by Kevin Hearne
“This is worse than a Tommywood rager,” she told Mingo, who aimed a peck at her eye.
Walking up and down the ferry docks, she grew increasingly frustrated. Where was Dock 76.4? And why would anyone name a dock that? The lake wasn’t even that big; it seemed to exist only to get students to and from the school, which was an activity that should happen only a few times a year and not require its own dock. And yet, as she walked up and down the space between Docks 76 and 77, tugging her angry flamingo, she couldn’t find her goal.
“Ol’ Dock 76.4,” someone said. “Crowded as all bleedin’ get-out with tourists every year. Can’t take a step without crushin’ a crayfish or gettin’ pecked by a giant chicken or emotionally antagonized by a pony.”
Tempest whirled around, finding an old man standing there with a nervous redheaded woman in her thirties and her sleeping flamingo.
“Did you say Dock 76.4?” Tempest asked. “I can’t find it.”
The old man’s face split in a kind grin. “Oh, it’s easy, lass. You just got to jump off into the space between Docks 76 and 77.”
“Really? Because that makes no sense.”
The old man winked at her, and the younger woman with him gave Tempest an encouraging smile.
“It makes sense to lawyers,” the man said. “It’s all about being fearless, ye see.”
So Tempest grabbed hold of her boxes and her flamingo leash, took a deep breath, and jumped.
They were laughing before she hit the water with a splash, tugged down by her boxes. As she spluttered and struggled, the flamingo trying to crawl on her head and chase shrimp at the same time, the old man yelled, “It was a joke, fool. You just got to wait until the Bogtorts ferry pulls up to Dock 76. The .4 is a funny old typo.”
It took a good twenty minutes for Tempest to swim to the shore, drag her sodden bags and boxes and flamingo up the rocks, and return to her place on the dock. The old man and the redhead were gone, and as the ferry pulled up, a handsome man in a poet’s blouse and a hat shaped like a lion turned to her with a smile.
“I’m Tempest,” she said, hoping to make a friend.
“You’re a right dummy,” the man said. “D’you jump off a dock every time someone tells you to? Ain’t gonner make it long at Bogtorts.”
When it was her turn to board, Tempest watched where the blouse-wearing man went and chose a seat in the opposite direction.
The ferry was the biggest boat Tempest had ever seen, big enough to have two decks and an indoor toilet. She was the only person in her row in back, but at least she had the window to herself. As the ferry laboriously chugged toward the looming school, Tempest looked around the boat. The redheaded woman and the man in the poet’s blouse were talking to the blond woman from Madam Merkin’s, as their flamingos pointedly ignored each other. Two men with soul patches were engaged in an attempt to set fire to the tail of a halfling man’s emotional-support horse. There was a flamingo fight ring going on in one corner, and something noisy in the loo suggested either a mugging or athletic coitus.
Taking a deep, cleansing breath, Tempest closed her eyes and struggled for control. She was going to school to become a lawyer so that she could help people and pay it forward. She wasn’t here to make friends, although she very much wished to do so. Nor was she here to party or cause mischief; she was here to learn. Thanks to her sisters and to Luc’s generosity, she had everything she needed, even if it was all a bit wet and bedraggled. She could do this.
The ferry docked, and a series of gnomeric-automaton-driven carriages pulled up to deliver the new students through the dark forest and up to the school. Tempest hopped into one but wondered what was the point of making it so difficult to get to the university itself; surely they could’ve easily taken the road like normal people? Was it to impress upon them the intense journey they’d be undergoing as they became lawyers? Was it to test their patience and commitment?
“No, they’re just jerks who think it’s funny.”
Tempest was rudely awakened from her reverie and had to stare at the strange man facing her across the gnomeric carriage. He wore funny wire-rimmed glasses and had half his hair singed off; a huge red scar slashed through one milky eye.
“Did you just read my mind?” she asked.
