Tales of MU

In Which Hazel Shares Old-Fashioned Values

Apparently it was Steff’s turn to ride to my rescue… while I was standing there trying to figure out how to make sense of my situation with Mercy to Nicki, she stepped up and said that a crazy slaver with a thing for half-demons had a bounty out for me, which seemed to cover the important points in a way that worked for a brief, public conversation.

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.

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Characters: Hazel, Mackenzie, Nicki, Steff, Two