Game: Session 12

Journals:
The last time I kept a narrative journal was back when Suleiman was just born, some fifteen years ago. I’d started keeping one for a class project when I was only fifteen myself, and then when I passed the exams to become a journeyman in the Order, Archmage Ethan gave me a red leather-bound journal book. I never asked him what it was for, but since I already had a journal I kept my notes on magic in, I used it to keep a personal diary in.

Shortly after I had Suleiman, Dedri initiated me into the sisterhood, and I wasn’t a journeyman in the Order any more. It didn’t seem appropriate to keep a journeyman’s diary when I wasn’t one, so I gave it back to him after finishing up the last few entries before the Predator War really exploded.

After the animaen rolled over the militaries of Kesser and Sayd, my life got a lot more complicated. I was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant in the Freeman Company, and have the brands to prove it. My son was safe in Mother’s Grace Temple, and to be near him, I asked to be posted to Sword’s Landing on the eastern coast of Kesser. They gave me command over a hospital. I’d been in charge of a legion’s medical unit before and thought that kept me busy.

I had no idea. Even with clerks to help me and a staff of skilled healers and nurses, I was always exhausted. There was no time to write anything that wasn’t paperwork even if I’d wanted to keep a record of what I saw and heard and did. When I couldn’t stand it any more I fled for the sanctuary of Alexi’s temple, Corri’s bed, and my son’s company. And then I’d go back into the shitstorm.

I still have my notebooks on magic and medicine from back then, and they’re eerily devoid of any personal or emotional context. Most of that would have gone into a personal journal, and I was deliberately not keeping one then. I lost the habit rather quickly. I still kept notes on the technical , and there’s necessarily something of me in them, but it’s hard to find most of the time.

Now that my son is getting close to the age I was when he was conceived, I’ve been thinking about that time a lot. And I think it might be time to start keeping a journal again. One of my sisters is a bookbinder, and she gave me a lovely book to use for it. Somewhere she found sandalwood to use in the cover, and the dark green leather is embossed with a coyote’s pawprint. It’s very beautiful, and I’m grateful to her for it.

Children:
I have two children, my son Suleiman, who’s almost sixteen now, and my daughter Linea (Lin), who’s nine. I worry that I neglect my daughter – Suleiman is a deeply troubled young man, and he takes up a lot of my attention. On the other hand, Lin is an easy child. She’s bright, likeable, talkative, and loves her big brother to pieces. I don’t know that I spend enough time with her or tell her often enough how wonderful she is. She is wonderful, and I’m lucky to be her mother.

Her father, Noah, was one of the men of the forest, though he’s gone now to the animaen’s world as one of the Dark Brothers. I still think of him fondly, but I’m not sure I miss him. Maybe I do, and I’m just fooling myself. I wanted another child, hoped for a daughter and prayed that lightning would strike twice and give me a daughter with the gift for witchcraft.

I got the first, but not the second. It doesn’t matter. Or at least it doesn’t matter now. When she was born and the midwives told me she wouldn’t be a witch, I was disappointed. Not in her, but because there were things I wouldn’t be able to share with her that I’d so wanted to.

There are places here for our children, and Lin shows a talent for helping things grow that has nothing to do with magic. I don’t worry about her future the way I do her brother’s.

I spend a lot of time worrying about Suleiman. He’s a good son, and the only people who know how good he is are Lin and Feli and me. Everyone else sees the moody, the violent, the unsociable and they don’t have any idea how much control it takes for him to keep from doing really awful things. This is what the ritual around his conception was for. He has Kaith, the god of slaughter, in his head, talking to him, telling him to kill people, to butcher them.

