Scribblings of Calliope

Reviews: The Space Between and iBoy

2012-09-03T04:25:50Z

It’s time for the long-overdue post on books I read this summer. However, I’m going to start with books I failed to finish reading.

Surprisingly, there were only two: The Space Between, by Brenna Yovanoff, and iBoy, by Kevin Brooks. I have my reasons for throwing both of them across the room in disgust. Trigger warnings ahoy.

Problems I had with the books:

iBoy:

I could have gotten over the premise, which is as dated as last year’s model of iPhone, and essentially the same “person becomes a cyborg due to random plot point” idea that has made the circles of science fiction short stories for years with a bit of modern lingo and a couple of side plots. The fact that the boy uses his newfound powers, caused by an iPhone shattering his skull and leaving bits of microchip in his brain, to run around playing superhero was, by this point in my reading career, boringly predictable. It’s a premise that seems tailor-made for the middle-school aged male, which is fitting as that’s the approximate age of the protagonist. Logic (and the fact that a shattered skull and electrical components are not good for your brain, nevermind that they won’t allow you to neutrally uplink to the internet because that’s not how a phone or a brain works,) need not apply to what is meant to be an escapist superhero premise.

The major problem I had with this book was the use of rape as drama. The protagonist’s crush is gangraped (What the hell do you mean, you’re writing for adolescents?) very early on in the book, behind the scenes, before the first few chapters are over. Though lip service is paid to the protagonist not being able to make things better for her, the thing that made me extraordinarily mad at the author was that her rape eventuated solely to give the “hero” a hero complex about her. And though I can understand that the protagonist is young and stupid to be pursuing a relationship with her (admittedly, a very g-rated one) after that, I cannot understand why the author thought it necessary to the plot, especially in what is throwing off outward signs of being a young adult novel.

If you have to deal with a subject like rape, go the route of Speak. (Laurie Halse Anderson) Don’t involve it for the drama, or for an object lesson about poorly researched “gangs” in a slum that somehow avoids all other potentially political issues such as socioeconomic equality between races, the breakdown of family in poverty and the resulting search for identity through gang membership, or drug abuse. The fact that the “heroes” of the book read like lower-middle class innocent suburban kids despite their lip service to the horrors of their neighborhood and school made the supposedly all-consuming power of the gangs and insipid impotency of the police laughable.

Other things I noticed:

The boy’s head glows for no apparent reason, supposedly a side effect of having a phone in the brain.

He’s had massive trauma, then massive surgery to his cranium and doesn’t have to wear a helmet or get a follow-up appointment, so I’m going to sue his surgeon for malpractice.

He has a “tragic past” of his grandmother raising him, which eventuated because she got knocked up young, had a daughter who she raised alone, and then watched said daughter become pregnant, give birth to her grandson, and die in a random accident while crossing the street when the boy was two. But because none of this really impacts the protagonist’s character, only serving to give him a guardian who is “too tired” to supervise him a lot, despite the fact that she works at home writing romance novels.

Which brings us to the grandmother supporting them both writing romance novels. She has a laptop. It’s mentioned that she bangs out a novel in some fraction of a year, but I find it hard to believe that, as young a mother as she was, she found the time in late adolescence or her early adulthood to polish her grammar or her writing skills. Regardless of that, how did she get discovered? When did this become the most logical way of supporting the family?

I also couldn’t be bothered to find a text sample from this book to give you an idea of how it’s written, because the subject matter is handled badly enough that I just don’t care.

The back cover promised me a “Wifi, WTF thriller.” I certainly said “What the Fuck?” a lot. (And note to writers and censors: if you’re dealing with rape, assume your audience is mature enough to handle the phrase “What the Fuck.” If they aren’t, you’re writing the wrong thing.)

The Space Between

This one I picked up on the assumption that not all supernatural romance novels can be that bad. It didn’t even look like a Twilight ripoff that much: sure, the cover was black and red, but someone had clearly spent much more time in photoshop to get the girl in white lying on the abstract, demonic scenery.

The premise of this novel is that the heroine, Daphne, is the daughter of the demoness Lillith and Satan. She lives in “Pandemonium” (the demons’ neighborhood in hell,) and has one brother and a bunch of demon sisters who do not figure into her emotional family tree, given that they’re the ‘soulless’ Lillim. Her half-brother (Lillith + Adam, in case you wanted to know,) Obie, is in charge of saving souls. He brings her souvenirs from the human world to play with, and she longs to go up there and be human.

The point is, these things eventuate so that she can fall in fascination (at least she didn’t call it love) with a human boy who attempted to commit suicide and run away to earth to find him. Needless to say, I didn’t get far enough to reach the running away part.

Why couldn’t I read it? Flat tone, flat characterization, and a story written in the present tense, wrongly as often as not. For future reference, this book has only reinforced my extreme hatred of fiction written solely in the present tense. It destroys all suspense because it removes the possibility of both future actions and past actions, and it kills the suspension of disbelief because you’re expecting me to accept that a person confronted with fast-paced events has the time to observe and narrate all the things that are going on. Additionally, the combination of first person and present tense means that your storytelling options are extremely limited: you can effectively write a past-tense narrator who knows more than she reveals to the audience, but that is very hard to do in present tense. Even thinking back or thinking forward is restricted.

There are some points at which the present tense becomes bearable, but they’re points where the interior monologue would have naturally shifted to the present tense anyway:

“In Hell, we tell our stories on the surface of things. The histories are forged a piece at a time, hammered on posts and pillars, pounded into the tiled streets. The spire building, where I’ve lived my whole life, is a celebration of the deeds of my family.” – The Space Between, Brenna Yovanoff

Of course, the “family” that Daphne has, aside from her brother, is not involved in her life to the least degree except for a bit of token manipulation from her mother to “spend more time with her sisters.” Still no word on why Daphne is supposed to be so different from the sisters, who are all iron-toothed demonesses who she disregards completely. Of course, all but six of them are half sisters – children of minor demons, because Lillith apparently gets around.

Remind me when it was discovered that Lillith the “demoness” + Lucifer = functionally human female spawn?

Other things I noticed:

This story is, according to be the back cover, supposed to be about Daphne learning to be human via falling in love, yet at the very beginning, she talks about what a sucker Adam was for believing that he could “change” Lillith. All indications are that Daphne’s human-infatuation-whose-name-I-didn’t-read-long-enough-to-find-out is a human who she’ll want to “change” in order to “save” him from himself. The fact that the possibility was brought up almost as soon as she met him annoyed me severely.

I always go into a book where angels and demons are advertized warily. I’m always waiting for the allegory to jump out of a dark alley and mug me.

I do have the advance reader copy, so some editing mistakes need to be forgiven.

Obie’s supposedly healthy relationship with a human female is a foot note. Actually, all the potentially interesting characters, including Beezelbub, whose appearance in the early chapters was the entire reason I continued to read them, are footnotes.

The heroine is featureless, with no past, no plans for the future, no real opinions (beyond a teenage contrariness that makes me parse her age as sixteen or so,) and nothing to do in life besides mooch around with her pretty little artifacts and long to be human. That worked for Ariel in the little mermaid – we knew that she was shirking her duties to do so and that she had a hobby in building up her hoard.

Name dropping movies and saying “the part where…” is as annoying as hell to me. I don’t know what movie you’re talking about, it’s not a clever reference at all, and its inclusion tells me nothing about the character. Also, newer movies are the surest way to stamp a bright, red date on your novel.

Where did the six functionally human seeress daughters go off to? They sound like more fun.

Daphne’s reactions to humans show that she identifies as one, and she somehow, despite being raised in hell, having demons for sisters, and having absentee parents, displays pretty empathy for her love interest.

I read the back cover. Her love interest’s name is Truman. Apperently they hunt down her missing brother together, which is at least a good premise for making them a team.

The concept doesn’t seem too terrible, if you leave aside the gratuitous “bible” mythology, and the question of where a girl raised in hell gets a concept of love, compassion, or family from. I couldn’t get past the featureless narrator or the present tense, though the descriptions wouldn’t be too bad written normally.

It’s certainly not “Breathtaking and Transcendent” like the back jacket claims.

TLDR: Here lie trees that died in vain, with bad plotting, bad characterization, and a general lack of stirring audience empathy. The more glowing the cover reviews, the worse the book is, as a general rule. Except when the reviews come from actual, respected authors. I’m going to have a very, very hard time finding a home for these two, and not for the usual reason.

Not dead.

2012-07-17T23:51:54Z

If anyone who reads this who doesn't talk to me otherwise was wondering, I'm not dead, just half-boiled (Heat indext today: 106. It's gotten to me not caring and just wearing whatever's not in the smelly laundry pile,) and I'll get on with the editing and posting of Silver in Eillen soon. Meanwhile, working on the sequel, Letters in Messian, and a writing challenge for the month, wherein participants were dared to write 10 k (or more) of a story that was in a genre that they never write, selected by the other participants. I was given action/adventure, did a wikiwalk to figure out what distinguished it from, say, sci-fi and noir mystery, and ended up witth a story inspired by pulp of all descriptions, which I've named Fiction Savvy. No idea why, really, except that I'm 2.5 k in and there are already pirates. It does seem promising so far, because I've managed to mash up some different "action" settings.

In the meantime, stuff's still going up on Fictionpress, so stop by there if you get a chance. I've recently posted a smallish series of tutorials - how to make good summaries was specifically for fictionpress, but I'll probably crosspost the name generation tutorial here for those who don't care to muck with the Fictionpress format. The character psychology tutorials will be expanded if and when I find a new topic - the first one is on having realistic (aka: not supposed to be perfect) characters with realistic reactions, as well as not playing trauma for drama. I'll be doing realistic ages next, but I've hit a roadblock because I don't know exactly what normal kids are like at any age, given that I've always been the mad scientist bookworm.

Letters in Messian 1: Learning Something

2012-06-23T21:02:41Z

“You cannot open a book without learning something.”

- Confucius

2: The Rest ->

If Varin couldn’t hear her coming, he’d gone deaf. She didn’t run down the hall to the study that had once been her fathers, the study that Varin had filled with cheap knickknacks and unchecked books and careless signatures on documents that he’d never read. She walked instead, but she walked loudly, the ticking of metal beating in time with her steps, which seemed in her ears to echo on the stone floor. There had been plenty of time to get her anger worked up to boiling.

Varin visibly jumped when the door banged open, and so did the maid who had been sitting on his lap. She left the room before the doors could swing back into place.

“Congratulations,” Adria told her brother, “You’re a father. Again.”

He didn’t even look embarrassed.

“I assume you interrupted me for something important, Adria,” he said petulantly, crossing his arms over his chest.

“How about the fact that if this one turns out to be a boy he’ll technically be your heir, given that you’re not married yet and don’t have any legitimate children?” Adria snapped, crossing the room to brace one arm on her brother’s desk, “or the fact that I have to send another of the maids off to some dairy farm in the countryside and find the money to keep the child fed and clothed?”

“You managed last time,” he said with a shrug, “I’m sure you can handle this one.”

“That is not the point. Why don’t you just get married and have an heir? Or you could seriously consider not chasing every skirt you see, that would be an improvement too. And what if this one’s a boy, what then? I have to pay people to keep quiet about who the father is, starting with the maid and all her family, then I have to find a place for her to live with the baby and a way to provide for it without making anyone suspicious. Sooner or later someone’s going to figure out that one of these kids looks exactly like you, and we’ll have them being set up to take the Dukedom away from you.” She could feel the muscles standing out in her arms as her grip tightened on the edge of the desk.

“You know, you would have been more fun as a brother than a sister,” Varin said, seemingly unconcerned with Adria’s barely-concealed rage, “I don’t expect you to understand, but men -”

“Can restrain themselves from hopping into bed with any doe-eyed ingénue who they lay eyes on, or there would be no monastaries.”

“I should send you to a nunnery.”

“Then who would do your paperwork?” Adria was trying very hard to stay mad. As stupid as Varin might be, he was still her brother, and arguing with him was still something that usually restored her mood. It was easy to be irritated with him, hard to stay truly angry for long, so long as he was still being flippant and carefree, like he had been when they’d been children. Until, of course, he said something stupid again.

“I’d have liked you better as a brother,” Varin said quietly, “then, when father died, I wouldn’t have been alone.”

Adria, suddenly angry once more, let out a hollow laugh. “If I’d been born your brother, Varin, I’d be the one sitting in your desk.”

It took him a moment to register the sound, and then his eyebrows came snapping down into a rigid line. “You forget that I am your Duke as well as your brother,” he snapped.

“Varin, half the time you forget that you’re the Duke,” she replied. It was a safe dig, completely true, and one with which she’d needled her brother about a thousand times before. It shouldn’t be anything different today.

“It would be best, sister,” Varin said in a cold voice, “for you to quit questioning my decisions and learn your proper place. Even if you had been born a man, you would not be my equal, and you should be grateful to me for my kindness, considering your weakness. It is only out of my consideration for you that I do not reassign your chambermaid, who is certainly unfit company for an impressionable young noblewoman.”

Adria was aghast. “You leave Letta out of this, I need her!” she shouted at Varin.

“Is that her name? She’s quite comely, but unsuited for her position.”

“If you so much as look at her,” Adria hissed at her brother, leaning closer against his desk, “I’ll tell Mother.”

Varin smiled a thin smile. “I am the Duke,” he reminded her, “What will Mother do, wring her hands at me?”

“Fine,” she spat, “I’ll tell Nurse.”

He cringed visibly at the thought of a scolding from their old nurse, and she turned as quickly as she could to go. He didn’t stop her as she stamped across the room to the doors, never offered help as she slammed one with her right shoulder and disappeared. He was long behind her when she reached the stairs and sank slowly down, gripping the rail all the way, unable to walk at that pace any further.

She stared at nothing – at the grey walls of the keep, at the faded tapestry, at the toe of her slipper poking out from her skirts where her left leg was stretched out in a stiff, straight line across the floor. Would Varin go through with his threat, or was it all just puffed-up air to make himself feel more important? It was impossible to tell anymore.

Time had been, years ago when they were children, that Varin had been her best friend. They’d done almost everything together, which had largely been whatever they’d wanted, charging about the keep and the castle lands. He’d kept all his promises then, when he wasn’t driving her crazy by leaving her behind in the dust as he, a year older and several inches taller, ran on ahead.

Of course, that had been when they were children, before they’d grown up and she’d been left alone. Before their Father had died and Varin had changed, the pressures of the Dukedom too much for him. Her weakness, indeed. Who had kept the castle and the Dukedom running for those two years when Varin was behaving like the debauched prince of a fairy tale? It certainly hadn’t been their mother, fluttering around like a faded moth in her mourning colors.

She rested her head against the wall and thought about getting up. Not yet, though. Not until she could figure out what she was going to do about her brother. He wasn’t likely to listen to any of her reasoning or follow her advice in this matter – especially not now, when she’d simply passed her anger on to him and made him twice as stubborn – in part because he was too proud, and in part because he didn’t plan ahead. And why would he? That was her job, the planning, and the only thing she actually could do to keep the whole Dukedom from going to the dogs. On a melodramatic day, she’d be likely to claim that it was actually the only thing that she could do at all… that road of thought was only going to take her in circles, though. Going over and over the past didn’t change it, or the present, at all.

With a sigh, she reached up for the banister and pulled herself back up from the floor. At the very least, she thought, as she grimly started up the stairs, she could warn Letta. Varin couldn’t send her away if he forgot about her, and the easiest way to achieve that was to keep her well out of his sight.

Adria had to pause at the top of that flight of stairs and lean against the wall, still gripping the banister. She wasn’t certain if she was more frustrated with Varin or with herself – she should be able to take the stairs, at least – so she headed for the library instead of her rooms.

Once inside, she took a deep, calming breath, filled with dust motes and the smell of stretched leather. Then she headed towards the back room, her footsteps leaving a slight thud behind her, one which the ancient librarian, the only other official denizen of the dusty room, knew by now not to investigate. It was only when the door was shut behind her, though, that she managed to relax. Her desk drawer was still shut and locked.

She’d taken this room as her very own years ago, partly because she had vowed never to have her world shrink to the four walls of her bedroom ever again, and partly as a good place to hide both herself and the book that she kept in her desk drawer. In that book, she kept her memories, and had kept them for the last eight years. It wasn’t anything much – some idle sketches at first, a handful of sentences scattered around the pages – but it was hers. It was the one thing of her that would still exist after her death, and the place where she kept everything that she simply couldn’t say. She drew the book out of its drawer, but left it sitting on the desk, staring at the cover.

The first few entries, which she seldom looked at, were an outpouring of thoughts, of the things that she simply had to spit out somewhere, in case her breath stopped again and took all of her thoughts, her very being, with it. Those entries were untouchable, preserved like leaves between the pages, because they had been fueled by her terror, because they had been written at a time when she thought she would never live to be nineteen. They were remote from who she was now, and should stay that way. Some of the later entries she never looked at either, because they had bled bitterness into the pages, and if she let that bitterness return to define her, she’d become nothing but a dried up husk. But she’d also filled in her old memories, the things that had defined her before the sickness.

After turning a few pages, she came upon the right entry, but she didn’t read it. It was her account, more than four years after the fact, of the day she had first decided that Varin was stupid. The pain of the realization had been great at the time – he was, after all, her older brother, and she was supposed to look up to him – but now it was worn away to a smooth bump in her mind. Varin, she knew, did not actually know what would happen ahead of time when he did something. He didn’t think about the consequences, and he didn’t plan. He did things for stupid reasons or no reason at all, and he couldn’t distinguish between good advice and bad. He’d been all right when their father had been alive, but largely because he didn’t have too many responsibilities that couldn’t be handled by referring to tradition. When their father had died, however, he’d been lost. People said he’d gone mad with grief, but Adria knew better. He’d gone mad from knowing that he wasn’t able to do his job, the only purpose in his life that he could envision, the thing that he’d been bred, born and raised for. So he decided to throw it all away and himself along with it.

Even though she knew that about her brother, she found herself constantly needing to remind herself not to give him more credit for rational thought than he deserved. She needed to be the one with the plan, because it had never occurred to Varin that if he drowned in the river, the entire Dukedom would be plunged into chaos, because he had no will and no direct heir. He didn’t have a place to press his thoughts for safekeeping, to preserve them against his eventual death. He’d never, even after their father’s funeral, realized that he, too, was mortal.

For Adria, who was flipping backwards through the pages, death was something she’d been deeply aware of since three months after her eleventh birthday.

Sticky: Stories List and Current Work

2012-06-22T13:30:08Z

Long Form (Novels, Novellas, whatever)
Silver in Eillen - Being edited and posted -

The opening of a new silver mine in Renua would be an excellent opportunity for the small, unimportant Duchy, except for one fact. Their duke, Varinius, is too inexperienced to sucessfully negotiate a trade deal with the neighboring city of Eillen, and too stubborn to understand that fact. Of course, that's not to say that he can't send a representative...

Setting: A historical analogue of the Italian Renaissance, circa the 1480's, in a world very similar to our own.
Length: 30 chapters, ~41,696 words
    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Letters in Messian - Current Work: I'll start posting it in a bit, for now it's mostly available on fictionpress, which is where the unedited version of Silver in Eillen can be found as well. It is a sequel, strictly speaking, to Silver, but they don't have to be read in any particular order.

Although Renua may be enjoying newfound wealth and political advantage, thanks to their current business arrangements, the small Dukedom must consider it's duties as a vassal state in the Nereonic Empire. And if the duke can kill to birds with one stone by sending away troublesome members of his nobility as emissaries of goodwill to Messian, the capitol of the Empire, then so much the better.

Setting: Same as Silver in Eillen
   1 2 3 4

Prodigal - Complete -

It has been years since Leah returned home and saw her family, and despite the past she is welcomed back with open arms. But it isn't just Leah who has changed, or the addition of her traveling companion, Ellie, into the family gathering that is putting people on edge...
  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Q&A

Short Form: Pretty much everything else.
Cricket Symphony
Drink of Me
Before the Light

Before the Light

2012-06-14T01:36:07Z

Warnings: disturbing imagery, swearing, stalking behavior, general mind screw. That should be about it, let me know if there’s something I haven’t remembered to put up here. This is also in the running for the creepiest thing I’ve ever wrote.

- - - - - - -

The thing about ghosts is that they don’t realize they’re dead.

Some of them, now, they wonder, and they’re the easiest ones to pick out. The easiest ones to send on. They’ve got an inkling, the doubt is gnawing at them from the inside, they’ve noticed that something’s not quite right with their world. But most of them still believe they’re still alive, and that’s how they try to convince you that they are. Very lifelike they can be, screaming and pleading, but all of them eventually realize that they’ve already died.

Most people can’t stomach it. You have to make them realize that they’re dead, but since they think they’re still alive, they do a very convincing job of acting like you’re murdering them. They even bleed, and getting their ghostly fluids out of your clothes is hard. You’ve got to do it before any of the other people, who are selfish enough to think that they can live locked up in their little boxes and not extend the hand of mercy to end the ghosts’ suffering, notice and disapprove. It looks just like the real thing, too.

Me, I can’t let a ghost just go by. They’re in pain, you know, and the sooner they move on, the better for them. They don’t want to live the shadow-life where they are, and they can’t get back to the sunlight and the way that they were before. Best not to let them dwell on it – you can see the relief in their eyes when you’ve done it, when you’ve sent them on.

I have to look in their eyes to do it: that’s when I know that all of the begging and running, all the screaming for no one to hear, was only their fear holding them back. I take the happiness from the fading eyes of the ghosts and it’s enough, it’s a purpose in and of itself. Certainly enough to get me through my boring day job as a court clerk, and the nights of microwave dinners and bad old TV or bad new TV. All this nonsense about vampires and demons and werewolves? It’s crock. Complete and utter bullshit. There aren’t any monsters in the world, just people and the sad remnants of what once were people, but aren’t any more and haven’t realized it just yet. The crime shows are only a little better, most of the science is wrong and they always catch their guy, far too fast. He’s always boring, predictable, and I can see the plot miles away. A real killer, now he’d act like a normal person, or at least, a smart one would. Ever read about a serial killer in the paper? There’s a reason they haven’t caught him for the past ten years. Because he knows that someone is going to find the body, and that there’d better not be any way to connect him to it, and that the best way to do that is not to go all crazy and start killing everyone who fits his profile without a good way to make it like he was never there.

The point is, my life between ghosts is boring. Bland. Nothing to do but watch the TV or study Psychology through observation, reading over the courtroom records and trying to figure out what makes people so messed up in the head. What makes them want to kill and die. Why the crackheads and the deadbeats and the abusers never seem to have anything done about them until they’ve gone and fucked up the world somehow. It gets depressing, I’ll tell you, but crime TV and amateur Psychology are my only hobbies. Aside from the ghost thing, which is more of something I have to do to get any sleep at night. Maybe if I’d finished law school and been a lawyer, instead of just doing their paperwork, I’d be able to help the kinds of people I see in the records before they become ghosts. Maybe I’d have a wife and kids and a dog, and know I was doing my part for the world every day at work, instead of sitting here combing the internet while CSI plays in the background.

Jeez. You’d think that serial killers would know by now not to leave fingerprints or DNA. Especially the repeat offenders – you know they’ve got your juices in the system, so why do you leave them lying around? The CSI people always get killed in really gruesome ways, too. Like a simple death isn’t good enough: an overdose, a stabbing – no, it’s always multiple stab wounds, a gratuitous gunshot, fractured hyoid, blood all over some of it the killer’s, large bricks of cash or crack cocaine, gang wars, death by arson, chemicals that nobody outside of a Hazmat team even knows how to use realistically, and forty minutes of pretending to lead the case straight to the only guy who will turn out to have an airtight alibi. All of this supposedly makes for good drama.

I’ll tell you what a real crime looks like.

It’s broad daylight when a man and a woman get into an argument in their home with the neat border of geraniums. Doesn’t matter who hits first, but they get to throwing all the fury of their useless existences at each other and soon enough, there’s another ghost.

Thirteen year old and their cool older friends find mommy’s cooking sherry while studying math one Wednesday afternoon. Then they find Daddy’s whiskey. One ambulance later, another ghost.

In gangland, someone with more testosterone than brains pulls out a knife or a stolen gun. Another ghost.

A mother of two watches her beloved, perfect daughter, drive off with her new boyfriend and half of mom’s life savings, from where she’s lying sprawled on the couch.

Boy from behind the picket fence can’t get away from his friends, online, at home, wherever. At least, they say they’re his friends, because strangers don’t hate so vividly and with that kind of venom.

One day a man finds out that his wife’s up and left with some guy she met at work. She took the pictures off the wall and the papers in the fire safe, but she’s left their son’s artwork on the fridge in an otherwise empty house.

Everybody’s got more hate and more fear in this life than they know what to do with. They either let it blow up out of them, let it simmer and sour and spoil everything, or they bottle it up inside until they drown.

