I knew I could come back into town and go to the bookstore by myself any time. I had done so a few times over the summer, because if I’d wanted to do anything over the summer I’d done it by myself. But by the same token, I understood how hard it could be to get up the nerve to do something like that when you were alone. A decade of being a loner hadn’t made it any easier for me to do anything by myself except for keeping to myself.

I believed that Nicki was in the same boat, or even more so… being alone had become the base level of my existence before I came to school. For her, the natural state wasn’t being alone, it was trying not to be. I knew that I could get used to being alone. To Nicki, that would probably be like giving up.

So even though it was perfectly clear that Hazel couldn’t stand to stay in town much longer without insisting that we stop for dinner, too, I didn’t offer a word of complaint about the delayed departure.

Of course, we had long since ran into the downside of shopping without Amaranth… we had acquired more bags than our group had hands, and since the majority of the purchases were my own I felt awkward about letting the others carry them. The logistical side of things hadn’t crossed my mind, since I’d never bought so much without having Amaranth ready to stow it away until we needed it again.

“There are lockers for rent at the gate end of the market,” Nicki suggested.

“I wouldn’t leave a stack of coppers in one of them, unless they were unlucky and I wanted to pass them on,” Hazel said. “The locks on them are nothing a child couldn’t spring, and there are children enough in the market to pick it clean before the professionals show up… you can bring your own padlock if you don’t like it, but a locksmith bought mine off me last spring and I’ve not yet bothered to replace it.”

“Aren’t there guards?” Nicki asked.

“Broadly speaking, yes,” Hazel said. “And they have a guardhouse near the where the lockers are, but they don’t actually keep one stationed there. The market guards are supposed to prevent theft, but they care about the stallholders first and hindmost.”

“Don’t you mean foremost?” Nicki asked.

“That, as well,” Hazel said.

“It’s a short line,” Steff explained. She put her hands on my shoulders. “Anyway, Mack can be her own magic lock… can’t you?”

“I guess,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know how to do actual wards, but I could enhance the difficulty of the lock and decrease the openability of the locker. That wouldn’t keep out someone really determined, though.”

“I can do wards,” Two said.

“See? Anyway, you don’t need to keep out the determined,” Hazel said. “Only the opportunistic. When there’s that much acreage of locks to choose from, it doesn’t take much to make it not worth someone’s while.”

“Okay, but by the same token, someone who makes a habit of rummaging in lockers isn’t going to be relying on guessing the contents,” I said. “I think I have a few items that would make it worth circumventing my first year enchantments and any wards that Two could legally put on a rental locker.”

“Well, it’s not like you’d need to rent an inn room to change your belt and put on a jacket, is it?” Hazel said.

“That’s a good point,” I said, and I meant it… it hadn’t occurred to me that even if I couldn’t start playing around with my new gear in a hands-on fashion, I didn’t have to wait to start using them in the conventional sense. Now I had an excuse. “Okay, let’s do that.”

The lockers weren’t very big, so we ended up putting coins into three of them, side by side.

“Aren’t you going to be really hot?” Nicki asked me as I slipped on my new jacket. It felt unfamiliar, but I felt good.

“She frequently is,” Steff said.

“I don’t really notice heat,” I said. “Except when it’s gone.”

I strengthened up the material of the lockers, especially the locks and other moving bits, and put some enhancements on the security of the locks. I anchored the spells with a version of the binding technique that Acantha had taught us for wand charges… not quite the right way to do such things, as I was aware, but something that would work well enough for a few hours.

Once I had done what I could and didn’t need to touch it anymore, Two… who had been reading the posted rules for locker use… laid a series of light blue protective runes over them, which faded mostly from sight a few seconds after they were created.

I recognized them as progressive alarm wards. The first contact from anyone other than her would make the wards glow for a few minutes, advertising their presence. The second contact before they faded again would sound a warning tone that would persist and increase in volume until the violator withdrew. Once it had reached a certain point, it would continue unless they left the area completely.

A serious disruption to the object they were placed upon… like it being broken… would skip right to the full effect.

It was only a small deterrent, but one that was harmless and difficult to trigger by accident. The market’s rules didn’t say anything about wards in particular, only that permanent alteration of the lockers was not permitted. I assumed that Two knew the relevant statutes on the subject and was following them as scrupulously as she’d follow anything. I wouldn’t say that it didn’t matter at all to her what she was following, but anything that she chose to follow, she would follow well. She was a natural adherent.

I didn’t think she had it in her to be religious. There had been golems of faith, but her creator had been practical and had not burdened her with an overabundance of things like philosophy.

