fun Steff and Two would have dressing me up like a doll, but I had a feeling that the dress Madame Selene was talking about would be a very expensive one to do something like accidentally stepping on the hem of and tearing it to pieces.

“Uh, I’m actually just looking for…” I started to say.

“Mack, do not talk to shopkeepers or merchants for any reason,” Two said.

The look Madame Selene shot Two was venomous, but probably not a lot more sour than my own at the moment. Being bossy… at least towards me… wasn’t unusual for Two, but being so peremptory for no apparent reason was.

“Oh, are you responsible for her now?” Madame Selene asked Two, composing her features into something more placid as she spoke. “Because if that is the case, perhaps I should be speaking to you. Or rather… perhaps you should be speaking to me, because I can’t imagine you know the value of what you possess.”

Oh.

So that was it.

Because I wasn’t exactly a market rat, it had been easy for me to forget that a gray elf with delusions of goddesshood had put the word out that anybody who managed to provide her with custody of me would basically be rich enough to found their own kingdom.

The only good thing was that as long as Mercy was operating as a legitimate merchant of death, she was stuck using legal channels, which meant that I couldn’t just be snatched off the street. The fact that I’d let myself be baited into one lopsided deal with an Enwich merchant that had put my ass on the line in the most literal fashion imaginable meant that others would try to get me to do the same, but all I had to do was not play along.

Of course, Mercy probably wouldn’t play the good citizen forever, but until she actually achieved her dream of an army of half-demons under her control… or realized the myriad problems with this dream… she was committed to staying within the good auspices of the Imperium.

Or at least the reasonably okay auspices. I couldn’t imagine that the government actually liked her all that much, so much as they liked that she wasn’t their problem. She was no dragon, but even a human lifetime was enough for an individual with the right potential and enough determination to rise to a level of prowess and skill worthy of the ancient epics… well, obviously, or there wouldn’t have been any epics about humans.

Mercy was an elf, which meant that she more deadly and capable than a human to begin with, and she’d had the equivalent of multiple mortal lifetimes to hone her deadly skills.

There probably wouldn’t be a race to be the first officer of the law… or agent of Law… on the scene when the day came that Mercy renounced her good citizenship awards.

“I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken,” Two said. “Mack is a free person and she is not for sale.”

“There’s no need to be inflexible,” Madame Selene said, pronouncing the word like it was a dirty word. “I have seven bondservants in my household. I will let you have my pick of them, in addition to a fair market price. A body for a body… you can’t ask for a fairer deal than that.”

“She is not for sale,” Two repeated.

“Everything has a price,” Madame Selene said.

“She is a person, not a thing,” Two said.

“And you are so very sure of the difference, are you?”

Two looked at her hand, as if seeking some kind of confirmation there. She nodded.

“Yes, I am very sure, thank you,” Two said.

“What makes you such an expert?” Madame Selene asked.

“My maker,” Two said.

She didn’t actually point to the runes that had been molded into the flesh of her forehead when it had still been clay, before life had been breathed into her… but she might as well have.

“Here, now,” Hazel said. She had to repeat it again louder to get Madame Selene’s attention. “Here, now… this household you mentioned, it takes seven slaves just to run it?”

“Well, I suppose I could possibly get by with fewer, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Madame Selene said, turning to Hazel and forgetting Two now that it appeared she’d found someone willing to discuss her terms. “Shall we say three for one? Though I will naturally drive a harder bargain on the price, but I am certain you will find my terms generous, even if you share equally in the spoils.”

“What I’m thinking is, this household… it can’t just be you,” Hazel said. “There’s high maintenance and there’s high maintenance. Unless you just like a different one for every day of the week, it can’t just be you they’re taking care of… for instance, is there a Mr. de Lune?”

“I did have a husband,” she said “If it is any of your business.”

“Any children?”

“Three daughters,” she said. “But that’s hardly relevant.”

“Well, then, we’ll swap this one here,” Hazel said, jerking her thumb at me, “for any one of them. Body for a body, can’t say any fairer than that. Am I right?”

“Hazel, what the fuck?” I said.

Madame Selene, on the other hand, didn’t say anything. She didn’t even blink.

“Here, we’ll even let you pick,” Hazel said. “We’ll take her sight unseen. No need to inspect the merchandise. You seem reputable enough.”

“How dare you,” Selene said.

“Well, you were going to do us three-for-one,” Hazel said. “Mind, we’d have to do a bit of conferring amongst ourselves before we settled on one. The one with the ears is a bone-wrangler, and I’m sure she could do with the parts.”

“You will not talk about my daughters in that fashion, you… you… horrible halfling!”

“Every thing has a price,” Hazel said, coolly ignoring the slur. She did nothing more than drop a space to emphasize the second word, but in the quiet, cold showroom, it had the same effect as spelling a message out in flames.

“Get out of my shop,” Madame Selene said, her voice trembling and rising in both volume and pitch. “Get out!”

She didn’t have to tell us a third time, but only because there wasn’t anything she could have said at that point that would have convinced us to stay.

“I’m sorry, that was rude,” Hazel said once we were outside and away from the door. “But I can’t half stand a bully… especially the kind who lives in a great big house in a… on a hill, and lords it over others. Where next, Two-fer?”

“One moment, please,” Two said, gazing down into her palm orb again. “I am registering a review.”

“What… seriously?” Steff said.

“Yes,” Two said.

“What are you putting, something like, ’Clean premises, well-lit, proprietor helpful but tried to press my friend into slavery?’” Steff asked.

“Yes,” Two said. “Like that. And she called my friend Hazel the h-word. Two stars.”

“Two stars?” I said.

“It was very clean,” Two said.

“So… question?” Nicki asked.

“What?” I said.

“What the hell was all that about?”

Specifically, it made him feel better until the time came to implement that course of action.

More specifically, it made him feel better until he realized that he had no idea how to actually implement that course of action.

His problem, he reflected, was that he let his mouth do all the thinking. Mouths aren’t very big on long-term planning, or even near-time planning. They’re all about movement: food in, words out, and his mouth had never been particularly bothered about the food.

He had certainly employed more than a dash of empty bravado in his attempts to reassure his wife. That wasn’t to say that he’d been wrong about it… it was more to say that he didn’t know if he’d been right. He’d picked up on a few things about how the lower ranks of the upper classes did things during his time with Dell’s family, but he’d grown up as a commoner.

Not just that, but he’d grown up on a series of airships. This upbringing had imparted in him a certain savviness, a quickness of thinking and a customary care for how and where he stepped. It had done little to prepare him to move in the circles that Sir Aidan Harris the First might be expected to negotiate.

He didn’t know if dropping a few titles and a bag of gold onto a desk would be enough to get Aidan in the door, much less prompt the kind of pomp he wanted to provoke before… and if he handled it wrong the first time, there might not be a chance to get it right.

Growing up on an airship had taught him quite a bit on the subject of things you only had one shot at.

Luckily, Dell’s concerns had been sufficiently assuaged for the matter to stand tabled through the rest of the weekend. The second thing he did when he got to work on Monday was commandeer an empty office so he could have a little private face-time with someone else’s reflection. The first thing he did was turn Martindale out of his office, so he could have an empty office to commandeer.

“Well, it’s like this, Bob,” he said to the image of his father-in-law. “We need to make your grandson feel sort of, well, special…”

“Oh? And here I thought the idea was to help the lad feel normal,” Lord Robert Corvir replied.

There were reasons that Robert got on well with his son-in-law. Most of them didn’t actually have anything to do with the way that Dan’s landing in his family’s life had improved their fortunes and standing.

“In the great generality of things, yes,” Dan said. “But in this specificity, we want him to know that he’s wanted. Really, truly wanted. You can understand why that might be, surely?”

“Ah, yes, of course I do,” Robert replied, nodding sagely. He was wrong, of course, but he couldn’t know that, and Dan was content to let him think that this was about Aidan’s status as an adopted child.

“We would like to give him an education outside of the village, you see,” Dan said. “Dell doesn’t think they’ll treat our boy right here, and I don’t half blame her for feeling that way. We want to give him a chance to get outside this small-town mindset and stretch his wings… metaphorically.”

“Yes, but at his age, it could be a delicate proposition. He could well be nervous if he thinks he’s being sent away,” Robert said. “But if he can see that schools are fighting over him, trying to outdo each other and prove their worth to him…”

“That is more or less exactly the plan,” Dan said. “But the schools we want to get into… well, they wouldn’t look twice at the son of an accountant and a mana-monkey, unless the second time was to make sure their eyes weren’t playing a cruel trick on them.”

“Dan, I know you know there’s more to both of you than that, so I won’t waste time giving you unneeded assurances,” Robert said. “But I fear you’re right about the impression you’re likely to make, and the reception you’d get. Still, you do have some social capital you could engage. You don’t have to apply as Mr. and Mrs. Mana-Monkey.”

“Now we’re leafing our way towards the same page,” Dan said. “The problem is, I don’t know how to use this social capital. Dell’s barely got me trained on the use of capital letters. If I know anything about the upper crust, it’s that they can spot an upstart with a recently acquired title a mile away, and they have no use for parvenus and danny-come-latelies from amongst the hoi polloi.”

“Well, you can’t be worse at playing the part of a distinguished gentleman than you are at playing the unlettered tradesman,” Robert said, his eyes twinkling. “But you know, even the landed aristocracy don’t try to navigate the currents of high society alone. Like everything, they have people for that.”

“And can people like me get people like that?”

“Dan, in the modern age, people with money can get anything… that’s why the upper crust is so crusty these days,” he said. “There are plenty of people skilled in the courtly arts who have realized they can make more money for less work by selling their services to the teeming masses than the hoarding few. The masses have less money, but there are so many more of them.”

“That’s one of the better qualities of masses, in my opinion,” Dan said. “So, what do I need? A butler? A valet? A batman? An aide-de-camp? A gentleman’s gentlem…?”

“Dan, I know you don’t like feeling out of your depths, but you don’t need to prove your vocabulary to me,” Robert said. “I know you’ve as fine a mind as any, and better than most. And as it happens, no. If you were intending to join polite society full-time, then yes, you would need such a person. For this, you just need someone who can help you make the right impression. For this, you need a herald.”

“There are… freelance heralds?”

“Dan, I told you: in this day and age, there are freelance everything. In the bigger isles, even the tax collectors can hire out for their duties, if they’re rich enough.”

“I know about freelance tax collectors,” Dan said. “They’re called brigands.”

“Listen, I know an old fellow who quit the aristocratic service and settled in your neck of the empire,” Robert said. “Well, no further away than the clavicle. You would have to pay his travel expenses and put him up, but if you’re looking to get Aidan into a good school then this will probably be one of the smaller expenses you incur along the way.”

“Money is a very small and distant object, your Bobship,” Dan said.

“His name is Willoughby.”

“That his first name or last name?”

“It’s the last name he’ll ever give anyone,” Robert said. “He’s fairly choosy about his clientele, but you won’t go wrong by remembering me to him at the outset. Let me give you his address… he responds to written correspondence only.”

“Tell me again all about this modern age of ours?”

“If he didn’t have one foot in the past, he wouldn’t be useful to you,” Robert said.

“Point taken.”

Dan sent his inquiry via portal post, following Lord Robert’s recommendations as to such particulars as the weight of the parchment and the thickness of the envelope and the existence of a wax seal, which after some thought he had ended up pressing using a key fob that bore the insignia of the Lefton Imperial Airworks. Even with instantaneous confirmed delivery, it was three days before he received a reply.

The letter was brief and to the point. It was a list of the finer details of what would constitute acceptable accommodations and the time and date for them to be ready by.

There was a boarding house on the edge of Lefton with a suite of rooms that met Willoughby’s standards, and Dan secured them for him. There had been no mention of sending a reply and the letter had seemed so definite that Dan figured it would be redundant. He had been accepted by Willoughby and that was it… to acknowledge that he accepted the old herald’s terms would probably insult him, by suggesting that there was ever any possibility they could be negotiable.

At the appointed hour, he met Willoughby at the air coach stop. The herald was old and silver-haired and faintly elven. He called Dan “sire” in a way that made it clear this was a general form of address he used for clients, not a personal statement of any kind.

“Would you like me to leave you alone to settle in?” Dan asked Willoughby once he’d nodded once in satisfaction at the rooms.