Me, I burn mine chasing after the ghosts that their lives make.

A couple thousand people in my town alone, hundreds of ghosts, one of me. I can’t imagine how many poor lost souls there are in this world, but I can’t even begin to think about expanding outwards. Like I said, most people are selfish. They just want to plough through their small lives, making more ghosts until they become one, they’re not willing to help set those souls to rest. And it takes a lot of work to make a ghost realize that they’re dead. A lot of time, and you’ve got to pick the right time. Ghosts get worse when they get away, they get scared and angry. After all, they still think they’re alive: as far as they’re concerned, you’re the sick bastard who just almost killed them. And they react accordingly.

I might start by telling you one of my ghosts.

It was a night in February and I was working late, nothing to look forward to but an article on paranoia I hadn’t finished reading and a pile of tapes of NCIS sitting by my couch.

Yeah, I still use a VCR. So sue me, it works.

I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of a ghost in nearly a month, and that was especially bad because I hadn’t been able to get to the last one. It made me itch to know that he was still out there, miserable, and that there wasn’t anything I could do about it, when I was the only one maybe in the world who could have helped him end all the senseless pain. I wasn’t expecting to see a new ghost just yet, because sometimes they’re months in between, and then they’re months finding the right way and the right time to send them on.

See, there’s a lot of ghosts, but they’re still only a few in a couple of hundreds. And knowing how to spot them is only half the battle: you’ve got to get to know them a little in order to figure out how to best let them know that they’re dead. Different people get persuaded by different things, just like when they were real people. That’s where the psychology comes in. You’ve got to figure out what makes them tick, what’s making them hold on, why they still think that they’re alive. You’ve got to watch them and know what they know, and who they’ve hurt, and who they’re still hurting. And that’s only the ones that you can see and hear and feel, the ones that believe they’re alive so strongly that it really seems like they are. It’s easier for the ones that have forgotten what it’s like to have a live body, you just find out who they were and you draw their attention to their grave. I don’t like to dig them up – that’s rude and it brings the cops like flies - but a little bit of candlelight goes a long way towards hey you, look here, you’ve been dead half a decade. I like it, the fire has a traditional feel to it, like you might be sending off some Viking warrior or some fallen king. I suppose that’s the same reason that they use it in Séances, but I fucking hate séances.

They’re so stupid. Séances, I mean. All of the holding hands and such – the ones you can’t see can’t communicate with you, and the ones that can – well, they’re right there. In your kitchen. At your work. Down the road. Just fucking tell them they’re dead. Is it so hard? Sit down and tell them. Yeah, sure they’d be gone, but they’d appreciate it, probably more from someone that they know than from Jack-nobody who they just met. Just stick with it, they’ll believe you before their eyes go out, and they’ll be grateful. Don’t let them talk you around into believing you again.

The February night that I was talking about, it was special because I saw two ghosts. The first one was on her way to a court hearing, and the second was on a bus.

I kid you not.

Seven o’clock, you’d think, would be a little late for a court hearing, especially one with kids involved, but I suppose they had to have them when the parents would be off work. It was a divorce case, so not the kind of thing that immediately draws my attention, except for the fact that the ghost was walking down the hall, holding her brother’s hand so tight, you could see the red marks forming on it. Their parents weren’t looking at them or at each other, even when the little boy tripped over the carpet and nearly crashed on his face. He looked like he was just about the right age to start school, she was maybe eight or nine.

That kid’s going to be pretty fucked up when he realizes that his sister’s dead.

Yeah, that was my first thought. I can’t afford to get involved with all the ghosts. I mean, I feel sorry for them, especially the young ones, the ones who had so much life left to live that it doesn’t surprise me that they still think they’re living it, the ones who haven’t had time in their life to screw up and hurt someone, make another ghost. I like to think that each of them might have become that rare kind of person who doesn’t make more ghosts, or help, but who stops people before they become one, saves a life. Or at least somebody, school councilor, teacher, police officer, fireman, confidant, friend, whose saved lives balance out the hurt they accidentally deal.

But kids are hard. I’ve sworn off kids. It’s almost impossible to make them realize that they’re dead, because they didn’t understand the concept when they were alive. And for obvious reasons, their parents and everybody around them wishes so hard that they were still alive that they don’t have the first idea about it, not consciously anyway. It’s called denial.

That’s the second thing about ghosts: they try to make it so that you don’t realize that they’re dead. See, that old lady in the bookstore? A ghost. Woman in the check-out aisle at the grocery? Same. Man trying to sell you a wrench when what you really need is a screwdriver? He’s a ghost too. You can tell by the way he stops what he’s doing and stares, as if the whole world had come crashing down on him, as if he realized for a moment what was wrong – and then he picks right back up, carrying that damn wrench again. Not all of them have that kind of tell, though. You’ve gotta keep your eyes open.

Anyhow, much as it would make my month better, I don’t go to the files and look up where the girl lived, don’t make a note to cross-reference her picture with the public school yearbooks. Kids are harder to track too, they don’t use the internet or pay bills and sign for things, and their records are off the books even when they’re dead. And if you start watching them in the park to try and figure out how they died the cops will haul you off as a pedo.

If you’re going to try and help send off ghosts, stick to teenagers and adults. Yeah, you might put a kid out of an eternity of misery, but when you’re behind bars you’ll have all the years of other souls that you could have saved on your conscience. Think about whether it’s worth it.

Oh yeah, most cops will fall for a ghost’s insisting that they’re alive too. At least, the really convincing ones, the ones that have a lot of life in their not-life. Partly, it’s the human brain, filling in the dots where there’s really no substance between them, partly it’s that cops can’t go on no evidence. And most people want to deny that ghosts exist. Any book or TV show that you see, it’s wrong or mocking the idea, because they’re afraid to show the truth or even admit it to themselves. They’re not gonna show you the real clues about how to figure out if you’re staring at the dead, they’re going to slap a lot of red cornstarch on a costume and paint a man’s face grey and call him a zombie. Because anything that looks that fake isn’t a threat. It’s somebody’s imagination, Poe’s nightmares, nothing that ordinary people need to worry their heads over. And then all the sparkling vampires crap and werewolves and wizard kids and super powered vacuums. Ghostbusters we ain’t.

So, much as it hurts, I let the girl go, and I hope that she doesn’t magnetically pull her brother after her, now when he’s looking up with his adoring brown eyes, waiting to see her smile again. Because she’s the only dependable person in his world right now, and she’s not even really there. Her eyes, the way they don’t focus on anything, really, except when she visibly remembers to do it? That’s because she’s seeing what she thinks would be there if she were alive, and the smile that she gives her baby brother while she’s still wearing them, just before they turn around the corner and out of sight, is the kind that you have because you’ve forgotten how your face works, you’re just moving muscles trying to get what you might think is the right expression.

Damn, I’m going to need a beer when I get home, to get that out of my head.

So I finish up for the night, pack up – kids file wasn’t in my pile, one of the other clerks must be dealing with it – and I head out to the bus stop to catch the seven fifteen.

I like the bus. It’s warm in the winter, like tonight, and cool in the summer. It gives me some extra thinking time, the time I wouldn’t get if I were driving and swearing at the moron who just ploughed through a red light in front of me, and it’s a proven location for spotting ghosts. Not that more of them take the bus than drive – pretty much they do whatever they did in life – but you don’t get to pick them out when they’re hidden behind car windows. I’m probably missing a whole class of ghosts, the ones who don’t take the bus or come to the courtroom or live in my neighborhood, but I’ve gotta start somewhere, and it’s not like you can tell a person is a ghost without meeting them. Official records will often say that they’re still alive because the EMT’s or the family members or the cops or whoever believed the ghost.

So, that night I was thinking hard about the little girl, wondering what must have happened to her, wondering if she was sticking around because of her brother or because of one of her parents or because she’d just never noticed that she was dead, wondering what the little boy would do when he grew up a bit and noticed that his sister wasn’t one of the living. The way the parents hadn’t looked at them, I doubted anyone else would see it.

I almost missed the man with the guitar.

Now, I knew he wasn’t a street musician, because he was wearing slacks and business shoes. He wasn’t some garage-band rocker, because he didn’t have electrical equipment on him. I suppose he might have an amp at home and an amp where he played, but most musicians like to know their own equipment well. Also, again, he dressed and acted like a low-rung businessman. None of this attracted my attention. It was his attitude, his way of standing, sort of like a sadness oozing out of him that let me know that he was lost. Most people don’t see that kind of stuff. They don’t want to. Me, I go looking, and I’ve gotten good at picking it up. Like some kind of shark.

Because of the guitar, he had to sit in the front, next to me. I nodded once and pulled out the paper from my briefcase, because I’d been staring up at the bus ceiling and wanted an excuse to look around closer to earth.

See, ghosts don’t like when you stare at them any more than living people do. And the living people, who don’t want to think about the fact that who you’re staring at is a ghost, start to get creeped out too. I looked at the guitar case over the edge of the business section.

It was black and made of cloth and had a bunch of zippers that had to be pockets for things other than the actual guitar. There were scuffs on the bottom. I couldn’t really tell if it was an electric guitar or an acoustic without opening the case.

I’m not Sherlock Holmes.

I looked up after a moment at my neighbor. “Guitar in the case?” I asked, in a noncommittal, let’s-make-small-talk-while-we’re-here sort of way.

“Yeah,” he replied, “Wesson.”

I don’t know shit about guitars, but he’d said it kinda proud, so it wasn’t some piece of crap with strings. I nod like I know what I’m talking about. “Yeah. Good instrument.”

He cracks what would be a smile if it reached his eyes, and this is when I know for sure that I’m talking to a ghost. There’s always something in the eyes, showing you that they’re lost, showing you that they’re trapped in there, that they don’t know how to escape.

It always sends chills down my spine.

“It’s not much, but it’s mine,” he says. “And all my students think its cool, even if it doesn’t have black flames painted on it or anything.”

I’m thinking, music teacher somewhere, which honestly doesn’t tell me much, except that he’s not obviously poor or obviously rich and a public school teacher or a private lessons teacher wouldn’t be either. I’m thinking, I need to be able to track this guy down again, and Caucasian man, brown hair, blue eyes, 5’7”ish, maybe thirties, maybe forties, carries guitar, big grey coat, might teach music somewhere, isn’t a good place to start.

“High school students?” I ask, because it seems like an okay guess. And because at this point I just want to keep him talking.

“Middle school,” he says, fidgeting with one of his gloves, pulling it up higher on his wrist, “Just old enough to think I’m an old fogie.”

If I’d been paying attention to where he got on, I might have someplace to start.

“Ah well,” I say, because it’s my turn to say something, “They’re young. They’ll wise up soon.”

He gets up as the bus hits the stop, nodding.

I sit in my seat until the next stop comes. Then I get up and get off the bus and as soon as it’s pulled away I’m headed back down the street, back down the three blocks towards the brick-fronted buildings that are a line of quaint, mom and pop stores during the daytime, nothing but a row of bars that the city ordinances can’t keep up with at night.

I don’t know which one he’s gone into, except that he’s not there on the sidewalk. I don’t expect him to be.

Halfway down the block, I stop. I turn around and see it, there in the window. A drawing of a saxophone. Palmero’s music.

With a grin I head across the street to the bar and get my beer. The seat by the window is next to the radiator and I stare out into the grey street, slush still holding up where it leans against the telephone poles and the streetlight, my breath fogging up the glass. Everybody else in the bar thinks I’m waiting for someone or lost in my own thoughts, and they mind their own alcohol.

I’m thinking, it’s a good thing I didn’t stay later, try futilely to figure out how to help the girl, when I’ve got a lost soul about to open the door to Palermo’s music and come out on the street any time now.

Half a beer later, I’m right. He comes out without the guitar case, looks around, hand in his pocket. It’s too dark for me to see his face, but I don’t get up and follow him just yet. There’s a moment where he’s the only thing in sight on the other side of the glass, blending chameleon-like into the evening and the grey February slush, just like a real person, then he crosses the street and opens the door to the bar. He gets a beer at the counter, and I’m watching him in the cold black mirror of the dead TV hanging over the tables. I can’t see much of him, but he’s standing like the lost stand, even worse than on the bus, and I swear I can see the shadow of the guitar on him, like a ghost on a ghost.

His face when he turns to look out at the tables is no surprise then. Looks like the cliff of life has cracked and crumbled under him. Looks like he’s in the middle of the sea and decided to drown.

Damn, this ghost already knows. He’s just not admitted it yet.

I make myself bored and inconspicuous – making yourself small actually attracts more attention – because I’m the furthest table from the main lights of the room, away from all the people getting cheerfully buzzed by the pool tables, and it’s a busy night. I’m thinking, if he doesn’t see me, he’ll head for the shadow I’m currently hiding in. Ghosts are sad. They know that they don’t belong.

I’m lucky, so he sits down. Then he does a double take, seeing that there’s actually somebody there.

“Sorry. Didn’t know this table was taken,” he said.

I shrug. “I don’t mind.” Go back to playing with my beer like I’m drowning my sorrows too.

He cracks his open and takes a long sip, stares into the night like he’s waiting for the world to dissolve, his flesh to melt, the long soliloquy on the stage of life to no audience, only darkness and silence watching (besides me), to cut the lights, drop the curtains, and be over. Alcohol pulls out the metaphors in me.

Then he takes another double take. Triple take, maybe.

“You’re the guy on the bus.”

I frown a moment, like I hadn’t recognized him immediately. Like I hadn’t been looking for him. “Oh yeah. Are you they guy with the guitar?”

And I watch his face crumple like the bar napkins. The guitar.

“Not anymore,” he says, doors closing, life retreating out beyond his grasp. I decide, the hell with waiting. Poor sucker doesn’t deserve another night like this. I reach into my pocket, touch my wallet, double check. He’s already convinced that everything’s over, he’ll go quiet, not like the mistakes, the early ones who bled and begged and screamed and didn’t understand until they were almost gone. Not like the ones that never came off my hands, not like the first ghost that never even noticed and looked at me with screaming eyes while his face turned purple and he drowned in the high school pool. Gotta make sure they already know, so that they won’t have such a terrible time in the last few seconds of their not-lives. Even aside from mercy, mistakes like that make it so that everybody who ever knew the ghost gets involved. Make it look like an accident, like an overdose or a suicide or a car crash or a fall, people get to move on with their lives. They accept that well, the world sucks and then we die, and you don’t make more ghosts by sending one on, you don’t make more people check out of life and pop the pills of apathy. It’s hard to forgive myself for the ghosts I made by helping the first one. Benny’s mom was the hardest. She’d made cookies for my birthday once, when my mom had a cold, and if drowning Benny was hard, cutting his mom’s brakes was harder. She even knew that she was dead, that her life had ended when her boy’s eyes had turned to pearls under the waves and of his bones were coral made – metaphorically of course, really he just became a bloated thing in the chlorine of the high school pool, a human pickle – but she couldn’t do anything about it.

She hugged me so hard and cried at his funeral, casket closed. Said she was glad I hadn’t been there, that I might have been drowned too. Said she wished I’d gotten there sooner, I was a lifeguard, maybe I could have saved him. Maybe if I’d had my phone the EMT’s could have rescued him. I didn’t say anything back, because it was my fault that Benny was dead in the first place. If I’d gone to that party with him he’d still be alive.

Drowning him was just putting the ghost out of his misery.

I’m down to half an inch in the bottom of the bottle, sitting there with the ghost without a guitar, and now is the time to do it, before he finishes his bottle and leaves. I put the bottle down on the table.

“Gotta pee,” I say, “Watch my bottle, okay? I don’t want somebody to drink it while I’m gone by mistake.”

I head for the men’s room door, and the whole place is empty. I whip out my wallet quick, open up the zipper, pull out a condom. It looks like a condom, but actually I’ve just glued the wrapper shut around a little white pill. I run some water, in case somebody can hear me or walks in while I’m standing in front of the sink, put the pill in the palm of my left hand, let my fingers close around it. I’m right handed, so it’ll be my right hand he’s watching.

I go back to the table and put my left hand in my lap. Take another drink. Look down and decide that his beer is too far from his hand, in the fashion of somebody whose booze is cheering him up and decides his neighbor should take advantage as well.

I pick up his beer bottle with my left hand, fingers around the lip, palm a bit above it, and the pill, already dissolving in the sweat from my hand, is inside.

“Hey,” I say, “You’re letting your beer get warm.”

He looks at me but doesn’t take another drink.

I look at him in a drunken confusion. Really, I’ve been having the same beer for the last two hours, but I’m acting like I’ve been drinking all night.

“’S just that you look like life kicked you in the ass today,” I say, “And I hate to see a good beer go to waste.”

He looks down into his drink, and I think for a second that he’ll see the pill. It might not be gone yet. But there’s no worry of that, he’s looking into forever, into the past, just the way that ghosts do.

“You know who gave me that guitar?” he said, suddenly. “My dad. He gave it to me for my sixteenth birthday, I’ve had it twenty years, not a scratch. Mom didn’t want me to be a musician. Not with my grades, I was going to be her little doctor. Only thing I’ve got left of the old man.” He took a drink. “Taught myself to play. Old man came to the one and only concert, back when I was gonna be the next Phil Collen. Only thing we ever really agreed on, only thing we had like father and son were supposed to. And know what I’ve done with that guitar?” He looked at me, but not at me, ghostlike and demanding an answer from the world. “I’ve sold it. Might as well have thrown it away.” He knocks back the rest of his beer at one gulp. And in his eye, in the world ending, I see the relief of having told somebody, of not letting the last thing you ever do be meaningless, the last few seconds before the light.

“Damn. I’m sorry,” I say, and I swig the last of my beer. “Wish there was something I could do.”

“Eh. You listened,” he shrugs, “It’s not the end of the world. Wish I didn’t have to, but the old man will understand.”

I nod and stand up, beer empty. He’s accepted his death. I’ve got to be gone, I have no idea how long it will take the pill to take effect, but I’ve already seen the death and the relief in his eyes. It’s strangely peaceful, a ghost that will have his last beer with you. Tidy and neat, a life wrapped up in a little box, not splattered on the carpet.

“Take care,” I say, because I don’t like them to feel like I’m not paying attention. He nods and turns back to the window, and I head out the door into the frostbitten night, happy now and at peace. It’s better when they’re transparent, just a moment, before the light consumes them and they’re really, finally gone.

In the morning I’ll search the papers to know when and where the cops find the body.

Even after I’ve killed them, they’re good at making people think they’re real.

Calli's Reviews: Under the Green Hill by Laura L. Sullivan

2012-06-01T17:57:09Z

While inspired rants can be fun, it was high time to spend some time reviewing a book that I could actually reccomend. It might not be the right cup of tea for readers around here, but if you need to give a child a book (and really, if there is a child in your life, you should give them one,) I highly reccomend Under the Green Hill by Laura L. Sullivan.

Recommended Age: 9 or 10+, the book’s clearly written for a 10-12 audience due to the age of the protagonists. I enjoyed it as an adult, though. Thirteen year olds probably wouldn't find it childish, but fourteen year olds probably would.
Genere: Children’s/JYA fiction, fantasy,
My Reccomendation: Five Stars.

Overall, upon opening this book I was pleasantly surprised.

I had expected to find a very traditional children’s book setup, based on the subject matter, which was four siblings (Protagonists Meg, Rowan, and Silly, ages approximately 12, 11 and 9, plus their toddler brother James) sent to England to visit distant relatives for several months. I didn’t expect the kind of wit and wisdom from the author and narration that made books with this setup (The Chronicles of Narnia, and books by E. Nesbit,) classics. I expected the children to have adventures and learn life lessons, but not that the lessons would be handled so naturally or that the adventures would actually include the adult characters, who were far from useless or oblivious.

The book opens, as I said, with the protagonists sent off to their relatives, in the company of two boys from their neighborhood who are close in age to Meg and Rowan. One is their enemy, Finn, the “arrogant rich boy,” (despite being just about as well off as the other families, in which the parents are professors of various subjects at the same college: it makes sense because his father is just as arrogant,) and a boy named Dickie, who initially fails to make an impression. Dickie’s role in the story starts out as the primary way to determine that the protagonists are good, because they are kind to him despite him being the stereotypical child looser, sickly, chubby, clumsy and untalented at anything, while Finn is not.

It is at the relatives’ house, where they arrive on May first, or May Day, that they initially start an adventure by breaking the rules and sneaking down to the village to watch the bonfire, which inevitably leads to their introduction to the world of fairies.

Though the book is easy enough to read, it’s not simplistic or patronizing to the reader, and it includes plenty of description and characterization, done in the old-fashioned, Victorian narration style of addressing the reader directly, which is appropriate for the audience that the book is written in. But it manages to do it without being too long, preachy, or boring, which are the three things that usually put children off of old books written in that style. Sullivan has managed to merge both her own literary upbringing in the classics with the more fast-paced sensibilities of modern fantasy.

Characterization is another big strength of the book, because even though there are some characters that don’t appear to have grown at all during the book (Silly comes to mind: one must make an exception for James, who is too young to understand a thing that is going on,) there is a vivid picture of what everyone is essentially like and how they act, rather than what they look like. The adults don’t go undeveloped either, but my favorite change has to be Dickie, who goes from a total zero to a confident planner and the children’s expert in the fairy world by taking up residence in the library and getting Latin tutoring from a very small dragon.

The world in which the children are immersed – one with fairies cropping up at every turn – is amusing and accessible for those with only limited knowledge of traditional English stories of fairies, without being oversimplified or made gimmicky. (I cite the Spiderwick Chronicles, which dealt with many of the same fairies but which might as well have come with trading cards for them.) And the climax of the story is not only fully justified by the logic of the world and well foreshadowed, it contains an interesting element of chance and is not an entirely foregone conclusion. The only real problem that I had while reading was the title of the chapter in which Finn, who has been left out of the family’s adventure the whole time, finally achieves one of his goals was titled “Some People Get What They Deserve,” and although nothing truly bad happens to Finn in that chapter (though getting a glimpse of something that he will always want and never be able to have was probably punishment enough for him,) its direct result is some very nasty consequences for him down the road. Clearly the author wasn’t implying that he deserved what happened to him in the end, but it was a rather unfortunate implication in that chapter title.

Part of the reason why I recommend this to a slightly older audience is the complexity of the morality in this book. Fairies don’t have the same moral standards as human beings in this universe, because they can not only live forever but regenerate from practically anything, as well as transform into various shapes. Therefore, the very real consequences faced by the children and the novel’s three adult characters barely register to the fairies who have embroiled them in their intrigues. Finn’s ultimate punishment is painful and permanent, and the reader really has to think to realize that to the fairy prince who delivers it, it was a sort of slap on the wrist, as any fairy who the same thing happened to would be able to heal from it, if not quickly, then eventually. On the other hand, though, Fairies are apparently aware that humans can die while they can’t, because the seven-year battle needs two human champions to battle to the death in order to be complete. The fairies believe that it keeps the world from falling apart, but within the story when the terms are not technically fulfilled, nothing happens. It becomes apparent by the end of the book that the reason for Meg and Rowan’s great aunt being an ambassador between the human and fairy worlds is that without her adherence to ancient rituals, the fairies wouldn’t respect her enough for her to be able to protect the humans from their antics. The real reason for the sacrificial battle is to keep humans valuable enough to the fairies that they leave them mostly alone, and so that the humans whose job it is to watch over the intersection between the two worlds maintain enough power over the fairies to ensure some degree of safety for the humans.

Like I said, it’s a book simply told, but powerful in its ideas, as complicated as the transition between childhood and early adolescence is complicated, and a lovely coming of age for Meg, the primary protagonist, who has finally stepped into the transition where she accepts adult responsibilities and realizes that her younger siblings aren’t equipped to handle the concepts of the adult world quite yet. She realizes it in part in the very first chapter, but has fully accepted the idea by the end.

Haha, fictionpress

2012-05-31T16:37:12Z

Apperently tutorials are popular, or me being snarky is amusing. I may have to crosspost that tutorial here, even though I wasn't planning on it and it's tailor-made for fictionpress. Which also means it's probably pretty provocative over there, because someone is going to take issue with the fact that summaries should be properly spelled and capitalized and actually relevant to the story.

Now I'm going to wait until tonight and see if I can grill over the flames.

Silver in Eillen 10: Sweet Adversity

2012-05-24T00:25:23Z

“Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.”
- Shakespeare’s As You Like It

<- 9) Thou Winter Wind ~0~ 11) A Great City

"You are absolutely certain."

Given that Vespasian had said this three times already, the other two in the room merely nodded their affirmatives.

“Raising a storm against a fellow citizen is a serious offense,” Rynar put in, “a capital offense for the Windkeeper involved, if anyone can prove it. Throwing an accusation like that around isn’t going to do us any favors.”