“There is seriously nothing to these,” Hazel said, standing on her toes to peer in through the keyhole of a less-protected lockeer. “I was a little surprised at how lightweight the locks on the dorm rooms are, but then I realized that they don’t think of them as properly ours to begin with… we’re more like long-term guests than residents, so I put it down to a mixture of public safety and not feeling any particular need to respect our privacy. But this? It’s like humans don’t know the first thing about putting together a decent set of tumblers. You could pop this one just fiddling around with a paperclip.”

“How exactly do you know so much about picking locks?” I asked her. I knew that she was considered less than respectable, but I had a hard time imagining her getting up to anything any more disreputable than swimming or shaving her feet.

Hazel shrugged.

“It’s just something you pick up, you know?” she said.

“I thought that was picking pockets,” Steff said.

“To be specific, I learned it from my cousin, but she learned it from one of the neighbor’s boys,” Hazel said. “They had a kind of a… to call it a gang would probably conjure the wrong image, but they went around raising hob at all the less decent hours of the morning. They spent their summers getting into as many burrows as they could… not to do much of anything when they got inside, mind. Just to see if they could.”

“So why did you and Honey get in on it?” Steff asked. “Maybe I got the wrong impression back in the bad old days of early last year, but I can’t really picture either of you getting up to that kind of mischief… or any kind of mischief.”

“Oh, we didn’t go along with them. She just wanted to know how they did it. She had her own reasons for wanting to be able to get around a lock without asking for the key,” Hazel said. “I won’t say they were good reasons, but I will say they were hers, and that’s all I’ll say.”

“So what about you?” Steff asked.

“You never know when Old Grayrobes will come knocking,” Hazel said with another shrug.

“What does that even mean?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” she said. “It’s just… something people say, isn’t it? ‘You’d better practice what you can while you can, because you never know when Uncle Grayrobes will come knocking on your front door.’”

“That sounds… morbid,” Nicki said.

“It’s not about dying, if that’s what you mean,” Hazel said. “Not directly. Grayrobes is sort of… well, he’s sort of like a spirit of… well, you know… er, venturing forth in a generally outward-from-home direction, basically. When a gnome does something that other gnomes would find a bit silly, they say ‘Oh, look who’s had a visit from Uncle Grayrobes.’”

“Gnomish sayings are weird,” Steff said.

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a stitch in time save anything, personally” Hazel said.

“Human sayings are also weird,” Steff said. “And before you say anything: elven sayings are exactly equally as weird. But gnomish sayings are weird in strange and unfamiliar ways.”

“And human and elven weirdness is familiar and comforting?” Hazel said.

“Like a pair of old socks,” Steff said. “Or two socks from different pairs.”

“See?” Hazel said. “Weird and indecent. Now… we had a bookstore to go to, I think. This would be one of those modern giant ones that sells sandwiches and pies, I take it?”

“I think they have some food in the cafe,” I said. “Not exactly what you’d call a meal, though.”

“I could surprise you there,” Hazel said. “Remember, I’ve done my research.”

In point of fact, Borderlands had redone their cafe area over the summer. I had mixed feelings about what this had done for their drink menu, but hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the food offerings. They were now noticeably smaller in both variety and portion size. It was more like a snack bar than a cafe now.

Hazel bore up under the burden of it all admirably, though.

“I love places like this,” Nicki admitted once we were all settled down together with food, coffee, and/or reading materials. “I mean, I like the little out-of-the-way neighborhood bookstores, too, but they’re always so…”

“Out of the way?” Steff guessed.

“That, too!” Nicki said. “But I mean, I feel awkward browsing in them. I always feel like I’m going into someone’s house and pulling things off the shelves… and sometimes the people there look at me like they feel the same way.”

“I’m sure they’re happy for the custom,” Hazel said.

“Maybe,” Nicki said. “But I get the feeling that some of them could do without all the steps leading up to it, starting from the one that involves me stepping into their shop and including the one where I touch their books… don’t get me wrong, I know there are nice and welcoming people who run nice and welcoming little stores…”

“They exist, and they’re a right treasure,” Hazel said. “Though in a city like this I suppose they can get buried just as deep as one, I suppose.”

I understood what Nicki meant. People often complained about the bigger stores being so impersonal, but sometimes you didn’t want to deal with the personal touch. Sometimes you wanted to go where no one knew your name, or cared… not because they treated customers badly, but because they treated everyone the same.

Which is to say neutrally to pleasantly, but at a safe distance.

