Game: Session 5

There hasn’t been a lot of time to write until now – we’ve joined up with the Freeman Company mercenaries and spent the last three months in basic training. We were training to be magical support – not line troops. It’s different from what the usual mercenary recruit does. We didn’t spend a lot of time on stuff like marching and close-order drill. We’re specialists, and that means we’re not usually on the front lines of a fight. (Especially someone like me, who’s a healer. So far, none of the magic I’ve learned does harm.) Sal’s pissed that he’s not getting more training in How to Kill People.

He’s asked. Several times. And Nouga, the training company’s commanding officer, keeps telling him that they don’t train for that – they train people to work together to stay alive. Killing people comes a distant second. Me, I’m just fine with that. I don’t much like killing people anyway. I’d rather keep them alive. I’ll train, and I’ll fight if I have to. Especially now that I have a baby to protect. Sometimes I think I know what a mother lion must feel like. Grr. Fierce little girl, me.

I wonder sometimes if I’m not just being an enormous hypocrite about killing people. I mean, I joined a gods-damned army, hoping for their protection, and Sal doesn’t seem to mind killing people at all. I don’t think that everybody shouldn’t kill people, obviously. But I just don’t like doing the damage myself. I know way too well what a sword or a spear does, and what it takes to recover from it. It’s hard for me to not think about that sometimes, and it gets in the way of doing it to someone else. Still, I haven’t had to kill anyone since we were in the desert, so that’s good.

Strangely enough, I’ve mostly been tutoring the other mage-talented recruits and getting them up to speed. Even though the School of Shimmering Sands wasn’t the best school in the world (at least until Archmage Ethan got there and started kicking ass) we’re still way ahead of pretty much everyone. We know a fair bit of the theories of magic, geography, world history, and we actually know spells. Most of the other people in the mage-training company have some talent, and might be able to do one thing – like the way I talked to spirits when I was little – but that’s all. The lucky ones had someone to teach them, the others just had to muddle around on their own and they often have really wrong ideas about how magic works.

Speaking of Archmage Ethan, it looks like he found out where we were pretty quickly. I’m not sure how, but he did, and he sent Quin through a gate to get to Minoth. It made a big bang and knocked out her hearing for a while, but once she was able to hear again, she told us basically what happened. They know I’m pregnant, but they think it’s either Sal’s or Pirin’s. They don’t know about Otaan. Which is weird – at least three people do know and never said anything. I wonder why Elian didn’t – maybe he’s got some idea about tracking us down himself.

But Archmage Ethan does know now. I told him.

It hasn’t even been a week since we finished basic, and we’re already on our way to a war. (In Kesser of all places! But I’ll get to that later.) Mage-talented people are treated different from everybody else. We get better food, more privileges, more ‘free’ time. The regular troops do a whole lot of physical stuff – I don’t do as much as they do, but I push myself harder than sergeant Nouga does.

Anyway, we finished basic and they had a kind of a celebration – even the front-line recruits get a celebration when they finish basic – and Nouga pulled Quin, Sal, and me aside and told us there was someone who wanted to see us.

My heart stopped for a moment when I saw him. I felt really, really guilty about running away the way I did. If the earth had opened up and swallowed me, I wouldn’t have minded much. But he wasn’t there to arrest me or kill my baby or even to try to get us to go back to the school. He was there to give us our journeyman’s examination. For some reason, Sal decided not to sit the exam, but both Quin and I did.

It was an oral and practical exam, and we both passed, which felt damned good. We’re both officially journeyman in the Order now. Archmage Ethan gave us each a journal book with the symbol of the Order embossed on the leather cover and told us we should write down everything we could. When we die, these books go into the Magister’s library – someday someone might read them in their studies and find something useful. So I’ve spent a lot of time copying notes and formulas and diagrams from my old grimoire (which was falling apart) into this new journal. The paper’s wonderful, it takes ink beautifully without getting all spongy and splotchy and ugly-looking. I’m trying to be very careful with how I write and draw in it.

Quin and I also got a missive from the Sheik telling us to present ourselves for service in the Saydean army. Oops. I’ll do it. I don’t know when, but I’ll do it. I owe Sayd that much for the schooling.

All the official stuff was done, and it got kind of awkward. At least I felt awkward. “Archmage Ethan?” I asked – I sounded really little and scared and I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t make my voice come out any other way. “Can I talk with you, sir?”

