Mikka lets “and this is the most important thing the Galdor-gesith thinks Doucelin could be doing” sit there without saying it.
Two forkfuls of my cake. “The Power, anything related to the Power, has this component of belief.”
Mikka nods. “Any sensible presumption of benevolence involves believing your teachers want you to succeed.”
“You’re saying I don’t know the answer to succeed at what?”
“You don’t know how many answers there are.” Mikka’s fork waves a little. “One of the successes has to have happened, wizard-teams are a legitimate category of sorcerous effort now, Halt’s been trying for that for centuries, it has an extensive presence in the literature. Same with the external Power manipulation, between Kynefrid and your team people will try to get that right until it works.”
Mikka gives me time to think about that, time to eat the last half of my small cake, time to finish noticing how completely I don’t think that’s all of Halt’s objectives. To wonder how much “the people doing the work have to derive the primary benefit from their effort” is an axiom for Independents, or to Halt, or how benefit or profit get counted.
“How’s the actuarial qualification coming?”
“Done,” Mikka says. “I’ll have to do it again in thirteen years, but for now it’s probationary accreditation and more interesting work.
“I found out it was done because the mail clerk gave me the letter as they were loading the downstream mailbags on the barge I was boarding. So no complaining I didn’t mention.”
I nod. Can’t complain about that. “Should have done something celebratory for you.”
“Instead of setting me up for a month of moping because of no unicorn rides?” Mikka doesn’t say this in a displeased way.
“Set myself up for at least a month of moping because there’s no small child to make happy and to protect.” If not for a season or two, Pelōŕios’ dramatic character may not be common to all Unicorn Fours but it’s certainly there.
Mikka looks doubtful, and I gesture really.
“I don’t know what the trouble was, among unicorns. Pelōŕios hasn’t said, some kind of status thing. Family’s a real concept, the idea of the Peace wasn’t, Unicorn Four uses a compound that comes out to ‘dwells-calmly-with-Halt’ to describe the Commonweal.” They don’t say Halt, it has something to do with Halt using unicorns as plow-beasts, pre-Commonweal, as a punishment or a threat.
Mikka downs the last swallow of cider, sets the glass down. “Dishes?”
I wave it off. Everything starts floating toward the kitchen.
Mikka smiles at me. “Saves time for thinking.”
Chapter 40
Zora
We almost didn’t allow enough time to show people through the Round House, or unstick Poesy’s attention from the ceiling. That’s the only thing that goes the least bit wrong with the festival dinner, Grue makes it in good time up from the hospital and the burn patients under continuous watch, Festival shifts go by lot which is why this is an early dinner, Grue will be back to the hospital in eight hours.
The wine from the Tall Woods is a heavy dark red; it’s immensely good, but almost too much to serve with food. Which is why there’s a whole roast leg of aurochs, and some crock-cooked root vegetables that are completely cheating, because it’s as though we had the dripping from the finished roast to add to the vegetables.
All of us like aurochs; Blossom’s fondness for aurochs is why we know about it. Everyone from Dove’s family of origin likes aurochs. There’s the little tickle in the link that’s Dove making a note to find out how legal or acceptable sending a frozen carcass north on a barge might be. Making a whole carcass isn’t any more difficult than making the cooked leg, but food inspectors have inconsistent responses to currently extinct species being presented as comestible.
Ed’s contribution, chicken with lemon and tarragon baked inside bread dough, isn’t as immediately attention-getting as the glazed aurochs, but Mikka really likes it, then the kids and Hawthorn ask for seconds, which is doing very well after the aurochs.
Our nibble contribution is from me, fruit pies, from fruits that don’t any of them currently have names, not in the Commonweal. I don’t think Wake gets homesick, precisely, but I do think Wake would like to live somewhere those fruits are grown again, so I have a selection of almost fifty to choose from. When Nimblewill asks what the red-and-green one is, Wake very solemnly makes the signs.