It was quite a bit later than I’d expected by the time we retrieved our purchases and left town, but it had been a successful trip. I wasn’t of the opinion that just going into town with friends needed to be a something that could be scored as a success or failure… I’d decided more than once that my life could do with fewer big dramatic productions and more things that just sort of happened in their turn… but we’d set out with a goal and achieved it, even if the exact end result wasn’t quite what any of us had expected.

Even with the ups and downs along the way, it had definitely been a great distraction from my nocturnal problems and the matter of the owl-turtle thing’s subliminal training regimen. The weird pseudo-flashbacks seemed to have wrapped themselves up at some point when I hadn’t been paying any attention to them, but as the evening wore on into night I couldn’t help thinking that my day out with friends had only been a temporary respite from the threats I had to face on my own.

“How I see it is like this: half the problem is that we’ve been treating you as a passive bystander to the process, as it were, instead of a participant,” she said to me.

“Yeah, I could see that being a problem,” I said. “And honestly, it’s not a lot of fun to be dragged from place to place like that, either.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not exactly a barrel of laughs to do the dragging, either,” Hazel said. “Like I said: that all is half the problem.”

“The other half is me?” I asked.

“To be specific, the other half is you being a passive bystander to the process,” Hazel said. “You saw how determined Two was getting to be about it, and how desperate she was for some sign of approval?”

Two nodded, being no more self-conscious about her desperation than she was anything else. Well, she was probably very conscious of it… she just didn’t care.

“I really do feel bad about that,” I said. “But… there’s only so much I could have done differently. This isn’t exactly my thing, you know.”

“We do know,” Two said. “That’s why we’re here.”

“Right,” Hazel said. “But it’s like the difference between someone asking your advice about a paper because they know you know about… papers… and them turning up at your dorm room and kicking back on the sofa while you write it for them.”

“I haven’t exactly been kicking back,” I said. “I mean, you do have a point, but this day hasn’t exactly been restful or relaxing for me.”

“You have to be careful using metaphors with Mack,” Two said. “She shows an unusual level of concern for their accuracy.”

“That just means she thinks she’s wrong about something,” Steff said. “She and Ian can both split a hair at a dozen paces when they’re in a mood with each other.”

Nicki snorted at this and covered her mouth in a too-late attempt to stifle her surprised amusement. As before, the fact that she found it amusing did something to tone down my irritation with Steff’s criticism. Having a third party who saw the humor in her barbs made it easier to appreciate that the humor was the intent and the barb was incidental, rather than the other way around.

“Well, at the risk of coming across all anti-semantic,” Hazel said, “let me just move on to the point. We’re here to help you find things to wear… not just things you can wear, but things you’d like to wear. This only works if you’re all present and accounted for, so to speak.”

“I can try to make a better effort…”

“Effort’s not what we’re going for,” Hazel said. “You should… I don’t know, get into the spirit of things? I mean, stop acting like you getting new clothes is some kind of… horrible onrushing inevitability, and the most that you can do is mitigate the damage while it rushes on.”

“That’s… okay, that’s actually a pretty good description of how I feel,” I said. “I mean, how I felt. I was excited about the idea in the abstract, but… old habits, I guess? My grandmother didn’t exactly make shopping fun, and I was happy enough when she stopped taking me along. It meant a few extra hours to myself, so it was kind of a net gain all around.”

“Isn’t the good thing about going away to school that you have a chance to ditch your old habits and pick up new ones, though?” Nicki said.

“Well, yeah,” I said. “And I’ve done a lot of that. But it’s never as easy as just up and deciding to be someone else, and I think there are limits to how much of it you can do.”

“Oh?” Nicki said.

“Maybe not hard limits,” I said. “But most things can only be stretched so far before they tear.”

“I think the key is to not change who you are,” Hazel said. “Just… find out more about you. I’ve an idea in my head that dressing another person should be more in the nature of an interview than a monologue.”

“That’s a good way of putting it,” Nick said. “I like to think of fashion as an exploration, but I’ve always thought about it in terms of exploring styles, not people… but there is no style without a person, right?”

“Sometimes there’s no style with a person,” Steff said.

“Two had the right idea with the jacket,” Hazel said. “She might have explained what she was after before heading off for it… or rather, another person might have… but she was thinking about you the whole way: what you need, what you like, what you could do that you might enjoy even if you’ve never thought of it before. That sort of thing. The only thing we might do differently in the afternoon is do that out loud.”

“Um… okay,” Nicki said. “I think I have a general kind of idea, if you want to hear it, Mack.”