“No. You were talking out loud. It was weird.”
The man’s emotional-support horse snorted in agreement. They were alone in the carriage, the last one in the line.
“The current headmaster is an elf, you see,” he went on. “Got expelled from the Morningwood for being a lawyer. Loves pranks. Makes the staircases move and plants venomous snakes in the desks for jollies. You get used to it.” She cocked her head at him. “Oh, I’m Gary, by the way. Gary Motter. Around here, they call me the Chosen One.”
“I’m Tempest.” She thought about offering to shake hands, but Gary’s hands were covered in horse dander. “Um, what were you chosen for?”
Gary laughed. “No, like the Chosen One, capital C and O. See, when I was a baby, the world’s most evil wizard—”
The carriage, luckily, rolled to a halt in front of the grand door to the university just then, and the driver blared, “Let’s all get out without a shout!” in a cheerful robotic voice.
Tempest jumped down and hurried to put as much space between her and Gary as possible. He sounded like a total nutter, and probably the only reason they’d had the carriage to themselves was that they were already the biggest pariahs in the school. An old man in heavy velvet robes with a stuffed owl on his hat waited in the grand foyer to welcome them, but Tempest was too busy looking around to listen to anything he said. Surely there would be an orientation, or a student peer group, or some kind of pamphlet she could read?
The décor was fascinating and strange, and she couldn’t stop staring. The rugs had statutes and writs woven into them and the tapestries were clearly Pickleangelos, most of which involved judges in curly white wigs getting defenestrated. But what really caught and held her attention—and made her gorge partially rise—were the recurring motifs seen in various sculptures, pennants, and ceiling frescoes. Roaches, worms, mosquitoes, and ticks covered almost every surface and had no business on wallpaper, as far as Tempest was concerned.
The group was led into a huge hall and seated at the first of five long wooden picnic tables, the hard seats of which immediately made everyone over thirty shift about in abject discomfort. Although the new students’ table had been empty, the other four tables were full of upperclassmen, already in their uniform robes. They watched the newcomers, snickering. The old man in the owl hat shuffled to a sort of stage in the front of the room and held up a ragged garment that looked like it had been found in the garbage.
“And now you will be called one by one in a random order, and I will place the Sifting Scarf over your nose and mouth,” the old man said tiredly.
“Wait, what?” Tempest barked, but everyone else was too excited to care.
“Evilyn Evilla,” the old man yelled, and the blond woman from the robe shop proudly sashayed onto the stage beside him. He wrapped the scarf around her face, and she just stood there, not breathing, and after five seconds the scarf yelled, “Mosquitopuff!”
Evilyn grinned and hopped down to sit with a bunch of people wearing red scarves and making concerted buzzing noises like some kind of cheer.
“Uh, what is happening?” Tempest asked Gary, who had appeared by her side, despite the fact that her flamingo kept poking at his crotch.
“You see, the Sifting Scarf is an ancient magical object spelled to place each student in the correct Bogtorts Box. So you’ll live in that dorm, eat with that group, be friends with only those people, wear only that group’s colors—”
“But I’m an adult with free will,” she said, increasingly uncomfortable.
&nb
sp; “Not once you’ve been sifted.”
“Tempest Willow!” the old man boomed.
Leaving her wet boxes and angry flamingo by Gary, and noting that she was currently the only student still bogged down with possessions and not wearing her school robes, Tempest walked up the stone steps and took her place on the dais. The old man wrapped the scarf around her mouth, and she struggled not to vomit. It smelled like a hundred years of bad perfume, onion and cabbage breath, and fear burps.
“Let’s see, let’s see. Where to stuff you?” a voice whispered in her ear. “Wormidor is for those who can wriggle off the hook and bounce back twice as hard when destroyed. Roachcraw is for those who can outlast anything, who can hide the truth, who can drop from the ceiling and surprise the jury. Slithertick is for the students who will dig in their pincers and suck their opponent dry, leaving them weak and diseased. And Mosquitopuff is for those who are stealthy but annoying, who will keep their enemies awake all night and leave them itchy, who can suck the blood out of any stone.”
