A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  Learning all these mineral names would never have been my favourite thing, either, but I got decent enough at memorizing stuff. How much water to how much solid in what kind of glue, that sort of thing, or how fast you want the lathe to be turning for what diameter of workpiece and what that means about where you put the belt on the pulleys.

  It’s surprisingly easy to just…eat the book. You don’t consume the physical book, but getting a complete copy into your metaphysical self is not a whole lot harder than picking up the physical book, only in some sideways-to-your-talent sort of way. It’s also surprisingly useless, since all you’ve got is a record of what’s in the book, right down to the tea-stains and inky thumb-print smudges. You’ve still got to read the thing and do the work of understanding. The only real advantage is not having to carry the book around.

  “Producing a tangible copy is next year,” Wake says. “Lamentable handwriting has been perpetuated for millennia in this way.”

  Eating the book, well, the library in the shared half of our mind started as a vague notion that there would be common knowledge. Books make a good metaphor, and it turns out we don’t both have to learn something. If we can get it into the common half, it’s really there for both of us. Having the metaphorical metaphysical page there to add to the idea of a book in our joint head makes the whole memorization process much easier for Dove, too, that’s close enough to hands in some way the physical book isn’t.

  It’s easier if we both do it, and it’s easier still if we do the book-lift a page at a time, so we spend a lot of time sitting in a window sharing a book. Usually sharing eyes. Books, big reference books full of the names of dirt particularly, get in the way of resting your head in somebody’s lap.

  It took about five days of watching us fuss with this for Chloris to hiss and produce an illusion-binding of an odd flowing book-stand thing that completely solved the one lap problem. “If you’re going to go using one set of eyes anyway,” Chloris had said. I’d said thank you very carefully. Dove had said thank you, too, rather gently.

  The other head-on-lap problem is that my neck is too short. Top of my head against Dove’s leg works fine, as long as I don’t get too tranced out and start trying to match Dove’s double heartbeat.

  Grue had pointed out, second shape-shifting class after I figured out how to shape-shift at all, that I’d stopped having a heartbeat. Grue looked amused. I’d gone over a bit of what I’d done, and there’d been a solemn nod and no reduction in Grue’s apparent lurking desire to giggle. The Edgar-statue is apparently a shape-anchor, it’s not unknown, it’s a good way to make sure you’ve got a stable default, though it’s likely to make turning into a tree harder than otherwise. I’ll take it, all the same, unsuspected preference for a distributed circulatory system and all.

  Zora has a couple really bad days, wailing-and-snorfling sorts of days. The news that Zora’s oldest sister is having a baby sets it off. As news, it’s good news; Zora’s been asked to come visit for the naming, and the combination of the tactful absence of ‘come home’ in the letter, along with the recognition that maybe Zora won’t be able to travel, and the sudden crashing awareness that, if Zora survives sorcery, Zora’s going to outlive the incipient kid put Zora through the Independent loss of family thing in one abrupt realization. Well, outlive, it’s not precisely immediate loss. The awareness of not being around for the kid growing up might have been the worst part. I wind up doing a lot of back patting and saying ‘there-there’, at neither of which am I any kind of skilled.

  Dove mostly seems to be getting better, inside. Getting those Line-troopers out of the hospital in Headwaters did something good. They were hurt under Dove’s authority, and that matters.

  It’s not, it’s increasingly obviously not, completely splendid in there, Dove’s experiencing sorcery school, the entire ‘try not to kill yourself, real-dead-in-the-deadline, turn into another form of life’ reality of the whole, not the individual days, as a relaxing change. Not even close to making the best of it, either, that way some people have of not expecting their life to be reasonable. So far as I can tell, it’s plain factual.

  Expressing concern mostly gets my hair ruffled. “The Captain suggested I give it time; Halt cautioned me not to be in a hurry. Going to try listening to advice for a change.”

  I give a solemn nod my best try, then pick Dove up and twirl. It’s become a surprisingly easy thing to do.

  Not like there isn’t enough space in here.

  The result is an amazing grin and Dove picking me up and twirling me about, which is hardly grounds for complaint.