“Of course,” I said.

“I think Two was onto something with the jacket, too,” Nicki said. “I don’t just mean all the stuff that Hazel said, but… well, like I said, I kind of find it easy to picture you wearing that kind of stuff. I mean, you’re not necessarily into pretty things, or things that pop out and I don’t think that’s something that should change. Your style is more laid-back, like you don’t even care how you look… and I don’t mean that in a bad way! But, anyway, it’s a short trip from casual to cool.”

“I don’t have anything against… looking cool,” I said. “The problem is that there seems to be kind of a fine line between cool and stupid, and I’m not sure exactly where that line is, though sometimes I kind of suspect it runs through me.”

“I think what you really need is the virtue of simplicity,” Nicki said, clearly growing in confidence as she built up speed. “I mean, take a hat. You can’t go wrong with a basic hat. But then you put a great big feather in it or something, and what’s that do?”

“I guess I don’t know,” I said, trying to sound

“Exactly!” Nicki said. “It’s something you try and see how it works, and maybe it works fine or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s dashing, maybe it’s silly. You don’t know if it’s ridiculous until you go out and… well… get ridiculed?”

“Are you saying I shouldn’t be trying anything, or are you saying I should be prepared to look stupid?”

“I’m saying we should be expanding your boundaries instead of trying to break them,” Nicki said.

“Yeah, keep it sensible,” Hazel said. “There’s always something to be said for that. Simple, practical, black or a good mix with black. So those are our watch-words… or watch-phrases, as the case may be.”

“And magical or magic-able isn’t a bad thing to look out for,” Steff said. “I mean, we want to get Little Miss Nerd to care about clothes… what better way than to combine with something she already likes?”

“She prefers Little Ms. Nerd,” Two said.

Nicki started to laugh, then stopped herself.

“Wait, was that a joke?”

“If it was funny, then yes, it was,” Two said.

“Seriously, though,” Steff said, “she’s probably already plotting out how to enchant the leather jacket.”

“Not exactly,” I said.

Its suitability for enchantment had crossed my mind, since leather riding gear was basically armor, and I had the knowledge and capability to lay some semi-permanent improvements on it now. But armor enchantment wasn’t exactly the field I wanted to get into… I could see the practical benefits of having socially acceptable armor and I’d probably get interested in it as a problem once I started working on it, but leather’s enchantment potential wasn’t the sort of thing that sparked my imagination.

That was what I thought.

“I’ll probably wait until I’m alone with it to really get into it,” was what I said out loud. Two came to my rescue, just as all the wrong ways that could be taken were flooding through my mind.

“If the leather jacket is your favorite thing so far,” she said, and then paused to look at me for confirmation, which I gave her with a nod, “then we should work around that.”

“I don’t think anything we got this morning wouldn’t go with it, luckily,” Nicki said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Not to get out of the spirit of getting into the spirit of things, but I really don’t think I could stand starting over from scratch at this point.”

“I think we’ve all done well, under the circumstances,” Hazel said.

“Do you want to keep the denim jacket?” Two asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t think I could wear leather everywhere, and I still like the inner pockets.”

“Again, practicality,” Hazel said. “So, yeah, let’s run with that… Nicki, you maybe want to tell us more about this vision you have of the way Mack could be dressed?”

There might have been something else that Hazel could have brought herself to say that would have made both of us blush harder, but if so, I wouldn’t want to think of it.

“Well… um… maybe a leather flat cap or beret?” Nicki managed to spit out. “I mean, I don’t know what you’re doing with your hair now, but you always seemed to keep it short before and not really take much notice of it…”

“I don’t know what I’m doing with my hair, either,” I said. “I mean, it’s been growing, but that’s not something I asked it to to… I can’t imagine letting it get really long, but I guess I realized that I can let it grow out a bit now and I wanted to see what it was like. I don’t know, though… I’m really not a hat person.”

“Hold on, let’s not dismiss anything out of hand,” Hazel said. “Are you not a hat person because you don’t like hats, or are you not a hat person because you’ve never worn hats?”

“I really can’t see myself in a hat,” I said. “Other than to keep warm in the winter. If we want to come up with something more stylish than a big wooly stocking cap, I’m fine with that, but otherwise it’s like Two said: I don’t accessorize. To me, accessories are things that toys come with.”

“Belts!” Nicki said.

“I think that falls under the heading of accessories,” Steff said.

“No, but… she does wear belts,” Nicki said. She turned to me. “You do wear belts, I mean.”