“No, sire, if you have no more pressing business, I’d like to get on with it,” Willoughby said. “My services are very much in demand. I’m only here as a favor to Lord Robert. Now, you’ve explained what you need, but there are some details that you left out of your inquiry. Important details.”

“I’m not prepared to discuss my reasons,” Dan said. “This is work for hire, you don’t need to know them.”

“Well, of course I don’t, sire,” Willoughby said. He had a trick of verbally rolling his eyes while his expression remained fixedly reverential. Dan would have held him upside down over an active volcano if he thought he could shake the secret of it out of him that way. “You told me your title and honors, but you did not say if you have a coat of arms. Your son, of course, can use the Corvir family one, but employing it would require the awkward circumlocution of penning the letter in his name.”

“My wife is Bob Corvir’s daughter,” Dan said. “Why couldn’t she use it?”

“Sire, you answered the question before you asked it,” Willoughby said. “And you’ve answered mine as well. Not to fret, however.”

“No?”

“Indeed not, sire. A good letterhead can be as important as a coat of arms, these days,” the elderly gentleman informed him, in a tone that suggested that while it could be, it usually wasn’t. “A gentleman and hero of the empire is entitled to a coat of arms, of course, and there would be much to draw from, even without Lord Robert’s shield. You have quite a colorful history…”

“We, er, would rather keep things simple,” Dan said. “The best deceptions usually are.”

“It wouldn’t be a deception, though,” the herald said. “You’re fully entitled.”

“Yes, but I don’t intend to go through life using my full entitle, don’t you see?” Dan said.

“Of course,” the herald said, in a tone that suggested the opposite. “Well, if you want simple, perhaps it’s for the best. The new thing… the current thing… is to be very understated. These things follow a cycle, you see. People begin adding more titles and devices to their stationery, and then it reaches a point where a third of the page is taken up with scrollwork and minutiae, and then someone… someone whose position is lofty enough that he can afford to not remind others of exactly who he is… will roll it all back, as it were, to a simple heading written in a bold, clean script with only a little flourish. If you’d tried to enroll your son in a school five years ago or five years hence, it would be a bad time to employ stark simplicity, but plainness in stationery is very respectable right now.”

“Well, if nothing else, that means the lad has a keen sense of timing,” Dan said. “We’ll be sure to mention that on his applications.”

“Now, the thing that’s going to be tricky is that it would be gauche to mention your own specific accomplishments in a letter of inquiry,” the herald said. “That’s not to say that no one would do such a thing, but… it isn’t done. And your achievements will count for more if you don’t put them forward yourself. ‘Hero of the Empire’ falls into an unfortunate limbo of being a title without a style. Signing your letters ‘Sir Aidan Harris, Hero of the Empire’ would seem a tad… ostentatious.”

“Well, I hired you on because I need to get it across somehow,” Dan said. “I’ve been in the news before but I’m not exactly a household name, you know.”

“I do know, indeed. You are quite far from being one, in certain households,” he said. “If your goal were to receive an introduction to higher society, it would be difficult to achieve, except perhaps as a curiosity piece at a certain kind of garden party. The sorts of people one will find operating even the finer schools in this region, though, will be quite a different matter… and they will be excited at the thought of improving their stock. Remember, it is always easier to impress the upwardly mobile than the, ah…”

” Upwardly stable?” Dan supplied.

“Indeed, sire,” Willoughby said. “And may I say you have quite the wit?”

“You may, but I have a feeling that you shan’t.”

“Now, while it would be appalling of us to remind people of your great deeds too directly, we can do little things to gently jog the memory and subtly stir the curiosity. You were a member of the Merchant Air Marines at the time of the disaster, I think? We can use their device. And the Imperial Air Service’s.”

“I was a lad when I was on those boats,” Dan said. “I was never properly enlisted.”

“Yes, sire, but you see, the rules for the use of naval insignia date back to a time when it more likely would have been impressment than enlistment, and they don’t account for age,” Willoughby said. “You served on an Imperial Airship. Whether or not you were properly a member of the navy is beyond the scope of the question.”

“I was on a Magisterian ship as a babe, can we put their logo on, too?”

“Certainly not, sire,” Willoughby said. “And then, of course, we’ll close with the death’s head and laurel wreath.”

“…the what?”

“It is what you might call a bit of… unofficial heraldry,” Willoughby said. “It is on the books, as it were, though it’s never been officially validated. It is a sign of imperial favor. Anyone who has ever been in the presence may choose to signify it with the death’s head. Anyone who has been offered a boon may add a laurel wreath.”

“…and the master of a school is going to know this?”

“I doubt it, though they will certainly be moved to look it up. Did you know that no living person has been granted more boons by the Unnameable Emperor than you have?”

“Well, three’s the significant number, isn’t it? I’m not the only three-fer.”

“Indeed, no,” Willoughby said. “But it is very rare for a person to be offered multiple boons. It’s impressive.”

“Look, he stared into my eyes for half an hour before he said ‘boo’ to me, to say nothing of sticking an ‘n-s’ on the end of it,” Dan said. “I think the fact that he offered three instead of one is because he had a good sense of what I would do with them. It’s not that I merited them more than the bloke who walked away with one. It’s that he understood that I understood not to ask for anything that would make him regret offering, so he got to appear all magnanimous to the hero of the minute.”

“Your understanding of the imperial mind is awe-inspiring,” Willoughby said. “But none of this will occur to anyone who is delving into your history. They are far more likely to think… ahem… ‘wow, three boons from the emperor!’”

“You have a fair point there, but I thought the idea to keep things clean and simple?”

“It is. Three small devices are quite sufficient, sire,” Willoughby said. “We could, of course, put more, but my thought is that having two fairly common and mundane associations and then the sign of imperial honor will pique the curiosity. If the wreathed skull were merely one of a dozen or so, it might be assumed to be for something frivolous. A simpler arrangement that starkly contrasts it implies a story: you were an airshipman, you had a career on both imperial and civilian ships… so far, so common. But then something quite dramatic happens, you are honored by the emperor, and then you clearly retire to this region and work as a humble inspector.”

“You’ve clearly never heard me inspecting,” Dan said.

“How perfectly drôle,” Willoughby said, employing a word that Dan knew the Merovians used to mean humorous and Metropolitans used for the opposite effect. “The point is that the unspecified event that merited the honor is a question hanging in the air. Your deeds are known, even if they are not well-known. It would be the work of minutes for anyone to learn who you are.”

“Sensible enough,” Dan said, though something bothered him about it… possibly the sensibleness of it. “But we’re going to need to have references, too… given that one is naturally going to be from my father-in-law, wouldn’t that be a more sure-cast way of making sure the story reaches its audience?”

“The things one reads in a letter of reference are both less interesting and less credible than the things one discovers for oneself,” Willoughby said.

“You do have a point about that,” Dan said, nodding thoughtfully.

He was starting to feel like he had a better handle on things. He’d described the whole plan to Dell as though they could treat it as an elaborate con and bluff their way through it. Now he was starting to realize that he’d essentially been right.

“The initial inquiries should be very general, sire,” Willoughby said. “You have a son who is of a certain age, and you hold their institution in some regard and would not look unfavorably if they would be so kind as to forward some information, if they think there may be an opening.”

“Right,” Dan said. “Should I write them and then show them to you, or would you rather I write them here where you can see?”

“I shall write them for your signature, sire,” Willoughby said. “Did Lord Robert not mention that I am a scribe, as well? The fact that your letters are written by a scribe… and not merely ‘scribed’ in the modern parlance… will count for much. Things may move at a speed we cannot control once the wheels begin to roll, though, so we should see to the other preparations first.”

“Other preparations?”

“We shall need to get clothes,” Willoughby said. “There is a teahouse in town. We shall go to it. You will drink tea while I take notes, and then you will take notes while I instruct you.”

“I’ve drunk tea before,” Dan said. “The hot, liquid part goes in the mouth. The hard crunchy part goes back onto the saucer. It’s not difficult, honestly. A Metro could manage it.”

“I’m speaking of matters of poise and comportment while doing so,” Willoughby said. “Once the letters have served their purpose, you can be sure that any time you visit the premises, you will be escorted to a quiet room and offered refreshment. It might be in an office where you will be engaged with chit-chat. It might be in a comfortable salon where you wait, ostensibly alone. Either way, you can be certain you will be observed. After all, anyone can engage the services of a scribe, in this day and age.”

“Scandalous, isn’t it?” Dan said. “Just to be clear: we’re getting my son into school, not passing me off as a duchess, yes?”

“Sire… you said to me that you see no need to go into your reasons, nor would I much care to hear them,” Willoughby said. “But reading between the lines of your query letter, I think there is more at play here than a desire to see your son enrolled. You could buy your way into any school on this island. You, for whatever reason, want to be courted. You want it to mean something if someone behind a somewhat respectable desk thinks they’ve seen the back of you. You want them to chase after you, as it were, in the fashion that is seemly for them to do so. Yes?”

“You’re a good man, Willoughby,” Dan said.

“Then let’s get to it.”

I was glad of this, and hoped the crowd would thin out more before Hazel and Two caught up with us. Steff would probably do okay if she could sit between Two and me, but I thought a confined space with a whole crowd of other people would probably not be the best way to start our day.

I hadn’t thought of this before because I was used to making runs into town during a long mid-day break during the week, or during the summer when it didn’t really matter what time it was.

Mass-producing magic carriages was still a fairly new idea, and like most such vehicles that were more than a decade or two old, the school’s had been not just purpose-built but purpose-enchanted. The schedules they followed were as much a part of them as the magic that kept their wheels turning.

The system could be stopped and started again. It had enough logic woven in to prevent any of the more predictable tragedies of automation from happening. But it would have cost almost as much money as having the whole thing built new to make a change to the timetable. This meant that during the summer session, the much smaller demand from the reduced student body was spread out over the same supply of seats.

Back in the present, though, I thought that if Steff wasn’t going to object to climbing into a carriage then I wouldn’t bring it up. My goal was to give her what she needed, not tell her what she needed.

“Hey, there’s your little friend,” Steff said, just as I registered that the girl who didn’t get up from one of the benches had firewagon-red hair. I hadn’t seen her with that color of hair, or with what I’d describe as an unusually tall pixie cut, but they both fit her.

At the sound of Steff’s voice, Nicki got up from the seat and turned around. I got to see the way the smile broke out across her face when she saw us, and that in and of itself was enough to make my day.

It wasn’t that nobody ever smiled at me like that. Amaranth had an amazing smile. She was usually already wearing it she saw me, though. I could watch it get bigger and brighter… really, she had an amazingly expressive face… but happiness was closer to being Amaranth’s default state of being than it was Nicki’s. Nicki being happy to see me felt like more of an accomplishment.

“Hi, you guys!” she said. “I’m so glad you came!”

I almost said, Um, we invited you. and then I realized that maybe Nicki had at some point in the past been invited to something that no one showed up for. The fact that I myself didn’t have much experience being stood up or ditched only spoke for my long history of not being invited anywhere in the first place.

Nicki was enthusiastic and eager to be liked. She’d be an easy target for that sort of thing.

“I’m glad you wanted to join us,” I said.

“I’m pretty much always up for shopping,” she said. “Even if I don’t have the money to actually buy anything, but this early in the year I’m still pretty flush. So, what are we shopping for?”

“Clothes, I guess,” I said. “I need some… better… ones.”

“Oh, really?” Nicki said. She sounded kind of surprised.

“Don’t you like shopping for clothes?”

“I love it,” she said. “But you don’t seem to really care what you look… I mean… you…”

“Mack was raised by gorgon monks who considered vanity to be a sin,” Steff said. “The first time she saw a mirror, she thought it was a kind of magic cage for trapping doppelgangers.”

I might have been a little ticked by Steff teasing me in front of Nicki, but Nicki laughed at it, so I did, too.

“Well, I’m not exactly fashion-conscious,” I said.”But, I mean, I do wear clothes…”

“Occasionally,” Steff said. “When there’s no other alternative.”

“…and I guess there’s nothing wrong with them looking kind of nice,” I said. “Anyway, you seem like you have a lot of fun with your appearance.”

