Safely You Deliver

by Graydon Saunders

  Just these two Dove says. Didn’t spread. Might be just the one weed that was in there.

  Chloris has the full sense of that, it was dead before Dove incinerated it and there was a lid on it before it was dead. Don’t recognize it. Even with time for riffling through the mental library, no idea what it is. Something straggly up out of the plain dirt of the floor in there, mortar means water or it blew in, the open side points east.

  Grue’s still looking morose, but Grue doesn’t know what it is, either. “Wretchedly competent,” Grue says in bitter tones.

  “Wretchedly competent savage gooseberry is a terrible binomial,” Dove says. Not quite the mild voice.

  The survivor, horrible to use the about a survivor, gets badly stuck on terrible. Not sure they should be standing up, and neither is Grue. Lots of arm waving and I can’t tell, I’m not sure what species they are, it’s like the Regular cluster but I don’t think it is, Ambiguous Typical Ed says, I certainly can’t tell from that new knowledge if this is plain and maybe helpful weeping or real loss of composure getting started.

  One of the medics, not the one who had the hurt arm, rummages quickly in a shoulder bag, produces a decilitre jar, and says “Drink this” in such confirmed tones that the survivor does. They’re wobbly, they couldn’t have got the lid off themselves, Pelōŕios opened it for them, they weren’t sure what to do with the bite pad before the medic who was behind me snagged it, then they drink whatever it was in one convulsive gulp and take two tries to hand the jar back.

  “You’re alive,” the medic who was behind me says, bagging the bite pad. You can autoclave those. Need to, because nobody knows what we’re going to do for rubber. “The terrifying sorcerer is why you’re still alive, and it’d have hurt worse if I had been trying to do it.”

  They’re mumbling, something about pain, and arms off and shaking, and Ed drops a blanket on them. Not a real blanket, but I doubt they’ve noticed, it gets clutched tight.

  “Zora is a student terrifying sorcerer.” Grue’s sounding firm, with extra emphasis on student. “I can offer to blur the memory of all that pain for you, but Zora can’t, it wouldn’t be lawful.”

  Grue’s qualified for a doctor about the way Blossom is qualified for an engineer.

  There’s a sharp nod, and more shaking, and Grue puts a hand on their forehead and Pelōŕios catches them, scooping them up. “Scarce weighty,” Pelōŕios says, and goes right on carrying them and the folded stretcher all two kilometres to the infirmary. The medics follow along with the hurt medic in the other stretcher.

  My patient looks smaller in the neat bed, against pale linen sheets, I don’t know why. Ed and Blossom really do look about fourteen if you don’t know them, if you just saw them for the first time walking down the road and were blind, entirely blind, to the Power. I cannot make myself really believe that Ed’s on the tall side for a man if you’re a Regular anything. Not very tall, not notably, but over their average. This patient’s shorter than Ed and their face looks like a sick child, even knowing they’re physically whole and after one of the medics washed their face. Grue got the blood off as Pelōŕios was picking them up.

  Blossom and the rest of us, Death and Constant Strange Mayhem following behind the Goddess of Destruction, really, all their quiet faces won’t do much to reassure anyone sensitive, have gone off with the ward and the remains to ask where the most-very-thoroughly-so ashes should be put. So it’s just me and Pelōŕios and Grue and two of the four medics, the one who had the hurt arm is off with the duty doctor running tests.

  “Student notwithstanding,” Grue says, “you just beat a tough novel weed when you had to do it fast without warning. I’m proud.”

  Both medics are nodding. Not that Grue is habitually lavish with praise, I have to believe Grue meant it just as soon as I believe Grue said it.

  Raised by Halt, Grue says, fey and merry.

  Chapter 52

  Eirene

  I asked Halt once how this whole mad idea could possibly work, how so much Power coming so quick could possibly come out right. Everyone knows you have to be careful with the Power, and the more, the more careful.

  Halt had smiled, smiled enough you could smell the ancient madness, and quoted clerks at me, that you can have success or you can have control.