When Suleiman was six – I was pregnant with Lin then – he came to me and asked what people were like inside, because he kept seeing pictures in his mind and he wasn’t sure if they were accurate or not. So we sat down with one of my anatomies (a book I’d bought in Gregor, not one I wrote myself. The writing part’s not hard, but I can’t draw worth a damn.) and I showed him where all the organs were in the chest and belly, how muscle connected to bone, things like that. Later when I was butchering a sow, I made sure to let him help so he could see in color. Pigs are a lot like humans inside, so it shouldn’t be too different.

Suleiman told me that the pictures in his mind were right. And then he assured me very seriously that he wouldn’t cut anyone open and take them apart the way the voice told him he should. He didn’t want to make me sad, and he knew that it would if he did that.

I’d made a rule for myself that I wouldn’t cry in front of my children, but that time I broke my rule. I hugged him tight to me and kissed his hair and told him that I loved him very much, and that I was the luckiest mother in the world to have such a good son.

It’s true, I feel like I am. He tries so very hard to push the voices away, to do what he knows is right. It’s not that he doesn’t know that the things he’s being told to do are wrong. It’s that he’s being told to do them constantly.

He’s so good that he’d rather hurt himself than hurt someone else. So he hits things. Rocks, trees, whatever. Yes, I’m a witch of the verdant forest and we don’t hurt trees, but he’s not doing much damage to the trees. He does a lot of damage to himself. I don’t want to think about how many times he’s come to me with broken, bleeding hands, having finally caused himself enough pain that he can concentrate on that and not the voice.

Living here doesn’t help him much. Suleiman has the sort of personality that drives men (and women too, but it’s more often men) to take up a sword and carve out an empire. He could do it, too. Given the chance, he could inspire armies to his cause, whatever that cause might be. It helps that he’s physically beautiful, tall and well-muscled even at not-quite-sixteen, but he’s got the charisma for the task, too. And here? Here, women have higher status than men. The men – our sons and brothers, the fathers of our children – are little better than servants.

A lot of people pass through our forest, including a fair number of Gregorian knights. Suleiman sees how they’re treated, how the women traveling with them bow to them and fetch things the way he’s supposed to bow to and fetch for the women here, and he wants to be in their place, having someone do what he wants.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing to want. I know he doesn’t fit in here. He really needs something else – he could make an excellent knight, or a mercenary officer, or even a werewolf. There’s not anything like that in our forest. There are the rangers, but they don’t have ranks, and each does his or her work alone. That won’t satisfy the need in him to be a warrior among warriors.

And what a warrior he’ll make! I gave him my school sword when he was ten, and he had more skill with it than me by the time he was twelve. He’s mastered every weapon I could teach him, and several I never learned. It’s amazing to watch him move through a sword kata – it’s as though the skill was in him all along and just needed a little nudge to come out.

Quite frankly, we need Suleiman at his very best. We’re not losing this war, but we’re not winning, either. He could make a tremendous difference. Or he could be a nightmare, a tyrant so depraved as to make Lord Axe himself pale.

I’ve been thinking about this so much that it’s worn a rut in my mind. I don’t know how to keep the voice from making him a monster. I desperately need help, options, new ideas.

See what I mean? Lin got two and a half paragraphs. The rest of it’s been about Suleiman, and I haven’t even started writing down all the things that worry me about him. Even if she doesn’t mind, she deserves better.

Lin:
Nine years old now, my daughter Linea is my easy child. I wonder sometimes what I’m missing – I get the impression that she knows how much I worry about her brother and puts some effort into making sure I don’t have much to cause me to worry about her.

She wasn’t born with the spark of a witch, but most of our daughters aren’t. Like me, most witches are originally from somewhere outside the forest and come here to join the sisterhood. So she’s being trained as a tree-tender for now, but I think she might like being a ranger better. I’d rather she was a tree-tender – it’s a lot safer, especially with our patrols skirmishing constantly with werecaul patrols – but looking after trees is a lot less exciting.

Lin dotes on her older brother, and he actually seems to return the feelings she has for him. He tolerates her more than he does me, in fact. She’s allowed to be snuggly and affectionate with him, and I’m not.