“Well, yeah,” Nicki said. “That’s because it is fun. Like playing dress-up! I mean, it is dressing up… well not, dressing up, but getting dressed, and you can play around with it…”

“I see why you get along with her,” Steff said. “It’s even awkward when she’s talking to herself.”

“You think?” Nicki said. “Sometimes when I’m alone I’ll start to sort of ramble, but then I start to feel silly and just sort of… trail off, so… um. Where are we going, anyway?”

“Well, I know places to get clothing, obviously, but not really where to shop for clothes. This was mostly Two’s idea, so I think she probably has some ideas,” I said. “But you and Steff also know about clothes… Steff knows my taste, and I like your taste. So, you know, everyone’s judgment counts.”

“I just think it’s so cool that you’re such good friends with Two,” Nicki said. I winced a little, almost hoping that she wouldn’t elaborate. Thinking of Two as some helpless object of pity was only marginally better than seeing her as any other kind of object. “She’s so… popular!”

“Yeah… yeah, I guess she is,” I said, feeling both relieved and guilty.

“Two really kind of took Mack under her wing last year,” Steff said. “Tried to teach her a few the facts of life. Mack’s sort of Two’s unofficial little sister.”

“That’s still not settled,” I said. “We agreed not to argue about it… though we did really grow apart over the summer. I mean, we were apart. She was off doing things with her friend Hazel, and I was here, haunting the dorms. This is the first time we’ll really be doing anything together since she got back. There’ve probably been other chances, but I guess we both tend to fall into routines really easily… and I’m not good at making the effort to reach out to people. I spent too much of the years I was supposed to be learning how to do that ducking for cover, I think.”

“Well, I’m glad you made the effort for me,” Nicki said.

Behind her, Steff started looking around in different directions, shading her eyes with her hand.

“What in the world are you doing?” I asked her.

“Trying to figure out where the audience is so I know which direction to hold up the cue card that says ‘Awwwwwwwwwww’,” Steff said.

“I’m glad you think it’s sweet,” I said.

“Sweet like kettle corn,” she said. “Or candy corn. Maybe sweet corn? I’m going for a theme here. See if you can pick up on it.”

Nicki laughed. It was easier to forgive Steff’s ribbing when she laughed, both because it meant that Steff wasn’t hurting anyone and because… well, she had a nice laugh.

The two of us talked about design class for a bit, while Steff sat back towards the far end of the bench and occasionally riffed. Another coach came by after about fifteen minutes, and cut out the rest of the people who were waiting. A few other people showed up after that, though.

“Here comes the pseudowench,” Steff said a bit after that, turning around and looking up the path.

Nicki and I turned to look, too. Two just discernible in the distance. After a few moments of searching, the smaller form of Hazel was, too.

“Wow, you have really good eyesight,” Nicki said.

“Compared to you, yeah, but it’s the ears, not the eyes,” Steff said. “Her footsteps aren’t the easiest to hear, but they’re really easy to identify. When she’s not moving through a crowd, her strides are all the exact same length and she puts her feet down with just the right amount of force. Hazel’s pretty easy to pick out, too, because of the whole lack of shoes thing… but even harder to hear.”

“Oh Hazel’s coming, too?” Nicki said. “She seems pretty cool.”

It was a rare thing that I had the chance to watch Two arriving somewhere. She didn’t tend to announce her presence when she entered a room. It wasn’t interesting to note how confident she seemed. She waved at people on the other paths, a little automatic wave that still had a surprising amount of warmth for being identical every time she did it. Just because it was highly formalized didn’t mean it wasn’t sincere.

Maybe this confidence, too, was in her nature. When she knew where she was going and what she was doing, there was no reason for her to have any doubts, and no room for them, either.

Still, she’d started her freshman year with a sort of perpetual wariness, an awareness of the fact that any moment someone she didn’t know could do something she didn’t know how to respond to. On firm ground, Two had a perfect awareness of the firmness of her stance. But when things got even a little… uncertain… she didn’t have the ordinary capacity of most humanoids to bluster their way through.

At least, she hadn’t been created with that capacity. I’d watched her arriving at justification for shortcuts and rationalizations for dealing with things that fell outside her experience. Originally it had been a slow and even painful looking process. Now she could cut to the hearts of most matters pretty quickly and make a decision pretty quickly.

I thought her friend Hazel probably had a lot to do with that. In some ways Hazel had been as sheltered as any of us when she’d arrived, but that just went to show how “sheltered” wasn’t an absolute concept.

I knew that Hazel had lost her mother. I’d slowly gathered the impression that she’d been somewhat responsible for bringing herself up the rest of the way after that, and taking care of her dad. I didn’t know the details, but I felt like her life might have undergone a couple of the same general sorts of zigzag shifts mine had. Her first year at school had been plenty eventful in its own right.

She was also more than a full decade older than I was, though gnomes counted their ages a bit slower than humans did. At thirty-three, they were technically an adult in the same way that humans in their late teens and early twenties were, but it wasn’t until fifty-five that they were expected to be completely responsible or respectable.

“Hi, Mack! Hi, Steff! Hi, Nicki!” Two said as she came within reasonable hailing distance.

“Hi, Two!” Steff and I both responded. I turned to suggest that Nicki to do the same, but she was already doing it, only a couple seconds behind us.

“Hey, folks,” Hazel said, nodding. “Nicki! Almost didn’t see you there..”

“Hello again,” Nicki said. “It’s the hair, blends right in.”

“Stay well clear of apple trees, or you’ll get yourself picked,” Hazel said. “So, when are you coming over to Gilcrease to play with us?”

“I’ll come over sometime, but I’d probably rather watch first,” Nicki said. “I like the game, but I’m pretty new at it… and not that good.”

“Well, you should fight me, then, and I promise I’ll go easy on you,” Hazel said.

“Maybe you should schedule a match-up in advance for some time,,” I said, knowing that Nicki was unlikely to come over of her own initiative, even with an open invitation and an understanding that no invitation was needed. “Take some of the guesswork out of working around each other’s schedules.”

“Not a bad idea, that,” Hazel said. “Not tonight, though. I feel that yielding my space on the floor to some guests tonight would become me as a hostess. It seems the hospitable thing to do.”

“How many games can you hold at once?” Nicki asked.

“Well, one giant one, two medium ones, or three fairly cozy ones,” Hazel said. “We could probably fit more in if no one were watching, but I’d rather err on the side of having room to spread out… you see, I think of war as an art, and I prefer an expansive canvas to paint on.”

There followed a three-way conversation about the finer points of the stone soldiers game that was quite a bit friendlier than the one at the breakfast table had been, even with two of the same participants.

Two and I sat quietly. I was half listening to the conversation. Without the drama of earlier, though, it wasn’t really able to hold my interest and I kept finding myself being drawn back to the cave of my mind, where I had apparently spent sometime alternately constructing and then smashing blocks of stone. The flashes had definitely been growing more concrete and specific in the back of my mind.

I couldn’t hear the owl-turtle thing’s words, but the sense of understanding it was growing more solid. The feeling of growing realization was shifting to something more like the feeling I’d have while sitting through a lecture about some new enchantment technique when all I wanted to do was get my hands dirty and try it.

Another carriage came rolling up. I glanced at Steff, who was glancing over at the other group of people who were waiting for it. Three girls and two guys. Technically we’d all fit within the coach’s capacity, but it would be what Hazel referred to as “cozy”.

I could see the panic rising up inside of Steff and I could feel it starting to grip me, too, as I tried to figure out what to do… but then I realized Two was already walking towards the other group.

“Excuse me,” Two said. “Hi, Lara.”

“Oh, hi, Two!” the one apparently called Lara said. “So, I guess you and your friends are going into town, too?”

“Yes, we are,” Two said. “But we need to have some extra space in the carriage to take care of my friend Steff, so would you mind very much taking the next one? If you are in a hurry, we can wait instead. Thank you.”

“Wow, she really takes charge, doesn’t she?” Nicki said quietly to me.

“She definitely has her moments,” I replied.

Lara and her friends looked around at each other. Some of them looked a little uncertain, but no one seemed to be offended by the request.

“No, I don’t think we’re in any hurry… are we , guys?” Lara asked.

“No, we can wait.”

“Yeah, that’s not a problem.”

“Is it everybody ready?” Two asked, turning back to face us.

“I guess so,” Nicki said, and we all climbed into the coach.

“Feel better!” someone from Lara’s group called as Steff climbed aboard.

“Have I ever told you that I love you?” Steff asked Two.

“Yes,” Two said. “I love you, too.”

Steff hesitated a bit when we got outside.

I say “hesitated a bit” because it was a brief hesitation, but it wasn’t exactly hard to spot.

One of the things that had always drawn me to Steff was her facial expressions. There had been something really distinct about them that had taken me a while… plus more familiarity with elves… to put my finger on.

Because her father was an elf, she had it within her to achieve a measure of the kind of self-control that Acantha or Dee tended to display, but from her mother’s side she had the human tendency towards involuntary self-expression.

This meant that whenever Steff was not actually upset to the point where she was shaking or sobbing, her body language could be preternaturally still while still perfectly conveying an emotion in human terms. Her reactions were smaller, but in the way of being more acute rather than subtler. Whenever she leaned in and leered, it was a concentrated leer and the pose she struck was always perfect. When she was distressed, she had a tendency to freeze up… but not quickly enough to stop it from showing on her face.

That was what I saw as we left the breakfast table conversation behind us and stepped out onto the sunlit plaza in front of the student union.

“What’s up, Steff?” I asked gently, because “what’s wrong” seemed a little too loaded, even if she was obviously stricken. This was our day to get out of the dorm and do normal things. If she wanted to talk about what was bothering her, she could, but I wouldn’t try to drag it out of her.

“Nothing,” she said. “I was going to… it’s not important.”

“If it’s important enough for you to think of it, it’s important enough for me to hear,” I said, my bold streak still apparently running its course.

“I was going to ask if we could go the long way, but then I changed my mind,” she said.

“The long way?” I repeated, and then I realized that she meant walking around the back of the union and circling around it to get to the carriage stop instead of taking the straighter route… the one that went right past the memorial to Leda that had replaced the fountain where she’d been killed.

The spot where the swan princess had left the world during my freshman year was also the spot where she had taken advantage of Steff on a night earlier in the same school year. She hadn’t shown much response to it before, but it was understandable why she might be uncomfortable around it.

And as soon as I understood that, I also understood why she’d changed her mind. The reason there was a path behind the student union was because it led to the admin building. We’d be passing right through its plaza on the way to the coach park.

Steff, feeling vulnerable, was trying to protect me as well as herself.

“It’s a good idea, actually,” I said.

“You don’t mind…?”

“The walk? No, I don’t mind it at all,” I said. “I mean, it is a nice day.”

We held hands and I kept my eyes on the grass on the other side of the pavement as we walked past the building where Leda’s killer had… last been seen… but other than that, I didn’t have any problems. Going into the building might just have given me a heart attack, but walking past it didn’t trigger any particular associations.

Still, the silence itself was an issue. While there was nothing else going on in my head, I still felt the disquieting echoes of the previous night’s events in my head. If we were going to be doing any more sessions… and if the first one had even worked as intended… I would definitely have to request a lighter dose next time. Having random bursts of distraction going off inside my head could be a dangerous thing, in Acantha’s class or Coach Callahan’s.

In an attempt to screen out more of the non-revealing revelations, I turned my mind back to the earlier conversation. Miniature warfare wasn’t my favorite topic, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

“One thing I don’t get,” I said. “If Hazel is so bad at stone soldiers, then why would it take two of you to fight her in the first place?”

“Well, I guess by the light of day I’m not sure I’d say she’s that bad,” Steff said. “She’s bad at fighting, and there are whole sections of the rules that she doesn’t know or tries to fudge things in on purpose, but she’s figured out what she’s doing and she does it well enough that her win-loss record is actually creeping upwards. It’s just not the sort of thing that makes for an exciting or interesting game for anyone else.”

“Still, if her record’s that bad, why would she be taking on two people at once?”

“Bravado,” Steff said. “I mean, she was kind of daring someone to do it… literally. She’d already declared it was doubles night, but Shiel was out and nobody else wanted to do a two against two match on her side, so she just laughed and said she’d take on two at once.”

“And your reaction to that was to team up against her?” I asked. There was sadism, and there was bullying… I didn’t like to think of Steff as a bully, but Hazel made boasts like that out of wounded pride, and trying to make her eat her words just seemed needlessly cruel.