“But the mere fact that the rumor is going around suggests that there is active animosity between house Argentus and house Isidrus,” Vespasian replied, “We need not make the accusation. In fact, it would be counterproductive for us to do so – as foreigners, we would be more easily suspected than the new third house.”

“Not to mention that if this Windkeeper bears a grudge, he might be inventing this for his own purposes,” Rynar put in, “Maybe he wants to topple house Isidrus himself, maybe he just didn’t like Venturos and wants to see him get in trouble…”

“If he were lying, I would have known,” Venturos stated flatly. “The man believes that the storm was under the control of another Windkeeper. He strongly suspects that it was actually raised against the fleet under his protection, but wouldn’t say so outright.”

“But he’ll swear in court that the storm was not natural?” Vespasian cut in.

“Yes. Though he claims he can’t truthfully be certain of any more than that.”

“We need more evidence than the word of a washed-up magician before we can go to court,” Rynar interrupted, “All this talk of magic only tells me two things. The first is that whatever’s been going on, we can’t track it like we could an army. The second is that anything we do find could mean nearly anything. It’s all very well for Venturos to talk about magic as if it were something the rest of us could see and touch, but we have to be practical now.”

“Then what would you suggest?”

“We stop looking and concentrate on finding a way to gather some support for you,” Rynar replied immediately, “visit your father’s old contacts among the houses minor. Enough of them might be able to sway the decision of one of the greater houses. We leave the Eillenian conspiracies in the hands of the Eillenians, prepare to cut a leaner deal than we were hoping for, and get out of the way once we’ve made it. All of this will blow over in a season or so, and we can push for a better deal then.”

Vespasian rose from his chair and headed for the long, narrow window that was painting the plaster with the golden light of late afternoon. There were discolored patches along that wall where paintings had once hung. The noises of passerby in the street below drifted upwards.

“I will not give up without achieving what I came here for.”

The sentence dropped flatly into the middle of the room.

“It wouldn’t be giving up,” Rynar replied, “It would still be a deal brokered with the Eillenians, and we’d still profit from the silver. So maybe the Duke will have to think twice about buying up new fripperies with the profits – it’s a business deal, they don’t all go as well as you might hope.”

Vespasian was silent for a moment.

“My father would not have given up.”

No, not his father. His father would have had a plan by now, and not one which relied on hearsay and vague rumors. But his father would have hedged his bets, and had more than one plan in the works, just in case. That was how he had survived in the world of political intrigue for so long. But all the same, his father would have made this work, no matter what happened.

There wasn’t much that Rynar could say, so he said nothing. Venturos, as always, kept his own council.

If Vespasian’s father had been in charge of this expedition, they would have had several advantages in negotiating with the Major Houses. Of course, that had been years ago – there was no way to be certain how things would have turned out if…

Vespasian shook his head a little to clear the cobwebs from it. Wondering what if wouldn’t do any of them any good. The only way forward was to act on what they did have and what they knew now. And to leave no option unexplored.

All the same, it would be best to act discreetly.

“I don’t believe that we will have to make such steep concessions – at least, not yet,” he said, turning back to the guard captain and the magician, bracing his hands behind him on the windowsill. “However, every avenue must be explored. We cannot let the opportunity to gather more evidence slip past us.”

He paused for a second. “Therefore, I want both of you to continue to look into this – discreetly, of course – and to find out everything you can about House Argentus’ downfall, this windkeeper and the storm that he says sunk the ships he was hired to protect, and the magician of house Isidrus. Meanwhile, I will rally the houses minor to our cause.”

Silver in Eillen 9: Thou Winter Wind

2012-05-20T23:36:04Z

“Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
thou art not so unkind
as man's ingratitude;"
- Shakespeare’s As You Like It
<- 8) Desires of the Moment ~0~ 10) Sweet Adversity ->

In cities – not large towns, such as the capitol of Renua, but real, overcrowded, overpopulated, slightly-less-than-sanitary cities, such as Eillen – it was easy to find magicians. They clustered around those centers of power and wealth like cockroaches around a crumb. Some specialized in one thing or another, still others claimed to be useful for any purpose, and yet more were simply cunning fakes. The sheer variety would have been a problem for most, since magicians were a secretive lot and relied on no guilds, no oaths, and none of the formal organization of any other trade. But there were ways for one magician to recognize another, and though no one knew for sure all of their fellows, one magician knew another who knew another… and so rumors spread.

Rumors that, after several days, lead Venturos down to the docks, in the downriver portion of the city. Sailors lived there, as did street urchins and pickpockets and yelling fishwives, but Venturos wove his way through all of them with a singleness of purpose which made people get out of his way without taking any special note of him – just another hurried and busy traveler. Pickpockets and footpads sized him up, but were unable to decide whether he was rich or poor, young or old, a good target or not worth the trouble, before he had swept past them and their opportunity was lost.

The peeling plaster of the building before him was similar to the peeling plaster of the building next to it. Venturos knew that it was the right place, however, not by any arcane sign, but because, painted next to the door, was an inscription that read “Windkeeper.”

He had come to the right place.

Venturos knocked on the door, and received no response, so he turned the knob and slipped inside.

The lair within contained the usual clutter, most of it for show. Bottles and jars lined the shelves and a rickety desk, as did a series of colored, knotted ropes. Some said that a windkeeper could summon a favorable wind with them, or calm storms. Others believed that they were merely a focus to keep the power of the winds in check. Still others dismissed the thought as mere superstition. That didn’t stop merchants from erring on the side of caution, however, and hiring alleged Windkeepers anyway. And for a Windkeeper with a good reputation, the business was profitable, so long as the ship or fleet that they sailed in returned home in one piece. Less lucky Windkeepers sank down through the fathoms with the ship that they were contracted to protect.

This particular Windkeeper had obviously fallen on hard times, as had House Argentum which had once employed him. His reputation had been ruined with it, for no one wished to hire a Windkeeper who was the sole survivor of a shipwreck, as it was obvious that he had failed in his last contract.

“Who’s there?”

An old voice, and thin – not entirely what Venturos was expecting. He turned around.

The Windkeeper was visibly old, one liver-spotted hand clutching at the banister of an extremely steep stairway that Venturos could only assume lead to his chambers above the shop. His hair had passed beyond silver to white, and his eyes were as watery as his voice.

“A colleague,” Venturos replied. If the white haired man understood the full import of that word, so much the better. If he misunderstood… no harm done, in the long run.

“Come to gloat, have you?” the cracked voice seized on the idea like a dog with a bone, “Come to mock the great Florio, Master of the Winds, Eh? I’m not some doddering old fool – not yet! Go elsewhere for your amusement, you young upstart!” Within a few steps, he was brandishing a knobbled cane at Venturos and as menacing as his years and stature could make him.

Venturos quickly sidestepped the cane.

“I’ve actually come to ask a few questions,” he said, in a voice of such flat calm that the elderly windkeeper paused momentarily.

“Come to steal my secrets, have you?” His eyes were suspicious, but the cane was lowered to the floor.

“Nothing of the sort.” Though Venturos would pay for them if he had to. “You would, naturally, not have to answer any question which you objected to. However, as I am not a windkeeper, I doubt your personal secrets of the trade would do me any good.” He paused for a moment, scanning the old man’s face for signs of agreement. “In fact, I am far more interested in the sort of ships you have worked on, the destinations you have sailed to, and who you have worked for.”

The old man looked at Venturos for a long moment.

“You mean, you want to hear about the ships I let sink,” he said.

“I’m sure that it wasn’t -”

“Bah. Whenever a storm brews up and a ship goes down, they blame the Windkeeper. Never mind that conditions at sea can change in a heartbeat, and any Windkeeper worth his salt knows that you can’t control the winds, just coax them into the right direction. As if reefs and rocks and sailors who can’t tie down the sails quick enough don’t do their part towards sinking a ship. Or captains too stubborn to follow their windkeeper’s advice.”

“There are a good many fools in this world,” Venturos agreed.

The Windkeeper, however, was too sharp for that. “Oh yes, a great many,” he replied in his crackling voice, “And I’m certain that you know all about them. What are you, a wandering juggler? An illusionist who gets up on stage and distracts a crowd while his apprentice cuts their purses? A quack doctor who mutters cryptic phrases over a jar of powdered sheep’s hooves and convinces peasants that he’s created a magic cure, Eh?” The old man was clearly enjoying needling him.

“A scholar.” Venturos’ clipped reply could mean anything, and the Windkeeper knew it.

“A scholar, Eh?” he asked with a sudden grin, revealing that he was missing his eyeteeth, “Well, I suppose I could spare a few moments of my time for a scholar,” he mused, “I somehow don’t think that anyone else is going to come in today. Sit down, boy.”

It had been several years since anyone had called Venturos ‘boy,’ but he sat anyway on the nearest chair as the old Windkeeper made his wobbling way through a pile of mystic paraphernalia and eventually reached the far side of his desk.

“Now, what was it that you wanted to know? I can’t tell you everything, mind – next thing I know you’d be setting up shop as a Windkeeper yourself.”

“House Argentus,” Venturos replied. “I understand that you have worked for them for quite some time.”

The Windkeeper snorted. “Had worked for them. But they’ve no use for a Windkeeper who let their ships sink, even if they had a ship left to their names. Over the years I’ve sailed on every ship they’ve sent out to sea, in fair weather and foul, and not a one of them so much as sprung a leak if the captain was wise enough to heed my advice. But what do they care about that? Forty years of service is nothing compared to a sunken ship.”

“I had heard that there were seven ships.”

“And one windkeeper between them,” the old man replied sharply, “Perhaps seven of us could have calmed that storm. But it was all I could do to save some from my own ship, the ungrateful wretches.”

Tactfully, Venturos decided not to comment.

“In any case, I was able to outrun the storm on a different wind, sailing east as it headed south. But it wasn’t a natural storm – it turned around against the prevailing wind and followed us in. Broke us up on the rocks, and mere miles from the river Aern too. Wrong winds for that time of year – probably some incompetent untied all his knots at once, or pushed a storm out our way because he couldn’t deal with it himself.”

Venturos was quiet for a moment. “I’d like you to tell me the whole story,” he said, “from the beginning.”

Silver in Eillen 8: Desires of the Moment

2012-05-20T23:29:32Z

“Men are so simple and yield so readily to the desires of the moment that he who will trick will always find another who will suffer to be tricked.”

- Niccolo Machiavelli
<- 7) The Establishment of Others ~0~ 9) Thou Winter Wind ->

The ale in Eillen, Eloan had to admit, was better than in Renua. He was too patriotic to say it, but that didn’t stop him from drinking it.

He didn’t even have to pay for it. Not until they ran out of the captain’s money, at any rate.

The captain’s instructions had been simple, and almost too good to be true. Go out, become friendly with the locals over a few mugs of ale. Listen hard when they started talking and keep your mouth shut whenever possible. Stick together, don’t go looking for trouble, and come back in one piece.

And they’d had a good time for the first few hours, though he’d had to drag Tobias and Len past quite a few pretty women. Eloan hated being the responsible one, but it just wasn’t worth the captain having their hides when he found out. That piece of logic had earned him quite a bit of griping from his two friends until they’d gotten settled into a likely looking tavern. There might have been a few odd looks going around when they entered, particularly from the liveried guards of several houses, but they’d made friends with a handful of guards, liveried in blue with a silver wolf on their front, by the simple method of buying them a round of drinks. In return, the five other men were happy to talk about anything and everything.

But all that was only serving to give a surreal cast to the situation, because Eloan listened. He knew that there was something going on – and these five other men, fellow soldiers though they were, were connected to it. The silver wolf was the symbol of house Isidrus, and house Isidrus was exactly what the captain had wanted information on. They’d been instructed to keep their ears out for everything, but especially anything about house Isidrus.

And what Eloan was hearing was probably important.

“Never could hold with magicians,” one of the Isidrus guard was saying, inspecting the depth of the ale in his tankard, “nor their nasty experiments.”

“Oh, yeah, nasty lot,” Len agreed quickly.

“For example,” the guard replied, “Just the other day that new magician of the house took an old hunting dog that had to be put down to test his poisons on.”

“Poor thing deserved a swifter death,” one of his companions muttered.

“I told you months back that the magician was a nasty piece of work,” the third guard muttered, “Remember when he was so keen to raise winds? It was like a storm at sea, all trapped in the courtyard.”

“That’s because it was a storm, you superstitious fool,” the second guard put in, “Just an ordinary storm – any man can deal in poisons, but no man can bring down the wrath of the heavens.”

“Funny,” Len said, “Ours just mutters – ow!”

Eloan had applied his boot to the other’s shin beneath the table. “The magicians I’ve heard of are a nasty lot,” he agreed. The other guards didn’t appear to have heard Len, but they nodded at Eloan’s words and continued talking among themselves about who knew first that magicians weren’t to be trusted.

“What did you do that for?” Len demanded of his friend.

“We’re supposed to be listening,” Tobias reminded him sharply, in an undertone, “Not volunteering our own information.”

“What did I say?”

Eloan sighed – his friend was clearly not the brightest burning candle of the lot. “Don’t worry about it, Len,” he said, “just shut up and finish your drink.”

Drink of Me

2012-05-01T21:40:47Z

“Drink of Me, Drink of me,

Forever then a Wolf you’ll be,”

He had never thought it strange that only his sister could hear the whisperings of fate in the song of the creek, nor had he thought twice about obeying her as he turned, thirsty, from the spring. Even as a wolf he would never tear her to pieces as she feared, but he had no desire to be a wolf the rest of his days.

“Aman, she’s still following us,” Kitra said half an hour later, as they keep dragging their feet through the forest, step by step. They had already thrown away everything that might connect them to her, have literally nothing in the world besides the clothes on their backs, and night, the second night, is coming quickly. He remembered it all with a burning clarity, how small they both had been, how large the gap between ten and eleven had seemed, how he had tried to be cheerful, tried to be happy, for her. She didn’t deserve the dark. She still didn’t.

“She’ll never catch up,” and she wouldn’t, not if he had to climb over the mountains or swim across the great river, because if she did, it wasn’t just him that would go back to that dark hole in the earth and never see the day again. He’d had chances to run so many times, but this was probably the only time that he’d had the chance to bring Kitra with him. If they failed now – four years in the dark, and Kitra had barely remembered the name of the sun. Who knew what a fifth year would do?

They kept walking, step by step, wishing to hurry but finding it impossible in the unfamiliar woods, on limbs weak from walking and from not being able to stop for food, for a decent sleep, for anything. As long as they were in motion, they were free.

What seemed like ages back, Aman had let Kitra finish off the waterskin. It was no wonder he was thirsty. The two stale loaves of bread they had been able to steal hadn’t helped, and he felt now as if his throat had closed in on itself, sticking together and making it hard to breathe, hard to speak.

They stumbled upon the second stream and Aman had never been more grateful in his life. He knelt to drink his fill once more.

“Drink of Me, drink of me,

Forever then a Bear you’ll be.”

Kitra grabbed his arm and dragged him away from the stream. He had wanted to curse, wanted to cry, as she told him what the stream was singing under its breath, what was to him nothing more than the sound of rushing water. He would become a bear, she said, and forget all that it ever was to be a human, a boy.

He almost wouldn’t have minded, except that Kitra couldn’t have lived off the forest like a bear, and he’d likely be shot at or made into a part of the circus if he attempted to steal normal, human food for her. He suggested that they turn themselves both into bears and simply be done with it, but she refused.

“How do you know she wouldn’t find it easier to catch us both? We’d be worse off than before.”

Aman had seen the black cat, and before that, the lion cub, and in the end he had to concede that she was right, that as animals they would be far worse off if she caught them than as humans. You needed fingers to steal, to pick a lock, to wiggle the glass shard out of your foot. A bear or a wolf would not last long in the dark, in the cages.

They had left the second stream with their waterskin still frustratingly empty.

It had never occurred to them to talk or tell stories to pass that endless walk, because the dark was silence and if it wasn’t, in the end she made it so. Besides, their throats were swollen with thirst, though for some reason Kitra was holding up far better than Aman. Perhaps because she had always been able to go away in her head and let things happen, because she saw and knew and heard the things that others didn’t. That’s why she had wanted Kitra, after all. The only reason that she had wanted Aman was because he was strong.

Strong? He asked himself, incredulous. Perhaps it had made more sense at the time, when he was so young, when he thought that he could find a way out of the dark and the silence despite knowing almost nothing about the light and the noise and the day. He had refused to die – and there was something, if only because he now had a chance to make good on an old promise.

Kitra’s face was etched with acid into his soul. They had only been children. And if he had been silent the last eight years, at least he had watched. If a child was defined by their innocence – and he and Kitra had been tearingly innocent about some things, but trust had never been one of them, except with each other – then he had certainly lost enough of that to be a man. The dagger in his hands should be easy enough to use, given the right motivation.

His memory refused to show him the end of the walking – the spring that he had finally, finally drank from, and the sudden sensation of being forced, bones liquid and burning, into a new body – it had only been moments ago – and the silence. Oh, the years of silence. As a wolf, he could have hunted for food, but he and Kitra lived well enough off of the snares that he had told her how to make, a distant memory of before the dark, one which she did not remember. A day, a week, a year – Kitra stopped going so far into her own mind, which was good, because he couldn’t tell her what she needed to know when she was there, at least not as a deer. She had tied the ribbon around his neck to remind him that he had not always been this way, but perhaps to remind herself as well. He could no longer convince her all of the time that they had managed to walk beyond the dark.

In the surfaces of glassy ponds his antlers marked time, and in twelve points he was no longer certain whether his memories of a life before he had been a stag were real or simply another dream in the dark. Perhaps his living was simply one long night of hope that would be snatched away when they were visited once more in the dark. He’d lost the knack of conveying something that strange to Kitra, and even if he hadn’t he wouldn’t have told her, for fear that she would retreat into the corner of dark in her own mind again.

“Brother Deer,” she always called him now, saving his own name to whisper when he needed reminding. In the way he sent his mind out to meet hers, distorted now by the shape and distance, she was always Sister. Very seldom, Kitra, because the name had become a strange group of sounds that his mouth could no longer make, it’s only meaning left that which they had learned in the dark before.

If she could only read his thoughts once more. His mouth moved, making no sound, as his voice had not returned and he didn’t care much if it ever did, even if he was going to have a chance to wait for it to happen.

Sister. Kitra. Sister.

But all that had changed – stopped, her mind had been closed-off and vague after the ones with the arrows had come, and at first he had thought that it was because they had shot him, the worst pain he had ever experienced except for the change. He had clearly been able to hear her panic, or more accurately, the meaning of her panic, as words no longer made sense to him, as he had fallen. He didn’t know what she had said or bargained. He did know that when he regained his senses, he was lying in the hay with his head in her lap and tears in her eyes and nothing but words to make the bridge between them anymore.

He touched the scar on his right shoulder. It hadn’t been his scar that had severed them.

It had been Kitra’s.

She had no use for all these fancy things, she had no knowledge of what they were, she kept going off into her head where he couldn’t see her, couldn’t follow her, couldn’t do anything but be a sort of pet, the tame deer in the castle, a curiosity with no interest in humans except the one that he was no longer allowed to see. She stopped saying anything, and it was that, more than the distance, that finally fell between them – even if he could not make out the words, hadn’t been able to for years, at least her voice kept the memories alive. Even the painful ones.

By the time the baby squalled the first time, Kitra was so locked up in her own head that she didn’t hear until he prodded her with his nose. She didn’t smile. Just rocked the baby back and forth and he could smell the way other people looked at her, she was sick, she was weak, she was going to be left for the wolves.

If she’d only been a little bit stronger, if I’d only been able to remember words…

The regrets were half-formed in his mind as he waited outside the door of the new queen. She had come and he had known her only by scent, and by Kitra face down in the water, all white robes like the down of an angel, her face blueish and closed in death. It had only taken eight years for her to catch up to them – and at that moment, he had known all the despair of a human once more, his bones had turned to liquid fire, and he had woken up on the cold riverbank with his hands digging into the mud, and he knew.

Upon drinking of that pale grey water, Kitra, it seemed, had become an intangible thing, not so much an animal but an idea, lodged behind his brain, pushing at him. He knew, after the shouting and the searching and the wailing was over, after the bier of flowers and lace obscuring the true cold face of death had passed him in the streets, when he finally looked like a human once more, albeit strange, that this would not take very long. He understood now why Kitra had retreated into her own mind, and the dagger was no longer slick in his hands.

The door was unlocked, and the false face of the new queen, peaceful in slumber as he had never seen it awake, she who had bent and twisted them into mere wisps of themselves, had no time to contort. Her silence as she passed to the dark, almost gently as the sheets reddened, was obscene in a mockery of the pale dawn of Kitra’s bare feet pointing back towards the shore. No water would wash that blood away, and she – and he, no less guilty – would be found in the visceral obscenity of their sleep, of the night. It was he that had broken it all, he who had allowed himself to be fooled by her sweet words, and most of all his scent on the drifting white linens in the water

He approached the cradle. The guards would be coming soon. The baby reached for his beard but made not a sound, and he let the tiny palm caress his nose as it had when he had run on four legs. Forevermore a Deer you’ll be. The baby couldn’t tell the difference.

Gently, he placed the last tie, the bit of ribbon Kitra had once placed around his neck to remind him, the one thing she had kept, in the infant’s hand.

With a crash, the doors burst open.

Silver in Eillen 7: The Establishment of Others

2012-04-29T03:56:32Z

“One change always leaves the way open for the establishment of others.”

- Niccolo Machiavelli
<- 6: Small Projects ~0~ 8) Desires of the Moment ->

One of the many advantages to being a Magician, Venturos found, was that it greatly facilitated the art of disappearing.

No magic, in fact, was required – if anyone noticed a Magician’s absence, they generally refrained from questioning it, as the general attitude of the populace maintained that the best way not to run afoul of Magicians was to politely ignore them. Furthermore, this extended to his presence as well, since anyone who took it into their head to closely observe a gaunt, dark-eyed man who appeared neither young nor old caught the distinct impression that something about him was not quite right, and they promptly stopped paying attention.

No one who hadn’t been paying attention as Venturos entered the city of Eillen would ever be able to peg him as Renuan. Magicians, ranging from street-conjurers on upwards, were common in Eillen, as in every major port, and they hailed from across the known world.

Rumors circulated freely in the crowded Piazzas outside of the quarter belonging to House Argentus. All Venturos had to do was pick a knot of citizens and listen. Most of the time, they never even noticed that he was there.

He stopped in the shade of a triumphal arch nearly an hour later to collect his thoughts. With the ease of practice, he filed away the conjectures, the rumors, and the probable facts for further study, and allowed his mind to construct a replica of the scenario.

The facts themselves were startling. The conjectures even more so.

~xXx0xXx~

It took all of Vespasian’s willpower to keep his face from reflecting his dismay as, bit by bit, the Patriarch of the discredited House Argentus spilled the whole sorry tale.

Business, he gathered, had been going discreetly to the bad for a long time – a year, at least, though the Patriarch still didn’t like to say. House Argentus, whose wealth had always derived primarily from the shipping industry, had been somewhat lax of late, and had staked a good portion of their remaining fortune on what was generally considered to be a safe passage down the shore to Romula, the capitol of the empire.

Seven ships set sail. Seven ships made profitable trade in Romula.

One ship returned to the mouth of the river Aern. In seven pieces.

~xXx0xXx~

It was dark with only a token sliver of moon when Vespasian met with Rynar to give him a synopsis of the situation.

Other nobles wouldn’t rely on their guard captain for a second opinion. Of course, it would never have occurred to other nobles that a general or a tactician was as useful during peace as during war, or that people’s minds were more important than their pedigree. In any case, Rynar knew Eillen better than Vespasian did, and was more likely to stumble across helpful rumors. And at heart, Rynar was a tactician. He knew how to anticipate the moves of the enemy.

Vespasian’s father had relied on Rynar – and so would Vespasian.

Rynar simply sat, rubbing his thumb across the bristles of his chin, as Vespasian told him everything. Then, a full minute after Vespasian had finished, he spoke. “There’s no use in trying to get one of the other two major houses to sponsor us, then.”

Vespasian shook his head. “I’ve thought about it. But Renua has been dealing with house Argentus only for too long. And house Argentus is deep in the disfavor of the Signolini – the seven ships were stocked with a loan from Signolini bank, and they have only just managed to pay it back.”

“The shuttered shops,” Rynar replied, with perfect understanding.

“Some closed because House Argentus can no longer supply their wares,” Vespasian confirmed, “Others have been sold off to minor houses.” House Argentus had indeed taken a sharp hit to their pride, and that they had chosen to sell their places of commerce, which were their greatest chance of working their way back upwards, spoke either of ill-management or greater desperation than they were willing to admit. For the ties that they still retained, they might be able to claim that they were currently the fourth house, but it would not be long before those holding the other end of the ties tired of the weight and let house Argentus slip into obscurity – and Renua’s future along with it.