“None of those sound at all like me,” Tempest protested in a whisper.
“But where to put you!” the scarf went on. “You’re pretty smart, so Roachcraw might be nice. Do you like to skitter?”
“No. I don’t feel like I connect with any of those…boxes.”
“Wormidor could work.”
“No.”
“Slithertick?”
“Ugh. Gods. That’s even worse. Like, slithering and ticks? No thanks.”
“Then it must be Mosquitopuff,” the scarf suggested.
“Not if that Evilyn woman is in there. She’s awful.”
“But the Mosquitopuff swarm can help you on your way!”
“I honestly hate all four choices, Scarf-guy. Like, I just want to become a lawyer. I don’t want to be divided up according to stupid artificial lines and be sectioned off with a bunch of randos. I’m a serious student, and—”
“Ah, my dear,” the scarf crooned. “Perhaps you are that rare creature. A divergent. Someone who fits in all four boxes equally well and equally badly.”
Tempest exhaled in relief. “Yes. Yes, that sounds exactly like me.”
“Kidding!” the scarf chortled. “Everyone fits in a box. We just have to find the right box and cram you in there. Sometimes it can help if you have a preference. Hmm?”
The scarf paused, and Tempest realized that whatever she chose now would influence the next four years of her life—and everything that came after that. This decision would determine her friends, her classes, her specialty, which law firm she interned at, where she would eventually make partner. She had to make the right choice in this precise moment, or her entire life would fall apart like a squashed roach underfoot.
“I choose…”
“Yes?”
“To leave this insane so-called school.”
Reaching up, she unwrapped the scarf from her face, took a welcome breath of unfunky air, threw the scarf on the ground, and bolted. She left the sodden box of robes under Gary’s pony but took her books and dragged her idiotic mail flamingo along behind her. For once, it obeyed, awkwardly trotting by her side and letting out weird little awk-awk noises, like it, too, was glad to be far away from Gary Motter’s crotch.
Bolting out the front door and into the glaring sun of late afternoon, Tempest considered the automaton carriages lined up along the road to the ferry dock. Instead, she took the perfectly normal road, hailed a real carriage with a real driver, and was back in Bustardo in about fifteen minutes.
Flamingo in tow, she ran for the docks, hoping she wasn’t too late.
Hoping The Puffy Peach hadn’t left yet.
She’d made her choice.
It was widely considered unsafe for centaurs to be wandering alone outside the Centaur Pastures. Gryphons, trolls, giants, and halflings wanted to eat them; dwarves on Meadschpringå wanted to kill them; elves took them hostage and held them for ridiculous cheese ransoms; but humans were the worst. Every centaur foal learned the six-line teaching song:
Never trot in human cities
Because they’ll try to take your kidneys!
If you do go, see what I mean
When you wake up missing your spleen.
They’ll draw the marrow from your bones
And make a tonic from your gallstones.
Such songs, of course, were designed to encourage questions from foals, and Vic had fired some at his revered dam, Barfing August:
Why do they want our kidneys?
Because we have two sets of them leading to a single bladder and they think we don’t need them all, and furthermore, they believe they’re entitled to take them.
Why do they feel entitled?
Humans look upon us as animals, son, and they feel entitled to do anything they want to animals.
But aren’t we part human too?
Yes, but humans always tend to focus on the part that doesn’t look just like them.
What the heck is a gallstone?
Gallstones accumulate in your gallbladder over many years. They’re basically nuggets of hardened cholesterol. The humans grind them into powder and put them in fruity drinks because they think it will make them perform well during mating season.
What’s mating season?
Let’s talk about that some other night.
Does the drink work?
No. Unless by working you mean it eventually kills them. Then it works great.