“I was pissed… it was how she laughed more than anything,” Steff said. “And she might have said something she shouldn’t have, just before it.”

“What did she say?”

“I don’t want to repeat it.”

“Was it really that bad?” I said. It was hard to imagine Hazel saying something that would shock Steff, and even harder to imagine Steff not being willing to say it herself for shock value.

“Well… I don’t actually know, that’s the thing,” Steff said. “Those gnomes talk like they have a mouthful of marbles and someone put the dictionary in a blender. When they say someone ‘doesn’t half reek of fags’… do you think they’re calling them queer, or just, you know… smoky?”

“Um, smoky,” I said.

Steff sighed.

“Yeah, I was pretty much afraid of that,” she said. “It seemed kind of obvious this morning… but last night, just something about that word and laughter… and I was kind of on edge… the word ‘reeks’ didn’t exactly make it sound better, I guess. I don’t know. I guess I was looking for a fight. It made me feel better for a while, even.”

“I guess a fight with little tiny pieces of rock is better than a lot of alternatives. Why did you smell like cigarettes, anyway?” I asked, more confused than concerned. Steff had climbed into bed with me before her scented bubblebath, and I hadn’t noticed any kind of smoky smell when I woke up.

“She didn’t say it to me,” Steff said. “But, you know… solidarity, or whatever. Do you think I owe her an apology?”

“Did you actually accuse her of gay-bashing or anything?”

“No,” Steff said. “Just took her up on her dare.”

“Well, then I don’t know what you’d be apologizing to her for,” I said. “You could apologize for the misunderstanding that led to her playing a six hour game from hell, I guess, but I think she’d rather continue thinking of that as her thrilling military victory than an ordeal she suffered through. I guess you could apologize for being prickly this morning and say that it was based on a misunderstanding last night.”

“I don’t know how I’d feel about that,” Steff said. “Just because I overreacted to something that she said doesn’t mean the way she plays isn’t annoying.”

“Well, she’s making use of the rules to win the best that she can,” I said. “So you either need to change the rules, or figure out strategies that don’t depend so much on knowing exactly where her units are. Aren’t there area effect spells? Volley attacks?”

“Yeah, and they’re useful for taking out massed units, but the radius isn’t so big that you can paint the whole map with them. Especially when she always pushes for big battlefields. There are rules for things like fire and disease effects that can spread… my army wouldn’t be so good with the fire, but I could maybe shift some points around to get some plague rats or something.” She shrugged. “Or I could just not get baited into playing her anymore. That’s the main thing, I think. The less people there are who want to play her alone, the more she’ll have to realize she can’t just draw defensive games out forever.”

“But if no one wants to team up with her, that doesn’t leave a lot of options.”

“Oh, some people do,” Steff said. “She and Shiel are really good together… they combine their forces instead of each managing their own, but that takes special alchemy that most people don’t have. Hazel takes care of things like fortifying positions and getting their infantry out of tight spots, and Shiel directs the attacks. Also, every once in a while Hazel comes up with something that’s rules-legal that no one’s thought of doing yet. It doesn’t always work and a lot of times when it fails, it fails spectacularly, but it heep things from getting predictable. Shiel is one of the best players in the league for obvious reasons, but other people have had time to get good now. Shiel plus Hazel is just about unstoppable.”

“Does Two play?”

“No, she has the rules down pat but that doesn’t mean she really understands how to play it. I think she prefers games where the rules are also instructions. You know, roll the dice, move exactly that many squares in the one direction you’re allowed to move, pick up a card, do what it says.”

“I can’t stand those games,” I said. “You might as well just roll the dice once at the beginning and say the highest roll is the winner. It would be quicker.”

Steff nodded.

“Yeah,” she said.

It felt like we were running out of conversational impetus, which worried me. As much as it helped me to have an actual topic of conversation to focus on, it also helped her. Neither one of us really wanted to be alone with our thoughts at the moment, albeit for different reasons. A day out on the town together… this wasn’t the perfect time for something like that, but for the same reasons it was just what we needed.

She stopped moving as the conversation also drew to a halt. I didn’t say anything, waiting for her to make a move.

“You know…” she said, more slowly and carefully than she usually spoke. “It isn’t really… just any one thing that’s bothering me. I mean, there are some big things, and you can probably think of them, and you’d be right. I’m just… just… I was doing okay with being here, but then leaving and coming back… it all kind of came back at me all over again, and the timing…”

“It’s okay, Steff,” I said. “You don’t have to explain it right now. You don’t have to explain anything to me.”

“I want to,” she said. “You pretty much taught me by example that it’s not good to keep things all partitioned off…”

“That’s me, the walking cautionary tale,” I said.

“I just… I don’t know if I can,” she said.

“I already told you that I don’t mind taking the long way around,” I said. “Take your time. Take it as slowly as you need to.”

She laughed, and it was only when she started laughing that the self-control broke enough for the tears to break free of her eyes.

“Slow is nnot exactly my natural cruising speed,” she said. “I’m a lot better at rushing in.”

“Yeah… I’ve noticed.”

I didn’t think of myself as a master of comedic timing or anything, but I managed to inflect that right to get another laugh from her. I wasn’t really good at the whole comfort thing, but I felt like I was doing something right if she could smile through the tears.

“Is it okay if I keep crashing with you for a while?” she said. “I can take a hike when Ian wants to come over, it’s a big enough building that I can sleep in a lounge somewhere without anyone complaining, but… I just…”

“Steff, I seriously don’t want to pry, but… as your friend, I need to ask you if you are having problems with Viktor,” I said. What I really meant was, is Viktor causing you problems, but even being bold I still wanted to be tactful.

“I’m just trying to give him some space,” she said. “I’m not really in a mood to be touched right now. I can touch you without a problem… but me and him, we don’t work that way. And it’s not fair to him to take up his space when I can’t give him anything in return.”

“Has he complained at all about… anything?”

“He doesn’t have to.”

“Okay,” I said, and I didn’t push the point farther.

I thought the most likely explanation was that Steff didn’t want to be around Viktor, but that wasn’t necessarily an indictment of him. I’d asked her twice about him now, and felt fairly satisfied that she was telling the truth. This was her issue that she was dealing with, not a threat from him.

If Steff felt the most comfortable around me at the moment because she saw me as non-threatening, I could understand why she wouldn’t want to be around her hulking half-ogre boyfriend. He wouldn’t have had to have crossed a line or done anything in particular to make her feel vulnerable… his physical presence was menacing enough. That was part of what Steff liked about him, in the ordinary course of things, but at the moment…

If she found it easier to say that she was giving him space than to say that he was triggering something in her, it wasn’t my place to call her on it.

“You’re a better friend than I deserve, Mack,” she said, taking my hand again.

“You don’t get friends because you earn them,” I said.

“How do you get friends, then?”

I thought about this. I wasn’t exactly an expert on the subject, but the friendships I’d formed… and the ones I’d rejected… made for interesting case studies. So did the people I was friendly with… like Belinda and Celia… who I’d never quite clicked with. Friendliness wasn’t enough. Merely looking for a friend or declaring friendship wasn’t enough.

Where did real friendship come from?

“I guess it happens by accident, mostly,” I said. “Some kind of compatibility helps, I guess, but it’s hard to predict what that means. Two lives bump into each other, and they get all tangled up… and then they step back and inspect the damage and decide they actually like themselves better that way.”

“Or they just stumble on obliviously together as one messy, co-dependent jumbled heap,” Steff said.

“Or they do that and decide they like it better,” I said.

“Shall we stumble onward, then?” she asked.

“Just you try and stop me,” I said.

“It’s a good thing I’m not afraid of commitment,” she said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because trying to keep you from stumbling would be a full-time job,” she said.

Her friend Hazel, on the other hand, was definitely a person of habits, and one of them was sleeping in. Since Two didn’t want to go shopping without her, we’d had to wait for her to get up, and then wake up… which she did in roughly that order… and then she wanted to go to the cafeteria for breakfast.

I hadn’t minded the initial delay, because it gave me time to get up the nerve to reflect Nicki and ask her if she wanted to come into town with us. It wasn’t that I was nervous about asking her, I just wasn’t a big fan of mirror-speech. More regular use hadn’t made me any more comfortable with a magic mirror, so much as comfortable with talking to the same few people on it.

But once I did it, I found that Nicki fell into the “old familiar” category pretty quickly and naturally. The fact that Hazel was still dragging her feet meant I could tell her there was no rush, which was a good thing. Just because I was asking her at the last minute didn’t mean I wanted it to look like I was. After some awkward back and forth about when we’d each be ready, said she’d head down to the coach stop in half an hour or so but it should be no hurry for us, either.

No, the delay didn’t bother me so much as the idea of dining in right before we were going out.

As much as breakfast was the most consistent meal the old dining hall served, I’d been far more excited about the prospect of eating in town. The last time I’d had a chance to eat out regularly had been when I was at an age where it still seemed like a huge deal, which meant that it still did seem like a huge deal to me.

At first, Hazel seemed just as excited as I was at the thought of getting breakfast at a cafe in downtown Enwich, but she also refused to go until she’d had a little something to eat.

Once we were actually sitting around the cafeteria I started to get more annoyed for multiple reasons, among them being the fact that any time I started to space out a little I’d suddenly get this little flash in my head of something that the owl-turtle thing had imparted to me in the compressed dream-time, but it was never anything I could make any sense of. Just as irritating was the fact that I kept having these little dawning feelings of realization or comprehension, but I could never quite understand what it was that I was realizing and comprehending.

It was like being in a situation where everyone else is in on a joke, but in this case “everyone else” was me.

Also, once we were out in public, Steff was in a jumpier mood. Despite her insistence that her elven heritage protected her from the negative effects of sleep deprivation, I couldn’t think that staying up the whole night before was helping her. It might not have made things worse exactly, but it changed her reactions from seeming a little more fragile than normal to seeming a little more brittle than normal.

While I sat there trying to make sense of flashes of insight that I knew nothing about, she was getting into it with Hazel.

“It’s hardly my fault that the last battle kept me up long into the reasonably-sized hours of the night,” Hazel said in response to Steff’s second or third request for her to eat faster.

“Wait… don’t you mean wee hours?” I asked.

“Oh, well… I suppose they would look that way, to you,” she said.

“That’s weird,” Steff said. “Mack walked into that, and I’m the one who’s wincing… anyway, I’m surprised they even let you play another game after I left.”

“Let me? It’s my room, isn’t it?” Hazel said. “I let people play there. Who’s this ‘they’ that’s supposed to be letting me do something with my room? Besides, it was still the one.”

“Still the one what?” Steff asked.

“Still ‘the one what’ I was fighting when you left,” Hazel said. “Kept me up all hours of the night, though I pulled it off in the end.”

“I’m sure they roll the footpaths in the shire up at six, but I’m not sure that ten qualifies as ‘all hours of the night’,” Steff said. “It’s more like ‘one pretty reasonable hour of the night’, really.”

“You packed it in at ten, but it was a quarter of four by the time my other opponent yielded,” Hazel said. “Stubborn customer, that one.”

“Did he yield, or did give up and go to bed?” Steff asked.

“I don’t see what it matters where the boy went after he gave up,” Hazel said. “The point is, he did, and that means that I won, fair and square.”

“That’s true, it does mean that,” Two said.

“You were getting your ass kicked when I left,” Steff said. “What did you do, move your pieces really slowly?”

“No, I moved my pieces really strategically,” Hazel said. “Willikins’ Raiders are impossible to pin down, and they’ll fight to the last soldier if necessary.”

“You were down to the last soldier when I left,” Steff asked. “Last unit, anyway.”

“Last unit in the clear,” Hazel said. “The rest were in hiding.”

“How do you hide your soldiers, exactly?” I asked. “The whole battlefield is spread out on the floor in front of all the players. I guess you could use selective see-invisibility spells, but that would take a lot of effort if you didn’t have dedicated magic items for it.”

“Well, maybe you should try dedicating some items, then,” Hazel said. “Because there’s a huge trade in soldier gear going, around uni and over the weaver-thing. But no, we don’t use magic. You just note the position of your units. Haven’t you ever seen me fiddling with my logbook? I have to note where everyone is turn by turn in case there’s a dispute later.”