“Of course, Sofiyah,” he told me. He frowned at me a little. Not like he was upset with me, but concerned.

It was really hard to get the words out and I felt like I was going to start crying at the least thing. “I. Um. I wanted you to know I wasn’t running away from you when I ran like I did.”

“Okay,” he said slowly. “Then why did you?”

“It’s about the baby.”

Ethan glanced over at Sal, who got that “I didn’t do it!” look on his face and held his hands up. It was even true, but it still didn’t look real. “It’s not mine,” he said.

“Pirin, then?” Ethan asked me.

I shook my head. “Uh-uh. Um.” I hugged myself, tight, my arms crossed over my belly, and looked down at my feet. “Did the trouble in Ashira stop after I left?”

The wrinkles in Ethan’s forehead deepened. He was trying to figure out where I was going with this. “No. It got worse, actually.”

“Didn’t you get our letter?” That was Sal. He’d been in the room with us the whole time, but didn’t say much since he wouldn’t take the exam.

“What letter?” Ethan asked.

There was a lot of confusion in the room. “The letter we left with Acolyte Telfor,” Sal explained. “We sent one to that judge we’d been working for, too.”

“I didn’t get any letter. And Telfor didn’t say anything.” Ethan frowned a little more. He’s still beautiful. Even if I’m kind of scared of doing anything with a man right now, I still like to look. And I feel like he’s more like a father than someone I want in bed. “The judge is dead.”

Ethan and Sal talked about that for a little while, but I’m afraid I wasn’t paying much attention. I was trying to figure out how to say what I needed to say, and that kept getting all tangled up. It’s not just that I did what I did with Otaan, or what I let him do with me. It’s that I loved doing it. He made me feel beautiful and attractive and sexy and so very very very good.

I don’t know that I wouldn’t do it all over again. I still think about him. (Among other people.) I think about him a lot. I remember his mouth and his hands on my body and his cock filling me and I feel weak in the knees. And I try to hate him, but I can’t.

I don’t really feel bad about any of it. I feel guilty for not feeling even a little bit bad about what we did, for still wanting him so very much, for running away from Archmage Ethan without any explanation.

“Otaan was doing all that ’cause he was looking for something,” I said. I was quiet, but everyone stopped talking and looked at me. “He was looking for me. I was a virgin when we. When. Um. And it was on an altar to Kaith and there were a bunch of other people there chanting.”

Archmage Ethan’s eyes got a little wider – I could almost see the pieces starting to fit together for him. “Were there eight people standing around you?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, barely even whispering.

“Did they turn around?”

“Yes.” My voice cracked.

“Was it just him with you?”

I hugged myself harder and just nodded. I was afraid if I said anything, I’d start crying. Everything was quiet for a few moments, except for the sounds of the celebration next door.

“Father Iyr would have you on an altar to the Nine to open your womb with a knife in a heartbeat,” Ethan said slowly.

It felt like someone hit me in the stomach. I think I whimpered a little. “Please, no,” I said. “That’s why I ran.”

Ethan looked at me. “If you have this child, it’s up to you to bring it to the Nine. It won’t be easy.”

“I know.”

“What do you want to do, Sofi?”

(Quin had not been quiet this whole time. She kept making comments about how ick ew gross getitoffme sex and especially babies were. “But babies are so dirty and ugly and smelly and slimy and~” “Shut up, Quin!”)

I looked up, feeling a tiny flame of fierceness light in my heart. “I want to have this baby. I want to raise it, to try to be a good mother. I don’t know how I’m going to manage that with everything else, but I want it.”

Ethan smiled and hugged me and I really did cry just a little bit. I don’t think anyone but him noticed. “You’ll be fine. I haven’t lost a student yet, Sofi.”

I looked up at him and smiled, just a little bit, with one corner of my mouth. “I don’t want to be the first.”

He hugged Quin, shook Sal’s hand, and left.

(Ethan also told us some things about demons and angels, but I’m not going to write them down here. If you’re reading this, you’ll either know what that is already, or you won’t, and you shouldn’t. Just know that demons are cruel and enjoy causing pain. All of them. With no exceptions. Also, Ethan wants to see us again in a few years for our Master’s exams.)