“Have you considered the minor houses?”

Vespasian sighed. “Yes. Frankly, I’m not certain I like our chances. As few as two minor houses might be enough, if we could find two that stood to profit by the deal that have enough standing. On the other hand, if the Signolini dislike the deal, then it could take all of them. House Montag will bring anything connected to house Argentus down, and they aren’t involved with shipping, so we have nothing to offer them. House Isidrus is an unknown factor – what have you heard about it?”

Rynar, who well understood the advantages of instructing his men to become friendly with the locals and listen closely to their conversations, tipped one hand back and forth. “The servants of house Argentus are torn between blaming house Isidrus for their misfortunes and blaming house Montag.”

Vespasian grimaced. “So we can only openly appeal to house Isidrus if we’re willing to throw away the goodwill of house Argentus.”

“You knew that already,” Rynar reminded him, “house Isidrus is house Argentus’ main rival in shipping.”

There was nothing more said, but Vespasian knew what the only two real options were. He could strive to return the prestige of house Argentus, most likely by finding a way for them to work back into the good graces of house Signolini. Or he could seek to discredit the house that had taken their place.

Silver in Eillen 6: Small Projects

2012-04-28T03:10:46Z

“Small projects need much more help than great.” – Dante Allighieri

<- 5) Thinking Makes it So ~0~ 7) The Establishment of Others ->

It was drizzling out of a sunny sky when they finally came in sight of Eillen. Cresting one of the many hills that surrounded the valley of the river Aern, Vespasian suddenly caught sight of its baked terra-cotta roofs and walls plastered off-white gleaming in a wandering shaft of sunlight. Rain dripped on his hair, and the column of sun left, the gap in the clouds having moved across to the other side of the river. Yet, even that one moment had dazzled him, and he drew in his breath.

Eillen was several times larger than Renua. Even considering the outlying villages and farmlands which the city of Renua had not quite gathered into its folds, Eillen both outsized it and outclassed it. Vespasian counted the gates in its walls: he was up to five in the section facing him before he gave up on comparisons.

The men behind him were muttering, wondering why they had stopped, and he urged his horse forward, thankful for the knowledge of Eillen that Rynar had taken the pains to instill in him during the journey. House Argentus was in the Argentus quarter, their symbol a silver wolf on a blue background. Argentus quarter was upriver, where the water was cleaner, but downriver of the waterworks.

The great grey gates loomed overhead, and Vespasian felt rather small as he lead the way beneath them. Suddenly, fifteen soldiers plus himself, Rynar and Venturos seemed to be a miniscule number compared to the hundreds within the city of Eillen. What he had deemed to be a sufficient show of security for a business meeting had dwindled to a knot of nervous men and horses, which snorted and tossed their heads as the sun came out on the other side of the wall to reveal a long, paved road leading to the piazza where two major roads of Eillen intersected. Rynar had them sorted out and in a respectable formation within minutes, leaving Vespasian staring upwards at the columns and arches and banners with Venturos watching him.

“On your guard, young lord,” the Magician said, snapping Vespasian back into the present, “You never know what watches you from a window…”

With an effort, Vespasian returned his mind to the task at hand, and they proceeded through the streets, often fighting against a throng of pedestrians who paid them no heed, at a slow yet steady pace.

The main roads of Eillen, Vespasian remembered from his lessons, both recent and in childhood, were laid out in a grid pattern that was characteristic of old garrisons of the Romulae, except where the city had outgrown its old walls and spilled over into the former farmland of the river valley. And while there were farms and satellite villages further out, some of which he and his men had been passing for most of the morning, there was little good farmland remaining near Eillen. They had exhausted the soil within the valley, and the soil in the hills was too thin and rocky for anything but sheep, grapes, and olives. Much of their foodstuffs were imported from more agricultural states, including Renua.

The one great strength of Eillen was trade. They were one of the last major ports along the river Aern, and most barges could go no further upriver, so all major trade coming inland, or going outwards towards the ocean, had to go through them. They supported the new emperor, Justinian, though they had, like most other states within the region, slipped beneath his notice as he expanded his empire.

There was a wealth of other facts ready and available in Vespasian’s mind, but he felt that his lessons had omitted some crucial details. Some were useful – the fact that he spotted very few horses within the city, and that groups of expensively-dressed citizens passed by those who were obviously much poorer in the street on a regular basis told him that the Eillenians were unlikely to be impressed by distinctions of class. A good thing that the Duke wasn’t present then: that concept was entirely alien to him. Others were mere impressions: the sheer size of Eillen, for one, and the fact that shops and dwellings were stacked on top of each other like so many bricks, each building making use of the walls of its neighbors and putting out several awnings and arches that protruded nearly into the street, shading passerby congregating on the raised curbs. It was also beginning to be unusually hot, for the sun that had finally chased away the clouds was reflected off of every stuccoed wall, and baked the cobblestones to a dark red-brown.

With Rynar’s knowledge and only a few slight detours, they all made it to Argentus quarter, where their hosts dwelt. Vespasian, and most of the soldiers, were busy staring at everything – the markets in the squares and popping out of the fronts of buildings, the statues and triumphal arches, and the ever-present teams of men constructing and repairing buildings, often on wooden scaffolding that reached three or four stories into the air.

If I watched long enough, Vespasian thought absently, I could probably figure out exactly how these buildings are constructed. He stared at a window full of black and red pottery as they passed, then another of multicolored cloths, and a third of spices. These were wares that seldom, if ever, made it to Renua at great price, and the people who he saw buying them couldn’t possibly all come from the great or even the minor houses. In fact, if he had to guess, he would say that most of the customers at these stalls were craftsmen or guildsmen, and possibly even shopkeepers. Renua seemed small and dingy and far away.

It wasn’t until Rynar spoke that he dragged himself to the present.

“What was that?” he asked his captain.

“I said, I don’t like this,” Rynar repeated, “Argentus is the third house, in charge of a large portion of the city, and Argentus quarter should be filled with people. Yet look how many shops are closed up.”

Now that Vespasian looked, the crowds had thinned considerably since they had turned down the river and headed for Argentus quarter. There were only a few people on the streets, and they moved as if they had little time to waste. If he’d thought about it before, he had attributed it to the afternoon heat. And yet… he could feel it now as well. Something in the air smelled of tension, and the blind eyes of the shuttered shop windows stared disconcertingly.

The pack of mounted men drew somewhat closer together. Hands rested near sword hilts.

But Vespasian was noticing something odd about the closed shops. Painted on their sign, or carved into the stonework near their doors, nearly all of the shuttered shops bore the image of a wolf – the symbol of house Argentus. A narrow ribbon of suspicion squirmed in his gut.

They arrived at the large doors of the domus, and Vespasian’s thoughts were cut off by the business of dismounting the horses and being welcomed by the patriarch of House Argentus. This, to Vespasian’s mind, took too long, and he was glad when he was able to leave the soldiers, servants, and the extended family of the Patriarch behind and suggest that the Patriarch, if he could spare a moment, speak to him about the business at hand.

For some strange reason, the Patriarch looked extremely nervous at the thought. But Vespasian was a guest, and eventually they made it to the Patriarch’s study.

The study of a patriarch of a great house of Eillen was different from the study of a lord in Renua. At home, the duke’s study was filled with items chosen because Varin thought they emphasized his power: as a result, the majority of it was gaudy, expensive, and in poor taste. Lord Lucio’s study was lined with paintings of his long family line, Lord Amador’s with hunting trophies, and Lord Cornelius’ with very little other than a few dark tapestries that were likely as old as himself. Vespasian’s own study was filled with items his father had collected, and which remained exactly as they had been six years ago. The only thing that he had allowed to change was who sat in his father’s chair.

The Patriarch’s study was a concentration of tasteful opulence, but practical – the cabinets full of records might have gold-leaf designs painted in the corners, but they were still full of records. The chair in which Vespasian sat was plush and comfortable, but the wine he was offered was what made him smile. It was Renuan.

“Now, naturally,” the Patriarch was saying, “You’ll want to… ehm… see the sights and such. Plenty of time… yes, plenty of time once you’re all… ehm… settled in to discuss the particulars.” And here he gave an anxious smile.

Vespasian frowned. He would like to see the sights, but when he was secure in the knowledge that the Eillenians were willing to trade. Preferably, when they’d already agreed upon the price. And there was something in the Patriarch’s manner that seemed off to him. He found it doubtful that the man would have risen far enough to become Patriarch if he was this inarticulate every day: therefore, the man must be flustered about something, and it most likely had something to do with the eighteen Renuans to whom he was playing host.

Right now would be the best time for Vespasian to discover what the situation was in Eillen. You couldn’t bargain without knowing how much your goods were worth to the other party, a basic lesson that the other Renuan nobles considered themselves too blue-blooded to learn. Undoubtedly, the Patriarch knew it as well – he would not have remained Patriarch of any house, much less the third house of Eillen, otherwise – but most likely he would not expect it to be so well known to Vespasian.

It took Vespasian a moment to think of a way to profit from that secret, and he discarded several approaches as too subtle. The Patriarch had subsided into a momentary silence, one of his extended commas petering off into a series of little coughs and a general air of hesitation.

Vespasian affected an air of polite boredom. “Unfortunately, I am under strict instructions to present the Renuan offer to your council as soon as possible,” he replied, “Immediately, in fact. In addition, I have been given the tedious task of asking you before we even begin for an estimate of the council’s current standings on the issue.” The Patrician looked conflicted, and Vespasian wondered if he wasn’t laying it on a little too thick. He decided that being friendly couldn’t hurt. “Now, of course I know that I can count on House Argentus to back the offer,” – he would have to, after all, and House Argentus was the house best positioned to profit from permission to sign contracts with Renua – “so I’ll only have to trouble you for information on the standing of the other two major houses. Do you believe it would be easier to win the support of House Montag? Or perhaps house Signolini?”

It was at this point that the carefully maintained façade of normality crumbled from the face of the Patriarch of house Argentus.

“To tell the truth,” he replied, with a frankness that Vespasian did not expect, “The chances aren’t good. We can present the case to the Major houses, but I doubt any of the three would support the deal…”

Vespasian’s brain did the math, and then seized up with a sudden realization. If none of the three major houses were likely to support the contract, and house Argentus, by presenting it, was a de-facto supporter…

House Argentus had been discredited. And he, Vespasian, was too late to find another supporter.

Silver in Eillen 5: Thinking Makes It So

2012-04-26T22:08:16Z

“Why then, ‘tis none to you; for there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

- Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Hamlet

<- 4) A Lean and Hungry Look ~0~ 5) Small Projects ->

As if Vespasian weren’t already galvanized by the situation, the day of his departure dawned bright and clear with only a few silky white clouds rushing away towards the horizon. He’d managed to organize the party in record time, in part because it consisted almost entirely of his own men, led by Rynar, who had been captain of the guard for his father before him, ever since Vespasian was a small boy.

The ‘almost’ however, was cause for some irritation. Vespasian didn’t quite dare give his all to trying to leave the Magician behind – more for fear that someone along the line would interpret it as weakness, than because there was a gleam in Venturos’ eye that suggested he might cause trouble if it suited him – so, like a strange, gaunt bird with his blue cloak flapping a bit against the saddle behind him when the breeze picked up, the magician rode out at the head of the party immediately to Vespasian’s left.

It was a three-day journey to Eillen – four, in bad weather – and the first morning passed quietly. There were the usual noises – talking, the clink and scrape of gear, the whuffing and slapping hooves of horses, and the occasional rustling of a field or woodland creature as it got hurriedly out of the way. Vespasian found himself listening closely for someone to come galloping up behind them to say that the Duke, one of the other lords, or someone, had changed their mind, and that they’d all better come back. But once they forded the river that separated the countryside near the capitol city from the wilder land surrounding it, he finally realized that such a summons was not about to come.

The thought was surprising, and, to an extent, freeing. For the first time since he had proposed the whole plan, he relaxed. He even smiled to himself, glad for once to be out from under the eye of the other lords, trusted to make his own decisions. The Duke might not know it, but he couldn’t have chosen a better man to lead this little expedition, for Vespasian, unlike the other nobility of Renua, had a good idea of how the Eillenians’ minds worked.

As the day continued on and the group made good time, Vespasian relaxed further, until, when they pitched camp and lit a handful of fires near the edge of a rolling meadow cropped short by sheep, he knew with a deep satisfaction that very little could go wrong.

He woke in the morning, unusually cheerful, and spent the morning talking to Rynar about Eillen. The guard captain had visited the state a few times, when Vespasian’s father had business interests there, and his memory was good at recalling the fine details. As a result, Vespasian felt very prepared to meet the Eillenians, and also very pleased with himself. He had, after all, gotten away with it, at least so far. And the Duke and other Lords were unlikely to understand the implications, or indeed to even notice what, exactly, he was doing…

Actually, the Duke was unlikely to notice anything unless it was expensive or female, or possibly both, though Vespasian could never be entirely sure on that score.

“If the Eillenians are anything like our Duke,” he said to his horse as it walked along at the head of the procession, “Fooling them will be easy.”

“Ah, but if they aren’t?”

Vespasian started – his horse huffed and flicked its ears back. Venturos and his horse were so close that he could have reached out and shoved them, without even leaning over, and he hadn’t noticed, too preoccupied in his own thoughts. And the magician was looking at him with an interest which was normally found only on the face of a magpie contemplating something pleasantly shiny, but too heavy for the bird to pick up. Immediately, Vespasian cursed himself for not being more aware of his surroundings – the old magician appeared to enjoy catching people off-guard.

“What do you mean, ‘if they aren’t?’” Vespasian replied coldly.

Venturos smiled. “A whole city full of people and you already know how they think,” he replied blandly, and Vespasian knew that there was sarcasm hidden in there, because if he’d said it himself there would have been. The fact that the magician was mocking him with his own forced mannerisms, and almost his own words, made him angry. But the Magician continued. “It is the height of arrogance to make assumptions about people you have never seen, much less met. And all it takes, in the end, is for one man to be cleverer than you.”

Vespasian knew who Venturos thought that man would be, but refused to be provoked. He wasn’t a child anymore. “All that it takes,” he replied in a voice that he kept even due to much practice, “Is for me to be cleverer than just a few other men.” He applied his heels to his horse’s sides, and it surged forward, breaking away from the company and glad of the change of pace. The horse, however, was not fast enough that Vespasian didn’t hear the magician’s reply.

“Ah, but if you aren’t?”

Book Reviews and Reccommendations

2012-04-19T17:59:06Z

All right, so for those of you who don't know, national book day is April 23rd, in the spirit of which my local librarian has gifted me with seven YA and JYA novels, and I am in the process of reading, reviewing, and distributing them.

So, in the spirit of making fewer of these reviews funny literary rants and of reviewing books which don't already recieve mounds of popuar accolades, (My originally slated review-of-the-month was Anne Rice's The Wolf Gift, but, come on, what can I say about Anne Rice that wasn't said before?) I'm instituting a new system.

Title, Author, other works by Author
Non-spoilery (as in, I won't spoil anything that doesn't happen in the first three chapters) plot summary.
A reader's opinion of themes and age group suitability and stuff, with explanations.

The third category is for this: In the course of reccommending books for children, pre-teens, teens and young adults, I and many other avid readers have the following issue: There are a lot of books appropriate to reading level but not for the age of the readers. And YA and JYA fic vacillitates a lot between happy fluffy fun times and darker and edgier, so there are plenty of things that are supposedly designed for a specific age range (marketed to 13 year olds, for example,) that are marred by their presentation of things that are too far above or below the experience of their intended audience.

Books on the slate for May and June are:
Above, Leah Bobet (Reading has already commenced)
The Space Between, Brenna Yovanoff (I have the advance copy, but it's been out for a while now.)
Under the Green Hill, Laura L. Sulivan
In the Forests of the Night, Kersten Hamilton
The Returning, Christine Hinwood
The Ghosts of Ashbury High, Jaclyn Moriarty and
iBoy, Kevin Brooks

All of these are intended as YA or JYA fiction, all touch on the broad category of Fantasy/Supernatural/Science fiction, and all of these books are being doled out free to good homes when I've read them, including children's school libraries. Here's a good cause that isn't costing anyone a dime.

Silver in Eillen 4: Lean and Hungry Look

2012-04-16T23:49:45Z

“Let me have men about me that are fat, sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights. Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look, he thinks too much; such men are dangerous.”

- Julius Ceasar, Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar

<- 3) Lady Disdain ~0~ 5) Thinking Makes It So ->

Adria’s unusual silence lasted until the doors to the ducal study closed behind them and Vespasian made a move to take the enormous pile of books that Adria was returning to the library.

“I don’t need you to carry my books for me, Vespasian,” she snapped, setting off down the corridor. Like her brother, Adria had a seeming aversion to showing any weakness. Most days it didn’t bother Vespasian, but most days nothing so important was hanging in the balance.

“Maybe it’s an excuse to talk to you,” he replied, keeping pace with her easily, “you very nearly ruined the best business opportunity that Renua’s had in over a generation.”

“Maybe I don’t want to listen,” she returned, “And I, unlike you, am trying to make sure that this business with the mines doesn’t explode in our faces. I’ve set my sights on keeping Varin in one piece and avoiding beginning a war with Eillen – you’re just here to annoy him.”

“No, I’m here to prevent him from losing an opportunity.”

“You mean, to trick him.” They arrived at the spiral staircase within the tower, and Vespasian stepped aside to allow her to begin the slow ascent. She glared at him when he tried to take the books again.

“You just saw him make that decision on his own,” he protested, walking deliberately slowly to remain just next to her.

Despite the pile of books she held with her right arm and the tight grip she had on the banister with her left, Adria managed to turn her head long enough to give Vespasian a cold look. “With you feeding him information and pulling strings.”

He couldn’t deny that. “Look, it’s for the good of Renua,” he began as they reached the next floor and emerged into the corridor, “I can make it work. I know how the Eillenians do business – Varin would be lucky not to get tossed out of the city on his ear. If there’s anyone who can make a profit out of this deal, it’ll be someone who knows how to bargain, and how not to offend the Eillenians. I can handle it, and Renua will be the richer for it.” Seeing that her frosty posture still hadn’t thawed, he concluded, “At least it won’t be Varin making a fool of himself in Eillen.”

She seemed to become somewhat more cheerful at that. “True,” she replied, as they reached the library doors and he went to hold one open for her, “It’ll be you.”

The smile dropped off his face like a stone.

However, his attention was immediately claimed by the gaunt figure in a dark blue tunic who was standing in front of the shelves. His breath hissed out of him in surprise.

“Magician Venturos, what are you doing here?” Adria asked, equally surprised. The gaunt man, who was neither young nor old, turned to look at her and Vespasian suddenly felt a lot more nervous. Lord Cornelius might see a lot out of his beady old eyes, but the duke’s magician was the kind of person who not only saw everything, but did something about it. Though he’d been in service to the old duke since before Vespasian could remember, these days he was rarely seen. No one blamed him for preferring to spend his days doing whatever it was magicians did in secret – it was surely preferable to dealing with Varin.

“The young lord rides to Eillen, my lady,” the magician replied, fixing his dark eyes on the two of them without any detectable expression.

Vespasian experienced a sudden chill – how had he known? – before dismissing it scoffingly. The same way any charlatan knew things – and like the jugglers and conjurers and fortune tellers on the side of the road on fair days, Magician Venturos was a fake. A well-educated fake. It was that education that made him dangerous.

If Adria was similarly rattled, she didn’t show it. “That still doesn’t explain what you’re doing,” she pointed out.

He smiled indulgently at her. “Gathering information,” he replied, and though the sweep of his eyes took in the entire room, Vespasian suddenly had the impression that he was staring right through his skull. “It may be of use to us in Eillen.”

Cricket Symphony

2012-04-16T23:36:37Z

Dusk was falling as she stood out on the porch, waiting. It was warm for April, with the spring peepers singing away in the ponds and streams beyond the cabin, and the beginnings of a cricket chorus tuning up somewhere in the grass. The snowmelt was long past, and the crocus in the front yard, bulbs that she wouldn’t ever abandon because her grandmother had planted them, though she let the rest of the yard run wild in a riot of blazing star, butterfly weed, cornflowers, ox-eyed daisies, and an assortment of other interesting weeds that she only knew by the odd, analogy-laden names of her grandmother or the low, rumbling, almost sighing sounds of another language entirely. She’d managed to cut down most of the buckthorn, and cleared a path through the wild roses. Although she had been informed it was unnecessary, she was inclined to think that it was, given that she’d several times had a thorn go straight through her dense canvas jacket and two layers of sweatshirt under that, and if the briars could get through that, they could get through anything. There was being tough – and she had her gran and her mother to thank for that, and years of a lot of thinking and not a lot of empty talking – and there was being obstinately proud, and thinking yourself resistant to thorns was the second.

A goose honked once somewhere out in the gathering dark, and for a moment she let herself think of the flock that should be heading north around now, high above the blue world, where they could trace a path far away from the infective light of the cities and highways, the sluggish, clotted veins of people and the low-hanging clouds of society. They could fly north for the cool, crisp air, and look down over the world as the rulers of the wind, and perhaps they would even see a small pack moving south, out of the cold white tundra and into the verdant green of the northern forests, after months of fasting and solitude, baring white teeth to the wind at the prospect of fresh hunting.

But no – look for me at sunset – not tonight. It might still be too early, as the calendar meant nothing to them and the days that turned, over and over again, were more closely calculated on the rhythm of the land and the broad sweep of the skies than any system of numbers and charted stars. Then, too, there were the delays – a spring flood, a new road, a hunt that could not be refused – and it would not do to get impatient. She would not pine for him – not for the green-gold eyes at sunset, not for the husky rumbles that were his first language, not for the gleam of teeth as suddenly he made that shift that took him far beyond her grasp. It was not only the physical change, but the sudden shift of his eyes, as he changed from the teller of tales and the explainer of all things, to the being filled with running, made of fur and claw, the one beyond the need of names. He would try to explain, later, what it was to live within two minds, to need not only the cornflower blue sky of summer but the razor powder of ice crystals cutting into his feet, the glistening gut of the caribou in the red, red snow, but how could she understand? She was only human.

I would go with you, if I could, she had once told him, and he had – not laughed, that action was foreign to everything he knew, indeed he had been surprised at how many teeth went into a smile, or that the action was meant to be friendly – told her with a few words and his eyes why such an idea was ridiculous. She had meant, of course, if she was able to leave it all behind – her sleepy job restoring antiques, her book club, her grandmother still growing pots of flowers in her nursing home, her visits to her mother and father where they had retired into the southern sun, her cabin that wasn’t her permanent address but was her home all the same, the photographs. But it was the sheer physical impossibility that daunted him – how would she keep up, running on ice? Would she be able to suffer the bite of a jackal, tell the poison berries from the sweet, feel the iron tang of a fox’s liver slide down her throat? He communicated in ideas, in pictures, but there was an eloquence there that nonetheless had left her desolate when the cries of the geese mourned in the marsh grasses. She could not be a part of his world. She was bound, bound with the unbreakable ties of being human, evolution and society having conspired so that not only was it unthinkable to throw convention to the wind and head out, step by step, across the wide green world, it was physically impossible. Oh, certainly she could survive for a while on very little: years of backpacking, a childhood as a scout, the lessons of her grandmother who had grown up in a time where waste was the cardinal sin had taught her that much. But the things she’d need for it – a knife, for example, a flint for sparking fires, probably fishhooks and line and snares, and then needles and twine and storage containers – they simply weren’t compatible with a nomadic life.

Very slowly, she turned back to the old cabin with its faded wallpaper and the broken clock on the mantel, slipped in through the door, pulled shut the latch.

Dinner was a simple meal – the cabin had no electricity and the kerosene stove was yellower than any ancient bulb, shedding a comfortable light on the brown eggshells as she made herself an omelet. Brown eggs had always tasted better to her, and she had no idea why. Afterwards she washed up the only set of dishes in the cabin, hung the cast-iron skillet up once more. Everything in the cabin was old and simple and never changed, just like the enormous pine trees and the mantel clock that was stuck forever at three sixteen. Whether it was three sixteen in the morning or three sixteen in the afternoon she couldn’t tell. She ought to get it fixed or simply throw it out, but she kept coming up here for the weekend away from all the thick, smoky sprawl of it all, and then returning without having done anything about the clock.

She went to the back door, and nearly opened it again. But the yard outside would be beautifully, placidly empty and she turned around once more. Something about these early country sunsets left her sleepy hours before she could manage a restful moment in the city. Perhaps that was why she kept coming here, despite the long drive, despite the fact that no one she was looking for was still here, because some part of her wanted to sleep. To dream as she never did in her tiny apartment, to look on the stars and swim between them in the night, to feel like she had a purpose again and control over her own fate. Perhaps it was as simple as letting all the windows open without hearing car alarms and sirens and barking dogs. The frogs and crickets were a symphony that she knew well.