“Doesn’t that take a long time?” I asked.

“Hence why I said there’d be a market for it,” she said.

“Probably, but I couldn’t pull that off,” I said. “Though you could talk to a communication student about coming up with some kind of… information sorting and storing thing. It could make the whole process easier.. .and also resolve things automatically if someone tries to move their army through yours, or attacks a clump of trees where you’re hiding.”

“Okay, not to interrupt the nerdery…” Steff said. “But just, to be clear, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that your strategy is not to fight unless you’re down to the last soldier?”

“If it can win a battle, it counts as fighting,” Hazel said. “Look, it’s not my fault no one else ever bothered to learn the stealth rules, or use them for more than a couple of lone assassins or scouts.”

“Wait,” I said. “Your strategy is to hide most of your army and just move them around until your opponent gives up?”

“It’s an acceptable military strategy!” Hazel said. “It’s called ‘going ape’, I think.”

“But the whole point of guerrilla warfare is to pick the other enemy off through quick skirmishing, ambushes, and traps,” I said.

“Listen to the expert,” Hazel said. “How many games have you won?”

“She’s lost fewer of them than you have,” Two said. “Statistically her win-loss ratio is very close to yours.”

“No, it isn’t,” Hazel said. “She doesn’t have a win-loss ratio because she doesn’t have any wins or losses, and ‘ratio’ means division. You can’t divide by zero, or the goblin gods wake up and eat the world or something. Basic mathematical fact.”

“I’m afraid I don’t think that’s correct,” Two said.

“Anyway, when they come up with rules for skirmishing and ambushing that work half as good as the ones for hiding in the woods, I’ll use them,” Hazel said.

“Just because you’re no good at fighting doesn’t mean there’s a problem with the rules,” Steff said.

“No, listen, if the problem were with me, I’d be no good at hiding, either, would I?” Hazel said. “You’re just sore because this effects your ratio.”

“When I left we were winning,” Steff said. “It’s not my fault that Jerkface McWannabelf couldn’t seal the deal.”

“Well, maybe he could have if his whole left flank hadn’t fled the field,” Hazel said.

“He was my right flank, I wasn’t his left flank,” Steff said.

“Your side lost, you lost,” Hazel said. “As they say dans la belle Merové: suck it up.”

“There’s no way that counts as a loss,” Steff said.

“Couldn’t you guys just call it a draw?” I asked.

“Two?” Hazel said inquiringly, looking at her.

“A draw occurs when both sides or a majority of both sides agree to end the game in a draw,” Two recited. “If one side is unwilling or unable to continue fighting, it is considered a surrender, which is scored as a defeat.”

“I can’t believe this… isn’t this why we agreed on the point system?” Steff said.

“In the first place, when you left your side lost the points you captured,” Hazel said.

“That’s not in the rules,” Steff said. “Points belong to the whole side, not the individual player.”

“Two?” Hazel said.

“That actually isn’t in the rules, either way,” Two said. “I told everyone that the new rules were less clear than the old rules.”

“It doesn’t have to be clear because it’s obvious!” Steff said.

“…that doesn’t make sense,” Two said.

“If points belong to the whole side, what happens when one player betrays another mid-game?” Hazel said. “Every time they defeat a unit, do they both get the points for it?”

“That’s not what happened, though,” Steff said. “I didn’t betray the Battling Bowmen.”

“No, you just abandoned ‘em,” Hazel said. “Look, everyone agrees that Two is the referee because she’s impartial and she knows the rules better than anyone. Even Shiel asks her for clarifications. Two, who won the last battle last night?”

“You did,” Two said. “Poorly.”

As much as I liked Hazel… in general, I mean, I wasn’t exactly enamored of either main party to the dispute by that point… the look on her face would have been priceless to see on just about anyone.

The look on Steff’s face was, too, if only because it was nice to see genuine mirth there. She sputtered with laughter while Hazel was sputtering with indignation.

“You’re right, Hazel,” Steff said, finally. “We did all agree she’s impartial.”

“Well… alright,” Hazel said. “It’s a fair pinch, that. I tell you what: if the both of you will agree to a rematch, we’ll play the whole game over.”

“If that’s the price I have to pay, I’ll take the loss,” Steff said.

“I may not be the most aggressive general in the league, but I’m the toughest one to defeat,” Hazel said.

After that the conversation became a bit friendlier, if a lot more scattered… which left me back in my own head again, dealing with the odd bits of memory falling into place. The most irritaitng thing was knowing that I wouldn’t have a clue what good it had even done, if any, until I went to sleep again. And since no one was fighting anymore, I didn’t really have anything to complain about, which made my irritation worse.

“I think I’m going to go check and see if Nicki’s there yet,” I announced, surprising myself with my own initiative… but I didn’t feel like I could take sitting there for any longer. I wanted to be out doing things. Besides, there really wasn’t much point in hanging around when I’d finished my bacon and ham and was just picking at the hashbrowns.

“I’ll go with you, make sure you don’t get into any trouble with your little friend,” Steff said. “I can’t leave you two without a chaperone, people would talk.”

“‘People’ here meaning you,” I said, though it was good to hear her in an actual teasing mood, rather than a prickly one.

“Of course,” Steff said.

“Oh, fat chance they’d be out there alone,” Hazel said. “This time of day on a Saturday? On a fair day, this early in the semester? We’ll be lucky to get the third coach that comes along while we’re sitting there. If we’re lucky enough to be sitting.”

I also felt a sense of fatigue. Not physical tiredness… more like the sense that I’d spent a few hours butting my head up against a problem, or trying to wrap my mind around a complicated new subject. I supposed that both of those descriptions could be apt, in a way.

It was either ironic, or just really unfair… spending an entire calendar year at school without a decent break hadn’t been enough to make me dream about studying all night, but now I was doing it for real.

As my bearings came back to me, I briefly had the sense that someone else was in bed with me… mostly because I was closer to the side than I had been when I went to sleep. Even when the bed was full, I tended to sleep in the middle… it was partly a legacy of the time when our bed hadn’t been big enough to have sides, and partly because I really didn’t mind being slept on.

Wriggling out of the blankets, I thought I caught a bit of Steff’s scent, which was hard to describe because it was very faint. It was more of a general sense that a person had been there recently, but there wasn’t Ian’s manly musk or Amaranth’s earthy, wind-over-an-open-field scent. I thought that maybe Steff had come to bed and then left.

I was occasionally dimly aware that my sense of smell was more than what a fully human nose would be capable of… usually when I was hungry or incredibly angry. So I felt a flutter of concern at this bit of olfactory insight, but it subsided when I realized that I felt more or less okay… as human as I ever felt, and completely myself.

Could it be a side effect of the owl-turtle thing’s “training montage”? I didn’t have any impression of having been directed to get more in touch with my physical senses, but it had been encouraging me to stretch out my mind and explore avenues of sensation I’d never consciously used…

I wasn’t crazy about the idea of my semi-demonic powers coming more to the forefront, especially ones that were strongly associated with hunting. Steff and Amaranth were mostly safe, and Dee could literally restrain me with a thought… but I didn’t want to walk around campus with my nostrils full of the scent of humans. All stereotypes aside, there had to be some people on campus who were still virgins.

Then I heard the toilet flushing and the bathroom door opening.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Steff said as I poked my head out the bed curtains.

She was naked, her hair slightly wet and her pale skin glistening with what almost had to be water, since she didn’t sweat that much. A warm draft followed her out of the bathroom, carrying with it the slightest scent of honey and vanilla. Steff’s penis was in the process of stretching like it had just had a long nap, though there was no hint on her face of lascivious intentions so I ignored it.

That’s not to say that I ignored her… that would have been difficult, verging on impossible.

Before her transformation, Steff’s wardrobe had been about evenly split between really tight pants and miniskirts that accentuated her frame, and long flowy dresses and billowy blouses and skirts that obscured it. Since growing curves that would scandalize her surface elven kin, she’d mostly given up on the tight clothes… at first for the practical reason that none of them had fit her anymore, but she hadn’t done much to replace them.

“Have you been up long?” I asked her.

“Only all night,” she said, raising her arms and arching back in what could only have been called a titillating display… though probably not with a straight face. “Well, I came into the bed for a bit, but I didn’t sleep. I just wanted some company and everybody else had drifted away. You were really out of it… didn’t even stir when I nudged you over to make room.”

Under other circumstances I might have wondered what Steff would do if she came across me while I was completely unconscious… actually, under other circumstances I wouldn’t have to wonder, because Steff would have volunteered the information. The fact that she didn’t spoke volumes, as was the fact that she’d wanted room to lie down without prolonged contact.

I noticed that her cheeks looked kind of damp… the rest of her did, too, but her eyes seemed really bright in the way that suggested tears. There was some redness there, too. She had been up all night, though, and I suspected she’d been missing sleep before that.

“I hope you don’t mind that I used you guys’ bubbly stuff,” she said. “I knew it was yours or Amy’s because I can’t really picture Dee going for that and I can’t picture Two letting the side of the bottle get all sticky and gunky like that and not cleaning it off.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “The borrowing, I mean, not the personal commentary.”

She stuck out her tongue.

“Are you still going to up for a day on the town, or do you want to wait for tomorrow?” I asked her, getting out of bed. I never appreciated Amaranth’s decision to carpet the floor more than when I first got up in the morning and put my bare feet on it.

If only I could wrap the bare rest of me up in something equally plush and warm…

“I’m fine… it takes a little longer for me to show the effects of anything like sleeplessness,” she said. “A lot of the baggage of mortality is semi-optional for elves. There’s actually a whole village of elves that decided to stop sleeping entirely… well, I say ‘elves’ but they’re all bansidhes now, after they went crazy and killed themselves.”

“That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement,” I said. “And you’re only semi-elven.”.

“Well, I’m fine today and I’ll just be tireder tomorrow,” she said. “And anyway, we don’t want to disappoint Two. So how’d your thing go last night?”

Right as she asked me that, something went through my head like I was remembering a conversation from long ago… something involving the owl-turtle thing and me, standing in front of a stone wall. My vision didn’t quite go hazy, but I momentarily lost the ability to process what was in front of me. A second later it all came back.

“I don’t know yet,” I said, shaking my head. “There was a lot to take in… I’m still sorting it out. Do you happen to know if Dee’s awake yet?”

“Awake and gone,” Steff said. “Girl’s an early riser. She and Two both had to use the bathroom while I was in there.”

“So what did you do?”

“Nothing,” Steff said. “I’m sure they would have asked me if they needed help.”

“They went with you in there?”

“On the other side of a shower curtain. I didn’t peek,” she said. “I mean, I’ve seen Dee in the gathering darkness before. I don’t need to see her peeing. That’s not exactly my cup of warm, amberish colored liquid.”

“I’m not suggesting… I mean, I’m just surprised she’d come in while you were there,” I said. “Or Two. They’re both so… protocol-y about things.”

“Well, before coming to school Two lived in a group home and Dee lived in a giant underground beehive,” Steff said. “So I imagine the protocol included things like sharing bathroom facilities. What, did people just not use the toilets while someone was showering in the girls’ side of Harlowe?”

“No, but that was a bit… bigger,” I said. “And that was a public bathroom. This one is…”

“Shared.”

“…private,” I said.

“They both knocked and asked if it was okay first, in case you’re worrying about them bursting in on you while you’re pretending not to masturbate or something,” Steff said. “Hell, they’d probably know better than to try if it wasn’t an emergency, since you’re so weird about this kind of thing.”

“It’s not weird to not want to be two feet away from someone who’s peeing,” I said.

“What’s the difference between someone walking right past the bathtub you’re in to get to the toilets in Harlowe, and someone coming in to use the toilet while you’re in the tub here?”

“Distance,” I said.

“Everybody who’s ever used a public bathroom stall has done that.”

“Well, I haven’t had to do anything like that for over a decade,” I said. “So everything about peeing is weird to me.”

“As long as you know that you’re the weird one,” Steff said.

“Anyway, that’s why I don’t take long baths first thing in the morning,” I said. “It helps me avoid awkwardness on all sides… even if all the awkwardness is on my side.”