  We get Zora’s best try at looking indulgent. Zora’s about decided looking nauseated doesn’t work.

  Somewhere in there I get a straightforward letter from Flaed. I suppose it’s technically a reply, I did write back, but there’s no real mention of that letter. Flaed’s sorry for having had so much trouble with the idea that I might be a sorcerer, not that the knowledge doesn’t still trouble Flaed’s understanding but it wasn’t expressed well. That takes half a page or so, plus a wish that studying isn’t too awful. Then there’s a couple pages of reasonably linear descriptions of where Flaed is and what the doings have been.

  It’s friendly, I’m glad to see it, and I have to think about whether or not it’s a good idea to pretend as much as it would feel like pretending to answer. It’s not like I can write about the mechanics of shape-shifting for small talk. “Making stuff,” Dove says. “Just what, no how.”

  I nod, and slide Thanks, and a quantity of affection toward Dove. That advice makes it much easier to write a letter; there’s the bathtubs, there’s the fact of Block’s exercises, let’s call them exercises, though that isn’t working so well for Zora lately, it’s very obvious that the whole point is an ability to kill people and that bothers Zora in ways increasingly difficult to ignore as the exercises feel less and less like theory. We’ve made some copper pans and a stack of baking sheets for ourselves, swapped someone their old copper water tank for a foamed-glass one. Blossom and Wake have to be getting bored running wards for us, but if they are, it doesn’t show. They’re both emphatic that the plan won’t change about that; wards are one of the last things, after we’ve got connecting as a truly firm habit.

  I do the head-tip thing, what would be onto Dove’s shoulder without five metres’ distance between us on the windowsill. Dove’s head tips sideways back. There’s a real sense in which Dove’s always right there.

  Chloris makes, I don’t know what to call it. It’s a noise. I don’t think it’s at the pen or the writing, Chloris made a switchable illusion of a writing desk and is sitting at it, working on the kind of notes that Chloris finds work best for remembering lists of facts. The desk is really simple, just a seat and a writing surface, no drawers or any moving parts, but it gives me ideas about how Halt manages to always have that chair.

  Zora, who is lying down past me, head into the room with the book on the floor, looks up at Chloris and says “We could get better at shape-shifting and take turns being the burly lad?”

  You can feel the spike of something from Chloris, I’m not sure that wasn’t physical movement in Chloris’ hair, and then control coming down, face, temper, tongue. It gets your attention.

  “I am not prim, I don’t think you can go collect half a barge team in a tavern and properly expect them to take entirely sequential turns, I can manage to be gracious refusing enquiries I should never have considered to accept, I can even mostly encompass this awareness that our course of study requires me to become something inhuman.”

  Chloris’ primness isn’t evenly distributed, I’ll go that far.

  “I am having a lot of trouble with loneliness.” Same declarative voice, out of a suddenly really not angry Chloris. “Abandoning my sense of self would not improve matters.”

  “They’ll let you into a tavern.” Zora is trying hard to be fair. Maybe too hard, and taking loneliness for more of a euphemism than Chloris means.

  “
Where I have to worry about pulling the life out of somebody in a fit of enthusiasm.” Chloris sounds really sad about that. Which is good, I suppose, being sad at the specific prospect. Necromancers enough in the Bad Old Days who weren’t sad at all, who thought that was the best thing and made a habit of it.

  “I asked Wake about it.” This is the voice equivalent of the death-of-all-that-lives serene countenance, it doesn’t sound like Chloris except it does. “It’s entirely legal in cases of natural or easeful deaths, it’s entirely fine to do whatever the shade agrees with, statistically they mostly will, it sends them on in the memory of their youth, it might help.”

  Even Wake won’t claim to know what happens to the dead. The metaphysical part goes somewhere, strong necromancers have this sense of where you go to go there, the place the journey starts, and that’s it. After that, there’s no knowledge at all, and only really thin inference.

  “Bit of a wait.” Dove can, somehow, sound commiserative in a way that doesn’t set Chloris off. If there’s a way for me to do that I haven’t found it.

  “The two male students, since, saving Zora’s pardon, it has to be a fellow-student and I’ve never had much inclination for the lasses, one of them left and even if Kynefrid had stayed, Kynefrid had no interest but the other lads anyway.”