I feel a lot better having told Ethan. I still don’t know how I’m going to do this, but I feel like it’s actually possible. Even if the memories of Otaan do make me wet.

~`~

Hah. One thing they did when we first signed up was cut everyone’s hair short. Mine was already short – I like it this way – so they left me alone. Sal took it farther and shaved his head to the skin. Quin and Pirin didn’t take it very well. It was funny. To me, anyway. She’s still very pretty, even with her hair short. I’m not jealous, not really. Even if she is the pretty one, I still got (and still get) attention from the men – they all tend to think it’s terribly cute for a little girl like me to be doing calisthenics and running and grunting and sweating through weapons drill with them. Some of them seem to get pretty excited when they see a girl with a big knife.

I lost (still lose) a lot of these practice fights. Not because I’m not good (though some of them really are just much, much better than me – they’ve studied the fighting arts with the same dedication I’ve put into witchcraft) but because I’m so much smaller. Size matters. Size matters a lot, and don’t let anybody tell you different. It takes a really big skill difference for a small woman to beat up on a big man. The swords Ethan got for us make up for a lot of size difference (which is why people carry swords in the first place), but it’s hard to practice them in the Company. Almost nobody uses a scimitar, and I’m not familiar with the short chopping swords they use here.

~`~

So we are now part of the Fourth Regiment, under the command of Captain Navarr. At sea, his rank gets bumped up to Major. There’s only one captain on any boat. Navarr isn’t just big and tough-looking, he’s also a werewolf. If I’ve done the sums right, we’ll have a full moon while we’re at sea, under way for Kesser. (Yes, we’re going to Kesser. I don’t know who we’re going to be fighting, but the rumor vines say it’s not part of the war with Sayd. Me, I’m planning to talk with the locals as little as possible. I speak good Trades, but I still have a Saydean accent.) I don’t know how he’ll handle that, but it ought to be interesting to see.

And yes, they know I’m pregnant. I started throwing up about a month ago, which is just about as fun as it sounds. It’s usually called morning sickness, but it happens more often than that. Of course, I’m hungry all the time, and eating a ton, so I’m gaining weight. The baby is just starting to show, but it’s not noticeable under loose clothing. Yet. I’m so skinny (or I was) that even a little will be pretty obvious. I’ve already got more curves than I did, and I look softer, not so skinny. My breasts have finally decided to grow a little. Their weight makes them bounce in new ways, which I kind of like. They’re also tender, which I don’t like as much. It seems like I’m constantly bumping them into things. Sometimes I almost think I’m prettier than I usually am – I get more looks and more men “asking me to dinner” now. Maybe that glowing thing is sort of true.

It took a lot of talking for the Company to agree to send me into a war zone while I was pregnant, but I managed. It’s not like I’m going to be on the line swinging a sword. And they got a witch to teach me a protection charm. I ask the wood-spirits to lend me their toughness, and my skin gets all rough and hard like the bark of a big tree. It was a little awkward at first, bark doesn’t move the way skin does, but I’ve learned how to compensate for that pretty well.

Captain Navarr will very likely want to talk with me about my being pregnant soon. Pregnant women aren’t supposed to be in combat, but he’s got a choice to make: does he want to send me away – back to Minoth, probably – or does he want me to stick around and keep people alive? The right choice is pretty obvious to me, but then, I want to stay and help keep the troops alive. These people matter to me. I’ve gotten to know the NCOs at least, and about half the enlisted soldiers by name.

~`~

You won’t be surprised to know that I spent as much of the very little free time available as possible with midwives in Minoth, learning everything I could about pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, parenting. The morning sickness is normal, and it’ll be over soon enough. I have more to look forward to, up to and including the pain of giving birth. But I really am looking forward to it. Sort of. I mean, I am just ridiculously in love with this creature growing inside me, and I want to meet him or her in person.

But I’m also really, really scared. I never had a mother. I’m not sure I know how to be one.

I just hope they don’t force me off active duty for long. If they do, my hitch with the Fremen could be a lot longer than I thought.