The old quilt, probably one of the ones that her grandma had made, was threadbare, frayed in the corner where she pulled it up to her shoulders. Another thing she should fix, if only for something to do up here, a responsibility to Gran’s memories that would give her a reason to go back up to the cabin next time. It was only marginally less ridiculous than waiting for the return of the wolf-eyed nomad, than eradicating the buckthorn stem by stem, than listening to the crickets. The truth was that she simply couldn’t think in the city, couldn’t take the pressure of all the people, all the news, all the furious, furious sound that surrounded her without some part of her mind going dormant, stopping her from feeling, from really seeing, from finishing an old paper-backed novel, from opening up that old sketchbook from her college days once more. Every day there was simply something to be gotten through, to be finished, and yet – and yet she was bored, later, and restless, staring into the midnight streetlights and the neon signs and knowing that no one, no matter how drunk they got, found their purpose there.

At the same time, though, no matter how many of her memories were stored under the loose floorboard in this cabin, no matter how little changed from week to week, spring to spring, she could not stay here. It was a beautiful dream: a dream to perhaps meet the wider world halfway, let herself stay in the world where everything made sense, where violence and death were simply facts, simply survival, not a Gordian knot of pain and fear and hatred and a thousand broken things, thrown away things that she could only scratch the surface of, never fix entirely. But it was just that – a dream.

In the morning she would carry her things back down to the car, all the way down the driveway between the pines. It would be exactly the things that she had come with, never anything to take back to the city, because she couldn’t throw anything here away and she couldn’t keep it, no, not where she lived and where it would so quickly lose its meaning, the old quilt in its ugly colors nothing more than a sentimental keepsake of the childhood days, of when the world was open and everything made sense. Not even Dan would understand, because he didn’t come here anymore, he didn’t remember the long days of summer when everything fit into place and time stretched like a hot, sticky rubber band. He was married now, and Julia was having a baby in October, and maybe the neon vanity of the world no longer kept them up at night. Maybe it never had.

She would fuel up in town, buy a soda from the old man at the convenience store, the one who had known her grandfather, and it would be a four-hour drive down from the world where everything was defined by the past to the place where the last five minutes were constantly erased. First, the trees would disappear, then the fields, then finally the sky, and she would have enough time when she returned to check her phone, her e-mail, her television. Tomorrow she would go back to being a mere converter of information, a circuit in the machine, the person who didn’t exactly know why she kept going north, intermittently, to spend the night in a house she couldn’t even truly say she had grown up in, because it had been her grandparents’ summer home away from the Saturday morning cartoons and piano lessons and the sprawling ranch house without a fence that she had been raised in. She would go back to scoffing at the sentimentality of the woman who wanted to sit on the back porch with a child’s box of colored pencils and draw the flowers, scorning doing something she wasn’t good at simply because it made her happy. She could work with her hands all she wanted, but the simplicity of creation, or at least of fixing things, was so often covered over in all that noise. And she would return to all that, she would just drive away from nothing in particular.

Tomorrow she would wonder why she had spent so long up here, waiting for what was never going to happen, and resolve not to come back again for another few weeks, a month even, though it rarely lasted that long, not in the spring. It was easy to stay away in the winter – her body craved the heat, not the icicles that could form on her nose and her car wasn’t equipped for the slushy back roads anyway – but in the spring, it was as if all her longing for this place was pressing tightly against the lid that she kept on it. But tomorrow she would seal that lid good and tight and not let those feelings bubble up again, because it was distracting.

Tonight she would dream of caribou, of sharp ice crystals and red, red snow, and of the mourning of the geese in the marsh grass for those that could not fly above the wind. She would dream of the wolf-eyed nomad and the scent of the grass under her toes, of the heat lightning blue and green across the sky, startling although all it ever destroyed were the amorphous clouds. And she would dream these things to the overture of the frogs, in counterpoint to the symphony of the crickets.

AN: Yeah… no idea where this came from. Not one hundred percent certain if it’s fantasy or if the nomad is a metaphor, though for what I don't know. *Is stalked by a metaphor*

Character Drabble: Two changes in the last ten years, from Lindsay

2012-04-11T02:21:31Z

Charloft prompt, posted there without context, but I liked it enough to pull it over here.

Character: Lindsay
Characterization Issue: Childhood/early adolescence, family relationships, old doubts

Ten years ago
When I think about who I was ten years ago, it's easy to trivialize being a teenager who'd never lived in one town for longer than a year, with a stack of library cards in my wallet easily ten times as many as the names programmed into my phone. Mom couldn't stand to stay in one place for very long, because eventually everything that didn't bear thinking about would catch up to us, and then everything would go wrong. Of course, when grandma died there was no running away for her anymore, and nowhere left to go but back inside her head where all the doubts were, but when I was sixteen I was terrified that I would end up like her. That somehow never fitting in, never staying in one place, never sleeping through the night without wondering when the momentum that she cherished would stop and the days of the grey fog of nothingness would close in on us again, would make me another person who could never be happy. Ironically, that's what made me strong. When I was sixteen, I was torn between desperately wanting to get away from her and make my own life, and horrible guilt at the knowlege that there would be no one to stop her from sinking if I did.

It's from mom that I inherited my love of travel, of wide open spaces, of the world and the people in it, and after so long in so many worlds, I have to say that I am exactly like her, but I am entirely different. I am no longer afraid of the empty future ahead, of the grey cloud that swallowed so many days, or of the dark hours of the night. I want the raging rain and the red-rimmed sun and everything that lasts for only a moment and leaves it's fingerprints in your mind, and the fact that it all falls away, while it draws my breath away, doesn't prompt me to dig my fingernails into the palms of my hands as I listen to the irrational fears from the other bedroom in the night, or the repeated mantra of "morbid, morbid, morbid, don't think about it," that I thought could keep me from obsessing over so small and uncontrollable a thing. And taking control of my own life - finally deciding that no, I could not stop this from happening, and that I had, for once, to do something for myself - it freed me, in a way, and it freed my mom too. Instead of long nights of waiting, instead of wondering when we'd move again, instead of trying desperately to make sure that she never heard a cross word from anyone, making sure that she stayed far away from anything that happened that might be bad, that someone might say which would cause us to stuff boxes and move again, I left her and went to school. I had to wait a few years after grandma died, just in case, but she was getting help then and I thought it would be the easiest way.

And because she kept going - going to therapy, yes, but also traveling and traveling to feed the part of her soul that always screamed for distance, for more blue sky, for anywhere but here - that horrible guilt has been released now. I know now that I did the right thing.

Prodigal: Author's Notes

2012-04-11T01:11:12Z

I'm going to get in the habit of doing this, as it's a chance for me to look back on stuff and reflect after it's all over and I've gotten past the "whatever, it's done" stage. Also, because I as a writer am interested in how other writers think, and there's an extremely slim possibility that the interest might be reciprocal with someone. You never know. This is not an epilogue of any sort, so feel free to skip it and move on to the next bit of your reading list.

Prodigal is made of pieces of worlds.

It's literally part of a hodgepodge, anachronism stew that's been slowly boiling in my brain for the past seven or so years. Of course, way back then it's not the story it is today, and the story itself is kind of a test run to see if I can make such a patchwork universe run smoothly. The only thing it has in common now with iteration one is that some of the characters have the ability to travel at will between otherwise unconnected worlds. And I think some names have managed to stick through all of this, but they often don't come from where I think that they come from, and a short archive dive informed me that the original story had a talking dolphin in it, which actually didn't disappear for good until iteration 4, the current universe that Leah and Ellie and co. inhabit. Of course, I was about twelve or thirteen when the dolphin was first dreamt up.

There are many, many worlds in this universe, of which Ellie and Leah are by no means the only focus - stories in my head include that of Leah's parents, those of Leah's sisters, and several people who can't claim relation by any stretch - so part of this was an excercise in re-establishing a world that has been central to all of this, but desperately vague since iteration 2. Strangely, this little private world is not the set of most of the other stories in this universe, simply because what kind of conflict can you run into on an island with practically no people? Okay, nature epic writers, don't answer that. I respect you all, but person vs. nature is not my cup of tea. I tend to have a bunch of person vs. person running counterpoint to person vs. society and person vs. self, because I want to know how people tick. The other thing that this story was good for establishing was the muddly time period between my two major chunks of stories, as well as the late teen, early adult dynamics within the family. Oh, and the fact that Ellie narrating doesn't change much at any age. I'm used to writing her in her mid twenties.

There will (probably) be no sequels to this story. Not because I don't have stories, but because this was sort of an outtake/idea dump/trial run for the whole universe, which I still hold out hopes of publishing. (You know, once I have a job and all that - double majoring in heavily academic subjects does not leave one much time in courting publishers, or indeed any idea of how to go about it.) Ellie and Leah and co. have been heavily annoying me because I replaced their names for this, as a paranoia-inducing precaution. Everyone gives you different advice on publication, and I wanted this to be able to stand alone, (as well as the ability not to do awkward retcons if canon shifts later,) so I decided to err on the side of caution, as I am rather fond of this universe.

The things that I am rather pleased with include that Ellie's voice is recognizable, but different from what it is 4+ years later in the actual novel bit, and that I finally have a handle on the characters of Rhian and Tess, who have changed a lot from iteration 2 and were, quite frankly, hardly visible in iteration 3. Writing everybody at ages I don't normally deal with for them was something of a challenge, and I have slight mixed feelings about Tess' presentation here. I really do love Tess as a character, and this story kind of vacilitated between not presenting her as, well, incorrigibly Tess and making too much of a big deal about her more peculiar qualities. All I can say to justify it is that this is Ellie's first encounter with Tess, so she pays a little more attention to that, and she is, after all, the narrator.

Frequently Asked Questions
I only have a couple, courtesy of my real-life perma betas and a couple fictionpress reviews.

Q: Is there a sequel? (Also known as "Why is the ending so indecisive?")
A: Not here, for reasons of publication hopes and the fact that there is a lot of material in the sequel and prequel plot. We could be here the next 20 years, and if it's going to take that long, I'm going to do my darndest to get it in print. You'll be informed if or when that happens.
It's also meant to be an open ending. It's more of a resolution on Ellie's part and a pivotal point in her relationship with Leah, as well as a point of sort of finding a new mission in life. Half the questions you might have had while reading aren't answered in the story at all, and honestly, it would kind of ruin my intent (not to mention involve the above mentioned decades) to explain everything, but any and all questions you may have will be answered honestly, even if the honest answer is "To avoid giving away the entire plot, yes, it certainly seems that way."

Q: Are Ellie and Leah a couple?
A: They haven't decided yet.
No, seriously. I know their lives for the next decade and a half after this little story, and I can tell you that the characters' relationship is deeply emotional, supportive, and at times pretty darn codependent, but the intent of the story has been to demonstrate their emotional and psychological closeness, and neither character has seen fit to inform me if hormones are indeed even a consideration in their lives. Also, this is probably the most frequently asked question here, and the only one that I really have to shrug and say "that wasn't really a consideration while writing." So, if what you see in the story fits your idea of a couple, go float your boat. :)

Q: Does Tess have an eating disorder?
A: If extreme childish pickiness counts.
Actually I was kind of surprised that this came up (though, upon editing chapter 4, and the fact that there are probably 10+ references there alone to Tess refusing to sit down and eat a proper meal... yeah, I might be a little concerned if I was her child psychologist too,) and my answer is no. She's extremely impatient and extremely picky and has been throughout her life. Think a three-year-old's eating habits towards anything nutritious and you've basically got Tess' attitude towards food.

Prodigal 8: Skipping Stones

2012-04-11T00:23:15Z

<- 7) A Silver Sheild ~0~ Author's Notes ->

In the morning, I woke up far too early to the crashing of waves and the diffuse glow of what should have been sunrise. My watch said five thirty, and when I knocked on Leah’s door, she was still asleep, and the door was locked. I hadn’t spoken to her much last night, and I’d gone to bed early, which was probably the reason for waking so unusually early. Having nothing to do, really, I wandered out of the house and down to the beach. The weather was surprisingly clear for this time of day, at least compared to the day before, and I could see out to the weird, truncated horizon, though I didn’t spend a lot of time looking.

I’d only walked a little ways along the beach before I saw another person approaching rapidly – Leah’s sister, Rhian, on her morning run. She waved, so I waved back, and within another minute, she had trotted to a stop on the sand in front of me.

“Another early riser?” She said with a smile.

I shrugged. “Sometimes,” I replied.

“Well, if you were after the sunrise, I’m sorry to inform you that we don’t really have one. The sky just starts getting brighter, that’s all. I miss proper sunrises – and sunsets – when I’m here.”

I wasn’t sure how she could stand to get up early enough to miss the sunrises, but she was right, the lack of a visible sun here was eerie. It was something that I hadn’t paid too much attention to until now.

Suddenly, I was overcome by curiosity. The desire to ask something that Leah would have answered incompletely, if at all. Rhian was talkative, after all, and as far as I could tell we were getting along fine, which was more than I could really say for Tess and I. But I didn’t want to pry, at the same time.

“I can’t imagine what it must have been like for you three, to grow up here,” I said.

Rhian smiled, a smile with a good touch of nostalgia. “Imagine your very own fairy tale,” she said, “that’s what it was like when we were younger, just the three of us. We ran wild – by the time we were eight or so there was really very little to endanger us on the island, so long as we kept our wits about us – and we literally had a whole world of our own, with woods and caves and ruins to explore, places to swim, the library… It just seems like a magical time, looking back, and for the most part I think it was. We were always together, you know, even when we eventually went to school. Of course, as we got older we had different tastes – Leah used to love to build things, for example, while I liked sports – but we stuck together, you know?”

“Actually, I don’t,” I said, with an apologetic smile. “I’m an only child.”

She looked at me oddly for a moment from where we stood on the beach, and then headed for what looked like a grassy dune and sat down. “Well, you must have had a best friend growing up, even if you didn’t have any brothers or sisters.”

I wondered if Kelly Saunders, who I had made a pinky swear with to be best friends forever in the first grade counted. I had moved away less than six months after that, leaving behind very little but memories and a legacy of candy bars split between the two of us. I had no idea of when I had last heard of her.

“Not really. I moved around a lot, sometimes three places in the same year,” I explained to her. My mother had been unable to stop in one place for too long, and I learned to have a life that I could pack away and take with me to the next place. Maybe that was why I had found it so easy to abandon everything and head on off to a new world with Leah.

“I’m sorry,” Rhian said, and I shook my head.

“Don’t be,” I said, “It wasn’t a bad thing. It’s just different for me to think of growing up with someone like that, for all those years. But your life sounds like a child’s paradise.”

She smiled, a little sadly. “I guess it was. All that my sisters and I really know about our mom’s childhood was that it wasn’t happy, and of course you know that the world where my dad is from is completely different from any of the ones that you’ve seen. I think that they did their best to give us everything that they’d had or that they’d wished that they had. And of course, we visited our family a lot – well, our grandmother on dad’s side and a lot of honorary relatives through several different worlds. We weren’t lonely: we really only needed each other.”

I nodded. I hadn’t been lonely. Not really. I’d accepted my life and I’d made the best of everywhere. Besides, there was always my mom, and the growing stack of library cards. And later, when middle school had hit and everyone had been suffering from betrayed friendships and terribly important crushes, I had been able to stay outside of it all. My life had remained mostly calm, because I was never in one place long enough to fully soak it all in.

“The messes we got into as kids are hard for me to even believe now,” Rhian continued, her face lighting up, “All those stories you heard the first night? They’re not even half of it. There was the time that we tried to make a raft and sail to the edge of the world – we were grounded for weeks, since we’d scared mom and dad to death by almost drowning – and then there was the time that we got stuck in the tree house in a rainstorm. Yes, we have storms here,” she said, in answer to my unasked question, “but not often. There’s simply not enough of this place to have very strong weather, unless there’s some conflict with the void. Hasn’t happened in years.”

I made a note that whatever that was, it didn’t sound good.

“And that’s not even counting what we got up to in school. I think we got detention about twelve times between second grade and fifth grade – mind you, most of those were because Leah decided to deck whoever had decided to pick on Tess that week, and the rest were for the kind of pranks that you only think are a good idea when you’re nine or ten. Oh, yeah, and the one time that I mouthed off to Mrs. Rovek, but that was just me.” She laughed a little. “I suppose you were the good girl when you were a kid – I know I wasn’t.”

I shrugged. I supposed I might have been – after all, I kept my head down, did the work, and lived for days when I could bring home half the library – but I’d never had the opportunity to get into much trouble. The other kids hadn’t trusted me enough at first, and after that I’d had to go home: after a while people just didn’t bother me much.

“I wasn’t the good kid so much as the quiet kid,” I confessed. I looked out at the waves for a moment, half-mesmerized by the light growing in the sky. I had been the kid who sat and thought about things, the kid who read. Bookworm, four-eyes – childish teasing had eventually petered out and died, and anyway after a while I had learned to tune it out and pack it away. I would be gone soon enough that it didn’t really matter what the others thought of me.

“The complete opposite of all three of us, nonetheless,” Rhian replied, “I swear we drove our parents nuts – still do, if you take a look at Tess and Leah. The amount of times they were called in to school because of Leah and Tess…”

“Leah and Tess got into a lot of trouble then?” I asked. Oh, I could believe it of Leah. She always had a plan, or something up her sleeve, and only rarely could she be bothered to put in all her effort, which had always annoyed me to no end, because when she did she was brilliant. But Tess? Wild horses could not have induced her, I would have thought, to any form of humor or mischief, especially such childish amusements as Leah would have come up with. Of course, I could imagine that scenes like the one I’d witnessed the day before would have gotten them landed in the principal’s office. “So they fought together a lot?”

Rhian chewed her lip. “No,” she said. “No, it wasn’t like that. That is, Leah fought a lot, and Tess fought a lot, but not with each other. Generally it was Leah beating up on whoever had last beat up on Tess… Look, I have to explain something to you about Tess, first.”

I nodded my acceptance.

“Tess… she didn’t have a very good time, when we were kids. She didn’t like other children much, and she definitely didn’t have Leah’s ability to make friends with just about anyone. Believe it or not, it used to be me and Tess that fought like cats and dogs.”

I raised an eyebrow at Rhian.

“It’s true,” she said, “We never could agree on the way we were going to do things, and Tess, as I’m sure you could have guessed, was a headstrong, impatient little brat. So was I, come to that. Leah grew up keeping the peace between us, since Tess always wanted to do things scientifically and logically, and I wanted to do whatever seemed right at the time.”

“You were the heart and Tess was the mind?”

“Something like that. Leah used to say that getting us to agree was like folding two sides of the universe together. Yeah, she’s always had some pretty grandiose metaphors hiding out in there. And despite all you see here, she and Tess were pretty close. Closer than I was to either of them. They used to build things together all the time… well, needless to say, I might have been a little more disruptive than was normal because I felt a little left out. They were really good about it all, though, looking back – they tried very hard to keep me in with them and they never ganged up on me – but they were like twins and I was like the tagalong little sister, even though I’m only fifteen minutes behind Leah.”

How many times had I tagged along in my life, trying hard to immerse myself into a group or even a pair of friends? It seemed that I’d always been behind – friends had already been made, and other girls already came in convenient, pre-packaged pairs or trios. I suspected that from the outside, Rhian had looked like she came shrink-wrapped with her sisters, and that she was the only one to feel or notice the gap. But that didn’t dampen my sympathy for her.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Well, we started to grow up, for one thing,” Rhian said, with a laugh, “Those days weren’t so bad, really, now that I think of it, but it seemed like the end of the world at the time. We chose to split up – go to a world apiece, that sort of thing – primarily because at that time, we’d developed preferences for different things without even really noticing it. We went to middle school separately. I learned that not having my sisters next to me twenty four seven wasn’t nearly as big of a deal as I thought it was.”

“And you grew apart?” Because it was the only logical explanation, really. Though it still didn’t explain why Leah had ended up worlds away just in time to find me.

“No. Well, we really didn’t get a chance, come to that. Leah cut and run when we were fourteen – yes, she went off to study, but everything was different then – and the task of making sure the world got along with Tess fell to me, ultimately. The past four years I’ve just been wishing she was back so she could do it again, or at least tell me how… and you see how well it works now that she is.”

I thought about it for a moment. “Why do you say she ran?”

“Well, she did. I don’t know, Ellie… something happened then, and she never would talk about it to anyone. She just got up one day and headed out. Said she couldn’t go back. Mom and Dad tried to get her to tell them, but… I just don’t know. I was kind of hoping that you did.”

The fact that it was Leah’s sister fishing for information meant that it didn’t bother me much. After all, it was her business too. But Leah’s life before she met me was frustratingly close to a blank slate. Yes, I’d heard about the adventures of her childhood – probably a highly exaggerated version of them – but as for her early teen years, they might as well never have happened.

“No,” I confessed, heavily, “I don’t know a thing.”

Rhian looked at me for a long moment, seemingly deciding whether or not to believe me. Finally, she sighed, and chucked a pebble out at the waves.

“Worse luck, then,” she said. I nodded. There didn’t seem to be much else that could be said. Rhian hurled a couple more pebbles viciously to their watery graves. Then she stood up and brushed off her legs.

“I like you, Ellie,” she said. “I think we can be friends. Heck, even Tess likes you, as much as she likes anyone, though you’ll never get her to admit it.”

I started to protest.

“The fact that you lasted ten minutes in that library with her is proof that she likes you. And you’re good for Leah – you make her smile.”

“I’d hope so.”

“Me too – or I’d have to do something about it. She’s not the only person in this family who gets to protect her sisters. But that wasn’t the point. She’s more herself around you, more than she is with us anymore, at any rate. She acts like she did in the old days now that you’re here – the days before everything changed. You wouldn’t know – how could you? You weren’t there – but it’s like she’s finally here again, after all this time. Like you woke her back up, or something. So I wanted to say thank you, for bringing my sister back.”

I mumbled something about it probably not being me at all. As far as I knew, I’d done nothing. Maybe Leah was happier than when I’d first met her. Maybe being my friend had been good for her, but I thought that maybe the helping had gone the other way around. After all, she was the first person that I’d been close to in years. I hadn’t remembered how nice it was to have someone to talk to.

“Nonsense. You did exactly what none of us could do. You didn’t see her – well, you didn’t see her after, when she was about to run away. I don’t know, it was like she was only a shell of what she’d been, always looking around like she was looking for danger, jumping at every sound – Ellie, I hugged her and she flinched. She’s still trying to pretend like nothing happened that year, but I know better. I know she was scared, I just don’t know of what and she’ll never tell me. Mom and Dad went to investigate and all that they saw was that part of an old building had been burned down. Nobody knew what happened, but I know that Leah was a part of it, and that she had to get away from whatever it was. I don’t know if it was something she saw or something she did, but she ran from everybody, and she kept running.

“And when we finally lost track of her, we wondered if it was for good – she had a thousand worlds to chose from – and I thought she’d finally run too far to come back. That’s why Tess hates her, you know. She thinks that Leah abandoned us… well, abandoned her, specifically. Neither of them has ever exactly been good at perspective, and I suppose that at some level Tess thinks it’s something she did that’s the problem. All those years of Leah giving anyone who called her a freak a black eye, and she still thinks about that.

“I know Leah. I know she wouldn’t have run if she wasn’t trying t leave something behind, most of all that she would never have left us if she were herself.” Rhian stopped for a moment, looking down at where I was still sitting on the hill, letting all this new information wash over me.

“Amateur psychology aside,” she said, “I wanted to tell you that this is the first time I’ve seen Leah act more like herself, at least the self she was four years ago, but I know that it doesn’t mean that she’s not still running from something. Ellie, don’t do it for me. Do it for Leah.”

“Do what?” I asked.

“Well, first, take care of her,” Rhian said, “but just as importantly – find out what happened to my sister.”

And with that, she turned and left.

I sat on the beach for another hour. I thought about the last two years and the last two days. I thought about the thousand worlds at my fingertips with Leah by my side. I thought about having been jealous of her, of watching enviously from the sidelines as the roommate I barely knew became the coolest girl in the school, and of the first time that I had ever thought of her as a person, when I’d heard her crying in her sleep. I thought about the things that she didn’t say, the way she changed the subject and laughed things off. Oh yes, she was still running, her mind traveling at a hundred miles an hour away, stopping to take verbal potshots at her sister, her oldest friend, but always moving on towards something. She was another one who couldn’t stop moving, couldn’t stop or something would catch up to her, and pull her backwards into the dark. But the fears following her weren’t arbitrary. They weren’t the kind of things that I could not fight and could not see.

She was not my mother. I could help her, instead of just watching her falter.

I tossed a pebble out into the water and it skipped twice before it sank.