Halt’s contribution is green-and-yellow cake. I think the legions of hell could march out of the sea and Halt would still make sure Blossom got green-and-yellow cake at Festival. Halle loves it. Halle finishes Mikka’s piece.
The kids get hats, literally enchanted hats, that you can’t lose and that won’t ever blow off. The enchantment in the hats was Blossom’s own-work project, you push a little bit of Power through the hat every time you put it on. Just a binding wouldn’t work, bindings aren’t flexible enough; you might as well glue the hat to your head. All the kids can use their hat.
Halt gives them scarves, that traditional grandma thing, made out of something “rather strong, children, so do please remember that while they won’t ever strangle you, other people aren’t as lucky.” That produces some wide eyes, a reassuring face from Dove, and a carefully suppressed snicker from Grue. It helps that they’re impressive scarves, shimmery and iridescent and water-smooth in the hand without being thin.
Mikka brought me a hand-written copy of our family ancestry book, which I wouldn’t properly get until I had a child. “Mother scrupulously didn’t notice,” Mikka says. I’ve made Mikka a pepper-mill calculator, the best one there’s an established design for, in silicon carbide and corundum and cobalt-chromium alloy instead of steel and brass. All the markings are incised with implausible precision thanks to the Power, then filled with platinum black. Not quite even, but I came close. Mikka’s face says I came a whole lot closer than Mikka expected.
I had no idea what to get Halle, it’s tough when they’re infants, clothes and food are touchy subjects, someone in the gean will manage to take offense at implied need. Huggable toys may or may not be the correct huggable toy to the infant, hair ornaments are worse than that, even without Dove’s memories of having kept the one specific much-loved ornament from the age of four forward until Lark was wearing it.
I made a bunch of blocks, silicone rubber ones unlikely to do or be done much harm. It was invented to be harder to eat than natural rubber for those things on the uncomfortable border of weeds and diseases, even if Halle gets very inventive it’s hard to see how there could be much harm. They have letters and numbers and my voice saying the names and the sounds if you touch the corners correctly. There are plus and minus signs and an equals sign, so number operator number equals number and a spoken answer will tell you if you had the answer correct with the answer blocks lighting up for single-digit addition and subtraction. If you touch the equals sign block, it will speak the correct answer for you.
There’s a first-hundred-words spelling and pronunciation set of letter tiles, which isn’t going to be useful this year, the addition won’t be, but I wanted to make it, it’s the sort of thing a regular aunt would teach their sister’s child. Mikka looks at the letter tiles, looks at me, and takes me by the shoulders to touch foreheads.
Halle is delighted with the blocks, and there’s a quiet “three!” or “eleven!” in my voice at odd moments the rest of the evening.
Us-together came up with a whole bunch of aluminium rods with hubs and corners with cam locks for the kids. There are different lengths of rods, corners appropriate to the five regular solids, and hubs and half-hubs and joiners. It comes in a big, well, chest, I want to say case but we got enthusiastic. Tea and dessert cider and four kids trying not to be excessively enthusiastic, especially after Dove shows Hawthorn the one thing involving the Power, the chest repacks itself. If anybody’s holding a piece, it makes a sad sound, Chloris’ best “O Woe!” which has a lot of sad in
it, and doesn’t repack. Second time, you get the “O Woe!” and then Ed saying “Grief! Lamentation!” loud enough that everyone in the house is going to hear it.
Halle takes some back patting to get over “O Woe!”, because Junco just had to find out what the sad noise was. Chloris manages to explain that while it sounds like the chest is sad, and indeed it’s intended that the chest sound sad, the chest is not sad, the chest hasn’t got any wits whatsoever, and can’t any more be sad than a chair. There are rules about making things with wits, and while you can make something that can be sad, you can’t make anything like that without giving it agency, the ability to want things on its own, at least as much as it has wits. If we’d done that with the chest, it could want to take pieces back before you were done with them, or not let you play with them at all, and we’d have had to give it eyes and ears and some way to communicate.