“I guess I do?” I said. “I mean, I wear a belt, but it’s kind of necessary… it isn’t something I think about in the morning. It’s just something to hold my staff and any other tools that won’t fit in my pockets… and since pockets are apparently out, I guess it’s just going to be more necessary.”

“Right, you have a belt because you have to,” Nicki said. “But you could have a particular belt because you liked it, right? I mean, right now you wear a kind of clunky, one-size-suits-none kind of thing. You could either find one belt that really suits you, or a few different ones so you can pick one based on how you’re feeling in the morning.”

I wasn’t sure that I wanted to have to think about what belt to wear when I got up in the morning, but I liked how excited Nicki was about the idea.

“I guess I could stand to get a better belt,” I said.

“Belts are right up there in those big lists of standard magic items, aren’t they?” Steff said.

“Yeah, I guess they are” I said. “They share a lot of the same properties as rings, but since you wear them… I mean, around the body, not like you wear jewelry… they edge into a lot of other territory, and since they’re right in the middle of the body, it’s kind of a ‘jack of all trades’ thing. Not as good as boots for walking or movement-related enchantments, not as good as upper-body stuff for upper-body stuff, but not really bad for anything.”

In the process of calling that to mind and explaining it, I was finding that the idea of having multiple belts was growing on me. If they were fairly interchangeable in terms of appearance… different enough that I could tell them apart at a glance, but compatible with the rest of my wardrobe… then I could see the point of picking a different one for different situations. There was a limit to how much magic I could pack into a single belt given my freshman-level enchantment skills plus what I’d picked up so far from Acantha.

“Well, we were going to do trousers this afternoon anyway,” Hazel said. “So this could work out perfectly.”

And though it didn’t quite work out perfectly, it did at least work out well. The second leg of the shopping trip passed more quickly than the initial portion had, in both the literal and figurative senses. The others were… that is, we were able to make progress towards final selections that would pass muster with me a lot more swiftly with my full and more enthusiastic participation, and the minutes that slipped away seemed a lot less tedious when I was engaged.

I ended up with a couple of pairs of pants that were baggier than I would have thought I would like, but which had the excess material to support more pouches and pockets than I knew what to do with… though that didn’t mean I wasn’t getting ideas. I got a few different belts, including one main black leather one to replace my weapon belt for everyday use.

It was less clunky, but still pretty substantial, with a snap pouch built into one side and hooks on the other. Best of all, there was a web-like weaving of thin silver wire embedded into the back of it, to give support and structure to enchantments.

It was the most expensive thing I bought, even more than the leather jacket would have been if I hadn’t got it on clearance, but I had a feeling it would be worth it.

I hadn’t planned on buying new footwear, specifically, but at some point during the proceedings Steff had slipped off and come back with a pair of what I guess would be called boots that were a perfect fit for me. They were shorter on top than what I thought of as boots, though undeniably boot-shaped, and more substantial than most shoes. They weren’t the sort of boots I’d picture Steff picking out for herself, or for other people to wear for her benefit. They weren’t clunky, but they kind of looked like if clunky and sleek got together and had a baby.

“You’ll get better traction in these than in your sneakers,” was her explanation.

All in all, I think we ended up somewhere very far afield of what Two had been envisioning for me, but she seemed pleased.

To be honest, I was, too.

This chapter of Tales of MU has been brought to you by the generosity of:
DM

“That’s why you’ve been so… focused… today?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, nodding earnestly. “I said I would help you find clothes that you like.”

“Oh… thank you,” I said. “And I’m sorry for being difficult.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. “I’m sorry for not doing a better job.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “I just have a lot on my mind… and not a lot of room in it for this kind of thing.”

“More like you haven’t had enough on your stomach,” Hazel said. “When people on both sides end up sorry, that’s a clear sign that it’s about time to take a break and then start again. How about we stop for lunch, and then start again with a new approach?

“Okay,” Two said.

“Yeah, that’s a good plan,” I said. I paid for the jacket, and once the anti-theft wards were wanded away, we headed out in search of food.

The street market had food vendors scattered throughout, but there was also an area in the middle of it that was nothing but food stands, with round wooden tables and chairs that were too heavy to be conveniently stolen in the center of it and we stopped there for lunch. I got myself two orders of chicken planks fried in golden cornmeal batter, because that was basically comfort food and I thought I deserved a double order of comfort. Two went straight for a frozen yogurt stand where she got a banana split.

Now that Two was no longer so single-mindedly focused on her goal, the appearance of aloofness had completely… uh, disappeared. She still seemed more confident and self-assured than she would have a year ago, but she seemed more herself. She was cool in only the positive senses of the word, but not like ice.