Then why do they think it’s great for mating season?
Because humans are stupid, son. Stupid and deadly. Don’t go into their cities.
As a result of that conversation, Vic had always suspected himself to be half stupidly deadly. But he was all hungry at the moment, and the captain’s decision to grant his crew an afternoon of shore leave in the human port city of Bustardo gave Vic the perfect chance to find enough food to fill both of his stomachs for the first time in weeks.
Ship’s biscuits weren’t sufficient; he needed a lot of calories to keep his body going, and he’d secretly been conjuring cupcakes and fruitcake during the voyage and scarfing them down when no one was looking; as a result, he was looking a bit less cut and ripped. So despite the warnings he’d received in his youth, he felt it worth the risk to venture into a strange city so he could feel full again. And besides, nothing bad had happened to him while he’d been staying in Sullenne—he’d had more trouble from other centaurs at the gym than he’d had from humans. That was one of the many benefits of being swole, or at least slabby: Nobody wanted to risk being pounded into jelly by his fists, much less his hooves.
His best bet, according to Qobayne, was to find a diner that served breakfast all day, which might provide gallons of steel-cut oatmeal to go with his bacon and eggs. His second stomach was not a true horse stomach, because he didn’t have to digest grass; it was designed more along human lines but was very efficient at the processing of grains and fruits, and it dumped its load, so to speak, into a bowel that merged with the one from the human stomach and led to a “common rectum,” which was terminology that Vic despised. He thought he had an extraordinary rectum.
As Vic trotted down the gangplank to the docks, humans uttered startled exclamations of surprise at his approach and sometimes squeaked in fear. They didn’t get too many centaurs around here, apparently. Their fear was delicious but not nutritious. Vic needed victuals. His stomachs were growling. The other crew members were going off in groups and clumps on other errands and Vic was left alone to find his own way.
“You there.” He pointed at a slim man cowering against the wall of a kuffee shop. “Tell me where I can find a diner with plenty of good food.” Captain Luc had paid them each a small purse of fickels for their work aboard ship so far, and he was anxious to spend it.
> “Th-th-the Knacker Barrel has great f-f-food. And large booths.”
Vic took a couple of menacing steps forward. “Knacker Barrel? Are you saying that because of my equine posterior?”
“No, no, all manner of beings eat there! Plenty of centaurs!”
“Where is it?”
The man pointed a quivering finger. “Three blocks that way, on your left.”
“Thank you.” Vic clopped down the main street of Bustardo, glaring at humans who dared to make eye contact with him. He wanted them to think about losing organs if they messed with him instead of plotting how they could take his. At least the humans on the ship didn’t seem particularly interested in his innards; he’d never once awakened to find someone poking his gut to assess the tenderness of his filets.
Spotting the Knacker Barrel, he noted a long row of rocking chairs out front, which made him feel a bit left out. But this was a human city—of course they weren’t thinking about the needs of other species. The door was extra wide and tall, at least, and his hooves clattered on the wooden floorboards as he entered a claustrophobic sort of gift shop full of aged and dusty tchotchkes. The walls were covered in old signs and garbage, not to mention several offensive harnesses, saddles, and bridles. Vic almost turned around, but then he smelled grease, and his stomach growled. Politely elbowing his way to the counter, he requested a table and was quickly ushered to a spacious high-top in a corner. That, at least, was just his size. His waiter appeared, greeting him with a welcome enthusiasm, and he ordered a dozen scrambled eggs, a steak cooked medium, five orders of hash browns with onions, and all the oatmeal they had, with plenty of brown sugar, cinnamon, and apples—hold the raisins.
“All the oatmeal?” his server asked. He was a diminutive person who sweated a lot. The kitchen must be hot, or perhaps the man really liked his meat.
“All of the oatmeal,” Vic confirmed.
“That would be, like, twenty bowls or something.”
“Bring it here now, sir. My horse half hungers for nourishment.”