Swift says, with all the gravity of eleven years and half a glass of wine, “That would be horrible.”
All the teachers nod solemnly. Grackle and Hawthorn are behind the kids, so they can make faces, which helps them not snicker audibly.
The first two toasts go round in cider, cider from actual trees with no more sorcerous intervention than any other cider gets to keep the weeds and the malice away from it, the Peace Established and the Work of the Year aren’t sorcerous things, even when the toasts are given by Halt and Constant.
The third toast is in the actual wine from the Tall Woods, small glasses and small portions unto half the carefully resealed bottle. Grackle makes it, to the Triumph of Hope. Dove and Edgar and Chloris all get a little snorfly.
So does Mikka.
Not enough that I have to explain anything to Halle; Halle knows adults get emotional about things just like infants, and that it won’t always make any sense.
Chapter 41
Zora
Saying good-bye to Halle is hard. Saying goodbye to Mikka is much harder, Mikka is emotionally certain never to see me again. Pelōŕios stands like a carving until Halle reaches up a hand and the strange fierce head dips to nudge Halle in the sternum, ignoring the raised hand that pats gently around the hinges of Pelōŕios’ jaw.
“Come visit,” Halle says with all the emphasis possible.
“When we’re all Independents,” I say as cheerfully as I can, and Halle nods solemnly at me, because as far as Halle’s concerned that’s the sort of promise I can be expected to drag myself out of my grave to keep.
“The food stays cold until you open it.”
Mikka nods, too, and hugs me again, because Mikka’s past saying anything. Then they’re on the barge and I carefully don’t stand there because I can see them all the way home if I work at it a bit, no matter where I’m facing.
Pelōŕios walks slowly beside me all the way to the hospital, and thinks four times about snorfling at the back of my neck, and never does.
Grue’s coming off shift. The brewers are each in a coma, they’re supposed to be, Grue half-jokes about it being necessary purely to withstand the itching as swathes of skin and flesh regrow.
The pain is worse, especially when the growth process makes new muscle twitch so it grows in with tone. It’s fine if a baby can’t hold their head up for awhile, but not so good in an adult. Then we want them to hold still even though they feel like they’re drowning under complex fluid in a thoroughly opaque vat. The hospital calls it a burn bed, all the hospitals do, but it’s one big piece of fired ceramic.
Really expensive ceramic, there are layers of bindings and points of congruence all through it. A provincial hospital has six, and it was four the year I was born. They take a specialized wreaking team a year to make now, it used to be closer to two. Halt says the first one took close to fifteen years to get a working prototype, the Independent Sorrow was known for it.
Halt also says no one ever came out sane until the medical profession figured out the coma part, late in the first century of the Peace.
These patients ought to come out hale, Grue’s mostly hopeful, so much of the problem with severe burns is getting the patient’s mind to believe in the cessation of pain. Nobody regenerates very well if they’re experiencing their injury as ongoing. Actual regeneration takes an application of the Power, but you’re doing it for someone, you need to get them to believe in their eventual health and wholeness.
“It must be very tempting.”
Grue smiles in a way I’m surprised Pelōŕios doesn’t shy away from. “Only permissible when you’re preventing immediate self-harm and nothing else will do. ‘Don’t jump’ is legal. ‘Lie still’ would be if it was just me and multiple patients.” Grue sounds whimsical, but it’s the whimsical-by-willpower version, not the way Grue sounds explaining evolution to Dove’s neeves.
How you tell when it was some ancient sorcerer or actual selection isn’t as easy as you’d think, because as soon as the sorcerer stops altering things, selection starts in.
“Somewhere out there, there’s something Halt has to be cautious about.” I’m doing everything I can to keep my voice light.
Grue nods, once.
“There’s a context in which the Commonweal is a bid in a selective process, a long term one, many thousands of years.” Not just Halt’s. All the Old Ones have to know, the Line and Parliament have to be supposing it’s there at a minimum.