There’s a part of keeps asking, “Why are you doing this? Just take some birthbane tea, abort the thing, and get it over with. A baby’s going to wreck your life.” And I hate that part. It’s not wrong. But the thought of doing that turns my stomach something fierce. This is mine. This might just be the first thing in my life that was ever mine. Besides, the spirits like it a lot that I’m pregnant – there’s almost always one around talking to the baby, and they’ll usually at least tell me hello. If anything, my magic’s stronger now that it was before. People who do other kinds of magic can be pretty screwed up when they’re pregnant, but witchcraft might as well have been designed for pregnant women. It’s not all shiny wonderful. I already mentioned the throwing up. I have to pee about eighteen times a day. I’m a little crazy – my mood swings from ecstatic to suicidal to homicidal in an instant. I find myself crying for no reason I can tell. This is normal. Every woman gets a little crazy when she’s pregnant. It’s still annoying as hell.

I wonder how Otaan’s ritual invoking Kaith will mix with the demon blood I pass along to my child, given the origin of demons. (No, I still haven’t looked to see if it’s a boy or a girl. I want to leave that until he or she’s born.)

Gah. There’s too little to do and too much time to think on this damned ship. (Apologies to the ship: I’m frustrated, but not with you.) We’re still tutoring the other mage-type recruits – all together, there are ten of us with talent – in the morning, but it gets too hot during the day to think straight. It’s not as bad as the high desert, but it’s pretty warm. Below deck it’s a fucking oven, and ripe with the smells of a hundred men and women with not too many ways to keep clean. The best we can do is drop a bucket into the sea and dump the water over our heads. And that just makes my head itch with the dried salt. It’s a good thing it’s short – this would be pretty unbearable if I had to deal with three feet of braids all sticky and crusted with salt.

Beyond that, I really like it out here on the sea. It’s a desert in its way, the water pushed up into waves like sand and with damned little of it fit to drink. One of the first things they told us was not to drink the water. It’s an ugly way to die, dehydrated and poisoned by salt. But there’s always a wind, and cooler up in the rigging. But the best place on the ship is the whiskers, a network of rope underneath the bowsprit. It’s close to the water, and really hypnotic watching and listening to the water being carved into a standing wave by our bow. And it’s out of the way of the real sailors. I’m not even close to a real sailor. These men – the crew is entirely male, though there are some women among the troops – have been in and around boats their entire lives. Me, I’m just a passenger, though an interested one. She’s almost a living thing, this ship. She creaks and moans and snaps – the lines are her tendons and the sails her muscles, and the crew the nerves that tell everything what to do. The ship’s chartroom is her heart, the wheel her sex, and the captain her lover.

Okay, maybe that’s taking it a little far, but the ship definitely has a personality. Every ship does, according to sailors.

~`~

We stopped for water at a Xandros waystation for water, but I didn’t really want to meet the water elves. They’re a little creepy. Sal, seeing a business opportunity, went and traded for a whole lot of fresh food. It was all seafood, of course, and it sold real fast back on board ship.

~`~

Early this morning, just about dawn, we were attacked by a corsair raider. Not one of the ordinary corsair raiders with their gaff-rigged (do I sound like a sailor yet?) sails but something else entirely. From what Quin said – she was on watch in the crow’s nest but didn’t see it until very late – it came up from under the water. And it didn’t have any sails at all.

It rammed us about midships, the barbs of its ramming prow taking hold of our hull and sticking fast, leaving our decks at about a fifteen degree tilt. Those of us still below were thrown around in our hammocks, but there weren’t any serious injuries.

Up on deck, skeletons armed with rusting, decaying weapons poured over the corsair’s gunwales and onto our decks. Not good. Sal was first out the hatch with a couple of our men following behind him. He flipped up onto the deck and raked a dagger across the two nearest skeletons. It didn’t seem to have much effect on them. I came out a little less gracefully than Sal had, pushing myself up onto the deck by brute force. In one of Father Iyr’s classes he said that undead, being animated by unnatural and anti-life powers, were particularly vulnerable to the healing magics – a charm that would heal a living person would do damage to one of the undead.

So I murmured the charm that would ask the spirits to heal someone and slammed my hand into the closest skeleton’s ribcage. It didn’t work very well – I misspoke a word and all that happened was that it was suddenly dripping with purple-red goo. The thing was still trying to stab me with a rusty spear, and I hit it with my sword.

