A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  Wake’s made, not precisely a brick, it’s porcelain, it’s a binding for an illusion-form. Once we’re done the furnishings, we’re going to cast the standard quarters around the form, it’s an advanced version of a technique Wake’s been teaching for making houses, single bulk ceramic firings. Needs lots of clay, but whatever it’s called, the West Wetcreek lies in a river valley, there is lots of clay to be had. It takes us maybe an hour to dig enough up, Wake’s got the map giving where we’re allowed to dig from, it’s managed, we can’t just lift out a four-metre cube, and then the rest of the day to wedge and sort the stuff properly, Wake’s being particular about it.

  Twenty-seven standards and the five signas, signas have meeting rooms, it’s a different binding and a different illusion-form. The binding comes out cold, all that illusion’s insulative, and it takes the four of us maybe twenty minutes to get each structure fired. It’s a long day, but we get them all done. Wake does something that keeps the air off, it fades, by the time the structure’s cool it’s gone. “Keeps the oxidization down,” Wake says.

  Chloris has a letter done, written, neat and formal, and an aluminium box, just large enough to hold the lights and some exploded wood fluff. The wood fluff took four tries, it’s done with steam and layers, no kind of necromancy.

  Made things, the lights, the box, Chloris says it works to think of that as the death of all other possibilities. Can’t fault the results.

  The whole package, someone in the post office will wrap it, the whole contents of the package, comes along with Chloris, going to dinner.

  “It is,” Wake says, “one thing to write a letter, and another to send it.”

  Chloris nods. “I spent my whole youth fighting with my mother. I was trying to argue about, about if I had to be prim. Mother was arguing about what kind of prim was the best kind.”

  Chloris stops, this is where you’d turn for the post office.

  We stop, too, and sort of flatten the clump out a bit, there are people going by. They go by Wake the way a stream goes around a boulder. Wake’s not being rude, Wake’s not paying attention to anything that isn’t Chloris.

  “Mother has a story about what I should be like. I’m never going to follow it. I want to live, I want to be an Independent, those aren’t really the same decision.” Chloris gets a little quieter. “I don’t want children.” There’s, it’s not a sigh, I think of it as like a sigh, the cloud of lamentation gets, briefly, shallowly, it’s not the dense lamentation, fifteen metres from Chloris. “However much Mother wants grandchildren.”

  “This — ” the box lifts — “is polite, it’s not, it’s what another adult would do. To say Mother needs to listen to what Mother’s said, at least, even if maybe not what I’ve said.”

  “Your mother might listen to me?” Wake says, in purely speculative tones.

  Chloris’ head shakes. “It would turn into some story about how I, a proper daughter, had been seduced away by sorcery.” Adjectives like fell and nefarious flit through Chloris’ conversational mind.

  No shortage of stories like that. No shortage of species like that, kelpies do that, unicorns sometimes, there’s a whole category of study around problematic blandishments, wholly separate from the stuff that just takes over your mind, ‘the illusion of choice’ is a phrase you have to use really carefully talking about this.

  “Besides,” Chloris says, “I want to find out who I am.” Arguing with Mother didn’t work, floats along behind, and Wake nods.

  “And this way you didn’t ruin Festival.” Zora’s tone is entirely pragmatic.

  More than an entire décade before, Dove says, just to me.

  Day after that we start making floors, room-sized floors, can’t really call them tiles, triple glazed over their own drain-gates, “Eventually, something spills,” Wake says, and a bunch of wall panels. Those are hollow, about a decimetre thick, and glazed on both sides, all pleasant warm tones, three shades of mild green, it’s not pale, just mild. The floors are rich-earth brown, nearly black.

  Big ceiling tiles, ceramic ones, an even milder yellow, hanging frames for them, and the gates that handle the air. Blossom shows up for those, they’re complicated, it’s not just moving air around, it’s managing the air quality and the temperature, mustn’t freeze or suffocate the standard-captains. Same with the privy, and something that’s the sorcerous equivalent of a set of settling ponds in Blossom’s version of one of Wake’s porcelain bricks.