  “We’ve come out the other side,” Halt had said, “which was quick of Wake. Not going through the mad middle’s better art, and the worst of those children is Dove’s hard heart.”

  Which, or so I take it, was meant to say they’ve got each other to bounce off, it’s not as simple as loneliness, it’s someone to argue the work with. Someone you can equal, in craft if not Power, someone who can share. Painters or musicians are like that, you need to get the gifted ones together so they can hammer out some common language or there’s never much discipline or joy in what they do.

  There were, before my time, a row of particularly good apple trees, and some rot or blight got to them, and they were all cut down before anyone found out the scions weren’t flourishing and the seeds hadn’t come true. There’s still a tray of mugs turned from the wood, and lamenting stories, and one of our young wizards, for all the law won’t quite call them sorcerers yet and surely not Independents.

  Halt’s madness is a fine old thing, with all its whims worked out of it. Deep and vast and cruel, but it won’t be accidental.

  Zora’s is like something’s got into the baking, and you just have to hope it’s going to come to some good accommodation with the yeast and the oven door won’t bulge open on hunger or worse and soon worser.

  It takes Zora five minutes to turn two turned mugs’ worth of sixty-year-old wood into twelve small apple trees in pots, as well-leaved and rising-hale as the season and good health would ask.

  I had the pots and the soil there by the refectory herb garden, but no hand touched it after, everything just rose up and sorted itself out. I think the water came from the Creek, and I know the gravel did, and I don’t doubt if I’d forgotten soil and pots it would have been arranged.

  Zora’s from the Blue Hills, up north of the canal east off Blue Creek, where they’re very regular people, and ought to know such work for remarkable.

  Zora smiles a little wistfully at me and says “It would be remarkable at home.”

  “It’s not unremarkable in Westcreek Town.” You just have to accept that they can see things in your face, or you work into a swivet over which sorcerer has been reading your mind.

  “Cognitive penumbra,” Zora says. “About as apparent as your apron, and we can’t not, there isn’t an analog to closing your eyes.”

  Zora makes an apologetic gesture.

  “Also about as deep as an apron, there’s no depth to it. Actual mind-reading would severely upset all the teachers.”

  I have to smile.

  If a judge would hang one of the infant wizards for mind-reading depends on what got read. Why the patient is screaming, if there are no witnesses to the injury, has precedent of permissibility, but only just, and narrowly. Zora knows that, they all know that, and they all decided to not pretend they’re less uncanny than they actually are.

  “Would you have time for a cup of tea?” is a surprise. Especially since it sounds like Zora’s not sure it’s a sensible question, in just the way that goes with Zora’s age, and not the infant wizard’s responsibilities.

  I most definitely have time for a cup of tea, and in a shady corner outside.

  “Did the work over by Edge Creek go well?” Get the talking started. It doesn’t have to start with the tricky subject, but it does have to start.

  Zora takes three sips of tea. Whatever it is can’t be an easy thing to express tactfully. “Some difficulties with scale were discovered.”

  Another sip of tea, set the cup down. “It took me close to an hour to realize Blossom’s sarcastic comments weren’t being made out loud, we could all hear them but no one else could. There’s a lot you can get away with in a small focus, you can just ignore third-or
der and emergent and resonant effects, they’re never going to be large enough to worry about. The refinery work they want is too large for that, it’s the same scale of Power as a battle-standard, no one involved wants to admit that, and they should have called us in first instead of deciding the warding problem could be solved later.”

  “Can it be?”

  “Blossom doesn’t think so. Blossom handed the planning problem to Dove.”

  “Did that work?” They were all here at breakfast.

  The ghosts of butterfly wings sweep through Zora’s chair. “Dove’s good at bossy.”

  A careful rueful sip of tea, and then a grin like Zora’s only young. “Dove’s even better at being hard to argue with. The focus-teams set up a committee to go talk to Ongen, Dove got them to agree not to alter anything until after Ongen’s reviewed the design, Dove even managed to convince them Blossom’s worries weren’t risk aversion.”