Things got out of hand fast. There were skeletons just about everywhere, Quin was swinging back and forth on the end of a rope, firing off lightning bolts at the top of each arc (which was pretty damn impressive, but I lost her when she stopped throwing lightning around), Captain Navarr had this enormous halberd and was just laying waste around him. Someone off to my right was pinned to the deck with a skeleton’s spear through his back – I dove over there, grabbed him, and asked for healing again. This time I got the words right and the wound started healing. More importantly, the pain stopped. There were other people bleeding, possibly dying, but I didn’t know where they were.

And suddenly all the skeletons stopped fighting and went back to their own ship. Quin had been over there and said that the people on the ship (there were a couple of humans) had gotten the wrong one, and when they figured it out, they had their necromancer call the skeletons back. Oops. I know how much I hate it when I attack the wrong ship – it’s so embarrassing.

The people there came up on deck and talked with Navarr a bit, actually apologizing for having attacked us – they were after a different ship that was supposed to be on this course about this time. The man was an alchemist, and asked if he could fix our ship. I swear I only meant to think “Could you do that with your shirt off?” but I guess I did say it out loud, because he grinned at me and peeled out of his shirt. I blushed – he was gorgeous and built like a bronze god, and that grin could melt just about anything. It did a pretty good job on my knees. I melted, he fixed the ship, and we were on our way.

Except I wasn’t done working yet. My work mostly comes after the fight. The guy I’d healed probably would’ve died without magic – that spear had gone through his liver – but I wasn’t strong enough to heal everyone with magic. Most of the injuries weren’t too bad, or wouldn’t have been if they’d been made with clean weapons. I had to scrub pretty hard to make sure the wounds were clean and didn’t have anything still in them that would turn septic. For a lot of them, my tending their wounds hurt more than getting them in the first place. They cursed me as I poured alcohol spirits into their wounds, but for all their imagination, none of them came close to my actual parentage. I just had to hope they wouldn’t come down with lockjaw. The disease charm I learned is still new and I’m not as confident with it.

One man I had to heal with magic, though. He’d taken a spear thrust in the joint of his shoulder and six inches of point had snapped off deep inside. That had to come out or he’d lose the arm for certain – I gave him enough poppy to kill an uninjured man, but he was in so much pain it didn’t even put him unconscious. That was bad – I was hoping to put him out while I dug out the spear point. There were four big, strong men holding him down, one on each arm, one on his feet, and one holding his head against the deck. He still thrashed around when I started cutting, and screamed, and finally, finally passed out. I worked as fast as I could, but it was almost an hour before I cut away enough of the ruined tissue to make a healing work.

It almost didn’t – maybe I was too tired to really be doing that, but if I hadn’t done it, losing the arm would’ve been the best outcome. The chant almost got away from me, and it took a real effort to get it back under my control. I was exhausted and bloody when I was finally done, but the young man wouldn’t die and would still have the full use of his arm when he woke up.

“Will he lose the arm?” asked Navarr.

I blinked at him, stupid-tired. “Um. No. He’ll be fine.”

“Good.” Coming from him, that was lavish praise indeed. Especially for a very green recruit like me.

I got a bucket of seawater to wash the worst of the blood off and stumbled down the ladder to find my hammock. Three people had died during the fight or soon after – I didn’t even get to look at them before they were dead.

The man whose arm I saved is Kanacir, and he’s only a little older than I am. There’s always a connection between me and the person I’m healing, and it’s stronger when I have to heal a lot of damage at once. When I asked for healing for him, there was a new voice among those that usually answer me. I know I’ve never heard it before, but it sounded familiar anyway. Kanacir and I haven’t talked a whole lot, but there’s still a feeling of intimacy with him.

When you reach into the void and pull a person back from death, it binds you to them. Not in a bad way, but I always know a little bit about Kanacir, and get faint echoes of how he’s feeling.

~`~

Even though the men sluiced the deck down with seawater, it still took all day to holystone the blood off the decks. I helped drag it up and down the planking until it was unstained white wood again. I wish I could holystone the blood out of my mind sometimes.

~`~

Davin was amazing – I’d like to go back some day, but some day is going to have to wait for a while, I think. Not because I had anything to do with the part of the docks we’d tied up at getting wrecked, because I didn’t. It had absolutely nothing to do with me. I was helpful afterwards, but that’s all.