  We can do the door-gates, though, even the otherworld one. We get a day of actual class, careful instruction, make one as a test, and then it’s Festival.

  First day of Festival, you’re supposed to make sure all the work’s done at your gean. Any collectives you belong to should have wrapped up before Festival, if your thorpe hasn’t quite got the hay in people will come help, the point is to get everything done so you can celebrate, rather than work in your Festival clothes.

  Dove asks, after breakfast, if there’s anything we might usefully do. The fine line between any implication that of course our host gean needs help and seeming to be unhelpful guests turns into eighty kegs of beer in a cellar, to be hoisted out as gently as possible.

  We do it carefully; gravity sock, and then tow the sock. The beer never gets to slosh.

  Still doesn’t take more than an hour.

  I never moved a tonne of gravel before I started learning sorcery, never mind the many-barge-load amounts we get asked to shift. Beer kegs, though, I’ve done that. I wind up sitting down for a little while, to a sort of general agreement.

  Cleaning the Round House doesn’t do that, afternoon work in the garden, I’ve done that before but the context’s enough different.

  Grue comes by at dinner with a dose of peace-abiding for each of us, individually labelled, and then stands there, watching. “I know you’ll drink it, I want to be sure it works,” Grue says. That gets some looks, not just from us. “The metabolism of sorcery students is a moving target,” Grue says, tone not precisely dry, and loud enough to be meant to be heard. There are nods, not just from us. There’s a lot of different kinds of peace-abiding — the Creeks used to only need two, lads and lasses, to the point they make the stuff in different flavours, someone four tables over is saying “Hackberry?” in mournful tones — but back in Wending it was normal to have a bunch of different kinds. Something that prevents conception and a bunch of common diseases and often annoying fertility side-effects for the next year has to care about sex and species.

  Surprisingly, I recognize the flavour of mine.

  Pine tar.

  Scorched pine tar.

  “It isn’t really,” Grue says, I’m probably looking appalled, betrayed, Dove says, but I take from Grue’s tone that asking what it really is won’t make me happier.

  Second and third day of Festival’s mostly unplanned time. You can finish making your festival hat, you can spend time with people you wouldn’t usually see, you can count all the preserves if you want. We’re all at a loss, life has been following a fixed routine, down at the level of ‘exercises with Block, lunch, Wake or another grownup shows up with a task, figure out how’ for what feels like forever.

  Second day, by afternoon, when we’ve agreed we’re going to have to come up with something, turns into a silly illusions contest. Grue and Blossom show up halfway through the afternoon; being over the ridge doesn’t keep some of the grander efforts from being noticeable down by the canal. No one’s complained, there’s been several questions about what we’re building and why we’ve been expected to do it during Festival.

  Getting into a silly illusions contest with Blossom’s much easier than you’d think, worse at silly than I am. Grue, though, people might not worry enough about Grue. Grue does this distant vista of a city, fortress, it’s not clear, but for a couple of seconds I’m desperately homesick for the place. A place that’s hanging, shining, in the air, that I watched Grue create.

  The whole illusion contest is a lot of fun, and everyone agrees Zora win
s it. No butterfly wings, it’s a mechanical forest, tree branches geared to the trunks, louvred windmill sail leaves. It all whirs quietly together like it’s doing something, too.

  Third day, Dove and I get, well, our, same one, anyway, canoe out of the boat house and paddle up the West Wetcreek and then a stream a few kilometres north of Westcreek Town called the Swan, that rises up to the west in a broad valley, broad enough it wants to be marshy, so it’s an easy paddle up and an easier float back down. There’s a rocky outcrop that happens to be an island at the moment with a low exposed rock north-west slope, so it’s warm and un-worrying as a place to eat lunch.

  No actual swans, and I don’t think either of us articulates a word all day. Extremely restful.

  Didn’t do anything with the Power, either; joint senses out two, three kilometres the whole time, the consonance, but nothing gets moved or modified or even poked at.

  It’s not all like that, not even close, but the Creeks part of the Second Commonweal around Westcreek Town is settled country. Travelling a half day on water through settled country is odd. I’m getting used to the canoe, barges are different, being a passenger, but that much settled, long-settled, country is still odd.