  “Captain Blossom hardly seems risk-averse.” Unnerving standards of risk among Halt’s choice-kin notwithstanding.

  “Blossom has a reputation for being extremely picky about focus design.” Zora shrugs. “Start with battle-standards and artillery and anyone would be. Rather like I doubt you’re forgiving of vague quantities in refectory recipes.”

  Time to pour more tea.

  “Five thousand focus-users incinerating themselves isn’t an ethics question, have to stop that.”

  There’s a column of insubstantial butterflies, swirling, which I much prefer to pronounced swearing.

  “Most sorcerers who go for Independent leave anything sexual out, it’s about three-fifths over the whole history of the Commonweal.”

  Aha.

  “After the run over to Edge Creek, Pelōŕios rested their jaw over my withers while we were both quadrupeds.”

  A big determined swallow of tea, well, I take one, too. It wouldn’t be anything simple, give Zora that much basic good sense despite everything.

  “Grue says,” and Zora talks in exactly Grue’s voice, most uncanny, “That’s about like walking up to someone and sitting in their lap. When you flow up against them so there’s no space between you and you somehow neglected to wear pants.”

  Oh dear.

  “It was once, I don’t imagine Pelōŕios thought I wouldn’t know what it meant or didn’t think it was a question.” Zora’s annoyed, but not at all with Pelōŕios as a person.

  “You need to say some clear answer.” Always, if someone’s asked unambiguously. There are so many distinctions of no.

  Zora’s tea really should slosh out of the cup with that motion, but it doesn’t. There’s a little bit of abashed, setting the cup down gently.

  “I want to say yes.” Zora puts up a hand as though I’m going to object, or feel surprise.

  “The rest of us, that’s not chiefly carnal.”

  “I have seen Chloris and Constant couple-dancing.” Or, twice, Edgar asleep, head on Dove’s shoulder, which I’m glad most folk have not seen.

  Zora nods, too focused to do more than acknowledge the point. No one’s told Zora how many young lovers watch Chloris and Constant dancing and decide their own love is a lie.

  “I know precisely what they’ve got, and I don’t want it.” Zora makes a face. “Even if I like Constant and it’s sometimes pretty to watch.”

  I had thought I knew where this conversation would go.

  “You’ve met Crane. Crane didn’t keep any physical desire, any need for sex or contact or even just wanting to climb into a tub for the whole afternoon sometimes.”

  I nod.

  “Crane is odd, only not. By Independent standards Crane’s not odd at all, and I don’t want to do that to myself. Halt’s kind of inhuman’s easier to understand, Halt doesn’t treat people as a collection of prey species out of sheer intellectual conviction. I can make sense out of that. What I can’t do is trust myself about this, because I don’t want to give up the possibility, I’ve had four years of, of contented squirming populating our shared awareness, the rest of us really are careful and polite about it but it’s always there, I can’t help knowing what all the secret looks mean.”

  “That seems entirely unfair.” I should have brought food, tea isn’t enough for this.

  “The end of the world will appear and thoroughly smite anything that threatens me.”

  I’ve never heard anyone sound so completely certain.

  “Hell or high water, and Hell’s already afraid.”

  Zora goes from certain to morose. “Wouldn’t be fair to them to say they can’t have it. Wouldn’t be safe, Dove and Edgar are a lot worse without each other.”

  Pouring tea is time to think. Not enough, which is why it’s important the food need to be severed, cut, something with a pouring sauce is even better.

  “Why shouldn’t you say yes? Pelōŕios is a pleasant man, and I presume otherwise without social obligation.” Given the sorry state Pelōŕios arrived in, I should hope not.

  “I’m the problem. I can perfectly well imagine it working out really well for me, educating Pelōŕios about their simiform shape just wouldn’t be dreadful. Being a unicorn is restful, Pelōŕios is someone to be a unicorn with, people are getting used to us running around.”

  People don’t know whether to be proud or terrified, and are picking proud by will alone.