No. I wasn’t going to do it for Rhian. I was going to do it because I had seen that skipping, sinking path before, and hadn’t known how to stop it. I couldn’t take it the first time, and I wasn’t going to stand there and watch Leah run from shadowy fears until she collapsed either. She would not end up at the end of her rope, boxed up so that she couldn’t move, so that they could watch her, just in case. I was used to sitting up in the night, after all, waiting, always checking and keeping watch for the demons that plagued those desperate dreams. Whatever had happened in her past, I’d find a way to discover it, and I’d do my best to fix it.

I wasn’t going to watch her sink.

I dusted off my pants and headed back to the house. One of these days, Leah had promised me, she was going to take me to see a whole new world. Today seemed like a good day to start.

Prodigal 7: A Silver Sheild

2012-04-11T00:18:53Z

<- 6) Fencing with Fog ~0~ 8) Skipping Stones ->

The afternoon didn’t pass so much as it fizzled. Nobody really wanted to do anything much, least of all Leah, and since I was feeling every moment more like a tag-along little kid, trailing along behind her as we grabbed lunch and then proceeded to sit around was getting irritating. To top it all off, the fog had closed back in, and according to Leah, the best time to see the island was when there was natural light, so she flat-out refused to finish up the walking tour we had begun after breakfast. And, she claimed, there wasn’t much to do in the house – I suspected that she was avoiding her sisters, possibly her father as well. Or maybe there just wasn’t much for someone like me to do, I mused gloomily, picking at my sandwich. I’d pulled all the peppers off, then the spinach, and the mess on my plate didn’t look too much worse than when I’d started. Leah had wonderful taste in sandwiches, but when putting them together she lacked any sort of organization or order. And when she was angry… the completed sandwich had resembled nothing so much as frustration on rye bread.

“I thought you liked peppers.”

I did. I just wasn’t in a pepper mood. Banana peppers always left a slight, bitter heat on my tongue, and today definitely didn’t need to become any more bitter. The only thing that would burn my tongue more than the peppers was the bitter words that were hiding out in the back of my throat, the questions of why, the wondering whether or not it was my presence that had thrown the balance off of this beautiful, delicate world that Leah had for so many years called her own. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t noticed that Tess’ animosity towards her sister was also directed at me – was I an intruder in her word? And I had upset the cheerful balance that was Rhian as well, though it had taken quite a bit longer to do so. Too selfish to return her sister to her rightful place… True, Leah was my best friend. She was the closest thing to a sister that I had ever had. But Tess and Rhian had prior claim by some sixteen years. I felt like a spy, or a theif.

“I’m not really hungry.” It was only about eleven, but I suspected now that ‘getting lunch’ was an excuse for Leah to get out of the way of her sisters, rather than her occasional voracious appetite. If I hadn’t known how many calories her frequent bouts of flaunting her magical abilities burnt, I would have wondered where she put all the food.

Strangely, there was still more than half of her own sandwich left.

“Me either,” she said, putting her plate down abruptly.

Now we had nothing to do if we weren’t pretending to eat lunch. And, as happened occasionally when there was something rolling in my mind that I didn’t want to let out, I had nothing to say. And as always when my infrequent moods coincided with the moments when Leah, normally so talkative, withdrew into her thick-walled shell, we were at an impasse.

I stared out the window at the fog for a moment.

“I suppose we should stick these in the fridge or something,” I said, finally, as it was clear that neither of us were interested in our sandwiches anymore. Besides, cleaning up would kill about five minutes, and maybe I’d get an idea then. I felt like I was navigating a boat through the fog, without the benefit of a lighthouse or a compass, mired in that feeling of dissatisfaction that rose from the depths whenever I was stranded, as I so often was, in an unfamiliar place with no clear sense of purpose.

It’s strange that at that moment, I wasn’t exactly homesick. It’s hard, I think, to have a concrete sense of home when you never stay a full year in the same place, or at least hard to hold onto it when you’re confused and vaguely sad. The word ‘home’ could fit so many different places I’d lived – even if only for a few weeks – but the comfort of it vanished under the right circumstances, to be replaced by vague dreams of cicadas and a summer snow of cottonwood and dandelion, the lazy heat of a childhood summer were for once, my inability to see clearly where my future was headed wasn’t a problem. Things, my grandmother had believed, had a way of falling into place if you just did a little bit of work in the right direction.

“Yeah. I guess we’re not eating anymore.” Leah looked down at her plate without really seeing it, and I wondered just what thoughts were tumbling around in her mind that she didn’t want to escape at that moment. Maybe if I told her why things just weren’t working out, why she should spend this time with her family – selfishly, I wanted to stay with her, but the truth was that I’d been with her every day of the past two years, and blood ties were more important than an unlikely friendship.

Leah stood up and grabbed my plate from me with little ceremony. But she walked in the wrong direction.

“I thought the kitchen was that way.”

“Oh, it is,” she said, absently, “but my room’s closer. I put a spell in, years back, that’s more or less a good fridge substitute, at least for several hours. I never really got it right for long periods of time, but at least it doesn’t need to keep running all the time so that it doesn’t defrost.”

She was talking. And in multiple sentences, with a little bit of her show-off nature evident in the offhand way that she dropped tidbits of information about it. Whatever crept about the back of her mind had been firmly shoved back behind a door. Though perhaps not quite locked out.

“You made a fridge?” I asked, because something to be interested in was the best way to show doubts the door. We went down the stairs side by side.

“Well… yes, in essence. A cooler, really, since it doesn’t get that cold. Thermodynamics is a little more complicated than I knew at the time, so it’s less of a “keeps things cold” kind of spell than a “maintains the same temperature as before,” kind of spell. Nothing too unusual.”

I rolled my eyes at that, because Leah had to know that her use of magic to do whatever she wanted was ‘unusual’ by any definition of the word. She opened the door of her room for me, and cleared off a portion of her desk. Then she went hunting around the room for an object she didn’t even bother to describe, which turned out to be, when she smacked it down on top of the desk, a napkin.

Now, I knew better than to judge any object that Leah placed in front of me by its cover, but…

“A napkin?” I had to ask.

“Yup. I stuck the spell to it so I could carry it around.”

And as I watched incredulously, Leah tossed the napkin over the pair of plates. Nothing obvious happened, but she turned to me once more with the air of being ready to do something once again.

There was a knock on the door. Or rather, the doorframe, as we’d left the door open. Both of us turned around to see who was there. It wasn’t one of Leah’s sisters come to make up, nor was it her father.

“Do you still want to go out to the shed and help me pull things out of the void, Leah?” her mother asked, “Your father said you weren’t busy.”

Leah opened her mouth to say something, but I cut her off in an undertone.

“Go ahead, spend some time with your mom,” I said, smiling for her benefit, “I’m not exactly going anywhere, am I?”

I’m not sure if the look she gave me was one of gratitude, or if I simply couldn’t read her expression, but within a moment, she was gone, leaving me with my thoughts.

There were several times in my life that I had tried to figure out people, but all of them had proven inconclusive. Leah’s mind was as far beyond my reach as my mother’s had been, and puzzling over them made no difference. No, if I was going to understand, I was going to have to take the insights as they came. Meanwhile, I was going to have to get my own thoughts in order, and that required me finding something to do other than obsess over the details.

My feet, as if they had their own compass, lead me to the library.

Sometimes Leah teases me for relying so much on books, and for being able to get lost in them so easily, not to mention the fact that I had always liked fantasy books – ones that dealt with grand adventures in different times, with different types of magic, often beyond what any real mage could do. The heroes were always brave and chivalrous (and even if they weren’t, at first, they could be relied upon to later see their true character and make handsome amends to anyone that they had previously wronged,) and their companions on the quest were always true, not worried about inconsequential things like which one of them was the most popular or whatever incomprehensible drama rocked a high school on a daily basis. Most of all, books were stable. You always knew where you stood, with a book, and if you didn’t like it… well, you could close it. In a way, I suppose it was similar to how Leah saw the worlds we were eventually going to visit – stops along the way, places we could simply leave and close the door on when we were done.

It’s one thing to get lost in a book, another to get lost in a library. I didn’t go around sniffing books or anything, but the smell of a library is unlike any other. New books smell like ink – old books like dust and something else, depending on how they were bound and who has been reading them. And as I wandered down the shelves in the library, I realized how many different books were there.

Leather and cloth-bound books, paperbacks, hardcovers with bright jackets, some even with library stickers on the back, all piled up on the shelves, in an order that I couldn’t identify. There was definitely some order, though. And, when I picked up one of the paperbacks, there was definitely evidence of archival tape. I put the book back, laughing a little. One or more of the souls trapped on this island must once have loved books as much as I do, if they couldn’t bear the thought of even a little paperback like this suffering an untimely death because someone had opened the spine too far. I wouldn’t mind being visited by a literary ghost.

In the end, I searched the same way I would search any library – looking for promising titles and then flipping open to the first page to see if it was worth it. Predictable as my fantasy tastes might be, sometimes books are just duds.

When I had a stack that I had to steady with my chin, I had to remind myself that I was living in the same building as the library and had better call it quits for the time being. I wobbled with my pile over towards the window area, where I had seen some chairs, fully prepared to drown an afternoon in a book or two. I was in a mood to read something with dragons.

I narrowed in on my chair and barely made it there with the towering pile, collapsing into it with the topmost book, a paperback no thicker than my finger. The cover promised dragons, at least in the singular.

It was probably fifteen or twenty minutes – three chapters, give or take – that I looked up.

Normally, you could ring the fire alarm while I’m reading and I would hardly notice, but even though the book was amusing me, it wasn’t good enough, and I wasn’t relaxed enough, to have sunk quite that deeply into it.

Plus, Tess slams doors.

I looked right back down again. The predictable was always better than the confrontational, and Tess looked like she was going to blow a fuse. Of course, she more or less always looked like that, but if she thought she was coming to the library and going to contaminate it with all her petty frustrations – well, I was already here, and I wasn’t even going to acknowledge her.

That resolution lasted for exactly three pages. I listened quite hard as Tess, seemingly ignorant of my presence in one of the deep chairs, flung herself down on a couch and listlessly opened a book, one of the kind that I usually skimmed over. At least I wouldn’t have to share books with her. It was a very unkind thought, but I was not in a kind frame of mind, even though she appeared to be as uninterested in interacting with me as I was with her, and ended up with what was undoubtedly a textbook.

I managed another half a chapter, before the mysteries contained within paled in the face of those awaiting me outside of the book’s cover.

Now that I knew, more or less, what I was seeing, when I looked at someone without my glasses on, I tried not to do it very much. It seemed somewhat like spying on them, reading their diary, to me. At least, I tried not to do it on purpose; obviously, I caught glimpses of what people were like without the glasses, though the awkwardness of the conversation where I had finally told Leah that she was made of blue fire was not to be believed.

But at the same time, I was curious. There wasn’t really that much of a correlation that I could see between what a person looked like without my glasses and anything about them, but it was one of those things, like learning their middle name, that even though practically useless was still something you could know about them, maybe a way of marking in your own mind that you understood them better.

Besides, it wasn’t as if I were reading the whole diary. Merely opening it up to the first page.

I peered over the top of my book and twitched my glasses just a little lower on my nose.

From what her parents and her sister were like, I expected Tess to be something a little more concrete… perhaps not a ball of fire as bright as a star, or a gleaming set of armor, but definitely not what I saw.

Tess was made of a chain of silver snowflakes.

At least, that was the first impression that I got. The second was that she was made of a lot of tiny, glittery wire, hung with little glittering things, very brittle, like ice or glass, but at the same time they were changing, turning and shifting, like nothing so much as the currents in a stream. And for some reason, that told me less about her than the great big gob of blue fire told me about Leah.

I went back to reading. Or, more accurately, to looking at the pages while thinking. Maybe if I made an effort, it would help? After all, as unwelcoming as Tess had been, I hadn’t exactly reached out to her either.

The book ended up closed. Tess didn’t seem to notice – she hadn’t noticed me the whole time, but somehow that not-noticing seemed less hostile, and less deliberate, when it was because she was absorbed in a book. I guess I couldn’t hate someone who loved books that much, and I couldn’t even stay irritated with them that long.

After pretending to go and find another book – the one with the dragons had definitely turned out to be a dud – I moved myself and my stack over to the chair across from the couch, where Tess was reading with her thick book balanced on her knees, her eyes moving fast, only the occasional twitch of her fingers turning the page betraying the fact that she could move. Of course, as often as not, that twitch was nowhere near the page, which turned itself, but I hardly noticed that sort of thing anymore.

She looked up briefly when I sat down, and made a move to grab one of her other books – maybe to leave – but I didn’t even try to talk to her, just picked up a new book and used it as a good excuse. I listened hard, and the feet that had hit the floor returned to the couch as she decided that my presence wasn’t harming anything. I ended up taking my shoes off and tucking my feet up under me, and it was in that strangely companionable manner that we spent most of the afternoon.

At some point, after I had finished a particular chapter and was staring up into space, I was surprised to hear her ask me a question.

“Can you really see auras?” Tess asked, seemingly out of the blue.

I decided that the simplest answer would be the best. The things that I saw without my glasses were complicated enough without me making them any more complicated.

“Yes,” I said, “Though I didn’t know that they were called that until a little while ago.”

Tess regarded me intensely, and I twiddled my toes a little, uncomfortable. She dropped her gaze back to her book before she spoke again.

“Does everyone have one?” she asked.

I nodded. “Most people’s I can barely see,” I confessed, “Very faint – they’re blurry anyway without my glasses, but sometimes the color’s a little off, and that’s usually how I tell. It’s hard to see anything, really, unless someone happens to be a mage.” I shrugged. “I can see when people have written spells as well, and sometimes I can see when Leah does something, but… well, she’s pretty bright.” I wondered, belatedly, if the subject of Leah’s aura was a good one to be bringing up here, but Tess seemed not to have noticed.

“I only ask because I’ve been doing some research on it,” she said, twisting her fingers together, “For a theory. There are many theories on exactly what magic is, and none of them are satisfactory, because half of them contradict each other.” I nodded, even though I had absolutely no idea of what she was talking about, and she seemed to take that as all the encouragement she needed.

“Auras, for example,” she said, “some people think they’re a form of entropy, with the dismissal of some form of will or other non-physical energy, whereas other writers believed that they are the physical manifestation of the soul. Others have posited that the mage’s aura is where they store their magic, or that the aura can tell you about a person’s state of mind.”

“None of the auras I know well really change,” I volunteered, having understood the last bit. “I don’t know how it is with other people that can see them.”

She tilted her head. “Interesting.”

“It’s not just people that have them, either,” I continued. “Your house, for example – well, it’s blurry, but that’s my astigmatism, but it looks like one of those optical illusions – you know, like the one with the stairs that make a figure eight, where you can just keep climbing forever – with some sort of blotchy, random bits of color over it, kind of like those marble paintings kids make. You know, where you let a marble roll through a blob of paint and just keep rolling it around on a piece of paper in a pan.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why your house looks like that, that’s just what I see.”

“I wanted to know why you would roll a marble around in paint.”

I looked at her and she wasn’t joking. I’d forgotten that no one in Leah’s family had any conception of what it was to live a normal life. “Because it’s pretty and little kids think it’s fun,” I explained.

Solemnly, she nodded.

“So, why are you studying all these theories?” I asked, thinking that if this was a civil conversation, it was probably best to make it last as long as possible.

Tess began twisting her fingers together again. “I intend to continue researching it when I attend college,” she said, and the part of my brain that noticed rhymes noticed the similarity between intend and attend, though really there was no rhythm to her speech. That was probably why she sounded so… well, not comfortable, for one, but also just not like most people. It was something that I hadn’t noticed when she’d been talking to her sisters or parents, but maybe it was something to do with nerves, and it didn’t turn up when she was with her family.

I nodded encouragingly anyway. “Think you’ll be able to make all the theories match up?” I asked.

She looked so much like Leah when she looked at me that time. “If anyone can accomplish that, it’s me,” and for that moment, I believed her. “I’m actually working on a series of experiments…”

Years and years of being the new girl at school after school have made me a very accomplished listener. With a little bit of encouragement, Tess continued on for nearly a half an hour, at which point she had gone through a long and complicated explanation of some metaphysical theory that I didn’t understand, which trailed off into some sort of theoretical demonstration. After that, she clammed up and returned to her book, and both of us continued reading until the light faded into orange and Rhian popped in.

“Dinner’s ready,” she said, and then she saw us. “Well, I figured I’d find Tess in here,” she said to me, “I had no idea that you’d be here too.”

“I’ll eat when I’m hungry, Rhian,” Tess replied automatically, still looking at her book.

I looked between the two sisters for a moment. “I think,” I said, to no one in particular, “that there’s a metaphysical argument for feeding the body as well as the mind. Don’t you agree, Tess?”

She looked up at me in something approaching shock. Rhian seemed to be preparing for an explosion.

“Of course. I should have deduced that my sisters had already converted you into another nursemaid for me,” Tess said, though without any real bitterness in her tone. “I suppose if I must.”

Rhian looked from her to me and back again. Then, she apparently seemed to decide to quit while she was ahead, because all she said was, “Well, let’s go down then.”

Prodigal 6: Fencing with Fog

2012-04-11T00:10:06Z

<- 5: Toumb of Lost Souls ~0~ 7: A Silver Sheild ->

The fog cleared out rapidly, though there was still very little wind, though we had to walk through a really dense patch of it as we headed back towards the house, and I ended up wiping damp strands of hair out of my face every few seconds. It was a little like walking through a spiderweb. Leah, predictably, didn’t much care what she looked like, and ran on ahead, though never very far. I simply walked along, soaking it all in as we took detour after detour, and let her show me her world.

Our pleasant walk was interrupted more or less the minute that we got back within sight of the house.

“Leah!”

Both of us looked up: Rhian was balancing on the top of a wall, looking very pleased with herself, wearing sweats and carrying… a sword? It was like a skinny piece of wire, and it took me a moment to realize that it was a fencing sword. Somehow I’d expected it to come from the approximate era of the other pieces of the house.

“Up for a match?” she called down to us.

“I’m giving Ellie the tour,” Leah shouted back up.

“I don’t mind,” I said immediately, “you should spend some time with your sisters too.” Besides, I was curious, though I didn’t say so.

“Afraid you’ve gotten rusty in the last four years?” Rhian asked, and I could hear the smirk in her voice. And I knew that, ultimately, Leah would rise to the bait. But she looked at me first, as if to check that I was okay with it. I nodded.

“You wish!” she yelled back up at her sister, and with that, we were off. Leah ran back upstairs to get changed, while Rhian mysteriously summoned their father and hauled a protesting Tess, laptop cradled in her arms, out to a flat piece of turf in the garden and started marking out a long, narrow strip in some sort of white chalk. I settled in to watch, though my choices were sitting on a bench next to Tess, who was already ticking away on her laptop and giving every appearance of paying no attention – a pity, since it looked from where I was like she was going to have the best seat – and planting myself on a comfortable patch of sod.

I compromised by finding myself a patch of grass near the bench. Tess looked up at me and then immediately back down at her computer. That was too bad, because I did not intend to move, for her or anyone. She was just going to have to deal with my choice of seating arrangements.

The match began. Granted, I knew very little about fencing, but even I could see that Leah and her sister made a good pair. They were awfully close to the same height, and when they started up they were almost the same speed. And wearing their fencing masks, someone who didn’t know them well might not have been able to tell them apart, since both of them had black hair thrown back in a ponytail and the same determined stance.

“You haven’t practiced at all in the last two years, have you?” Rhian asked as they bowed.

“Doesn’t matter: I’ll beat you every time, practice or not, oh little sister.” Leah was clearly hoping that her sister would rise to the bait, but they both stood there for another moment, clearly considering their options. Finally the match began, with Leah advancing but Rhian not seeming to mind retreating backwards. Especially since Leah always found her sword blocked, and before long had to make a great leap backwards.

To me the match looked like a lot of walking, backwards and forwards, with a lot of cleverly waving swords around, but Tess seemed to know what was going on, because she glanced up occasionally at her sisters.

“Watch her parry, Rhian!” she called out once, before hiding behind her computer screen once more. I could have sworn that Leah made a face at her, but under the masks I wasn’t sure. I supposed it was only fair that Tess was cheering for Rhian, because I was cheering for Leah, if a little more quietly due to never knowing exactly what was good or bad.

Four minutes later I heard the trio’s father, who was judging, call out “Hit!” I wasn’t sure which one had hit which, but both of them backed off quickly.

“Where did you learn that trick?” Leah asked, a trifle enviously I thought.

“Grandmother’s,” Rhian replied serenely, “obviously, it’s a little different with those kinds of swords, but I’ve been practicing.”

They began again. This time Leah did not immediately go after it – she seemed to have underestimated her sister in the first round, and now she was being more cautious.

It still looked like a lot of flailing to me. Really controlled flailing, though.

Leah put on a burst of speed somehow, and her dad called out “Hit!” I was more or less certain that this time she had won, because Rhian made a noise of disgust.

“I cannot believe you got me with that old trick,” she said, and Leah just smugly stepped back into the beginning position.

This is about when I realized that both of them were showing off. Mostly because Tess rolled her eyes and made a very loud comment about it, either not caring who heard or intending for everyone in the area to hear.

“The point is to actually poke the other person,” she said.

“Do my ears deceive me?” Leah asked the world in general, “Our Tessandra made a pun. I’ll start ordering popsicles from hell.”

“The day hell freezes over will be the day that you do something worthwhile,” Tess shouted back from where we were sitting.

“Oooh, metaphor. We are getting fancy,” Leah said, not taking her eyes off of Rhian and their admittedly now very slow swordfight. “Someday you might work your way all the way up to irony and sarcasm.”

“Lay off it, Leah.” That was Rhian, who had pretty much stopped fighting.

“What? Last I heard of it, you fully approved of making the pocket dictionary shut up occasionally. Besides, you were the one who said that she’s too much of a computer to take offense -”

“Enough, Leah.” I had never seen Leah’s father angry, and he was nearly as scary as Leah’s mom. If I were Leah, I’d be long gone. He didn’t even have to raise his voice.

And suddenly even the birds were silent. Leah stared at her father, while Tess stared at Leah, and I tried not to stare at anybody in particular. Their father likewise did not stare at any of them, but he made it clear that he was staring at all of them. He didn’t even look particularily mad, except around the eyes. He meant business, and his daughters knew it.

“All three of you,” he said, quietly, “will cease provoking each other. Now. I don’t know what’s been going on here, and I don’t care, but this will stop.”

I took the long silence as assent. There was no talk as Rhian and Leah began again, but there was no showing off either. Nobody said anything, and I missed the first point because I was watching Leah’s face carefully, as much as I could see of it through the mask, and it seemed to me that her concentration was more or less frazzled. She just wasn’t in it anymore, and it only took a moment for Rhian, with a look of great closed concentration, to score the last point, digging it firmly into her sister’s elbow so that her foil bent up like a thin victory arch. And then it was all over, with Leah quietly rubbing her bruised elbow as the little family gathering disappeared like the fog.

Prodigal 5: Toumb of Lost Souls

2012-04-11T00:02:37Z

<- 4) What Happened to the Potatoes ~0~ 6) Fencing With Fog ->

It was somewhat surprising how quickly things could become normal. My first morning at Leah’s family’s house I woke up to the sound of waves, and something falling over in the next room.

Naturally, the second noise was Leah, who had somehow managed to knock over her desk chair, doing who-knows-what at six thirty in the morning: most of the time, Leah is a morning person, and sometimes she is annoyingly so.

I went over to see if she was there, and found most of a drawing crumpled on the floor with her, and two other pieces trailing from the wall. She scrambled up from the floor when I knocked and popped the door open.

“What were you even trying to do?” I asked, surveying the ruin she’d made of one of her beautiful pictures.

“Move it,” she said ruefully, “I forgot that I used some sort of superglue on it when I put it up. You’d be surprised at what doesn’t stick to these walls.”

Considering that they were made of stone, I was surprised at how well the poster had stuck to them. Superglue indeed.

“Do you have tape or something?” I asked, surveying the bits of drawing that I could piece together. It looked like it once had been a drawing of a feathered serpent, but it was well and truly ruined now.

“Nah, it’s old,” she said, quickly wadding up the paper and throwing it in the trash, “And I was taking it down anyway. You going to be ready for the rest of the tour after breakfast?”

“There’s a rest of the tour?” I asked.

“Well, there’s a lot of rooms where we store boring stuff,” she said, “and the summoning room, and the tower, and that’s just in the house. Also, I know of one room that you’re guaranteed to love. Then there’s the ruins and the caves… I was planning to show you the rest of the island. Unless you know of something else you’d really like to see. It is a rather large island.”

I nodded. There was definitely enough of the island left to see. “Can I ask you a question, first?” I didn’t want my thought to come out of nowhere, because I’d been thinking about it all of last night but thought it might be rude to say. It was, after all, Leah’s sister… “Your sister, Tess… I don’t think she likes me much.”