Seeing Two getting happy over a little thing like ice cream was a pretty joyous thing any day of the week, because she was so completely unguarded about it. It was even more of a kick when it served to reinforce the fact that as far as she’d gone and as much as she’d grown, she hadn’t actually left me behind. She could grow up without outgrowing me.

“That’s your lunch?” Nicki asked her, watching her daintily and precisely digging into it… a feat that you’d pretty much have to be a golem to replicate.

“It’s my dessert,” Two said. “But it would melt if I got the rest of my lunch at the same time.”

“Can’t fault that logic,” Hazel said.

“Couldn’t you have gone for the ice cream after you ate the other stuff?” Nicki asked.

“I suppose that I could,” Two said slowly, not elongating the syllables but slightly increasing the pause between them. It seemed that she’d begun to master the trick of thinking as she spoke, though it showed when she did so. “But… then I might not have been hungry enough for a banana split. This way I’ll be able to get exactly the right amount of other food to allow for it.”

“Dessert is kind of a priority for Two,” I explained to Nicki. “It was the first real pleasure in her life, outside of work and obedience… the first thing she ever learned to do for herself.”

“There’s nothing wrong with prioritizing your meals,” Hazel said, rearranging the plates and baskets on her tray as if to illustrate the point. “I wouldn’t strictly go for the sweeter stuff first every single time, but it’s like this: the world is full of good things, and there isn’t time enough nor stomach enough to hold them all. You know? Of course, there is such a thing as overthinking… you can spend the whole time planning a meal and never get to eating it. That’s why it’s important to know your course, but also not be afraid to go where the flow takes you. In eating, as well as in rivers.”

“I didn’t think gnomes liked rivers much,” Nicki said.

“Well, it isn’t what you call ‘respectable’, the river life,” Hazel said. “You get viewed as shiftless, untrustworthy. People don’t think riverfolk can be part of a real community… and they especially don’t want us to be part of their community. My mum was from a hill family, which meant the folks in town had to accept us there. Nothing could have made them respect us, though.”

I watched the silent moment of realization on Nicki’s face when Hazel made the shift from talking about riverfolk to talking about “us”.

“Your mother’s side of the family was the side that disapproved of your decision?” Nicki asked.

“Of me in general,” Hazel said. “They’d always made an effort to bring me into the fold, but they also too pains to make sure I always knew what an effort it was. We had what I’d call a final falling out over the summer hols, but it wasn’t really a falling out… it was more like a giving up. I gave up on them, they gave up on me, we gave up on trying. The only reason I didn’t do it sooner was I felt like turning my back on them would be turning my back on my mother. I felt like they were all I had left of her… I’ve come to realize that there isn’t really much of her in them, least not the things that made her her. The best of her is in me… I’m what I have left of her.”

“Sounds like you’ve been talking to Dee,” Steff said.

“Does it, now?” Hazel said. “She’s one for talking about the value of motherhood, but she doesn’t often speak of her own mother, that I’ve heard. It’s more a feeling than anything, but I’d guess her mother didn’t have much to do with her upbringing.”

Dee had told me that her mother had paid her less attention after the death of her brother and she’d been basically raised by a nursemaid, but that seemed like too private of a thing to reveal.

“Well, she doesn’t get along well with her mother’s wife, as I understand it,” I said.

“Wouldn’t that also be her mother?” Nicki asked.

“She prefers to translate it as ‘stepmother’,” I said. “I think there’s more duty than bond there.”

“You aren’t far wrong about that, I’d wager,” Hazel said.

“Is this… gossiping?” Two asked, both genuinely confused and genuinely concerned.

“I think it might, at that,” Hazel said. “There’s no ill intent, of course, but I don’t think Dee needs our sympathy any more than our scorn. Well-spotted, Two.”

“Thank you,” Two said.

“You’re welcome.”

We fell to eating in silence for a bit after that, but only a bit. Almost inevitably, it was Nicki who broke the silence.

“So… what was it like, living on a boat?” she asked Hazel. “Was it like a houseboat, or did you put in at night and sleep in inns?”

“We didn’t have the money to spare for inns, but when the weather was fine sometimes we’d tie up for the night and sleep under the stars. Though we could do that on deck,” Hazel said. “And did, sometimes. Fine weather doesn’t necessarily mean safe country. But we had all the comforts of home onboard. We berths below deck and there was a galley in the stern, but mostly we lived in the big cabin. We’d make our way up to Logfallen in the spring and summer, and then just flow down south when the weather started to cool.”