It made me jealous at first. It’s a terrible thing to feel jealous of one’s own child. But now I’m just glad Suleiman has someone that he lets love him the way Lin does. If he can love Lin and me, then he’s at least capable of it.

Lin’s father was one of the men of the forest, though he’s gone now, off with the human rebels from the animaen’s world. There are men with the gift we call witchcraft, who can speak with spirits and channel their power. And there were more than thirty in the forest when the Predator War began. They weren’t allowed to use their gift, and were mainly kept to father witches’ children, and provide blood for rituals.

Noah was one of these men. When I first came to the forest, I’d said (to myself) that I wouldn’t use them the way my sisters did. It didn’t sit well with me, the way we treated them – it was much the same way the Kesserit treated women in their culture, and I didn’t like that when I was there. A distinction between those with the gift and those without I can understand, but a distinction based on sex bothers me. There aren’t many things only a man can do, or only a woman can do, but the gift allows people to do very different things than people without it. And even then not having the gift shouldn’t make a person less than a person with it, just different.

But then, I grew up being treated the same as every other child at the school. We were magic wielders first and boys or girls a far distant second. They didn’t even bother to keep separate dormitories for boys and girls. We were different because we had the gift – and it wasn’t a very positive difference.

I didn’t look to find a lover among those men. I really didn’t look to find the father of a child among them. But Noah set his mind on catching me, and by the time I noticed I was mostly caught already. He was – is, if he’s not dead – a lovely man, tall and strong and pale as a birch tree. It felt good to be in his arms, safe and warm and protected and I hadn’t known I wanted any of those things.

It meant losing him as a lover, but when he mentioned it, I encouraged him to go with the other men, the dark brothers, to the animaen’s world to help the humans there fight their rebellion against them. Here, he could be my lover and not much more. There, he’d be a hero. He’d be able to use all his knowledge and all his magic (when it came to theory, he was a better witch than I was) to do something immensely important.

When we knew I was pregnant, he put off leaving. He wanted to see his child before he left, he said. So he’d know that he’d done something important here too.

He made me cry a lot while I was pregnant, my Noah did. It made Suleiman very unhappy; I had to explain over and over again that being sad wasn’t always a bad thing, and that Noah was doing exactly the right thing and I was doing exactly the right thing and it hurt anyway.

When Lin was born, Noah made excuses to stay until he just couldn’t any longer. I still wonder how he is, if he’s still alive, if he’s accomplishing the things he wanted to in the animaen’s world.

Otaan:
I put a lot of effort into not lying to my children. I’m not going to try to make myself seem like a better person than I am. Like about my sexuality. Almost all women, I told them, love men, and almost all men love women. There are some women who love women, some men who love men, and a few who love both more or less equally. Most of the time when you love someone you want to be close to them physically, though often the being close physically comes first.

I’ve told both Lin and Suleiman about their fathers, and I didn’t gloss over much. Suleiman knows who Otaan is and what he did at his conception (not the details, but that there was a ritual invoking Kaith). He twists it sometimes, when he wants to hurt me, but he knows the truth of it. He knows that I loved his father and he loved me, but that we couldn’t make a life together. Lin knows what her brother struggles with and adores him for being so strong.

I do too. My poor brave son.

I haven’t mentioned that Otaan caught up with me in Kesser while I was still there during the war. (I haven’t told anyone about this, actually.) I was still working in the refugee hospitals then. It was late evening and the air reeked of the citronella torches we burned to try to keep the insects away from our patients. I was in my office – as a lieutenant and the chief surgeon of the hospital I rated a private tent, though I had the sides rolled up to let the air move through – trying to make a dent in the paperwork.

I didn’t even notice him come in. Usually I’m more observant than that, but I’d spent all day working with my patients, had three surgeries, and lost one of them on the operating table. I was staring at yet another inventory request, trying to make sense of what the clerk had scribbled down, when someone pushed my hair aside to kiss the back of my neck. “I don’t know who you are,” I said, sighing as I relaxed. “But you’re going to have to stop that. In at least a day or so.”