If I had asked anyone else, I would have fully expected the answer to run along the lines of: Who, Tess? You must be kidding me. What makes you think that? But this was Leah, and white lies weren’t her style. She winced.

“Sorry about that,” she said, “Tess… Tess isn’t good with people. Never has been.”

I said absolutely nothing about that.

“I mean, I doubt she actually planned on being rude… Okay, well, to tell the truth, I don’t think she cares. Whether she’s rude to people or not, I mean.” Leah shrugged. “Though… you did get her to laugh. Sort of.”

“Sort of.”

Leah kicked her feet from where she was sitting on her bed. “I guess I’d forgotten… she usually doesn’t warm up to people very fast, if she ever does. When we were kids Rhian was always the popular one – you know, loud, athletic, liked to make everyone play the same game – but Tess really never played with anyone but us. Well, and she had a pet lizard once, but now that I think of it, that’s kind of sad.”

Yet another statement I was not replying to.

“The point being, Tess just isn’t good at socializing. She’ll get used to you eventually… I think.”

And with that vote of confidence, my day began.

I managed breakfast without finding anything pickled in the milk or orange juice. Contrary to my expectations, the toaster did not explode either. I began to think that perhaps the idea that normality was a little unusual in this house had been somewhat exaggerated for my benefit. After all, every family was a little odd in their own way.

Of course, Tess was not at breakfast, so that might have accounted for the relative peace. Rhian showed up about halfway through, having gone for a run on the beach.

“Disgusting,” Leah said of the voluntary exercise, and Rhian threw an orange at her head, which she fielded.

“You only say that because you can’t keep up,” Rhian said, and headed upstairs with a napkin full of breakfast, grumbling something about spoon-feeding Tess toast. “It wouldn’t hurt for you to take a turn reminding her to eat, Leah,” was the last thing I heard her say.

“Tess might have been up all night with that experiment,” Leah explained to me, “At least, I smelled roasting potatoes some time after midnight.”

I blinked at her.

“Don’t worry though, we have a lot of precautions in place to prevent fires. Especially near Tess’ room,” she said, “And it’s quite possible she fell asleep waiting for something to happen, or on her computer.”

I put milk in my coffee and decided that Tess was a little obsessed. Leah found the cocoa for me, and since I was finally looking and feeling something like a human being, we headed off to see the rest of the island.

There were two wings to the house, one of which, Leah told me, had apparently been broken before it was reconstructed, so the roof still leaked occasionally in one spot. That was where most of the odd stuff that had been pulled out of the void was stored, especially things that Leah’s family didn’t have any use for at the time. Or things that were already broken.

“You’d be surprised at how much identity broken things can have,” Leah told me as we looked in on a room full of sad old furniture that would not have looked out of place at a rummage sale. One of the chairs had legs in four different colors, none of which matched the seat and the back with its broken slats. “Especially if they’d been used for a long time before they got into the void. And it’s not as if we can throw them out…”

I had a sudden vision of the island overrun with the debris of three worlds – the one-eyed teddy bears, the broken mugs, the shoes with soles worn paper-thin and crumbling into little bits of black rubber, the stained curtains and popped soccer balls, and all the lost and empty pens. All the empty things which are left behind when the people are gone.

Perhaps the whole of the island was the tomb to lost souls.

We walked down one long hall full of storerooms, since Leah said that once you had seen two or three of them, you had seen them all.

“We used to make forts out of this stuff,” Leah said, fondly, nudging a pile of abandoned couch and chair cushions with her toe. No two of them matched. “I wonder if the ones we dragged up to the tree house are still there.”

The long wing of broken things stretched on, but Leah led me up two flights of stairs back towards the main wing, and I stared out of mismatched windows towards the water and the strange illusive horizon, even more protracted than the day before. I really wanted to see more of the island, but there was a mist this morning hanging low over everything, spreading the already diffuse light and banishing all shadows. I could see about twenty, maybe twenty five feet out, before the fog closed in and cut off the world.

“This is the room that I guarantee you’ll love,” Leah said, and I walked quickly up the last twist of steep, narrow stairs, coming into a hall that I recognized once more. She was standing near a door with a mischievous grin on her face. “You know how I told you that some things have more identity than others, right?”

“Yes?” I said, somewhat cautiously, unsure what Leah had in mind.

“Just this,” she said, and opened the door.”

My mouth dropped open when I stepped inside. The mists had parted and the light had finally grown strong enough to tumble in through the windows, highlighting shelf after shelf. I was prepared to swear that the whole room, even from where I was standing looking up at the shelves that lined the walls and stood rigidly in rows, smelled like paper and ink. There was so much here… it was easily one of the biggest rooms in the house.

I finally put my face back together and turned around to look incredulously at Leah.

“Turns out that one of the things that has the most identity is books,” she said, by way of explanation. “Theory has it that it’s because they make people think about them far more than almost any other item – because people use a chair all the time, but their feelings about it aren’t always conscious, and they don’t often distinguish it much from other chairs. But for books, even library books, there are people who go around smelling them.”

I blushed. “I do not…”

Leah grabbed a book off of a shelf and did a very stupid impression of me opening it up and, planting her nose so deep between the pages that I was surprised she didn’t manage to get paper cuts on her ears, gave a theatrical deep sniff. It would have been funny except for the absolutely stupid expression on her face when she did it. As soon as she was done she slammed the book shut on the shelf and smirked at me.

“Do too.”

“Not like that.”

“If you’ll notice, you’re the one who brought it up. I never accused you of smelling books, just said that there are people who do it. You confessed all on your own.”

I tried very hard to glare at Leah without admitting defeat. “And the fact that you spent a good half hour teasing me about it one day obviously had nothing to do with it.”

“Clearly.”

Finally, I had to laugh, which meant, of course, that Leah had won. I could hardly ever help laughing.

“Anyhow, there’s plenty more to see, you can sniff books later,” she said, earning herself a half-laughing glare, and we headed off to see the rest of the house and island. The tower was less interesting to me than it would have been on another day, because the view barely made it off the roof. And I understood very little about the summoning room, except that it had a distinct air of… well, not exactly of being haunted, but of being lived in, at some point, like you might expect at a run down castle or a ruin or other archaeological site, with just the weight of history and a thousand lives everywhere, like swimming through extra thick air. We spoke quietly and left quickly after that, and I was glad to get outside into the fresh air, where the mist still clung, but only in shreds. The whole island seemed bigger somehow, and quieter, and it was easy to believe that I might be standing in a place where no one else lived. It would be very easy to wander away into the mist and be lost.

I walked maybe a little closer to Leah than was strictly necessary, but she didn’t seem to mind my shoulder brushing her arm from time to time.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said as we walked through the fog, “In order to get you really warmed up to this exploring thing, we should start with places I already know. Ones that you’d like, naturally, not anyplace with giant centipedes or something like that. After that we could get around to really exploring new worlds, once you’d gotten used to the traveling and everything.”

“And what do we do then?” I asked, because her concept of exploring had always seemed like something of a vague concept to me. Then again, with the power to go literally anywhere she wanted, maybe things that a normal person would spend a lot of time planning for were really spur of the moment decisions. I had often noticed that Leah had very little conception of what it was like to lead a normal life.

“Well, you know… look at stuff, talk to people, poke about in caves… exploring stuff. It’ll be great. And there’s really a lot of time to do it in, because most of the time the void is pretty stable and when people have an unrelated problem, it’s really my mom or dad they want to have fix it, not me. We can go wherever we want and always be back for dinner.”

“Oh.” It sounded good, but far too simple. It sounded like the plans that an idle child would make for a life of daydreams, and totally alien to the world I knew, the idea of a regular job and responsibilities and memorizing a hundred numbers, your address, your phone, your identification and banking numbers. I wasn’t certain this new world could last a week, or if it was Leah spinning a tale for me again. “I meant, what do you… well, now that you’re home, what are you going to do the rest of your life?”

Leah shrugged. We had long since passed out of the gardens, and were heading away from the hill where we had made our appearance the afternoon before, trailing up a wide sandy path where she had managed to find a single pebble. Each kick sent it disappearing into the soupy grayness before us, not so much swallowed by the fog but hidden by the way the fog distorted color and shape before it cut off the eye entirely.

“Well, magic, I suppose,” she said, “Whenever it comes up and wherever it’s needed. I… well, to tell the truth, I haven’t thought about it a lot in a while. Years.”

“Well then, what did you want to do before you stopped thinking about it?” I asked reasonably. I supposed maybe there was a college of magic somewhere, but I had very little idea of what proper adult magicians did with their lives, at least outside of fairy tales. At home most of us knew very little about mages except that they were all filthy rich and that they mostly kept to themselves and messed around in business and politics. All the famous magical families were really their own community, and their actions didn’t affect anyone else most of the time, except when their constant feuding posed problems to the innocent bystanders.

Leah, surprisingly, didn’t answer me right away. She looked away and kicked her rock off into the gloom, where it disappeared entirely. The next few steps did not bring it to light again. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

“Of course it does, every kid has something they want to be when they grew up.”

“It was stupid anyway.”

“So? I wanted to be an airline pilot before I discovered that airplanes always make me sick. And before that I wanted to be a marine biologist and swim with dolphins. It doesn’t matter how stupid it was.”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Ellie.”

I frowned at her evasions, but Leah was a stubborn nut to crack, and it was clear that if I continued to pester her, what had started out as an innocent conversation was going to turn into a day where she just shut down and didn’t say anything, so I tried a different track. She hadn’t won yet.

“All right then,” I said, backing up the conversation, “what am I going to do while you swan around doing… whatever you do with magic. Levitating boulders off of people? Rescuing cats out of trees? Rescuing trains from falling off their tracks? Fighting the minions of evil?” I was deliberately teasing her about the sort of stuff that wizards did in children’s stories, the stuff that any sane adult knew that mages didn’t do. Either they didn’t have the power, they didn’t have the versatility, or they just weren’t inclined to help out their neighboring commoners. But it was the kind of stuff that held some sort of appeal for Leah, with all her talk about how mages were supposed to protect ordinary people instead of ignoring or exploiting them. And, given that it was Leah, she just might be able to do any and all of the above.

“Nothing so exciting, I’m sorry to say,” she said, “but I promise to never let things get too boring. You can do whatever you want, naturally.”

I made a face. I was not going to be of any help to Leah in whatever magic she did – even if I had been a mage at all, I would be so laughably far below her class that it would be a pathetic effort, at best. “I meant that it’s just as easy for you to do all this on your own, so why chose to bring me along?” I asked, then regretted the way it sounded. “I mean, not that I’m not grateful or anything, because I am, but it’s a natural -”

“Ellie. You do babble quite a bit, you know.”

“Do not,” I objected instantly, though I knew that I had been.

“All right. It’s this simple, so don’t try to make things complicated. I like you enough to want you around, and you’re crazy enough that when I asked you to stay with me you said yes.”

I was doing a pretty decent impression of a fish – for someone who claims to reject all of the presumption and privilege of the other mages, Leah can do a pretty fine job of assuming that she can arrange the world in whatever way she likes – when I stumbled over a step and nearly fell headfirst into a depression in the ground. Ahead of me was a small, crumbling ruin in what appeared to be a miniature valley where the fog pooled in shredded snakes of mist above the moss.

“Watch your step,” Leah said, finally letting go of my elbow when we reached the solid ground six stairs beneath us. I glared at her, but it failed to make an impression. Probably because she was looking almost reverently at the little ruin, which I realized a moment later was our destination. The toumb of lost souls.

I never have liked graveyards. This is probably due to the combination of an overactive imagination, an older cousin who liked to tell ghost stories, and the fact that, as a constant new kid, I was never allowed to get comfortable with one set of legends and superstitions before heading on to the next. But there was something peaceful about the silence here, something which was very unlike the sad eeriness in other graveyards. If there were ghosts here, they were at peace.

“This is it?” I asked softly.

“Yeah. Keep in mind that it had been well over a hundred years – there wasn’t a lot left to bury, really, just bones – and they always did try to bury their predecessors decently. We’re pretty sure that at one time there was a small village of mages on the island, but eventually… Well.”

“They stopped coming.”

Leah nodded. “They all volunteered to stay, though.”

“What?” I asked, turning away from the ruin to look at her, “You just said that the void -”

“Sucked them in, yes, initially. I was talking about after, when my mom arrived. All of their souls volunteered to stay.”

At the look I was giving her, she continued. “There was some serious debate over whether or not their leaving would destabilize the void again, or harm the kernel. Mom could have let them out to… well, wherever souls go. She managed it for the captives of another Necromancer once. But they didn’t want to risk it, so they’re all still here.”

“Like Ghosts?” I asked, just to be sure, because I really didn’t want to wake up to a haunting one night. That might be a non-issue for the daughters of a necromancress, but my mother was a sales consultant and I did not like the idea of ghosts.

“Well, not quite exactly. They didn’t chose to be quite that… directed. After all, they were already here a long time, they’d gotten used to the state their shades were in, and they certainly didn’t want to pass hundreds of years more actually aware of the time passing… so they asked Mom to change them into forces.

“Some, I guess what made them happy was gardening. Before Mom and Dad knew it, flowers and vegetables and fruit started appearing on the island, weeded, watered, everything. Somebody else must have liked fishing, because we keep having to freeze more fish that turns up in the freezer in the cellar. The roast you saw last night means that mom and dad went to a store somewhere and got it for you – usually, there’s a lot of fish or chicken on the table, because there’s a force somewhere that has a bunch of chickens hidden on the island and keeps sending us eggs, and occasionally a whole chicken. There were some other forces that liked fixing things, so occasionally something in the broken wing will turn out not to be broken after all. Or something will be made of them that wasn’t there before.

“Finally, there were a few who liked wandering about in the woods, or minding small children, and we used to run into those from time to time as kids. Like mom said, the island is perfectly safe – if anything happens, the forces or shades or whatever either sort it out themselves or, for something that requires a little more direction, find a way to inform her. That’s why the summoning room, Ellie. She keeps very good memories there, so that she can call them back and they can tell her what’s going on.”

I looked out at the valley before me and could easily imagine ghosts popping out of every corner and every rag of mist. It wasn’t a good thought.

“They’re everywhere, aren’t they?”

“Well, it’s a big island,” Leah hedged, sensing my utter weirded-out-ness, “and chances are that you’ll never see one. Actually, I can’t see them, because necromancy is not among my extensive list of talents, and really, they don’t bother much with me. Or you, really. They just grow their vegetables and tinker about and generally all you ever see is what was left behind for you by them. They’re grateful to Mom and Dad, though they don’t exactly know why in their current state.”

“So one could be here, right now, and I wouldn’t know?” I asked, my voice rising a little.

“Same as in the world outside,” Leah replied with a shrug. Then she saw the look I gave her, which I’m sure must have edged towards panic. “There’s lots of lost souls out there that aren’t able to move on for some reason,” she explained, “and while Mom tries to help them, especially the ones that other necromancers have exploited, sometimes it’s just kinder to let them softly fall apart. There’s not really such a thing as ghosts, unless a necromancer’s been around, just a lot of… well, impressions of people. Kind of a little fingerprint left on a certain bend of light, a little draft under the door. Nothing more than that, certainly nothing like those horror stories you’re so fond of -”

“Seventeen Ghosts was not a horror story, and neither was the Curse of the Aberings, which was only about someone who thought there was a ghost -”

“All right, whatever, I always lose the argument about your love of books. But trust me, Ell, when I say that you have nothing to worry about, especially not here,” Leah said, and her voice suddenly got serious, “ever. Really, I’m scary enough myself that all of the bad things that go bump in the night pack up and head for the hills when they hear I’m in town.”

That got a smile from me. Yeah, Leah blew things up occasionally, but that was old hat by now and she was really about as intimidating as a big shaggy dog begging for scraps, at least if you actually knew her.

“So, you promise there’s no ghosts?” I asked.

“Nope,” she said, as we turned away from the valley and headed back up the stairs. Some of the fog had lifted, and I could see quite a distance away now. “No ghosts. Ever.”

“And no other strange monsters I should know about?” I asked, just to be sure.

She hesitated a moment. “Monsters?”

“Oh, you know, ghouls, goblins, zombies, vampires, mummies… things that go bump in the night.”

There was a moment’s thought on her part. “Monsters don’t exist, Ellie. There’s just us.”

And with that, we left the valley far behind us.

Silver in Eillen 3: Lady Disdain

2012-03-23T15:58:25Z

“What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?” –

Benedick, Shakespeare’s Much Ado About nothing

<- 2: The Status Quo ~0~ 4: Lean and Hungry Look ->

On any other day, the only emotion that Vespasian would have felt upon facing an audience with his Duke was a faint irritation. Of course, on any other day, he would not foolishly have let his tongue get the better of him and promised more than he could possibly achieve. He wouldn’t be facing the possibility that in an hour he would either be heading home in disgrace or packing up to travel towards a city he had never seen. The fact that, if his plan succeeded, he was about to essentially hoodwink the Duke didn’t even figure into it.

Of course, that he should be nervous about Varin was ridiculous, so he knocked and entered the duke’s study with a confident stride, prepared to lie his face off.

“What do you want, Xylandos?” Varin asked from behind his desk, a pile of barely-touched papers indicating that he was trying to appear busy. At least, Vespasian thought dryly, he’s learned the value of looking like an actual ruler. He barely even noticed that Varin had called him by his last name.

“It’s about the trip to Eillen, your grace.”

The trick to getting the Duke to agree to this would be to make him think that he was right, which should be easy to accomplish. The second trick would be to make him think that everyone else thought he was right, which was where Vespasian anticipated the difficulty. But he had been right about using the title which he usually avoided – Varin sat up a little straighter, and actually began to pay attention.

“What about it?” Varin’s voice betrayed his interest.

“I was simply wondering if you required any help making the preparations,” Vespasian replied. The Duke scoffed.

“No, I do not.”

Vespasian nodded, though he would have liked arguing better. “Of course. I should have expected you to be prepared for the long journey and weeks of day-long ceremonial and business meetings with the heads of houses, and attending several days of their council meetings before they even decide whether to consider the deal or not. Forgive me.” He bit his tongue, wondering if the sarcasm he could hear in his own words would be picked up on.

He needn’t have worried – Varin was as observant as a blind mole. “Of course I am,” he replied, but it took him longer this time.

“Then I needn’t bother you any longer,” Vespasian replied, turning to go. He’d only taken a few steps before he paused, though. “Actually, Lucio and I discussed it yesterday, and it’s actually very clever of you to go during their ceremonial month of fasting. It’s a show of good faith.”

Varin frowned. He hadn’t heard of the Eillen ceremonial month of fasting before – likely because Vespasian had made it up – but Vespasian could tell that the idea didn’t appeal to him in the least. And Vespasian was counting on his proud words of the day before as an indication that “a show of good faith,” to the Eillenian merchants that the Renuan nobles looked down upon was not his intention. Vespasian took it as a cue to go on.

“Condescending to travel to Eillen yourself, and meet with the business proxies of the three houses, lodging with the third house instead of the first, and waiting for them to decide whether to bargain with you or not – all of that is an extraordinarily generous gesture for a duke to make to a gathering of merchants. The Eillenians will like it very much.” He added, then stopped, afraid of belaboring his point.

The Duke appeared to be thinking hard. “Yes, it is extremely generous to those gilded purse-cutters,” he replied, “probably more than they deserve.”

“Oh yes, definitely more than they deserve,” Vespasian was quick to agree. “Very generous of you, more generous than most Dukes in your position would be willing to…”

There was a thump on the door. After a moment’s silence, there was another, harder thump. Then, an unexpected but familiar voice came floating through the door. “Varin, if you want the documents you requested, then you’d better open the door. My hands are full.”

Vespasian crossed the room and opened the door before Varin could make up his mind. Then he immediately got out of the way in order for the person behind it and the stack of books, papers and maps that they were carrying to get through. It wasn’t until he deftly removed two thirds of the stack that the face behind it could be seen.

“Oh, it’s you,” Adriatica said, and then proceeded to ignore him as her armload came crashing down on a mostly-unoccupied corner of the Duke’s desk.

Vespasian grinned anyways. Adria might be an interruption to his plan, but she had two redeeming qualities that made her, in his eyes, infinitely more worthy than her older brother. First, she had the ability to carry on an intelligent conversation for more than a full minute, and secondly, she was much prettier.

Adria obviously neither knew nor cared what she was interrupting, for she proceeded to brace one arm against the desk, tuck her dark hair behind an ear, and shift through her piles for a map which she shoved under her brother’s nose. A thick, leather bound book followed it quickly, along with a sheaf of papers that, after Vespasian looked closer, turned out to be reports on the state of the mine.

“And this time actually read the reports before you make any announcements,” she instructed him, “Or have you forgotten how? Anyway, I made up a list of things that you should not talk about in Eillen, and things that you should not do, if you actually want this deal to go through. I thought about making one of what you should, but I know you’d get them mixed up, and I decided that this would be better in the long run.”

Varin glared. “Adria…” but his sister was immune to his feeble attempts to actually embody his status, and she continued on anyway.

“All right, listen carefully. The first day that you arrive in Eillen, your hosts will have a ceremony of greeting. You should be fine if you more or less repeat what they say. Most likely you’ll have to appeal to the Patriarch of the house either the next day or the day after, and then he has to present it to their council at its next meeting, and I couldn’t find any records of how that works. There’s also no records of whether it’s wise to lay out the offer we want or if we should go bigger and let them whittle it down…”

“Most likely the second, your graces,” Vespasian put in with seeming boredom. However, inside he could scarcely believe his luck. Varin’s confidence was disappearing like a fox down a hole. Adriatica was practically doing Vespasian’s job for him.

“What do you know about Eillen?” Adria asked, turning to him, “More importantly, why haven’t you said something about it before? We’re trying to organize an expedition here!”

Add placating Adria to the list of complications in his plan. “Only a little,” Vespasian replied, “I was under the impression that the Duke would have asked someone to do the research weeks ago, and that he was already prepared.”

Vespasian wasn’t sure whether the frown that suddenly crossed Varin’s face was from his comment, or from Adria’s exasperated reply.

“You would think that, wouldn’t you,” she began, “but that person is always me, and yesterday is the first I heard of this. Probably the first that Varin heard of this either.”

“I’ll have you know that I’d been planning the announcement for days,” Varin replied, stiffly.

“But you hadn’t spent a moment before that thinking of what you’d actually have to do to travel to Eillen!” Adria shot back, “Not to mention what you would do once you got there! The guard is dashing about trying to put an honor guard together, your servants are going mad trying to pack everything, the Librarian and I have been dashing around trying to find enough information on trade with Eillen to give you some idea of what you’re about to do, and Mother is in hysterics because she’s certain we’re going to end up finding you in the river! You’ve done a better job organizing drunken hunting parties!”

Vespasian winced. Adria had gone too far – there was no way that Varin’s pride would let him back down now. The best thing Vespasian could do after this would be to hope that Varin would get lost and end up in Genona.

Varin stood up, and Vespasian knew it was all over. “For your information, sister,” he said stiffly, “I have in fact given a great deal of thought to this expedition, and know more about this than you wrongly assume. For example, the negotiator will have to deal with multiple proxies before they can hope to contact any of the three main houses, after which their council will decide whether or not the offer can be made. You assume too much – and that is why my negotiator will not be needing your lists.”

Vespasian nearly left then, until the words “my negotiator” managed to sink into his mind. Adria beat him to it.

“Your negotiator?” she asked, not bothering to hide her skepticism.

Varin was ready for that. “Surely, sister dear, you don’t think that the Duke of Renua should negotiate in person with the proxies of those Eillenians? A representative will suffice.”

Vespasian stared at Adria, willing her to just shut up, even if it meant loosing the argument with her older brother. But he should have known that she couldn’t let something like this slide.

“Oh?” She arched an eyebrow, crossing her arms. “Tell me, brother dear, have you given any thought as to who will be your negotiator?”

This one, it was obvious that Varin wasn’t ready for. But he gathered his wits quickly enough, and Vespasian waited for the whole plan to come crashing down around his ears. Damn that Adria.

“Him,” Varin said simply, pointing a quill at Vespasian, who at that moment could have been knocked over by a breath of air.

For once, Adria was silent.

~x0x~
continue ->

Prodigal 4: What Happened to the Potatoes

2012-03-17T22:36:45Z

<- 3: Pieces from the Void 5: Toumb of Lost Souls ->

The house tour apparently concluded with my room, though from Leah’s stories we had yet to see everything. Within a few moments, the rest of the family had left us be, and the only noise that I heard was an occasional computer-like beeping from down the hall, which I assumed was coming from Tess’ room. Leah sat on my bed, and now that I had stopped the urge to babble about how much I loved the room and how generous everyone was and how they shouldn’t have done it, it was quiet.