“How did you go upriver?”

“Goats,” Hazel said. “Three to begin with, though we lost one and never could replace her.”

“They pulled the boat?”

“They turned the paddle-wheel,” Hazel said. “The nannies were good for milk, too… and cheese, though after a certain point, my mother put a lid on on-board cheesemaking. We could use them to go downriver in a hurry if we needed to, but it was generally safer to let the current carry us at the pace that best suited it.”

“Did you have jobs?”

“Well, my dad and his brother took turns piloting, until he was able to get married and build a boat himself… my uncle, I mean, not my dad,” Hazel said. “I was old enough to take some turns at the wheel on clearer stretches by then, and when I didn’t, I would stand at the bow and call out the snags sometimes.”

“I wouldn’t think steering a boat on a river would be that difficult,” Nicki said. “Isn’t it mostly like you said… going with the flow?”

“Oh, no, love,” Hazel said, shaking her head. “A river isn’t anything like a lake or an ocean, it’s more like a pond: just a low spot of land with a bit of water washed over it. That’s why we tend to call everyone who doesn’t live on a river ‘hillfolk’, even if the patch of ground they live in doesn’t look much like a hill to them. If you look at the sides of a river, everything you see… trees, rocks, ups and downs… it’s all there, just under the surface, and it can tear the bottom out of your boat before you can blink. If you walk into a tree you just stop, but the river doesn’t stop for anyone.”

“Oh,” Nicki said. “That’s… I never realized that. I guess what I meant when I asked about jobs, though, is what did you do for money? I mean, I know you said inns were too expensive, but you must have had some.”

“Well, you’d be surprised as to how much business you can do without money when you’re doing it with folks who don’t have any, either, but we did pick up odd jobs as we went along,” Hazel said. “And we’d take stuff on when we traveled. Usually loads of apples in the fall. Letters and things, too. A lot of gnomes don’t trust the imperial post. We’ll use it if we have to for communicating outside the shires, but they never seem too fussed about actually delivering to gnomish addresses, and they aren’t too regular about the pick-ups, either. So we’d carry mailbags to the nearest post office in a human town, and we’d carry letters and parcels to gnomes up and down the river.”

“Just from other… riverfolk, or from hillfolk, too?”

“For riverfolk, it was mostly other sorts of messages we carried… we called it the ‘mooring post’. We’d leave signs at all the landings about new snags and other items of interest, you see. But the actual post, that was mostly for hillfolk and cityfolk… metro gnomes aren’t particularly well-thought of among the hilliest of hillfolk, though some of them have more money than George.”

“Who’s George?” Nicki asked.

“I don’t know, really,” Hazel said. “Some old bloke who had a lot of money? That’s just what people say: he’s rich as George. Or when someone’s after an unreasonable amount of money from you, you can ask them if you look like George to them. Anyway, there are colonies of gnomes in most big cities, some of them even organized like shires. There are seven shires in New Port Chartres, for instance, and they’re all friendly to riverfolk because most of them washed up there. That’s why I always liked going south.”

“Did you spend a lot of time in Blackwater, or did you just pass by it?” I asked her. I felt awkward that the conversation had mostly been between her and Nicki… some of this was stuff that the rest of us knew and she didn’t, but that didn’t mean that the additional details weren’t interesting.

“Usually passed through,” Hazel said. “It’s only a bit southerly, so the weather there’s almost as chancy as it is up here… as I’m sure you know. But we regarded it as friendly territory. Better for boats than burrows, as they say. The hillfolk all live on the Treholme side of the river, mostly. It’s all marsh clans down in Blackwater proper. Even the ones who were more settled than us were still in the same boat, as it were.”

I nodded, because that made sense. When I had been a child, my mother had occasionally pointed out areas that she swore were gnome dens, though I’d never seen anything to support that. I’d regarded the gnomes as a kind of faerie folk… not quite of the world, not wholly existing within it, and maybe not even quite real the way that other things were.

I knew a little bit better now. Gnomes could be a little bit… sideways… to things, but they weren’t fae folk.

“So, what’s your story?” Hazel said to Nicki. “Is my life really all that interesting, or is yours just boring?”

“My life?” Nicki said. “Um, my life… well, there’s nothing really wrong with it, I guess. It just isn’t the live I thought I’d be living, by this point.” She shrugged. “I don’t really have anything to complain about, really, but…”

“But you’re not happy, just the same,” Hazel said.