“In my defense, it was more like the middle of the night when I started,” Steff said. “So I guess it was a really long bath, really first thing in the morning.” She reached down and touched her now very hard dick with the tips of two fingers, in a casual how-did-that-get-there kind of way. “Anyway, I’m glad to see you’re awake now… because this keeps happening.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d be…” My mind reached for a prepositional phrase that wouldn’t be a double entendre, discarding up for, into, and down with before giving up.

“Come on, Mack,” she said, giving me a slightly pained smile. “This is me you’re talking about.”

“You seemed kind of… down… last night.”

“Even down I’m still me,” she said. “Anyway, I told you I’m fine. Besides, I’m not looking for real intimacy right now.”

“What are you looking for?”

“To fuck you in the ass until I come two or three times so I can walk around town without looking like the world’s worst short sword smuggler,” she said.

“That’s not intimate?”

“What, haven’t you ever heard the saying? Elves masturbate with others and make love by themselves.”

I could tell she meant that as self-deprecation, but the words still stung me. Even the part of them that was aimed squarely at herself stung, because I didn’t like hearing anyone suggest that Steff wasn’t capable of love.

“Don’t even try to pretend like that’s true,” I said.

“Well, not entirely true because I’m not entirely an elf,” she said. She shrugged and came closer, moving in a way that made it seem like her hips were ambulatory entities in their own rights and her legs were just their puppets. “But I have needs… some of them are physical and some of them are emotional, and right now they both say I need to bend you over and fuck you like you aren’t even there, and I wouldn’t be suggesting this if I didn’t think you’d be into it… so are you in or out?”

My cheeks were red hot in mingled frustration, arousal, and embarrassment… because damn if she wasn’t right. Amaranth gave me a lot of gentle intimacy and Ian gave me stern demand, but sometimes what I really needed was just to be used… to be taken advantage of, not in the way that a vulnerable person would be but in the way that a conveniently placed public facility would be.

“In,” I said, closing my eyes.

“Of course you are,” Steff said, her breath right up against my face, as close as she could be without any physical contact.

She took me by the shoulders and spun me around, bending me over the bed and handling me until I was in the position she desired. I remained completely passive, staying where she put me and uttering not a sound, not of protest or of agreement.

Lube was a sometimes thing, as far as Steff was concerned… my invulnerable body was immune to the more dire outcomes of raw, dry sex.

That wasn’t to say it was pleasant, but not all pleasure was physical, and we both had more than one itch that needed to be scratched.

I didn’t need to be told that this time was going to be pain, and nothing but pain… joking aside, Steff did not need a partner to masturbate. She wouldn’t need me for this if she didn’t, well, need me. I could take anything that she could dish out, and I could give her pain.

There was no doubt that Steff was a sadist, but I think there was more than a bit of projection involved. She drew up lovingly detailed sketches of grisly endings for others because devising them for herself got boring, or her imagination tripped her up by pointing out that such things would necessarily be a once-in-a-lifetime event.

She forced her way in. I knew it couldn’t be much more comfortable a fit for her than for me, but she didn’t mind physical pain, either. It just hardened her resolve… as well as the other thing.

Ian and I had tried to do this, on occasion and without much luck. Steff seemed to have some knack that he lacked. Maybe it was a quality of elven grace… they were supposed to be able to step into spaces between spaces, after all.

Whatever… it would be hard to describe what she did as graceful.

And as she pounded away at me, I think she was pouring her pain into me, as well… trying to take whatever she was feeling and push it out. I don’t know if it worked. I don’t know if it made her feel better. But even if I didn’t get anything out of it, I still would have submitted to it on the chance that it would help her.

I did get something out of it, though. The pain… it wasn’t pleasure. It was pain, and at least while it was ongoing it was way above the threshold where it was possible to cherish the little warm glow that came along with it.

But I liked the pain.

I needed it.

I craved it.

I drank it in.

The pain hurt, but it hurt good… and I felt a fierce and growing sense of pride as I realized how easily I could withstand it. Well, I’d been run through and chopped up and bashed to bits in mock combat… what was a little internal impalement, between friends?

I didn’t exactly grin and bear it, but I did bear it, and I bore it well.

Steff didn’t last long… needs aside, she clearly wasn’t in an amorous mood… and when she finished, the sensation of her pulling slowly out of my ass gave me a gut-wrenching burst of pleasure that left me gasping. With the source of stabbing pain gone, I started to feel the familiar tingle, like the aftermath of a spanking or a pinched nipple. Tendrils of warmth spread out from the red hot pain, and I started to laugh as I realized that I was getting horny now myself… hornier than I’d been before or during what was technically sex.

“Um… I guess I had to be there?” Steff said.

“Sorry,” I said. turning around and sliding down to the floor. It was easier than standing up. “I just… I’m starting to get all worked up, and there’s probably not going to be any chance of doing anything about it for a while..”

“I’m glad I’m not the only one who finds that hilarious,” Steff said. “Also… thanks. I really needed the chance to unload, so to speak, and with no one in the rooms on either side of us, this is as close to being alone with anyone as it ever gets in a dorm, and you’re the least threatening person in the world.”

“You’ve been afraid of me before,” I said.

“I’ve been scared in your presence, but not of you, Mack,” she said. “Never of you… and I’m sorry if at the time it seemed like I didn’t know that.”

She sounded embarrassed as she said this, and the vulnerability just made her more heart-achingly beautiful. I was glad that I didn’t feel up to standing, because if I had been, I probably would have tried to hug her.

“You should probably shower or something before getting dressed,” she said. “We still have a big day ahead of us.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “And you’ve made yourself fit for walking around town at the expense of my ability to do so.”

“Right!” Steff said. “Priorities… anyway, you’ll be able to walk. You just won’t be able to do it without thinking of me.”

“As if I need a reminder.”

“Well, it does just about confirm my theory,” it said. “But it doesn’t do much to advance the immediate applicability of that, in reference to shielding.”

“In other words, you know I’m definitely… very slightly psychic, or whatever… but not if I’ll be able to shield on my own,” I said. “But if I could reach out and touch that thought-construct, shouldn’t I be able to do the same with the walls?”

“Let’s find out,” it said. It gestured to the still untouched pillar with the target on it. “We’ll start with what we know you can do.”

“Okay, hold on a second,” I said, and I tried to recapture the sense of disconnected omniscience I’d had before… it had occurred to me that if I had found one hidden presence without really trying, it was worth taking a deeper look. Who knew, maybe the obvious one had been a decoy… maybe there was a failsafe.

But I couldn’t detect anything in my mind except for my mind, the owl-turtle thing, and the little almost-mind that dwelled in the bullseye.

“Satisfied?” it said.

“It was worth checking,” I said.

“No argument here,” it said. “And I’m sorry I didn’t check myself. I’ve become pretty good about dodging him coming and going, but it never occurred to me that he’d lie in wait here.”

“It seems kind of obvious, in retrospect,” I said.

“Yeah, in retrospect,” it said. “But you didn’t think of it, either. I’m a creature of limited imagination. If I don’t think to think in a direction, I’m not likely to have a random stray thought. Anyway, you’re clean. I’ve checked, and now so have you.”

“I don’t suppose it’s likely he’ll come busting in here for real now,” I said.

“There’s no way he can know that his infiltration was discovered,” the owl-turtle thing said. “I think he’d be counting on learning what you’re up to from it at the end of the night rather than risking blowing his own cover by forcing a confrontation tonight.”

“Yeah, that’s my thought, too,” I said.

“So let’s make the most of the time we have and get down to it,” it said.

“Okay, yeah,” I said, and I turned to face the target… but then something else bobbed up into my awareness that I couldn’t ignore.

What we were doing, what was happening… it was pretty much the closest thing I’d ever experienced to the moment in the story when the hero with the special powers first realizes she has special powers and then learns how to use them. I even had a wise-ish and inscrutable mentor.

Okay, as far as special powers went, “telepathic but only within my own head” wasn’t the best, and the owl-turtle thing didn’t exactly rate up at the cosmic or all-powerful level of the entity scale, but it still felt familiar enough for me to get a little excited… but only a little bit excited, because I didn’t know what it would count for, what any of it would signify.

“What?” the owl-tutle thing said.

“Okay… not to get all sidetracked, but there’s a question that’s not necessarily immediately important, but that’s going to burn a hole in my mind if I don’t ask it,” I said.

“So to speak,” the owl-turtle thing said. It sighed. “What is it?”

“Just… what does it mean, that I can do this?” I asked.

“In what sense?”

“You seemed pretty sure that I’m not going to turn into an actual telepath no matter how much I practice or train,” I said, “but you also acted like it’s really pretty rare that I should even be able to do this much.”

“Correct all around.”

“So where is this going? And where did it come from?” I said. “Is this something I was born with? Something I picked up secondhand from you? Something I got from the night of the fish-beast?”

“Definitely wasn’t from me,” it said. “It would be hard to say if the fish-beast could do anything to unlock some kind of potential, but my instinct is that there would have to be potential there to unlock. I think the best theory to work under for now is that you inherited it, for a variety of reasons.”

“So this is just my version of the ‘not conventionally telepathic’ demon stuff,” I said.

“Maaaybe,” the owl-turtle thing said, kind of doubtfully. “But among mortal races, the inheritance for this kind of thing can be kind of wonky. It can skip generations, or lie mostly dormant through them. You could be a ‘mostly dormant’ generation… I mean, if you didn’t have so much outside activity acting on your head, there would never have been any reason for you to find out about what you can do, much less try to train it up.”

“It would have to have been ‘mostly dormant’ or more for at least two generations before me,” I said.

“Well… that can happen,” it said.

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing you’ve been interested in hearing so far,” it said. “Nothing you’re ready to hear.”

“If you’re trying to suggest that my mother or grandmother were telepathic… okay, maybe one of my aunts or cousins could be, though it never came up when I was around them. Though I guess I never really saw them much except when my grandmother was around, and I could understand why they’d keep it a secret from her… but still, it seems kind of like a long shot, and I guess it’s not really relevant. I have what I have, right? It’s not like it’ll turn into full-fledged telepathy, or make it easier for me to shield on my own, if I tracked down Aunt Jo and asked her if she happens to be a secret mindreader.”

“No, I really don’t think that would accomplish much,” the owl-turtle thing said. “On the other flipper-wing, though, I do have some exercises from Dee we could do that would help you… what do you say we work on that now, and your self-awareness later?”

It gestured at the pillar.

It took a bit more effort to blast the completely inert and non-threatening stalagmite than it had to do the same to the spying image of my father, but somehow thinking about the owl-turtle thing made it easier. The bullseye board exploded into a mass of splinters that bled off into the ether and dissolved, leaving the metal bands to fall and clatter to the ground unharmed. The stone pillar was barely chipped, though, and the small blemishes I made repaired themselves.

“Damn,” I said. “That’s not good, is it?

“No, that’s good,” the owl-turtle thing said. “The metal wasn’t supposed to be touched… any damage to them would be a sign that you were kidding yourself again, because they’re just standard dream stuff. As for the stone? Not good would be if you didn’t affect it at all, and you did! But a complex thought-form is going to be more delicate than a defensive fortification that is specifically designed to repel attackers.”

“Does that mean that if my father could have created a shielded aspect, if he’d thought there was a chance I could have blasted it?”

“Possibly,” the owl-turtle thing said. “But you have to figure he does have an inkling about what you can do after last time, and he knows you’re in contact with someone who can cast a shield over your mind… you have to figure he considered the possibility that he would encounter trouble since he sent the doppelganger in the first place, but I don’t think he expected it to be noticed.”

“Let’s not call it a doppelganger,” I said. “I mean, that word means something specific… I don’t want to start thinking of it as a doppelganger and confuse someone down the line. But did you know that he could do that? Send an aspect of himself?”

“He might very well have done it before,” the owl-turtle thing said. “I mean, would you know if you were dealing with the real thing each and every time?”

“Probably not,” I said. “I just wonder where he picked it up… and when. I mean, I know he doesn’t know who you are, but is it possible he somehow learned the trick off you? By proxy?”

“Doubtful,” it said. “Dee’s quick research says that demons are rarely telepathic in the conventional sense, but they often have special talents when it comes to mental intrusion and domination. He’s been in the world too long to have much recent experience with out-and-out possession, but maybe he’s found a way to keep his hand in, anyway.”

“Okay, so getting back to my talents… I can ‘touch’ the walls,” I said. “Does that mean I can build them?”