Grue nods again. I can feel the tension in Grue. Pelōŕios can, the sidelong gaze isn’t in fear of Grue this time.
“At least one of the somethings will see me as the vulnerable component to the wizard-team, and I should think about that before I attempt my metaphysical transition.” Carefully, because you’re sure you flubbed it, and I don’t understand why.
“That would be a good idea.” Grue’s having trouble keeping their voice even, or loud enough to hear.
“Before I worry about that, there’s Pelōŕios and shape offers, there’s warding classes, and there’s an own-work project. Am I missing anything?”
Grue goes from tense to smiling in half a second. “Don’t leave what you want to be called until the last second. You can get stuck with a childhood nickname that way.”
My turn to nod. Custom says you don’t tell anyone, that you should fall out of the records under your metabolic name and come back in under your Independent one with no formal connection.
I thought that was bizarrely cautious when I first heard about it.
“Pelōŕios?”
The half-whistled breath of Yes? comes back.
“If you want to try the shape alteration, is there anywhere in particular you’d prefer to try it?”
Grue’s face quirks along with the smile. “‘Anywhere away from the Independent Grue’ is a fine answer.”
Pelōŕios whistles cheerfully, three notes. “Somewhere near Long Pond.”
After running.
Chapter 42
Zora
Half way to Blue Creek, Pelōŕios starts talking.
The birds of thy whim sing not but one song.
It’d be rude to make birds that perched in the refectory and cackled. Or sang the same thing over and over until someone threw a plate.
A kilometre goes by on each side of a distance marker. I’m not entirely sure the birds will be welcome as they are. Might have to move them to the Round House.
Eirene hath named them each and several Pelōŕios says. I should not thee fear their welcome.
What Pelōŕios says next is Curse all cowardice.
I may me not sing six notes, Pelōŕios says, of an incapacity entire. It maketh me no sorcerer among unicorns, who all do by song.
Two barges to wave at, one after the other. They wave back, we’ve become enough known to take any hesitancy out of the replies.
Giving you another kind of metabolism is meant to not alter you.
Such was my surmise. Pelōŕios sounds amused. Be so great in care as thou might wish, and yet I shalt not much me comprehend thy subtlety of working.
Pelōŕios doesn’t say anything else th
e whole rest of the run, because Pelōŕios can tell I’m thinking. The rest of us can tell what I’m thinking, which is mostly that it really wouldn’t be difficult.
It wouldn’t be any more difficult to make Pelōŕios into a hair ornament with living eyes, whole of mind and memory and happy to be worn. Proper dynamic happiness, not definitional, the whole structure’s just there if I think about it because closeness and a sense of value are mighty things.
By chance it’s the same judge, Westcreek Town has twelve, and I don’t think their rotation is as simple as the décade days. A judge is always available for attestation of contracts and other commercial functions, you might have to go find them in a small place where the judges work part-time, but in Westcreek Town there’s an office, the Peace-gesith shares the building with the Lug-gesith in the south-east corner of town, so it’s convenient to the Creek and the canal and the shipping-yards, which are where most of the work comes from. Hardly anyone needs a contract attested personally more often than once a year, but every barge load is going somewhere, and the terms and delivery both need to be attested. Easier than hoping there’s a judge available at the judging-hall, where the doors don’t get opened without scheduled cause.
I go bipedal as soon as we’re at the contracts office, the clerk’s very polite about whether or not I can ask an ethics question verbally, those are usually formally worded and written and submitted to at least three and more likely five judges to consider for as long as required, this is much more like asking if there’s any point to the formal version.
The judge is visibly cheerful about the whole prospect, “Something I don’t see every day,” and ushers us into the room with the copies of the Whole Book and the Books Describing the Law, detailed references to precedents. Five hundred years of precedents, well, five hundred and forty as of Festival, the Ur-law, and eight gesiths worth of regulations is shelves over two walls of the room. Pelōŕios fits in anyway, it’s a substantial room.
Safely You Deliver Page 27