“…yeah,” Nicki said, sounding like she’d been caught out at something. “I guess I probably sound like I’m whining?”

“Not at all,” Hazel said. “Well, not much… but it isn’t as though you go around saying ‘poor me, poor me’. I asked and you answered, and you’ve the good sense to wonder about how you sound, doing so… but in any event, not having any reason to mourn your existence isn’t the same as having a reason to be happy. What would make you happy, do you think?”

“I don’t know, really,” Nicki said. “I mean, I could name off a bunch of things that I want, but things never quite turned out the way I expect them to, I guess.”

“So by this point, don’t you kind of expect that?” Steff asked.

“I guess I’ve kind of resigned myself to it?” Nicki said. “But I still keep hoping I can find a way to turn things around…”

“My experience is that a life is too big and loud and messy of a thing, generally, to make it move any one way for a wider of a span than a lazy afternoon or so,” Hazel said. “I mean, you can just about plan out a day, if your plans aren’t complicated, but any longer than that and there are just too many things that can go unexpectedly wrong… or even unexpectedly right. Or just plain unexpectedly.”

“Then why does everybody expect us to have a plan?” Nicki asked. “That’s really all anyone did to get me ready for college: tell me that I needed to have a plan. ‘You’ve got to have a plan. If you don’t have a plan for after you graduate, you’ll be lost.’ Sometimes I think the only difference the plan made was that it kept me marching confidently in the wrong direction for longer than I would have.”

“I don’t think a plan is a bad thing,” Hazel said. “It just has to be the right sort of plan. Instead of trying to live the life you want, think about what you want most out of the life you have, and figure out how to get it.”

“I wish you would have been my guidance counselor in high school,” Nicki said.

“When you were in high school, I would have been rubbish at it,” Hazel said. “It took me sitting down and looking at what I was doing with my own life… and what I want to be doing… to sort any of this out. I hope for my sake that this is half as wise as you think it sounds, because it’s all advice I gave myself.”

“But you have real problems!” Nicki said.

“Don’t you?” Hazel said. “Listen, if someone had come up to me while I was mourning my mother to tell me about his GPA and losing his scholarship, I’d think he was a right prat, but now imagine he’s just sitting there trying to sort out how to pay for school and I come over out of the blue and say, ‘Yeah, well, my mum’s dead.’ Even if I would trade my problems for his like they were nothing, that doesn’t make them nothing. I’ve had my troubles, but I have my health and my friends.”

“But don’t you have to worry about all the things he does, on top of your problems?” Nicki said.

“Does that make things easier for him?” Hazel asked. “Anyway, I had to take on a loan to complete my own schooling so I could pay for it myself, but I had a choice where others don’t, and that makes a difference.”

“How would you have paid for school, otherwise?” Nicki asked. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

“Still don’t mind, though we’re maybe edging into the territory where I might… so mind you don’t ask me to elaborate where I’m simplifying, okay? Anyway, there was a sort of a deal involving looking after my cousin,” Hazel said. “On my mother’s side, before you ask… they don’t exactly trust me to keep after her, and she doesn’t need keeping, if you ask me, but they won’t have it be said that they don’t pull on their end of the rope.”

“But didn’t they disown you?”

“Oh, no, that’s the one thing they’ll never do,” Hazel said. “I’m my mother’s daughter, and if they wanted to ignore my blood, that would be like saying theirs doesn’t count for anything. And if they didn’t claim me, they couldn’t impress each other with how well they bear up under the burden of it all… no, they’ll never renounce me, because then they wouldn’t have any reason to talk about me. I’ve stopped claiming them for myself, but not in what you’d call an active way… no speeches, no stomping around or slamming doors. I’m just… I’m done with them.”

“What about your cousin?” I surprised myself by asking. I knew Honey… not as well as I knew Hazel, and Hazel and I weren’t exactly close. I couldn’t say that I was fond of her, but Honey was the only person in the drama that I knew at all besides Hazel, though, and I found myself wondering how she fit into it.

“She knows where I am,” Hazel said. “She said some things that were pretty unforgivable, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t forgive her for having said them if she were to apologize.”

“I don’t understand,” Nicki said.

“I do,” Two said. “Things are unforgivable. People aren’t.”

“That’s about the shape of it, yeah,” Hazel said. “How’d we end up talking about me again, anyway? I’m afraid I’m coming across all sorts of self-involved here…”

“Oh, no, in my experience, it’s not really that hard to get people to talk about themselves,” Nicki said.

“No?” Hazel said. “You’ll have to show me how, sometime.”

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.”