I woke up gasping for air and looking around wildly. My brain must have been working off some really old subsystems, because my first thought was, this isn’t my room, before I remembered that I didn’t have a room anymore. I was on Aerb, not Earth, and on Aerb I was an itinerant wanderer without a home to call my own.
I looked down at my shoulder, fearing the worst, but saw that it was intact, connecting my arm to my torso like it had been doing for more than seventeen years, until very recently. There was a deep red seam there, but it was only on the level of the skin, not in the flesh itself, and my mobility as I gingerly moved it was only slightly limited.
I wasn’t in the hotel; I was in the house built into a tree, inside the bottle, which was presumably inside Solace’s cloak. It was dark, but the remains of a small fire smoldered away in a little blackened recess of the tree. I got up out of the pile of furs that had been
“He made a deal with fucking Doris Finch,” said Amaryllis, as soon as I was out of the bottle.I stared at her; her hair was different, cut short, almost to the scalp, and no longer the red it had been, but brown instead. She was in her full armor, minus the helmet, and it gave her a look that was boyish (but like an extremely attractive boy, enough that it started to awaken confusing feelings in me).“The shirt says ‘Incognito’,” said Fenn. “But you can’t see it, because someone is a spoilsport.”“I’m staying armored until he’s dead,” said Amaryllis. She didn’t seem to be in the mood for humor. “We all are,” she nodded to Fenn.Fenn was wearing her own leather armor, I noticed, and she held out her hand to me. I caught the things she threw to me one by one, first a plain white shirt, then the tights I wore to keep my armor from chafing, then the armor itself.
I drew a seven of tines, which meant we’d go in the middle 60° arc, then drew the virgin, which was card #57 according to my scheme. I considered the card somewhat suspect, but I had done a lot of shuffling and wasn’t going to reduce our probability spread by getting superstitious about the kabbalistic meanings of the cards. If the Dungeon Master had picked a specific card for me to draw on the basis of something that I had been giving some thought to as of late, then I doubted I would be able to improve matters by simply drawing another card from the deck.Solace transformed me into a swallow again, then herself, and we took off together, flying side by side. I relaxed slightly as we passed the city walls, because that meant we no longer had to worry about a last-second ambush. It was mid-morning and a pleasant day for a flight, and I tried to take joy in it as I internally counted the minutes.After an hour’s flight and (approximately) twenty-fi
Amaryllis was slapping me in the face. This actually hurt quite a bit, because she wasn’t being at all gentle with me. I raised a hand to fend her off and began to come back to my senses. I had leveled, and it had been fantastic, sending me beyond the ability to think. It was disconcerting how quickly the thought of 'yes, that again' went through my head.“I’m okay,” I said.“You need to heal Grak,” said Amaryllis. “Now.”I scrambled to my feet, looking down at my left hand, which was … well, whole again, but still as numb as it had been before, and there was something else off about it, like it hadn’t been replaced quite properly. Even just looking at it, I could see that it was not right somehow, proportioned slightly wrong, making the skin look loose in some places and tight in others. I didn’t really have time to think about that though, so I ran over to where Grak was lying and began pulling out bones from my bandolier. (I quite selfishly wanted to be basking in the afterglow of
“Well, that was fast,” said Amaryllis. I snapped awake and stared at her, standing over us, and realized that I was in bed with Fenn next to me (wearing no pants), resting her head on my chest. Amaryllis was still in her plate, looking tired but pleased with herself. I think ‘wry amusement’ just about covers the way she was looking at us.“It’s not what you think,” I said, not making a move to get up. “Unless what you think is that I gave her a transfusion and then we took a nap together.”“He really filled me up,” said Fenn, who rose and stretched. She turned back to look at me and smiled, and I couldn’t help but very briefly glance down at her naked butt. “Pervert!” she screamed, and leapt from the bed, covering her privates with one hand. She wasn’t even attempting to hide her smile. “Mary, you saw, he looked at my butt.”Amaryllis held out her right hand, where she was wearing Sable, and materialized a pair of underwear, which Fenn swiftly took from her.“Also the glove,” said Fen
“Vervain was far from the first flower mage, but he was the best there ever was,” said Solace.The glass bottle that contained the locus’ domain didn’t have anything so neat and ordered as a garden would imply, but there was a small section that was devoted to Solace’s side business as a flower mage. In a proper garden, you laid everything out in clean, ordered rows, clearing away the weeds, grass, and everything that wasn’t a cultivated plant. In Solace’s unstructured growing space (okay, fine, garden) it was hard to tell which plants were supposed to be there and which ones weren’t. I couldn’t see terribly many flowers, though some of the plants definitely didn’t look like they belonged; long red vines with sharp brown ridges, a low green plant with blue-edged leaves that spread out to cover a whole square yard of space, and a tree whose trunk was a vivid purple where there were cracks in its thick black bark.“A flower mage usually has a few carefully cultivated strains,” Solace co
It did feel kind of weird to take a vacation, mostly because none of us had jobs. Actually, Grak had a job, which was as group warder, but for this one week the work he did was keeping the bottle warded against intruders, which was none too arduous. Solace had a vocation, which was as druid to the Six-Eyed Doe, and she was still doing that; so far as I could see, it involved a lot of walking the domain, changing various things in small ways, usually with the magic that came to her by way of the locus. But that left Amaryllis, Fenn, and myself with only our personal ambitions, and that, of course, led to some discussion.“How was speaking to the flowers?” Fenn asked me as I came back from the nominal garden. She had come out to greet us with a smile on her face, which meant that she must have been keeping an eye out for when we’d get back. She had been smiling a lot these last few days, giddy, infectious smiles, not just when she saw me, but also when she was talking with the others, o
“Uther had a lot of love interests who died?” I asked. “I mean, he had love interests … in addition to his wife?”“Which version of history do you want?” asked Amaryllis.“I want the truth,” I replied.“I don’t know the truth,” said Amaryllis. “Juniper, you have to understand that this was all five hundred years ago, and he was a very private man. Even if he wasn’t, the fact that he was such a central figure in the founding of the First Empire, not to mention the dynastic head of what would become the Lost King’s Court, not to mention that he founded two of the athenaeums -- he was really, really important, and his role in history very quickly became a matter of politics. The historicity is complicated.”“What are my options, as far as versions go?” I asked. What I really wanted was a clear, concise explanation of why Fenn was upset so I could go comfort her and explain that everything was going to be alright.“There are two extremes, one where Uther is a saint, the other where his te
Skill increased: Parry lvl 20! (Skill can no longer be increased by amateur training.)New Virtue: Prescient Blade!Prescient Blade: You take half the normal penalty to parry bullets, arrows, or other missile weapons. These attacks still do damage to your blade as normal.I was happy to get that one in the course of my training, since I’d had Parry hovering close to the soft cap for quite a while, but while it was a good one, I did find it a bit puzzling, because I had gotten the ‘Nascent Blade-bound’ virtue when Parry had hit tenth level. My confusion was cleared up a few hours later.Skill increased: Two-Handed Weapons lvl 20! (Skill can no longer be increased by amateur training.)New Virtue: Lunge Striker!New Virtue: Neophyte Blade-bound!I stopped our sparring practice and stared at the messages. I had been dueling both Fenn and Amaryllis, though we were all using blunted blades; Fenn wasn’t terribly good with a sword, and Amaryllis was noticeably worse than I was, but together