From what I could tell it started when Quin got back to the ship and immediately climbed up into the crow’s nest. A few minutes after she did that, an incredibly handsome man (I keep running across these ridiculously beautiful men. I’m not complaining. Believe me, I’m so not complaining) appeared on the deck of the ship. The sergeant of the day tried to tell him to go away, but the man threw him overboard without even really meaning to. Splash. Then he jumped from the deck to the crow’s nest, making the ship rock. It was pretty damn impressive. I put up what I was doing and went to throw the sergeant a line so he could climb back on board. Just as he was doing that, the guy jumped from the crow’s nest back down to the dock with Quin in his arms, putting a good-sized dent in the very hard, very thick wood. The sergeant (wisely, in my opinion) decided to just let him go.

Quin didn’t seem to be an unwilling participant in all this, but I followed along after them all the same. When they went into the inn on the dockside, I stopped following and just grinned at the door. Maybe she’d stop being such a pain about sex now.

When the screaming started and a lightning bolt blew out through the wall of the inn, I stopped grinning. It was even less funny when the lightning bolt hit a magazine and ignited all the gunpowder stored inside. The explosion knocked me down, made all the ships in the harbor rock like crazy, wrecked the front of the inn, and shattered all the windows along the waterfront. That was bad. And the screaming got a whole lot louder. Very loud crashing noises came from inside, along with the sounds of animals snarling and growling and roaring.

The wharf blew up at some point, and most of the inn collapsed, but I couldn’t tell you what order things happened in. A bunch of people came out of the inn, most of them wounded, but there was a young man (called Cub, I heard later) concentrating very hard, a Dworn woman (a priest in Jorah’s service whose name I never learned) with a very large hammer, and an Irosian woman (Ira) helping the worst-injured man stagger out into the open. The fight was still going on somewhere close by.

I could see the spirits gathered around her, and they lent her their strength as she healed the people gathered around her all at once. “I can’t do that,” I said, only the teeniest bit jealous. Someday I’d be able to do that. “But I can heal. I can help.”

She looked at me and smiled like the sun rising. As bad as things were right then, my breath caught in my throat. Not because she was attractive (though she was beautiful) but because I had the completely irrational thought that I knew her from somewhere. “You’re spirit-called, aren’t you?” she asked me. I managed to nod, and she hugged me very, very tight. I might not have met her before, but my heart knew her. It wasn’t like anything I ever felt before, and I didn’t want to let go ever. But we had things to do.

“There are more still inside,” the young man said, and started concentrating again. Big chunks of rubble started to lift up from the ground. Apparently he could do something like Sal’s tricks with the marbles but on a much, much larger scale. The Irosian woman dived in and I followed after her. One woman was dead, her head crushed under a heavy ceiling beam, but we were able to save the rest. We staggered back out of the rubble. I’d done too much magic – I’d had to reach into the void to pull one person back – and couldn’t stand up any more. The Irosian woman led me to a relatively quiet spot and sat me down. When I’d gone into the void this time, it felt like I could reach farther than I could before, that the new voice would hold on to me and pull me back if I stumbled. Up to a point. It’s always risky, reaching into death.

“I don’t want you to go,” I mumbled.

She smiled at me and kissed the top of my head. “I won’t go far. Stay here, I’ll bring you some water.”

Impressive as Ira was – and she was damned impressive – the Dworn woman was simply phenomenal. I’ve never seen anything like her. She must have healed fifty people, and not minor injuries, either. These were broken bones, dislocated limbs, that sort of thing. People with scrapes and bruises we just left to take care of themselves – there was too much damage to spent magic on minor hurts. There always is. That’s part of why I’ve put so much effort into learning how to diagnose and treat people without magic. There’s never enough magic to heal all the wounds. And I absolutely hate just throwing power at an injury or disease without actually knowing anything about it. How can you know what you’re doing will actually help if you don’t know what you’re doing in the first place. So I’ve studied anatomy, surgery, apothecaria, epidemiology, midwifery. There’s still lots more to learn, but I feel like I’ve got a pretty good foundation for what I’m doing.

The Davin guard started to show up about then, getting people quieted down and moving away. Ira came and found me and took me back to the ship. We held on to each other as we talked – actually, I talked. She asked me about my life and I talked until she absolutely had to go because the ship was about to weigh anchor. But we didn’t go any farther than that, though we did get a couple of kisses in here and there. Not that I don’t want her – she could have me just for the asking – it just wasn’t the right time for that sort of thing.

“I’ll miss you,” I told her.