  Chloris inhales carefully.

  “The other one appears to be an odd mix of revoltingly cute and oblivious.”

  Not something I was expecting Chloris to say. Completely not. Dove sort of snickers at me inside our head. Not wrong about cute, Dove says.

  Zora’s rolled half up to look down the windowsill. “What is going on with you two?” Zora makes a vaguely placatory gesture. “I know it’s not really my business only we’re all something, and it’s looking really odd.”

  Dove nods. “I promised myself that the next time my hopeful nature got the better of me, I wasn’t going to do anything about it for a year.” That means something to Zora and Chloris, they’re nodding.

  Help?

  “Edgar, well, Halt used the word hatch, and Ed hasn’t yet.”

  “Hatch?” says Chloris.

  Breathe. Your heart can’t stop anymore, you didn’t keep it, just breathe. There’s a huge difference between Dove knowing and anybody else, if I did still have a heart I might be bleeding from the eyes in panic.

  “I don’t ask Halt about word choice. I’m sure it’s something real, I’m sure I don’t feel like an egg, I’m sure I don’t know what an egg feels like.”

  “So you’re waiting to find out what you hatch into?”

  “What, and when.”

  There’s a look from Dove. I’m not sure it shows, not a face thing.

  “How long, too, it could have sorta started. Halt showed up for the first shape-shifting class, I don’t think that was overcaution.”

  There’s a collective mental pause as everyone tries to produce a response to ‘overcautious Halt’ as an idea.

  “Edgar, why does hatching matter?” Chloris, well, curious is better than angry. Has to be.

  “Halt’s worried about it?” That gets me three narrowed looks.

  “I have no actual idea, I’m not asking, I don’t want to think about it, what we think about tends to become real, it moves the odds. This — ” a wave at the house, the Tall Woods, all of it — “wasn’t a whole lot more than doing that on purpose. If it was important that I focus on something, Halt would have told me. Halt hasn’t, I’m trying not to think about it so I don’t get all fixated on a bad outcome.”

  “So hatching isn’t what you’re doing with Dove.” Zora’s rolled the rest of the way over, looking up but scooted deeper into the windowsill to avoid the ceiling grabbing at the ability to think.

  “There are four things you can do about consonance: take off ‘ignore it’, because it’s not mild consonance. Building a joint metaphysical brain’s what we picked.” Dove sounds just a little dry.

  “Consonance makes you cuddle like, like newlyweds?” Zora does doubtful with real depth to it. Marriage was rare in Wending, rare most places in the Commonweal-as-it-was. In the Creeks, among Creeks, marriage is unheard of, it’s viewed as evidence of madness, possibly socially functional madness. Zora’s using a locally legendary example. “When you’re not? Or lovers at all, or want to be?”

  Dove makes a passing gesture at me, which I suppose is fair. It’s not like Dove doesn’t know the panic has passed. Doesn’t mean I can think of what to say quickly.

  “Kynefrid was sure you weren’t one for the lads.” Chloris says this slowly.

  “I wasn’t. Whatever happened when the parasite came out more or less shut down any experience of sexual attraction.”

  Which is something I am so entirely glad I didn’t, won’t, have to explain to Flaed. It would have been difficult, when that was past half of what we had.

  I know Dove’s figured it out, we didn’t talk about it directly but I was hoping we wouldn’t have to. It’s not something Dove’s at all nervous about, which would be more reassuring if I could think of anything that did make Dove nervous. I suppose Zora and Chloris do deserve to know, we are, all four, a something.

  “Whatever there is to hatch into, back in my metaphysical self, thinks you smell good. Tasty, the way food smells good. I think it’s tied to the amount of talent.” Zora’s staring at me, Chloris is nodding, very slowly, and Dove’s slid me something that’s half a hug and half a hair-ruffle.

  “Leaving it as hunger would be stupid. So it’s a desire for skin contact, something someone could consent to. Shutting it off wouldn’t work, I’m not crazed enough to try, it’s something really basic.”

  “More basic than your heartbeat.” Chloris, marvelling.