  Fourth day is the public party, treats for infants, races for children and youth, sort of thing. This one’s, all those funerals weren’t that long ago, it’s not quite subdued, there’s an edge on it somewhere, it’s not entirely the party people wanted to have but it’s going to have to do.

  Lots of people come to Westcreek Town for the day, there are a bunch of tents set up to shade people, food, and drink in the grazing meadows north of town on the west side of the West Wetcreek, and a lot of strolling around and talking.

  Also foot-races, a kilometre-long timed barge course, one barge at a time, and, you can’t say attested, the Shape of Peace isn’t involved, say witnessed, spear throwing. You get a slip of paper that has a sober respectable person’s written witness that you threw as well as you did, and if your friends don’t want to believe you later, you can wave the paper at them.

  Dove gets a speculative look, hauls us all into line, picks up a spear thrower, and puts three spears into the hundred metre target, spread over an area I might or might not be able to span with my hands. Easier than it was, Dove says. Several people in the throwing line look fussy when Dove turns down the slip of paper. Zora’s head tips about it, after we’re twenty metres away.

  “The Line doesn’t provide warrants of authority just because you’re bossy,” Dove says, and Chloris can’t stop grinning at how flummoxed Zora looked, just for a moment.

  We chance on Halt, who is handing apples to a couple of infants, siblings, I think, who clearly need either food or sleep. Looks that could be the precursors of petting motions result in Spook hiding behind Chloris, and it being clear that their minder can’t hear the doubtful “Meep?” and the infants can.

  “Exactly the same apple,” Halt assures them, staving off some kind of protest and getting a look of melting thanks from whoever is minding the kids.

  One memory, two instances, the thought goes with a wildly hopeful look somewhere back of Zora’s face.

  Halt looks at us, and twinkles. “I can entirely understand feelings of hunger when faced with a festival, my dears.” The spider looks, well, wistful, and there’s a faint smell like the feel of nubby towels, new, clean ones, dried in the sun.

  There’s the tiny moment of thinking ‘I’ve got the buttons over the left eye?’, and Halt smiles. You’re entirely fine, children, Halt says heading away, waving us on the way were going.

  That’s out around the outer curve of the loop, past the folks talking and commenting on the barge times, more on the barge times as you get closer to the people doing the timing by the side of the West Wetcreek.

  We’re heading back in, our, our host, gean is one that does the big dinner inside, one sitting, terrible form to be late, and I’m thinking that, here we are, wandering around in a clump, Death and Strange Mayhem and Zora manifesting butterfly wings, fancy gauzy ones, all of us with apprentice buttons, even if they’re on big summer hats like everyone else is wearing, ghostly ocelotter trotting after Chloris and sometimes through people, and no one objects, no unease, there isn’t any drawing away, it’s like being a sorcerer was a normal trade.

  We’re all feeling like that, differently, only Dove really grew up near Westcreek Town, it’s not completely familiar to Zora or Chloris, either, but the same absence of strangeness underneath somewhere, when someone says “Chloris?” in uncertain tones.

  We stop, you can see the family resemblance, I think I can, Creeks mostly still look all related, I don’t think it’s Chloris’ mother, and Chloris says “Auntie,” and gives a kind of acknowledging nod.

  Whatever Chloris’ Auntie meant to say doesn’t get said, the thought trips on a look that settles on Chloris’ hair, there’s a stiffening of expression, and “Bleaching your hair?” gets said in tones appropriate to ‘hoarding money’.

  “Shapeshifting, Auntie, no bleach, just willpower,” Chloris says, in quietly dignified tones, and starts walking. So we do, and Spook does, and Chloris’ Auntie, whoever they are, sees Spook and goes from stiff to startled.

  Mother’s cousin, Dove says in our head.

  We’re fifty or sixty metres further on when Chloris says Misery and lack, and Spook leaps on to the top of Chloris’ head, to look down, worriedly, at a fixed expression.

  Chloris doesn’t look like someone about to cry; Chloris looks like someone about to kill every living thing to the width of the horizon.