She smiled at me, a not-quite-big-sisterly sort of smile, and ruffled my hair. “I’ll miss you too, my seedling.”

I grinned and wrinkled my nose at her, not embarrassed at all. “But we’ll meet again, right?”

“Of course. And I know we’ve met before.”

“Um…”

There was that dazzling smile again. “Maybe you weren’t born yet, but we’ve met. Life is circular, you know.”

“Oh, I know that.” I did. It’s one of the foundation principles of witchcraft. Everything that dies is born again, in some shape or another. I looked at her and smiled back. “Yeah, you’re right, we have.”

Ira hugged me close and kissed me lightly. “Goodbye, Sofi.”

“Goodbye, Ira,” I told her, not wanting to let go. “Love you.”

“I love you too.” And she really, really, really had to go, so she did. Knowing we’ll meet again makes the leaving easier. Next time my baby will probably be here, too.

~`~

Quin’s been locked in Navarr’s cabin since they got back – and Navarr locked himself on the outside. I wonder what the hell’s going on.

~`~

The other amazing thing about Davin was that my luck was actually better than the dice these guys tried to sharp me with. I knew the damned game was crooked when I went into it, but it’d been way too long since I’d had a serious game, and I couldn’t not get in it.

It wasn’t the very first thing I did when I got onshore – I feel like a paragon of self-control. The first thing was I went to a public bathhouse. They robbed me, but I wasn’t going to complain about it. Five silver thalers for a bath and another one for tea and a little something to eat. It felt amazingly good to get in some hot water, to have my hair washed, to get the pitch and the tar and the pine sap off my skin. It was highway robbery, but I paid it gladly. Getting a bath, a real bath, was worth twice that just then.

Right after that, though, I went to find a game. I didn’t have the stakes for a really serious one, but I could get in a low-rent game, try to build my stake up some so I could get in a serious game. There were three guys, and it didn’t take too long for me to figure out they were all in it and they were going to try to fleece me down to my toenails. They pretty near pulled it off, too. The one guy put out all the coin he had, lost that, and put his fucking gun out there. It wasn’t even a decent bet, being worth like twenty times what was in the pot. I’d had some pretty strong suspicions before then, but that clinched it. I was about to get took, and took but good.

They weren’t half bad. I almost missed when they switched the straight dice for the barred dice. And they threw some good ones. I threw better, even with their barred dice.

Naturally the gun dude was pissed. He grabbed up his gun, a little one popped out of his sleeve, and each of his partners suddenly had guns pointed at them. “This was not in the plan, assholes. What the hell is wrong with you?” And then he looked at me. “Take it and go.”

It sounded like real good advice. And got to be better advice – as I was leaving, I heard twin booms as he fired off both guns. I decided that it would be better if I left even faster, just in case he had another one somewhere and decided to get his money back, so I ran. I almost ran into a little Halfor girl, not looking where I was going. (But I swear she wasn’t there when I started the step.)

“Why are you running?” she asked after I apologized for almost running her over.

“There was a guy back there with guns and a real bad mood. I didn’t want to get shot.”

“What happened?”

I grinned. “My luck was better than their dice.”

She grinned back. And then managed to look both innocent and devious at once. “So you wouldn’t be interested in an investment opportunity, would you?” she asked. I didn’t trust her a bit, but it might be for real. “Since you just sharked the sharks, you’d have the funds, right?”

My grin went away and my eyebrows went up. “How much?”

“Not much. Just a hundred.”

I made a disappointed face. “Sorry. I don’t have a hundred.”

“Well, maybe I could cut you –” She stopped when a voice cut in.

“Emma, leave the poor girl alone.”

“But Candy…” she whined, doing her very best to look adorable.

“Two hundred years old, and you’re still scamming people.”

“But~! The money! I want to get all the money.”

I looked over at the man she called Candy (I still can’t describe what he looked like) and shrugged. “I can respect that,” I told him. “But it’s nice to be able to hang onto this. Thanks.”

“No problem. Mark, take this young lady to her ship, make sure she gets there safe and sound.”

“Sure, boss.”

Mark was nice, handsome in a nondescript sort of way, and he offered me his arm as he walked me back to the ship. I’d just finished counting what I’d won – it came to more than forty gold thalers – when the world blew up. You know about that part.