  “Pelōŕios did ask.” I am not going to start talking about equivalence of perceived benefit, as though Zora was twelve and utterly bewildered.

  Zora nods. “Really did ask. But I’m” — Zora waves a slow-fading fantasia of roses everywhere, the nook, the herb garden, right up to the roof peaks — “more than a unicorn. Just me, without being part of the working link and rearranging the landscape. Pelōŕios could become a citizen and learn sorcery for five hundred years and it wouldn’t be a relationship of equals.”

  “How do you feel about Pelōŕios’ former fellow unicorns?”

  “If those unicorns ever find out about their images on the carousel, someone’s going to have to kill them. It might be the rest of us, it might be the Line, it might be Halt or Wake or Blossom, but it will be necessary that they die.”

  Zora doesn’t disapprove.

  “Pelōŕios did those illusions as defiance, anger, something, it’s hard to feel benevolent when you’re escaping a lifetime of abuse. We thought about it, and decided we weren’t taking a substantial risk with anyone’s safety.”

  I’d think sorcerers shouldn’t trust their feelings if I didn’t know it was more people in late youth. Zora slumps a little.

  I don’t think it needful to remind Zora how hard they argued the unicorn was worth saving.

  “Are you breaking a rule of sorcerous conduct I don’t know?” Or by conduct I don’t know about, but do by all means let there be tact.

  Zora’s head shakes. “I don’t think so. Halt and Grue, separately, don’t think so. Five judges agreed it was permissible to correct Pelōŕios’ obligate metavory.”

  “So you’re worried you’ve gone and made yourself a lover, only it’s not fair to them, because you made them.”

  Zora nods.

  “Nothing wrong with using social means.” I say it as gently as I can.

  Zora’s face hurts to watch.

  “Not coercive social means, not threatening something needful, getting everyone to insist someone should do what you want is unlawful, never mind wrong. But all you’ve done is be kind and express if-you-can possibility. Everyone does that, negotiation must happen, even when the people involved can’t bear to admit that’s what they’re doing.”

  If you think so young it shows, sometimes it shows when you think nothing of the sort.

  “You are young. You’ve got less experience than you’d like. Pelōŕios can’t have much experience, subject to brutality doesn’t go with a history of lovers.”

  Zora nods. “None.”

  Half a smile. “It might make Commonweal expectations easier to communicate.”

  “It might.”

>   Wait for the sip of tea, wait to see an increase in composure.

  “One of those expectations involves talking.” “To be said with gentle firmness” the instructions for counselling all say, have said since the verb was written sayeth so.

  Zora nods. “Pelōŕios still doesn’t ever get to be part of the working link, I’ll still always be much more capable with the Power, and Pelōŕios is still unreasonable about me in some kind of glorious mad poetic way I’m most unlikely to adopt.”

  “Instead of the calm, practical unreasonable you’ve been using.”

  Zora blushes. Zora can’t quite decide what to say.

  “You have invented entirely novel sorcery, borrowed Halt, and completely ignored social convention. If you don’t want this unicorn, what you do want is subtle.”

  Really should have brought food, this is entirely the time to hand them cake.

  “There’s nothing wrong with wanting a lover or reliable affection or even a reminder that the whole world doesn’t react to being immolated by stepping back into life from out of a different fire.” It must seem like Zora’s whole world, sometimes. If I correctly understand Halt’s purposes they’re all meant to live in that world.

  “There’s a lot wrong with,” and Zora stops and stays stopped for a little while.

  “Strong talents alter the world, then you can’t prove you didn’t.” Zora looks very sad.

  Zora sits up straight and looks at me, not rudely but with force. “So much of anything is luck, little things. The law says I can want whatever I like so long as I will that it not alter others, then I got the law to allow me to give Pelōŕios a means of self-alteration, and it doesn’t matter what I have or haven’t willed, all the little bits of luck get loose and nudge the outcome.”

  “Pelōŕios has agency. Is, if not your match, sorcerous.” Untaught, and not, a guest, to be taught, but Grue and Halt both say on the strong side for their ilk of unicorns.