“Eventually, maybe,” the owl-turtle thing said. “And here’s the kicker… if you learn how to do it here and now, in an inward-focused dream with me imposing awareness on you… well, I’d be very surprised if you can translate that to anything while you’re awake. Right now you have a perspective that’s centered in your own mind, looking inward… I know you’ve done deep meditation before, but do you have any idea how much focus it would take to manage something like this when you’re awake?”

“And even in my normal dreams, I probably won’t have the presence of mind to first realize that I’m dreaming, then get into this kind of state of awareness,” I said. “So even if I can manage to do this by myself, I won’t be able to do it by myself… great.”

“Not right away,” the owl-turtle thing said. “What I’m saying is that lucid dreaming should still be your goal, because if you can get here on your own you can at least put your own walls up while you’re sleeping, and so far that’s when you really need them.”

“Okay, another question,” I said. “Does this mean I can do something about the hole in my head? I mean, in my mind… apart from the small but present danger of demony thoughts leaking out and clawing at a passing telepath, I’d feel better knowing that I’ve closed his passage in.”

“Short answer: no,” the owl-turtle thing said. “That’s an alteration in the permanent structure of your mind. We can shore it up with a temporary structure, but to heal the rift… well, according to Dee’s mind, that kind of literal mental healing is a highly specialized discipline. Back home, it would have been on an entirely different career track than the priestesshood… it takes decades of training before anybody dares to start even beating out the dents in another mind, because of the damage that could be done by the careless.”

“Okay, what about up here?” I said. “Human telepaths don’t have decades to spend getting ready to practice.”

“No, and that’s one of the reasons she’s up here, to learn things the human way and get a jump on things,” it said. “But even if they compress the process a bit, it’s still a graduate level skill.”

“Teddi is a licensed mental healer,” I said. “She could probably do it. I mean, they were healing the damage I did to Hissy’s mind, right?”

“The damage she did to herself,” the owl-turtle thing said. “And no one at the healing center can touch your mind.”

“No, but you can,” I said. “And you pick up techniques right out of their minds.”

“Hold on!” the owl-turtle thing said. “As keen as I am to spread my flipper-wings and fly-swim, I don’t think I’m quite ready for my primetime debut. The world isn’t ready. Teddi’s kind of agnostic about me and I like it that way, but if she saw me in all my glory… well, the best case scenario is that I would find myself fielding a lot of requests. In the worst case, they wouldn’t be requests. Either way, I’d be a whole lot busier. And there’s something you’re forgetting.”

“What’s that?”

“Where did the hole come from?” it said. “The obvious answer is that your father made it, and if he can tunnel into your mind without you noticing, then closing up the hole isn’t going to keep him out.”

“It might slow him down,” I said. “Who knows how long he was working on it, or what it cost him in effort compared to strolling through it?”

“I’m still not convinced it’s worth blowing up my existence over,” it said.

“What if Teddi agrees to secrecy?” I asked. “I mean, Dee and I are her patients.”

“But I’m not, and I don’t think healer confidentiality rules apply to metamental entities,” it said.

“Is that what you are?”

“Maybe,” it said. “I just made the word up, but I think I like it. Aren’t you pretty sure that any day now your grandmother’s going to get this guy off your back, anyway?”

“Not as sure as I’d like to be,” I said. “And I have no control over the timing. Would you have to reveal yourself to Teddi in order to get the information from her mind?”

“Right, I’ll just go tiptoe through a trained telepath’s mind on a fishing expedition and hope for the best,” the owl-turtle thing said. “There’s no way that can end badly for me, I’m sure… in fact, I’m starting to have a really good feeling about the whole thing.”

“Okay, I get the point,” I said. “Well, we’re here now… let’s focus on the wall thing.”

“Right,” the owl-turtle thing said. “Now, one positive thing that came out of our little test is we know you can put some stress on the walls without doing any damage to them. So what I want you to do is push on them… not one big solid shove like you’ve been doing, but a gentler, steadier pressure. Okay?”

“Does it matter where?”

“Anywhere except there,” it said, pointing to a spot at what I instinctively thought of as the back of the otherwise symmetrical room, where there was a barely perceptible outline where it looked like a tunnel had been plugged.

“Okay,” I said. I walked over towards the edge of the space, extended my hands, and tried to push as the owl-turtle thing had described. There was no noticeable reaction from the walls, though I could feel a sensation of resistance and pressure as though my efforts were rebounding, or the walls were pushing back.

“Are you feeling that?” the owl-turtle thing asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good. Try to hold onto that feeling as you stop pushing… just grab hold of the sensation and keep it in your head.”

It might have been easier said than done, but here was where my experience with magic-working started to help me… unless I was fooling myself again. But it seemed to me like I was able to hold fast to the presence of the walls, to take the sensation of there-ness I got when I pushed and take it into me.

“Okay,” I said, when I felt like I had a good enough grip on them.

“Okay,” the owl-turtle thing said. “Now, don’t do anything until I tell you… I’m going to start giving you instructions, but don’t try to follow them until you’ve heard the whole thing. When I tell you to, I want you to slowly… very slowly… start to open your mind wider, a little bit at a time, to take in the pattern of what you’re touching with your mind. It’s a big pattern, and complex… more complicated than anything you’d ever have had a reason to think on your own. That’s why slow is important. It will overwhelm you if you try to take the whole thing in, so don’t.”

“I have dealt with complex concepts before, you know,” I said. “I am an enchanter.”

“Yeah, you’ve dealt with things that take a long time to explain or a lot of study to understand, right?” the owl-turtle thing said. “Now imagine one of them being crammed into the forefront of your brain all at once, in a single wordless thought… listen, your active memory is only intended to deal with a very limited number of things at a time, and none of them are supposed to be very big. You’re not going to be able to absorb the technique just by touching it, is what I’m saying, and you shouldn’t try. But you need to get a bit intimate with it for what we’re going to do next.”

“So how can you just pick up techniques, then?”

“I’m patterned off a mind with more high-density storage capacity than yours,” the owl-turtle thing said. “I’m not divided into short-term memory and long-term memory. Anyway, if you’re feeling sufficiently cautioned and not at all cocky, you can start slowly expanding your awareness now.”

“Expand it how?”

“Just start cautiously flexing… you’ll know when you’re doing it right, and then you’ll understand what I meant about going slow.”

“Okay,” I said.

I focused my attention on the sensation of the walls that I’d taken in, and… basically thought about opening my eyes. That didn’t do much, sense my eyes were already open. Thinking expand my awareness, expand my awareness didn’t really do anything, either. So I tried to focus on the way it had felt when I’d shoved outward, but tried to leverage that “muscle” inward. I imagined a porthole in the middle of my head, and tried to force it open a crack.

Whoa…

The owl-turtle thing had been right… I did know it when I found it. It was like I’d started to unzip a hole in the ceiling and a lower corner of a great pig pyramid fell down into it. I felt like I was knocked to my knees, though in the dream I was still standing. Something that was a bit like a series of directions and a bit like a long string of numbers or symbols seemed to be dancing through my mind.

“Okay, okay, that’s wide enough,” the owl-turtle thing said. “Don’t try to sort out the pattern, don’t dwell on it… try to think it normal.”

“What?”

“Start a thought in the back of your mind and roll it up to the front, where the intrusion is,” the owl-turtle thing said. “Not words, just… thought. Like a meditative exercise to calm and quiet your mind. What we’re trying to do is massage the wall into something that fits in better with the rest of your mind.”

“Like taking a generic spell formula and making it mine?” I said.

“Yes,” the owl-turtle thing said. “But you’ll only be able to keep touching a foreign pattern for so long, so let’s save the explanatory analogies for after the fact.”

“Okay,” I said.

I tried closing my eyes, but that just made the mountain in my head bigger and brighter so I opened them and instead focused on the physical manifestation of the cave wall just in front of me.

Calm thoughts, from the back of my mind to the front…

That wasn’t quite like anything I’d done with Dee, but it was something I could handle. I imagined a sensation like a rolling ocean wave, sweeping up from the depths of my mind. I focused on my breathing… which, this being a dream, only really began when I started focusing on it. But it made for a nice parallel or counterpoint or whatever to what I was doing with my mind… deep breaths, calming breaths. Deep thoughts, calming thoughts.

The wall in front of me seemed to smooth slightly. The presence in the front of my brain became smoother, too… or lighter, or more tolerable. It was less a set of incomprehensible but definite elements, and more like a pleasing geometric pattern.

I began to picture the wave in my head as an ocean wave, wearing down the wall… smoothing it out, taking away bits of it. The progress was dramatic at first, but it seemed there were diminishing returns… each repetition yielded less and less effect, until I couldn’t tell that I was making any difference at all.

“Okay, I think you’ve taken it as far as you can for the time being,” the owl-turtle thing said.

“What exactly was I doing?” I asked.

“Making the wall I wove with Dee’s borrowed technique into something you mind will recognize better,” it said.

“And that does what?” I asked. “I won’t be able to cast it myself…”

“No, not yet,” the owl-turtle thing said. “But I can copy the modified pattern to summon up later, and it will be more resilient now, and use up less of your capacity. With more practice, we can work it around to something that fits you as naturally as a suit of custom-tailored armor… maybe something so close to your mind’s natural state that it can become second nature. That’s how Dee described the process… adjusted a bit for the dream state.”

“What will that look like?” I asked.

“What does it look like now?”

I considered the question. The walls had been rocky and uneven, like a natural cavern. The protrusions and indentations had been flattened quite a bit. The cracks and seams had resolved themselves into a series of not quite regular but mostly straight lines. The room itself was less rounded, though it didn’t have corners.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It actually looks more artificial than it did before… less so than when it was the adamantine plates, but more than when I started working on it. Isn’t it supposed to be moving in the opposite direction?”

“When it’s finished, it will look completely natural to you,” the owl-turtle thing said. “That’s not necessarily the same thing as ‘natural’ in the generic sense of the word.”

“So you’re saying I’ll know it when I see it?”

“When you see it… you’ll recognize it.”

“You clearly have some idea where this is going,” I said. “Why can’t you just tell me?”

“Because if you don’t know, then you can’t fool yourself into thinking you’re getting there,” it said. “I was a little bit worried that you’d catch on, but clearly I was underestimating your natural gift for obliviousness.”

“You’re a hard entity to like, ridiculous owl-turtle thing.”

“Oh, then you won’t mind if we cut to a training montage, then?” it asked.

“Is that actually an option?” I asked.

“Kid, have you forgotten where you are?” it said. “I had to walk you through things in real time a bit, if for no other reason than to make sure the techniques would actually work for you… but there’s no reason I can’t dump the rest of it into your mind and then let things unspool in normal dream-fashion.”

“And that will actually work?”

“Probably not overnight, but we should be able to tell if it doesn’t work at all, and in that case we’ll only have lost part of a night,” it said. “The alternative is to spend hours of every night being fully conscious… in a manner of speaking… and actively working with me. I’ve got to tell you, you’re not the only one who wouldn’t be thrilled by that. I do have other interests.”

“What are they?”

“Mine,” it said. “So what’s it going to be?”

I sighed. When it put it that way…

“Hit me with your best thought,” I said.

Remembering how abruptly the owl-turtle thing had pulled me into a full dream state the night before, I wondered if that had anything to do with the man’s never-before-seen ability to keep me asleep. Maybe the fact that it hadn’t been a fully natural sleep to begin with had something to do with it… the owl-turtle thing got its mental mojo techniques from Dee’s mind, after all, and she had done something similar to herself in an attempt to get to sleep.

Once this thought was swirling around in my brain, it was hard to ignore. Had my father been telling the truth when he’d said he’d had nothing to do with my inability to wake up?

The hole in that was that… all his protests to the contrary… he’d had no problem sending me back to the waking world the instant it suited him to, right after I’d surprised him with that inexplicable show of force. Even if Dee was no longer sure I could trust the owl-turtle thing completely, it was still the more trustworthy of the two.

Whatever its plans were, it hadn’t killed anyone.

Thoughts of this nature swirled back and forth in my head while sleep overtook me by degrees. I had a sense later that I passed some time in the foggy, poorly remembered fields of regular dreaming before I found myself in a very solid-looking cavern with a high vaulted ceiling. The space was about the same size and shape as the dream fortress the owl-turtle thing had constructed, and as soon as I thought that I realized it was perched on a stalagmite in the middle of it.