“Don’t thank them,” she had told me while my eyes teared up, “they’ve wanted an excuse to fill another of these rooms for ages. Besides, if you’re going to be travelling with me, you shouldn’t have to use some random room where they’ve been stashing whatever they yank out of the void for two decades. If you kept coming back to that, you’d be ready to go home within a week.”

Leah’s instructions not to bring more than I could comfortably carry had meant that there were a lot of things that I had left behind. I’d packed some clothes, of course, and other things that I couldn’t do without. A fresh and empty journal was in my bag, since I had left the other one behind with my old life, and I took it out and put it on the desk, trying out pens on the notepad. There were certainly a variety of them, both the calligraphy pens that you have to dip in ink, cheap ballpoint pens, a handful of felt-tips, gel pens in every color but orange, and one of those four-color pens where a click changes the ink over from red to green to blue to black. It looked like the lost-and-found for pens from a hundred schools.

I said something with that embarrassing simile attached, and Leah attempted, once more, to explain.

“You’d be surprised how well small, heavily-used items retain their identity within the void,” she said. “And people lose pens everywhere, so when the void began to collect matter, a few missing pens were some of the first things in an area to go. They also fall into pocket worlds a lot, which explains why people are always losing them so mysteriously. Paperclips and rubber bands are a different story – they fall into pocket worlds a lot, but they don’t really have identities, so they end up as just aggregate matter for the migratory worms and beetles trapped in the pocket world to stumble over.”

“Pocket worlds?” I asked, since they were another thing she’d never explained fully to me. Doubtless her father had an ancient metaphor for them.

“Well, they’re really small. They get ambient light that filters through from other worlds, mostly, and they start out when a little bit of matter gets through a slightly weak barrier between worlds… I told you this part already, didn’t I?”

“During a particularly boring physics lecture last winter,” I confirmed, “Though I have to say that listening to the idea and wrapping my brain around it are two completely different things.”

“Well, we can’t all be naturals at physics,” Leah said, and I aimed a swat at her with the pair of jeans I was putting away in my dresser. I missed and had to fold the jeans again.

“I understand the concept, I just can’t do the math or work out why it works,” I told her. “Anyhow, what’s the difference between a pocket world and this void that you keep talking about? And isn’t this island just a really large pocket world?”

“In essence, yes,” Leah said, after a moment of seeming to consider it. She drew her feet up so that she could sit cross-legged on my bed, obviously determined to be of no help in my unpacking. “Though most pocket worlds would never get this big. Pocket worlds tend to accumulate more matter when they have more matter, but after a certain point they pull themselves away from the worlds that have been feeding them matter and exist in a certain bubble, which isn’t large enough to be sustained and eventually fails, returning matter or energy to the system at large.”

“So it’s a little bubble that breaks off from a big bubble?” I asked, stuffing socks in a drawer.

“Kind of.”

“How come this one’s different, then?”

Leah chewed on her lip a little while she thought.

“Well, to start with, there was once a world, which mom and dad think was actually quite similar to this one, more or less right here.”

“More or less?”

“Quantnum uncertainty.” I threw a sock at Leah’s smirk. It missed.

“To the point then, this world split into three at some point in time. Since the worlds had once been one, the barriers between them were quite weak and it was still possible for people – okay, magicians and people who were either really lucky or really unlucky, depending on how you think about it – to travel between them. Possible, though not easy.

“Anyhow, this world had been huge, because there was enough stuff that the three worlds were pretty decently sized worlds of their own. And each of them was like the original world, but not exactly, and after an amount of time that no living being seriously wants to think about, each one was pretty distinct.”

“Just to clarify,” I asked, “Is this an amount of time on a geologic scale, or do you just refuse to retain historical dates if they occurred before you were born?” I got the sock thrown back at me, and it hit me in the back of the head and fell into the drawer. Making fun of Leah’s shaky grasp of history was an old tradition, though admittedly it had started in days when I didn’t know why she had seemingly never taken a history class in her life.

“It’s not important for a traveler between worlds,” she insisted.

“Sure. You know what they say about those who don’t learn from history.”

“Hush. I was telling a story.”

“Then tell it.”

“Fine.” She paused before resuming anyway, probably deliberately. “Anyhow, the problem came because these three worlds weren’t split apart all the way. In the process of splitting them, there was a bit leftover, and it was a decently-sized bit of what had once been the original world.”

“This island, you mean?”

“No, let me finish, Ellie. Not this island – or not really. It didn’t have much of an identity anymore, but it was there, not really matter or energy as you might think about it -”

“Antimatter?”

“You know I hated chemistry, Ellie, now shush. The problem was that it had no identity, and so it kept swallowing bits of the other three worlds that had identity. Maybe it started with pens.” She gave a sly grin as she looked at my desk. “Especially it started swallowing matter that passed between worlds. Including people. The thing is that living things have a lot more identity than other bits of matter – oh don’t make that face at me Ellie, you know that from a scientific perspective we’re only so many chemicals and electrical impulses – and people have more than most. There were people living on this island from time to time, and enough of them were competent enough magicians that they made a start on creating some order in here. They all died, eventually, and their spirits were trapped here, but the thing about people is that they help give everything else identity, so it’s actually their life and death that slowed down the progress of the void.”

I shivered at the thought, certain that I would be visited by ghosts in my sleep. Leah, of course, remained entirely unconcerned.

“Anyhow, long story short, after a while people stopped traveling between the worlds. The void kept claiming matter at a steady rate, and eventually the identity-less matter was large enough that the rate increased, though there was a kernel of identity within it. By the time Mom and Dad arrived in one of the worlds during their travels, you could literally walk up to the edge of the world and pitch yourself into the void – sorry,” she said as I winced, “but it’s true. Anyhow, the Void was consuming everything, and it looked like it was headed for consuming all three worlds, and everything in them. Even though the matter would still be intact, it was very unusual that anything making the passage would survive, either arriving here in the kernel or at one of the other worlds. There were some interesting things going on due to it: there’s one woman who got too close to the edge of the void and somehow got triplicated, which was a really one in a million chance and she’s lucky to retain as much memory as she did – okay, the three of her did – but overall it was just bad news.”

“Three of her?” I repeated a little faintly, but Leah waved it away with airy unconcern.

“She’s as well as can be expected for three amnesiacs, and happy enough in her current life. She has no idea why she keeps calling her children by names that she decided on in a different world, though, or why she keeps waking up thinking she’s in the wrong place. Two of her know what happened, more or less, though mom thought it was kinder not to tell the part that stayed in her original world, so she could just get on with her life as planned and get her original memories back.”

“That’s… um… great,” I managed, before Leah plowed me over with the rest of the story.

“Mom and Dad did several very brave and stupid things, and they succeeded in giving a large part of the void some identity,” she concluded, “as a sort of barrier and conduit between the three worlds. Brilliant, of course, but they nearly died handling that much power, and there’s always the chance that any chance encounters with additional stuff will cause the void to start slowly growing again, at which point it will probably finish the job of destroying all three worlds. So they spend quite a bit of time pulling stuff that still has identity out of the void before it decays or shaping bits of void into things that are actually useful. The plan is that eventually, the void will be sub-critical again, and the kernel will hold it together, meaning that life in the three worlds will have a chance to die out on its own before the void completely consumes it.

“And that,” Leah concluded cheerfully, “Is the story of why we have so much random stuff.”

I looked at the pens on my desk with faint horror and swallowed a few times.

“Do you ever pull out a… I mean, someone who…” I couldn’t say it. Fortunately, Leah can at times read my mind, in a strictly non-literal sense, and she said it for me.

“You mean, a corpse?”

I nodded.

“Not as such, no,” she said gently. “Living things have a lot of identity, but it doesn’t stay with the body after death in the way that identity sticks to an inanimate object. And soft organic matter with no measures taken to preserve it decays quite quickly. I’ve only ever once found a bone, and it was a fossil. We do have a tomb to all of the lost souls, though, where the travelers who lived and died here are buried.”

Once more, I nodded, bewildered at all of the distant death in such a lovely place, as if I had encountered a flower that was poisonous to the touch. It made me wonder again how people could live with the weight of history upon them in places such as ancient battlefields and cities that had been destroyed and then raised from their own ashes once more. If I had any doubts about it after having met Sabarin the necromancress, it would have been enough to make me believe in ghosts.

“All right, enough morbid talk,” Leah said decisively, “It’s nearly five thirty, so let’s go pry Tess out of her latest experiment and head down for dinner, because otherwise she’ll forget to eat and I’ll never hear the end of it from Mom or Rhian.”

I followed her quite quietly down the hall.

Dinner was yet another thing beyond my experience.

I’m not entirely sure whether it turned out to be a success or a dismal failure, though it had moments of both. The food was good.

Leah’s oldest sister was deep enough in whatever she was working on, which appeared to involve several dissected computers, a lot of chalk diagrams on the floor, six potatoes and a Bunsen burner, that her response to Leah popping her head in the door progressed from ‘go away’ to ‘I don’t have time for you,’ within the first minute. After several creative threats on Leah’s part about what she would do to her elder sister if she continued on a path to unintentional starvation, and several threats of creative retaliation sent right back should she follow through, mixed in with several casual insults, the Bunsen burner went out and Tess grudgingly accompanied us down towards the dining room.

Well, accompanied Leah, because she was pretending not to notice either of us, but it was towards Leah that she was offering a cold shoulder. She just failed to notice me. Unless I said something to her, in which case she deliberately ignored me if at all possible.

There was a smell of roast coming from a dining room which looked much like the rest of the house – a strangely fitting collage of what I now understood was the mix and match remains of three worlds – and we must have arrived just in time, because Rhian came through the door, smacked a bunch of forks and napkins into Tess’ hands, and disappeared back into the kitchen.

“Help me carry this, Leah,” she said, and a moment later the two of them appeared once more carrying a platter with a roast on it and an enormous glass bowl of salad, while a basket of rolls followed them obediently at about eye level. It was tailed by a doggedly wobbling butter dish.

“Don’t levitate the china!” their mother yelled after them, “Who knows when I’ll be able to find another good plate!”

“It’s just the rolls, mom!” Leah bellowed back, but she reached up with her free hand and snagged the butter dish out of the air anyway.

“Because of course you should never have to do any of the heavy work around here,” Tess grumbled from the end of the table. I was standing awkwardly, not having been given any job to do, but she deliberately looked past me and directed her comment at Leah.

“Next time you want to patch the storeroom roof by magic, be my guest,” Leah hissed back, attempting to balance the roast and the butter dish at the same time while keeping the basket of rolls in the air, “You and all your dainty little calculations.”

“Leah.” Their father had emerged from the kitchen with a pitcher of water and the carving knife, which he put down on the platter holding the roast.

“What?” she asked, trying and failing to look innocent as the basket of rolls settled to the tabletop next to the salad as quickly as was possible without tipping over.

“You know what. You haven’t stopped fighting with your sister since you arrived.”

“I’m getting along with Rhian just fine.” Rhian herself rolled her eyes as she went to the cabinet and pulled down a stack of plates and began to place them.

“Leah…”

As a witness to that somewhat embarrassing exchange, I was at a loose end until Rhian noticed me once more.

“Ellie, you can sit right here, next to Leah,” she said, and at that moment their mother came in bearing a platter of baked potatoes, steaming and already sprinkled with parsley and a bit of salt. Everyone scrambled to their seats, and I noticed that not only had I been placed on Leah’s left hand side, I was also next to her father and across from Rhian, while her mother was on the other end, presumably to prevent the glaring that was going on between Tess and Leah from escalating.

It was with a mulish look on her face that Leah started pouring the water by levitating the pitcher, and it probably wasn’t a complete accident that she poured Tess’ first, a little too fast, splashing her and her plate and placemat.

“Whoops,” she said, while Tess scowled.

“Whatever happened to no magic at the dinner table?” their mother wondered aloud.

“The fact that four out of five of us can’t resist,” her husband answered from where he was simultaneously carving the roast and buttering himself a roll. The butter knife was moving in exactly the same pattern as the carving knife, but I was somewhat relieved all the same that the knife which wasn’t directly under the visible control of a human being was the blunt one.

“Not so much butter dear.”

“I like butter.”

“Yeah, but Da, your heart doesn’t,” Rhian interjected, helping herself to a roll. “You know what the doctor said.”

“After everything I’ve done in my life, I seriously doubt that butter on a roll is going to kill me, Sabarin. And Rhian, the doctor only said that he’d start to worry if my cholesterol level rose.”

“Wait, when was this?” Leah asked, “No one told me about this.”

“It was -” Rhia started to explain.

“Not a big deal,” her father cut in, “nothing to worry about.” He continued to serve the roast, finishing up with Rhian’s plate, and since everyone had passed the potatoes, salad and rolls by now, we all started eating.

“Your father had a few tests done,” their mother explained, “it turns out he, and therefore you girls, have a genetic predisposition for having high levels of cholesterol.”

“Not high enough to worry about though.”

“High enough to start eating less of it.”

“When was this?” Leah demanded of her sisters as their parents settled into what appeared to be a comfortable argument. Rhian opened her mouth to explain, but Tess, unexpectedly, beat her to it.

“The October before last,” she said, “Mom finally dragged Dad into the doctors’ so that they could examine his heart.”

Leah’s fork clattered on her plate. I seriously considered the fact that if I were her, with the ability to spontaneously travel to another world, and with the look of complete and utter regret on her face, I would have been long gone, especially now that everyone in the room was looking at her.

“He started showing some symptoms after you left Avarin,” Tess said to Leah in a conversational tone that nonetheless seemed to have a devastating effect. If I had to guess at Leah’s emotions, she was warring between some sort of guilt and the desire to punch her older sister.

There was quiet in the room for a moment.

“It was nothing to worry about,” their father said, “I’m just not as young as I once was, and I don’t mind admitting it. After all, I have three beautiful grown-up daughters, and I earned every single one of these grey hairs.”

“That you did, Landon,” their mother agreed, too quickly, “Though only half of them are from the girls. Do you remember that time in Lycea…?”

And before I knew it, the conversation had resumed again, everyone eating and laughing as the two adults traded telling wild tales of the magic and magicians of worlds that passed me by in a blur of unanchored names, some of which were so well-known that the girls all chimed in with the funny or exciting bits. I couldn’t help but loose myself in them, especially relieved that no one in this unknown and somewhat intimidating house required me to participate in the conversation except as an attentive listener, and before long I’d heard about giant centipedes in a world without a name, an exploding steamboat, how to ride a camel, and the incomprehensible accent of a magician named Gvarrhin, which had caused the delivery of a hundred jars of pickled eels.

Just as I was laughing over the mental image of pickled eels to a magician desperate for a specific type of wheel, I glanced over at Leah. She was picking at her plate, biting her lip, and generally advertizing to everyone who knew her as well as I did that something was wrong. I gave her a nudge with my knee under the table, as Rhian finally stopped laughing over the eels and launched into a discussion of something that had happened at her school with her parents, about which her mother was horrified and her father slightly amused.

“It’s all right, mom,” she insisted, “they shouldn’t have to put me in just because of who you are.”

“Yes, but they’re singling you out unfairly…”

“Everything all right?” I asked Leah, under cover of their conversation. “You look like…” I didn’t finish the sentence, because in truth I didn’t know exactly what she looked like, but I let it trail away gently into the potato she was crushing with undue force.

“No, I’m fine,” she lied, looking up at me briefly and not meeting my eyes, “maybe a little tired. And I had forgotten that Rhian always burns the potatoes.”

“I did not!” Rhian exclaimed, seemingly eager to switch conversations, since her mother was wearing a frown that was a universal property of all mothers who are making up their minds to do something. “Ellie, did you get a burnt potato?”

“No,” I replied, “they were delicious.”

“See?” she said triumphantly, “I don’t know how you found her, Leah, but I think we ought to keep her. At least someone around here is capable of appreciating someone else’s cooking.”

I didn’t know if her target for the last comment was Leah or Tess, who hadn’t touched her potato in the least, and had only eaten about half of her roast, most of a roll, and some salad, and was scribbling busily on a napkin with the pen that she had conjured from somewhere, possibly in the most literal sense of the word.

Tess looked up distractedly. “I ate it.”

“About a third of it.”

“Tess, please eat something before you start in on another experiment,” their mother interrupted, “Do you want another roll? Some salad? Roast?”

It appeared as if Tess had only just now realized that her plate wasn’t empty. “I just thought of something,” she offered as an explanation. She cut a chunk off of her now-cold roast and put it in her mouth obediently, before setting the fork down again and halting with her scribbled-on napkin halfway to her mouth. Rhian passed her a fresh one automatically and rescued the pen from ending up in the butter dish.

“She still writing on napkins?” Leah asked of her younger sister, pointedly ignoring Tess, and Rhian rolled her eyes.

“Just because your thoughts pass through your mind at the speed of glaciers doesn’t mean that the rest of us can wait until a geologic age has passed.”

“Your attention span has a half life of a nanosecond.”

“If the two of you don’t shut up for five minutes I’m dumping the salad dressing on you.” This last was Rhian. “Honestly, what are you, twelve?”

“Fourteen,” Tess replied, and Leah’s face darkened a bit. I suspected that anything that came out of Tess’ mouth was only going to serve to wind her up for the rest of the night, since I didn’t see what was so bad about a simple number.

“No salad dressing dumping will be necessary,” their mother said. “Leah, why don’t you start clearing plates – no, not that way,” she amended as several of the plates on the table immediately rose into the air, and Rhian’s almost clipped her on the chin, “and Rhian can bring in the dessert.”

Their father perked up at the mention of desert, while a scowling Leah started stacking plates by hand.

“It’s made mostly of yogurt, Dad,” Rhian said, patting him on the shoulder as she dropped another sliver of roast on Tess’ plate, for which she received a peeved look that she paid no attention to, and headed into the kitchen with the leftover roast. Leah levitated the empty breadbasket behind her on her way out with the plates, just as their father was about to reach for another roll. I made a move to help with the clearing up, but both of Leah’s parents had turned to me in the absence of two thirds of their daughters, and I suddenly felt quite trapped.

“So,” Leah’s mother said with a smile that I classified under politely scary, though probably not intentionally so, “We’ve heard a lot about you this last year.”

“Um… Good things, I hope?” My sense of humor was going to get kicked to the curb if it kept bringing out such trite phrases to break the ice with these people. They were Leah’s family, so of course I wanted to like them, and for them to like me, but you have to admit it’s hard to face down a necromancress and an archmage in their own dining room and treat them like a normal pair of parents. Also, the fact that they were working together, very subtly, to observe and investigate me was something I hadn’t had a lot of experience with.

“I’ll just take my plate in and go back upstairs.” Tess unwittingly provided me with an escape from her curious parents as she made as if to rise from the table.

“But you’ve barely touched your roast.”

Tess shrugged. “I’ve got an experiment all ready to go upstairs and I need to adjust the current to the potatoes.”

“So that’s where all the potatoes went!” Rhian exclaimed as she headed back in with six dainty bowls of something white and orange. The salad bowl passed sneakily behind her, four feet off the ground, chased by the butter dish, and I could only assume that Leah couldn’t be bothered to come in and stack those like a normal person.

“Not all of them.”

“And here I thought that for once in your life, you realized you were hungry and had gotten a snack…” Rhian shook her head.

Tess made a face. “Thank you, mom. Get off my case.”

“Tessandra, it really wouldn’t hurt for you to eat a little more,” their father put in, hoping to quell what was likely to become an argument between his daughters. He dropped his knife and dirty napkin on the potato platter as it crept past, settling heavily down towards the floor and then scooting through to the kitchen at a height of about six inches. “You’re going to need the energy when you want to do any major spells.”

“I’ll eat then,” she replied, “Not when I’m busy.”

“No you won’t, you’ll be preparing all your diagrams for it,” Rhian contradicted her. “And it’s your fault if you don’t like the food when you’ve let it go cold.”

“Hey, I know,” Leah said brightly from the doorway, where she had apparently finished clearing plates, “Why don’t we take all the fattening food out of Dad’s diet and feed it to Tess?”

I wasn’t sure which of the two looked more alarmed at the suggestion.

“I don’t have time for…” Tess protested immediately.

“Yes, you do. Finish at least something on that plate,” her mother instructed. “Whatever it is you’re trying to discover will be as available in half an hour as it is right now. And do remember to dispose of those potatoes when you’re done with them.”

“Last thing we want is moldy half-animated potatoes running around the house,” Leah agreed blithely, and I wasn’t entirely sure how much of that was meant to be taken literally. I really shouldn’t be surprised at all anymore.

“Thank you for that charming reminder of the fact that you increase this house’s chaos tenfold,” Rhian said airily. “And for that disturbing mental image that is likely to cause me never to look at those leftover potatoes the same way again.”

“I can’t help it if they already have eyes…”

“Right. Start shoveling your dessert in your face and never say that again.”

I looked around the whole table and saw that everyone was taking this in stride. Leah smirked at me as she watched out of the corner of my eye.

“Mom’s a necromancress,” she reminded me, snickering. “Anything you hear about has probably already happened, and if it didn’t it probably will.”

“…Potatoes?” I said, not entirely sure that I even wanted to know.

“Generally harmless,” her father said, “Except the one time when the girls built a potato gun and continued cannoning the house with spuds until they broke a window. I see that Leah likes to wind you up as well as everyone else.”

I blushed, and Rhian and Tess laughed while Leah looked entirely unrepentant. And here I thought I had a handle on when she was lying.

Everyone dug in on a silence that was significantly less tense than it had been mere moments ago.

“This is good,” Leah’s father said to Rhian, “what is it?”

“Caramel oranges,” she replied, “It’s new in Dalsten, and it’s really not hard to make at all. You could put it in the blender and make a smoothie, but I kind of like it this way.”

“You made this?” I asked politely.

“Yup. That and the rolls and potatoes,” Rhian replied, “I do a lot of cooking around here, since Leah and Tess are more or less banned from the kitchen.”

“Banned from the kitchen?” I asked, sensing a story of the kind that Leah would probably never be persuaded to tell me on her own. “Why?”

“Well, Tess because of a string of incidents that started with what we like to call ‘tail of newt soup’ and -”

“It was a salamander.”

“- ending with the fact that no one cares if it was in the name of science, no person should be expected to put up with finding dead frogs in the freezer on top of their lemon pops. Especially not at the age of six.”

“The process of mummification -”

“Has already been thoroughly researched by someone else in a proper laboratory, Tess. Not in an otherwise sanitary kitchen and most definitely not in the orange juice, salted or not.”

I made a mental note never to drink the orange juice in this house regardless. It just wasn’t worth it.

“Don’t forget the pasta,” Leah put in quickly, and Rhian groaned theatrically.

“That one you had to see to believe,” she told me, “I found linguine on the ceiling a month later. Tess’ sins against the culinary world are too many to name.”

Tess was scowling at her caramel oranges. “I’m not the one who makes trouble in the kitchen, Leah is,” she grumbled.

“Oh, don’t worry about it, I haven’t forgotten Leah,” Rhian said with a big grin. Her mother and father were suppressing laughter at this point, so I assumed they already knew what was coming. And Rhian was hamming it up. “Have you ever seen Leah cook, Ellie?”

I had to admit that I hadn’t, because sandwiches didn’t exactly count and neither did microwave oatmeal or ramen.

“Would she still be sitting here if she had?” Tess asked.

“The problem with putting Leah in the kitchen,” Rhian continued over her sister, “is that she is the single most impatient person in the universe, and she’s a mage. Naturally, something that takes about ten minutes to make is fine and good, but if you have to heat something for longer than twenty minutes – say, if you’re baking…”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Leah said defensively, “and it was for a good cause.”

“Yeah, a lovely birthday for mom, cleaning that up.”

“If flour and powdered sugar are that flammable, they should come with a warning label.”

“Most things are flammable,” Tess said in a superior voice, “eventually.”

“How was I to know?”

“What,” I asked, finally tired of all the allusions, “actually happened?”

Rhian’s grin would not have been out of place on the Cheshire Cat. Or a shark.

“Three words,” she said, “exploding Bundt cake.”

It was at this point that everyone in the room besides me finally cracked and burst out laughing. Tess was snickering, Leah was struggling to keep her mask of disgruntlement intact, and Rhian and their father were practically falling out of their chairs, while their mother shook her head, chuckling. The mental image that inevitably formed – that of a very angry young Leah covered in cake – filtered through my brain and settled there like a brick, and I started giggling as well.

“Okay, it was pretty bad,” Leah finally admitted.

“Bad?” her mother asked, “We had to fix the roof!”

“And we had nothing but cold food for nearly a month while mom tried to find a new oven!” Rhian said, shouting with laughter.

“To this day, I do believe that there is a badly beaten Bundt cake pan embedded in the ground somewhere on this island,” their father said, attempting to keep a straight face.

It was an extremely unlikely meteor.

“Well, if I find it, I’ll let you know,” I said, eliciting another wave of laughter.