Tales of MU

In Which Mackenzie May Already Be A Winner

The worst thing about a sunny vacation getaway in the dead of winter has got to be coming back to the snow-swept plains at the end of it.

Seeing the white landscape below us as we neared our destination had been kind of nice… it was actually really pretty. It allowed some of the dream-like nature of the whole extended experience to slip back in after the rude dose of reality that had been the chaos of the cruiseline complex.

Actually touching down within that snowy landscape and being bundled off into the cold… that was like waking up from a nice dream that was interrupted when your alarm triggered and reminded you that you have to get up and go to class, and there are several feet of snow on the ground and it’s cold and windy and terrible.

That last clause wasn’t so much a metaphor as an accurate and straightforward description of the circumstances.

It was likely doomed from the start, but the bleak weather probably doomed the last chance we had for a truly united front. The fact that things had come to a head less than halfway back to Prax had probably already done that, though. If everyone had needed to make their decision right then and there, then who would have wanted to be the first person who stood up and said she was going to turn her back on her friends?

But the timing was all weird and wrong, not at all the way it is in stories.

If my life was a story, then probably the thing that would have happened is that all of the elves would have stood up beside Glory and marched… or swished, or glided… back into Oberrad House with her.

Or the lone holdout… who would have been Prudence… would have gone her own way at the airfield, but then turned up unexpectedly at a suitably dramatic moment, having been unable to keep her distance under the circumstances.

…actually, though, if my life was a story, then what probably would have happened is that none of them would have come. Any of the elves who were even leaning towards throwing in with their queen would have been so annoyed by my attempt at swaying the crowd that they would have ran for the hills as soon as we touched ground.

Life isn’t a story, and none of those things happened.

We lost three of our party at the airfield. They didn’t really say anything, didn’t wait around for goodbyes. I didn’t know who was missing… I only knew how many were missing.

I would have spotted if Prudence bailed, but she didn’t. Maybe she wanted to, but as the one who’d prompted my rant, she was also the one most affected by it. The girls who’d kept quiet could slink away when no one was looking, but Prudence didn’t really have that luxury. Too many eyes were on her.

Glory must have known who was absent, but I didn’t bother asking her.

The prediction I’d based my speech around had been just that, a prediction… not a promise. If the deserters did show up later and somebody made a big enough deal out of it that I knew who they were, I’d probably hold it against them, yeah. But I wasn’t going to swear out a vendetta against them or anything. Who had the time? Even if there weren’t real enemies arrayed against us… and for all that I knew at the time, there might not have been… I had better things to do.

Glory and I were alone for the last little leg of the trip. She’d put Nicki and Grace into the seats that were vacated in one of the other carriages. She’d laughed when she did that, saying that she wanted to savor her last bit of time alone with me and that she hoped her sister hadn’t grown too used to the royal treatment, but I think she was thinking about what would happen if the lead carriage… ours… was attacked when we got back to campus. Elven eyes and ears could certainly determine which vehicle Glory was in, even if they didn’t attack the first one just because it was first.

If it came to an ambush… well, I hated the idea of fighting and I would avoid it if I could. I found myself imagining scenarios where we were attacked on the road. None of them seemed very likely, but then, nothing about the situation seemed less than ridiculous, now that we were closer to it.

If push came to shove, though, I wouldn’t bother with either pushing or shoving. I had other options. Coach Callahan had drilled into me the importance of seizing opportunities to end fights quickly, but I was remembering someone else’s advice. When I’d started dealing with Glory and we’d had reason to be suspicious of her motives… or at least no reason to trust her… Dee had advised me to light the room on fire at the first sign of trouble.

Her reasoning had been that I was unlikely to defeat elven reflexes backed by decades of combat practice in close quarters, but demon fire is a hell of a thing.

It was sound enough. I was just never sure if I would have been able to bring myself to do it.

Now, though?

I’d have to protect Glory, but I could do that, especially if I only had to shield one person from the flame. I’d be directing most of the force outward, anyway… I could turn the coach into an inferno, blow it to hell and then direct the flames at anyone or anything that didn’t take the incredibly unsubtle hint.

It was kind of scary how easily I could think of doing something like that, but I’d used my fire in a pitched situation before without thinking about it, and that was worse. I’d hurt Amaranth very badly once without meaning to, without even realizing what I was doing… she’d been trying to prevent me from doing something I’d have regretted.

At the time I’d had a hard time imagining regretting anything more than burning her, but she’d made the call knowing she was immortal. One way or another she could walk away from it.

“Would you mind if I put a protection from fire spell on you now?” I asked Glory.

“Do you really think anyone who knows anything about the company I keep would attack us with fire?” she asked.

“I’m not thinking about what other people might do,” I said.

“Oh… I see,” she said. “Yes, that seems prudent.”

I thought about weaving a few more spells of protection around her, but decided against it. Better to keep things simple, keep them pure. My spellwork was inspired from time to time, but it was a little sloppy… I liked to do things by feel. Raw power would make any fire spell I wove around her hard for anyone who lacked my elemental affinity hard to undo. If I complicated it by adding an air shell or trying to buff her natural defenses, I could easily leave enough loose threads for a more experienced mage to unravel the whole thing.