“I had a bit of an easier time integrating the defensive pattern with the structure of your mind, the second time around,” the owl-turtle thing said. “If it looks a little different to you, that would be why.”

“Does it not look different to you?” I asked.

“It looks more subtle,” it said. “Less obviously foreign. I see the pattern, I don’t see what you’re dreaming it looks like. Something… subterranean, perhaps?”

“Yeah, it looks like a cavern,” I said, nodding.

“Not quite what I was hoping to hear. But your mind’s accepting it as natural,” the owl-turtle thing said. “That’s progress. I want you to try to do something, and it’s going to be tricky because it’ll be easy to fool yourself into thinking you’re doing it… to dream you’re doing it… but that’s not going to accomplish anything.”

“What?” I asked.

“I want you to reach out and feel the wall, the way you would if it was a spell,” it said.

“But it’s not a spell,” I said. “The subtle arts aren’t magic, not the kind of magic I can feel and manipulate.”

“Outside your head, you’d be right,” it said. “Inside? Let’s just say that I have my suspicions.”

“How will I know if I’m really doing it?”

“You won’t,” it said. “The difference between you thinking that you feel something and you feeling something are zero, from your point of view. But I’m a self-contained point of view within your mind, so I’ll know.”

“Okay,” I said.

I closed my eyes and held up my hands, extending them slightly towards the wall. When I’d first started reading magical energy, I’d had to reach out with my hand in order to reach out with my mind… learning how to do it without touching was a bit like like learning how to move one finger without moving the others, as small children did. It still helped to gesture.

If the walls had been the result of a spell, there would be traces of magical energy. Depending on the nature of the spell, they could be made out of it entirely, or they could be awash in it as an active spell constantly reinforced them, or they might just have residue from the spells that moved otherwise mundane earth and rock into a stable shape and left it there. Since the mental walls had no reality beyond the pattern they represented, I imagined it would be more like the first or second case than the last one… and yes, there it was.

Like a glowing thread woven through space, I could almost see the signature… it really was just like magic.

Or was it?

It seemed a bit too much like magic, and too easy.

“No, stop,” the owl-turtle thing said, and I opened my eyes. It fluttered its flippers a bit. “You’re thinking about it too much, leading yourself to the wrong conclusion. It’s like how you feel magic, but different.”

“Sorry, but magic’s my only real frame of reference here,” I said. “I’ve never actually done anything like… wait, does this have anything to do with what I did to my father last night?”

“Maybe,” the owl-turtle thing said. “I mean, yes, it does, but I don’t know if it will go anywhere. I got a third-hand description of that, from Ian telling Dee what he remembered and understood of you telling him. It sounded a bit familiar to Dee, but this kind of thing is subjective to begin with, before you get into the language gap.”

“Hold on,” I said. “You have to know what it feels like when Dee pushes thoughts around or whatever, and by now you should know what it felt like when I did…”

“Oh, I should?” it said. “You barely understood what was happening, and then you woke up right after that. Do you have any idea what kind of damage forceful waking does to the nuances of memory? And then you have a day of ordinary mental activity on top of that… right now your predominant impression of what you did is that it would be hard to describe, and let me tell you, that doesn’t give me much to work with.”

“Okay, but hang on,” I said. “The upshot of this is that I might be telepathic?”

“In practical terms? No,” it said. “Not a chance.”

“Then what are we talking about?”

“Something like telepathy, but inside your own head.”

“Isn’t that like saying I’m telekinetic, but I can only move things I’m touching?”

“Imagine that everybody lives inside bubbles. Telepaths can pick up rocks inside their bubbles and throw them into other bubbles.”

“And what can I do?”

“Well, there’s a chance you might be able to pick up a rock.”

“And?”

“And nothing,” it said. “You could drop it, but good luck throwing it against the inside of your own bubble, much less through it and across the gap to another bubble. But compared to the vast majority of the population, that’s impressive.”

“Is it useful, though?”

“Who knows? We don’t know what we’re working with,” it said. “But I did tell you that the reason you couldn’t keep a defensive pattern up yourself is that you wouldn’t be able to feel what you were doing, and maybe I was wrong about that. You see where I’m going?”

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “Then I think I’m going about this the wrong way… I couldn’t bring the walls down by willing, could I? I mean, in the ordinary course of things.”

“It’s not your will that’s keeping them up,” it said.

“Right,” I said. “So instead of trying to feel and manipulate them like I would a spell… something I can fool myself into simulating… maybe I should be trying to tear them down.”

“There’s not a chance that would work,” the owl-turtle thing said.

“But that’s good, because we don’t want them down,” I said. “But it’d be closer to the thing we know I can do, and you’d know if I ‘hit’, right?”

“Ah, now you’re thinking,” it said. “Okay. But instead of the walls, hit me.”

“You?”

“Well, listen, just because there’s absolutely no chance you’d succeed in taking the walls down doesn’t mean we should risk it,” it said. “Maybe you make a crack. Maybe you make a gap that lasts just long enough for something to sneak its way in using a less-than-obvious fashion while we think we’re alone and secure. Anyway, if you attacked the walls I think they’d become less integrated with your mind, which is the opposite of the goal here.”

“Okay, but by the same token of ‘what if I do really well?’… what if I hit you harder than you expect?” I asked. “You’re a pattern of thoughts, basically. What happens to you if I destroy you?”

“Listen, there’s nothing that you can do in your amateurish flailing-around that Dee hasn’t tried,” it said. “I can’t be too confident in the walls because they’re cobbled together using your mind’s processes, no offense intended… the mind I was originally made from is much stronger, for certain values of ‘strong’, than yours or Dee’s.”

“So you’re saying that in my amateurish flailing around, there’s no chance that I will try something that Dee didn’t bother to?” I asked. “I mean, maybe there are possibilities she’s been trained out of seeing because nobody ever found any situation they would work in… or maybe the demon side of my mind will see I’m trying to tear something down and get its claws into you? You’re fond of reminding me that you’re so new that even you don’t know how you work… who’s to say that there isn’t a loose thread somewhere that could cause you to unravel just by being yanked?”

It gulped.

“Okay, point taken,” it said. “Let me give you a target. Actually, let’s make this interesting.”

It waved a flipper, and another stalagmite rose up out of the floor. There was a wooden board with a bullseye painted on it, secured to the stalagmite with metal bands.

“What I’ve done is layered three different types of constructs here,” it said. “The bullseye is a figment, like me or your dream lover from last time… less interesting than me, but it still has a mind, even if that mind is just thinking ‘I’m a board.’ The pillar is the same kind of defensive fortification as the walls right now, though it’s not fundamentally connected to them so you can rock it without upsetting the whole boat. The metal bands are just a really solid dream of metal bands. Try to do to it what you did last night, just before you woke up and we’ll see what happens.”

What had I done? I’d reached out and pushed somehow… I’d been angry and frustrated, and it seemed like that was key to what I’d done, but I didn’t think it was the anger itself that mattered. Anger had just stopped me from stopping to think about what I was doing. It had been instinct.

Instinct… a natural reaction.

But even if I’d done it without trying the first time, it didn’t stand to reason that it would be impossible to do it when I was trying. Still, it would help if I could summon up something like the same circumstances, the same state of mind… I thought about my father invading my dreams, violating my mind and my life despite my repeated protests. I thought about the owl-turtle thing, and the way that even at its most helpful there was something fundamentally unwanted about its presence in my mind.

I thought about all the baggage my grandmother had installed in me, all the beliefs about sex and religion and myself that I’d come to internalize even if I hadn’t precisely agreed with it. I’d worked hard to excise those influences from my mind, but it was an uphill battle and an ongoing process. Wouldn’t it be great to just be able to shove an unwanted influence out of my mind as easily as throwing a dead weight overboard?

I thought about what the owl-turtle thing had said about picking up rocks. Maybe it would be a mistake to treat the analogy too literally, but I had to start somewhere. The metal bands were just a dream, it had said. That meant the stalagmite and the target should have some kind of presence, some kind of reality and substance in my mind that it lacked… right?

It didn’t come to me all at once. I slowly became aware of the solidity of the walls around me, and by extension the solidity of the rock spire in front of me. The wooden bullseye had a similar weight, but it also had a sort of pulsing presence that I was now aware of from the owl-turtle thing. The owl-turtle’s pulse was stronger, and also more irritating… its fundamental unlikeability was shining through loud and clear.

Strangely, I didn’t seem to pulse like that… and for a panicked moment, I wondered if it was possible that I was somehow just a dream. Then I realized that this was in fact the case… or rather, the body I was seeing out of was a dream.

My pulse was all around us. My presence was everywhere. My mind wasn’t actually localized inside the arms I could see, or the holes I saw them through.

I held on to the awareness of that omnipresence, as I had a feeling it would be both important and useful in my quest for lucid dreaming… but it wasn’t what I was working on now.

I could feel the pseudo-mind the owl-turtle thing had constructed for the target. I could feel the structure of the tiny fortress it hung upon.

Strong as they looked, the metal bands were an illusion compared to either of them. They had less reality than a phantasmal weapon… they were like the memory of metal, or someone saying, “Hey, think about metal.”

With my mind firmly fixed on the “weight” of the target, I really did feel like I could reach out and shove it or twist it or break it, like I could scream at it with my mind in a way that it couldn’t ignore… but I found myself distracted by the sense of another weight, something that was deforming the landscape of the dream in such a way as to be almost invisible.

As soon as I thought that, I realized that this was basically what had happened: somebody had taken two bits of empty air and folded them over each other to create a blind spot. There had to be more to it than that, because that would just hide a visual presence in the dream and I didn’t think that would fool the owl-turtle thing… the presence being concealed was definitely muted. There was a pulse like the one I felt from my mind and the pseudo-minds, but it was slower and felt… farther off… than it actually was.

I shifted my point of view from where I imagined I was standing to the pulse of my mind, and from that perspective… the god’s-eye-view… there was no mistaking his presence. He was here. Probably he’d snuck in ahead of the owl-turtle thing, while Dee was consulting with it and quizzing it about its intentions.

He was here, and he knew… well, he knew what the owl-turtle thing looked like, and whatever he could glean about its existence from however he was able to peer into its structure. Even if he’d learned nothing else except the obvious, I felt slightly deflated. As disconcerting as its presence could be, there was no way the reality of the owl-turtle thing would be nearly as unnerving as the great creeping unknown he’d been dealing with before.

Still, I’d succeeded in shaking him up quite a bit in the past week, and I knew how to shake him up some more. From my external vantage point, I watched as my dream-self squared off in front of the target. I concentrated, and concentrated on looking like I was concentrating… felt the determination rising, building, and then I shoved with all my might… but not against the flimsy figment that made up the bullseye.

This time I did more than set him back on his heels. This time I heard him scream… maybe more in shock and outrage than pain, but it was a beautiful sound. The flimsy dream-fabric of his hidey hole tore apart as he stopped concentrating on it, but it hardly mattered because he’d fallen backwards out of the blind spot.

His face was twisted and ugly in a way I wasn’t used to seeing, but what stood out more than that his suit looked cheap… patched and threadbare, but cheap to begin with. Off the rack and out of date. I wasn’t any kind of expert when it came to that sort of thing, but I could tell it didn’t suit him. It… he… was kind of almost smoldering.

His edges were kind of going hazy in places and giving off traces of what looked like smoke, but which I could feel were more like bits of him that had lost integrity.

It sounded impressive, but I could also tell that this wasn’t really him… not all of him. He’d projected his own figment rather than coming in himself. The unknown did scare him, enough that he wouldn’t risk getting caught in a locked room with it.

I looked at the owl-turtle thing.

“If I can destroy that thing, he won’t know what it learned?”

“Nope,” the owl-turtle thing said. “Just that he sent out a part of himself that never made it back. Hoo boy, will that ever get to him.”

“Good,” I said.

It was exactly what I’d expected to hear, and in fact it was so obvious an answer that I regretted having asked, because now I’d just advertised my intentions and the figment could make a mad scramble for the walls and I didn’t know who would win that fight.

But the shade couldn’t change its essential nature, and couldn’t resist answering injury with insult.

“Wouldn’t your mother be proud?” it said.

It was exactly the thing I needed to hear to end it.