  It’s less than one in five but it’s more than one in ten, here, people doing things to their hair. Including what I suppose to be bleach. Though that usually seems to produce magenta shades.

  Frivolous wastefulness, if you ask Mother or Auntie, Chloris says, and none of us say anything until we’re heading in for lunch.

  The refectory’s full, full right up, we wind up sitting with some trainees from a copper works south and east. I find out a bunch of stuff about raising lathes, what they use to make mixing bowls with, and realizing that I wouldn’t be safe with a lathe anymore, not without sitting down and going through all the steps carefully first. Still fun to talk an entirely material kind of shop for a bit.

  The refectory manager comes by and sets a glass of cider down by Chloris, doesn’t say anything, doesn’t really stop, doesn’t precisely look sympathetic. The trainees do when Chloris responds to some searching looks by saying “Auntie disapproves,” and makes a hair-encompassing wave.

  And you would stay drunk how? Dove says, when Chloris starts to dither about whether it’s proper to actually drink the cider, given a wroth emotional state and it only being lunchtime.

  Don’t think the ethanol does anything at all. The awareness that it’s the seriously good stuff, wine-strong and five years in the barrel, past kindness and into strong approval, does a great deal.

  The customary use of the afternoon is music and dancing. There’s a steady graduation of how energetic the dancing is, moving upstream away from town. The furthest out is after a gap, pipes, drums, and big wrap-round-the-body trumpet things. Looks like there’s a lot of vertical motion in the dancing. Zora and Chloris grin, wave, and head straight for it.

  Dove and I sort of drift toward one of the music-only clumps, strings and woodwinds and a couple wooden flutes.

  It’s extremely restful, it’s not precisely happy music, but it’s all elegant and peaceful, four hours of it, four different groups for fifty minutes each and a ten-minute break in between to stretch your legs. Think it’s the first time I’ve spent any time with Dove in a social group of Creeks. I feel slow over how long it took me to notice how much social status Dove has. The sound argh forms in my mind when Dove notices.

  Dinner is roast sheep on a stick, there’s a shepherd-thorpe association with an outdoor roasting pit. The honey and radish-mustard sauce could clear a statue’s sinuses. Shape-shifting the grease off my hands feels a
little bit like cheating, but it’s effective.

  I get a little bit of shiver, I’ve been walking by people at dusk on a Festival day, using the Power.

  Didn’t occur to me not to, easier to use the Power than get sheep-grease on my clothes. Nobody, well, Dove, Dove’s done the same thing, noticed, it’s not ostentatious or threatening.

  Or important. Dove’s face isn’t how Dove’s grinning at me. Halt can hand apples to kids. Grue has trot-to-work days.

  Law is wider than custom. Which was a caution, every time anybody said it to me; not sure how I mean it now. Having a unicorn show up at a hospital should cause panic, but Grue, no one agrees what Grue is, really, except theirs. Anybody who could be polite and do what Grue’s doing to the recovery rate of the injured would be theirs, socially.

  I get my hair ruffled, hat notwithstanding.

  Didn’t spend much time in taverns back in Wending, never had much inclination to drink to be drinking, and known slow people don’t do well in taverns. Haven’t set foot in one in Westcreek, never even thought about it.

  This place, not a lot of lads in it. Everyone here clearly knows Dove, there’s a shout. It’s full, but there’s space by Pallas and Cel. Back-to-the-wall seats, the sort that fill first.

  I only have to explain where I’m from twice, which is about six fewer than I expected. No one expects me to sing, which is good, and I’m not going to be able to forget the lyrics, which isn’t always. Sometime when Dove’s away from the table Cel asks me, despite Pallas’ attempts at shushing, if Dove and I are turning into one person.

  I can shake my head ‘no’; I can manage about eleven words, none of them connected to the others, which is the problem with thinking of so many ways to answer this question ahead of time, and they really do, Pallas, certainly, merit a better answer than a bunch of almost-word noises.

  So I make a small illusion, just a schematic, it doesn’t have the energy flow, it’s not even obviously a house, it’s only not a circle diagram because the areas are square, well, and circle diagrams don’t float over the table so there’s room for a sphere of darkness underneath and a fire-feather hovering above.