It was tempting to think of middling wizards as dilettantes, but if they were, they were dilettantes with upwards of half a century on me.

“You know… I remember when I said I didn’t want to get involved in elven political bullshit,” I said to Glory when the spell was in place.

She laughed.

“If you wanted out, you probably should have left before making that pretty little speech,” she said.

“I didn’t want this, but I don’t want out,” I said. “That’s the weird thing… I didn’t even think about it.”

“You? Didn’t think?”

“Okay, I mean, I was thinking about what I was saying,” I said. “But there was no moment… or multi-day period… where I sat down and wrestled with myself over whether or not I wanted to get enmeshed in the fighting. I never changed my mind. I’m not even sure it’s my mind that’s changed, so much as my feelings.”

“You involved yourself emotionally,” Glory said.

“Yeah.”

“Throwing in physically is almost an afterthought after that,” she said.

“You don’t sound surprised,” I said.

“Should I be?” she said. “I’ve been watching it happen. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything…”

“No, it’s okay,” I said. “You had no reason to. Every step I’ve taken has been my idea… I’ve kept my eyes open, if I didn’t put together what I was seeing.”

“And now that you know?”

“I… don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been very clear on what my future is going to look like, and right now that goes for my immediate future… I can’t really think about what I’m going to do when it comes to you or Oberrad House when there might not…”

“You know there’s a very good chance we aren’t actually riding towards a life-or-death battle,” Glory said.

“I know that,” I said. “And I definitely like to think it’s way more likely that we’re not… but I can’t make a plan based on that. And right now, thinking that it might be… that we might be heading towards disaster… I mean, it’s like you said, I’m emotionally involved.”

“So it’s not the time to be making long-term plans,” Glory said.

I nodded.

“You have a very wide protective streak, Mackenzie Blaise,” she said. “It’s one of the first things I noticed about you… you’d rarely stand up for yourself, but you’d stand up for others. And if somebody threatened or touched someone you cared about…”

“I’ve… done some things I regret, in that circumstance,” I said.

“You’ve done a lot of things I admire,” she said. “I swear, my interest in you predates any situation where it seemed reasonable to think I might need such a fierce protector, but… it gives me some comfort to think about that.”

“I really don’t like thinking of myself as fierce,” I said.

“You are, though,” she said. “It says so on your student ID.”

“It also says I’m a creature, and I’m not too fond of that, either.”

“We’re all creatures,” Glory said. “There are as many stories about people… humans… being carried off by elves as by demons, I think.”

“Yeah, but they have less religious significance,” I said. “And because elves don’t need to be absolute dicks, a lot of you just got jobs, or got married, carrying off mortals the… relatively new-fashioned way.”

“And a lot of us spend 82 years acting out the part of monsters and fairy tale villains or re-enacting our own petty versions of the old epics to get it out of our system, before we spend potentially forever being mature, responsible adults,” she said. “You know, that’s why I didn’t blame Prudence, or anyone who wanted to walk… or anyone who did. Because it’s stupid. It’s stupid that we have to do this. It’s stupid that we are doing this. The whole system, the whole thing, the whole idea… it’s stupid.”

“What’s the alternative, though?” I said. “I mean… ideologically, I get that the alternative is just don’t. But right now. On a practical level.”

“None that I can see,” Glory said. “We owe it to the people who’ve been spending their break watching the house not to ditch them… and if we pulled them out to just go crash somewhere in order to make some kind of point that we’re above it all, the stuff we’re supposed to be above can burn our house to the ground, or trash the inside without disturbing anything on the outside… or even just go in and mess around with stuff to prove that they can. And then what?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I tell you this, Mackenzie Blaise: if they come at me… at us… I am going to fight,” she said. “I will give as good as I get, and better. I will fight to defend myself, my people… my thing. But if there’s a space before the attack, if it’s not just arrows and blades coming out of the darkness but starts with words, if I can look my tormentors in the eyes before they become my attackers, then I’m going to tell them: I’m done. No more. We aren’t children. We aren’t monsters. We aren’t living in fairy tales or living out the last days of Athanasia. We’re college students in the modern world. We’re adults, legally and physically and mentally.”

“Now who’s making speeches?” I asked. “Do you think anyone’s out there listening?”

“I kind of hope so, but probably not,” she said.

“It’s a shame,” I said. “It’s a good speech.”

“Well, you heard it,” she said.

“I… I think I kind of needed to,” I said. “I mean, I’m not an elf and I’m not even twenty, but… yeah. We’re all adults here. People, not monsters. Maybe it’s time to stop letting stories define us.”

“You’re thinking of those religious stories again,” she said. “Your grandmother’s influence… it never really goes away, does it?”

“Maybe it’s always going to be with me,” I said. “I don’t feel like I’ve defined myself by her thinking for a while, but maybe I’ve been trying to define myself against it. That’s not the same thing as forgetting it, or leaving it behind me where it belongs.”

“No,” Glory said. “But it’s not defining yourself by it, either, and that’s something. You know, I don’t really care what happens next… I feel like in a very real way, we’ve already won.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I kind of also hope we win in the actual, even more real way, though.”
“

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Characters: Glory, Mackenzie