  “Wasn’t on purpose.” It wasn’t. Never occurred to me, which might be why, too.

  “Didn’t notice you’d done it.” Dove’s voice has nothing in it but affection.

  I nod. I really hadn’t.

  Chloris has a sudden smirk. Doesn’t want it, can’t stop it. “You know what the Line is saying.”

  Zora makes a snrk noise, and nods. Dove, I think that’s a fond look.

  “The Line troopers are saying something about my heart?”

  I really hope not.

  “Not the recruits, the injured veterans from the hospital.” Dove looks, I don’t know, wry? Sharing a mind doesn’t mean Dove isn’t complicated. “They’ve about settled on a view that I’ve finally found someone tough enough.”

  I must look bewildered. I am bewildered, but I can see Chloris and Zora looking at me like I’m looking bewildered. Tough enough?

  “That draught of Halt’s. Most people can’t make themselves drink it the second time, even knowing it will fix the hurt. Not with Halt standing there looking prepared to be disappointed if they don’t. Some of those spine-stuck had been dosed with it, hurt in the battle before the one with the spine-critters. They’ve had the indescribable horrible dreams and the days and days of their food tasting wrong, and it does that to absolutely everyone but Halt and you.” Dove grins at me. “Kinda sad I missed the faces when you asked for a second mug.”

  “You’re not worried about this?” Zora, very serious, talking to Dove.

  Dove’s head shakes.

  “Salvage, remember?” Dove gets up, walks along the windowsill to where I am, sits on the floor and leans on my legs. Chloris stands up, moves the notes, turns the desk off, and sits on the other side of Zora, who, still lying face up, has scooted in. One of those conversations you could almost have in the tub. Not that we don’t, for somewhat less fraught things like the housecleaning schedule.

  “Back in the tent, on the odds, I was already dead. We were all already dead. When you’re already dead, you can give up, you can do whatever does the most good that’d get you killed because it hardly matters now, or you can go on because you might be wrong. I’ve been wrong before, it was odds, Blossom was real clear it was odds, so, go on. Only sorcery doesn’t muddle, you do it well or it kills you.” />
  Chloris is, very reluctantly, nodding. Zora’s, somehow, never actually sat up, pulled into a knee-hugging posture and leaning on me a bit. I put an arm around Zora. Everybody has to grow up, but going to this particular sorcery school can’t be one of the easy ways. Regular sorcery school probably wasn’t, isn’t, easy, either, but it’d be slower. Nobody’s had a ‘get it right or die’ meltdown so far. Though I suppose the first décade, the whole house building, was a concerted effort to make that our regular state. I even suppose it is, any time we have to do something new.

  You are distractible.

  Sorry.

  “Only I thought I was dead.” Dove doesn’t sound sad. I put a hand on Dove’s shoulder. Out of hands. “So, well, don’t worry about it. There’s a high-felicity consonance, ridiculously so, some — ” Dove turns, inside arm reaching all the way around me — “skinny displaced lad who tended quiet. You get consonance with high-talent people who grow up together, who have similar mental outlook. Strong consonance cross-gender’s almost unheard of, it gets studied in specific cases, there’s only four.”

  Chloris almost says something, and Dove says “Counting me and Ed. Only if we’ve got a similarity of outlook, it’s not obvious. And we’ve got unrelated talent flavours, Ed might not have a talent flavour, not the way anyone means, could just be whatever hatching results in. So it’s new. Can’t guess about the outcome. Go with it anyway.”

  “But,” Zora says, looks up at me and then looking at Dove.

  “Not trying to be happy, trying to get the job done. Consonance is a way to patch some of my weak spots, to get skilled enough fast enough I can survive to be an Independent. It’s a way to be a better Independent, there’s a multiplier, we don’t just add together.”

  “Letting someone, it’s not even into, is it? It’s become a part of your mind.” Chloris sounds, well, troubled, if Chloris’ propriety’d permit it. It’s Chloris’ emotional-reaction-later voice.

  Dove nods. “When’s the last time you dropped the general linkup between the four of us?” Chloris looks a bit confused, I can feel Zora twitch. “Not stopped paying attention to it, removed yourself from it.”