There was one more thing, though. I’m fair certain that Otaan knows that I was in Davin, and most likely what I was doing there and where I was going. While Mark was walking me back to the ship, someone along the way saw me and looked really startled. Then he ran like a rabbit. Quin was there and tried to trip him, but he was pretty slippery himself and disappeared into the crowd.

It was bound to happen eventually. I just wish I could convince myself that I didn’t want to see him again.

~`~

Captain Navarr finally let Quin out of his cabin and moved back in himself. It’s been days since we left Davin. A lot of people assumed she was sleeping with Navarr and aren’t talking to her any more. She wasn’t, but nobody really cares about that.

And we finally figured out the hell what was going on with her. She was really badly broken. It seems she’d started life as a cat and a sorcerer’s familiar, and that sorcerer had tried to do some kind of transformation that didn’t work right, putting Quin’s personality in the sorcerer’s body and the sorcerer’s in the cat’s body. She’d gone into heat when she was in Davin, which was what set off all the destruction. The first guy’s name was Chase, he was a werelion, and he’d taken Quin off to be his mate, and Navarr wasn’t having anybody doing anything even like that to one of his soldiers. Lots of masculine shapeshifterish stuff ensued, wrecking the inn even worse than it had been from the cat’s lightning.

It’s fixed now, but it took a lot of doing. The cat was the one throwing lightning bolts around Davin and Sal picked her up and brought her back to the ship. Until Navarr opened the door to his cabin, everything was nice and calm. He opened the door and I guess the cat smelled Quin and went up after her. Quin ran out of the cabin and slammed the door shut behind her, trapping the cat inside.

The cat stayed trapped for all of a heartbeat before yet another lightning bolt blew the door off and left a huge smoking hole in Captain Navarr’s chest. It looked really, really, really bad and I hurried over to see what I could do for him. Even werewolves need help healing sometimes, and it seemed like a good idea. By the time I got the crater closed up, Sal was standing in between the cat and Quin, with a lot of blue glowy stuff going on around all three of them. With the light, I could see that Quin actually was a cat, and the cat was a woman. She kept flickering back and forth between cat and woman, though. If this didn’t get fixed, and fixed soon, the cat would be nothing more than a cat, and gods alone knew what Quin would be.

Anyway, he talked the two of them into not killing each other somehow and the blue glowy stuff faded.

The short version of what happened next is that we needed to be able to work a transformation so that the cat would be a woman, but Quin could also be a woman too – she didn’t want to be just a cat any more. We had the bright idea that since alchemists were all about transformations and we knew about where one was, we could try to get in touch with him and get his help.

Which is pretty much how that happened, except that Sal almost made his brain ooze out of his skull like porridge trying to get the word to the Nexians in the underwater corsair boat. I supplied blood for the ritual – about a pint, not too much. There wasn’t much else I could do – I couldn’t even figure out what the damage Sal had done to himself was, much less fix it. The cat was fixed, becoming a woman called Orellia, and Quin was fixed, staying pretty much herself.

It was a hellishly impressive piece of magic. It got even more impressive later when I found out that what the Nexian had done (he took his shirt off before he started. “Thank you,” I said in a small voice) was impossible. Or it should have been impossible until he’d done it. The cost for me wasn’t much just a little blood, a little pain, and the lictum the Company had given me when I finished basic. Sal almost lost his ability to do what he does, and Quin and Orellia had their prices to pay as well, which I don’t understand clearly. Apparently Quin is going to be a slave at some point in her life, but we don’t know when, or whose slave. The Nexian woman, his wife, picked him up and carried him back to their raider. Sal had promised fame, and the woman said she’d make sure of it. Strong woman, that.

She will, too. She’s a bard, and added her own magic to the transformation. I couldn’t have told you even then what the words were, or the melody, but it was incredibly beautiful, joyous, and seemed to call for everything within hearing to wake up. Everything did – all of us watching, spirits of the dead and of nature, and my baby. I felt it, and felt its curiosity about the world it hadn’t seen yet.

I think it’s going to be a very interesting child, what with everything that’s happened to it so far. I can’t wait to meet him or her.

Orellia want to be put on the next Saydian ship we come across. That shouldn’t be a problem, there are lots of Saydian ships in these waters. I’ve given her my hammock – I can sleep up on deck for a couple of days, no problem.