“Hello Sofi,” purred a voice in my ear.

Otaan. I didn’t bother trying to pretend that I wasn’t glad to see him, that my heart leapt knowing that he was alive and well and here. I stood up and turned around to kiss him and the whole world fell away in that kiss. “Hello Otaan,” I said when he finally broke off the kiss so I could breathe. “You’re not dead.”

He chuckled and I felt it low in my belly. Why did I love this man so much? How can he make me feel this way still, after everything that’s happened. “No, not dead. You know, if you joined me, if you came away with me to be my wife, you’d have power over death itself.”

Gods above me it was tempting. Not so much the power of resurrection, though thinking about the children I’d seen die in this war gave it some urgency, but having him for the rest of my life. I closed my eyes. “No, Otaan. I can’t go with you. Not forever. I’d give you a weekend or so, but not the rest of my life.”

“Then I’ll take a weekend.” And he kissed me again.

It ended up being almost a week – I told my deputy I was taking a short leave and left him in charge of the hospital. Otaan had a lovely house on the edge of a forest, and it was luxury like I’d never seen since I’d gone with him that night in Ashiri.

What can I say? It was amazing. Not just the sex, though I’ve never had better, but the whole experience. There was an always-warm bath big enough to fit both of us, a huge bed with a mattress and a featherbed under silk sheets, scented oils and a masseuse, delicious food and wines served to us in bed. We made love out in the garden under the light of the moons.

It broke my heart to leave him, but it always did. He asked me to stay again, something he’d avoided for all the days I was there. I swallowed back my tears and shook my head. “No, Otaan. I can’t go with you.”

“Why not? Sofi, I love you. I want to spend my life with you.”

How can anything hurt that much? “I love you too, Otaan. But it’s not enough. Would you forsake Kaith for me?”

He thought about it a while. He really thought about it. But in the end he shook his head. “No. No, I wouldn’t.”

“Then how can you ask me to forsake my gods?”

“I guess I can’t.” He lifted my hand to his lips and kissed the tips of my fingers. “But I’ll never stop wanting you to.”

“I won’t either.” I sighed and kissed him again, one last time. “Goodbye, Otaan.”

“Goodbye, Sofi.”

Coward that I am, I changed my shape for the coyote’s and ran. The coyote doesn’t cry, but she does howl. I howled out my grief until my throat was raw with it.

Living in the North:
Three years in the refugee camps (and later, when most of the refugees had been evacuated to Gregor, in a military hospital) was more than enough. It got to the point where I stopped seeing my patients as people. I didn’t care what happened to the young woman who’d just lost her arm, I just wanted her to shut up and let me get some sleep. The man who died on my operating table did it just to spite me. Everyone who came down with dysentery did it on purpose, and deserved what they got.

Even visits to Suleiman and Corri once or twice a month weren’t keeping me sane any more. I had to get away. The Company, as represented by various officers, quartermasters, and the guy in charge of pay arrears, was sorry to see me go, and the severance bonuses I’d accrued over my time of service came to just enough to cover my debt to the Company with enough left over to get me and my toddler son to the verdant forest by military transport.

I’d be welcome in the forest – I seemed to know that, and need it, deep in my bones – and though it wasn’t an impregnable fortress like Alexi’s temple, it was safe. Relatively speaking. Otaan would have a hard time getting to us there, but the werecaul seemed to have little enough trouble slipping in and killing a few of us every few months.

(That’s gotten better over the years – early in the Predator War we were one of the few human places left on the continent. Since then, using our forest as a beachhead, a lot of humans and our allies have come over both to resettle and to fight the werecaul. If nothing else, they give the werecaul more targets to consider. I still don’t know why the werecaul turned on us in the first place. We’d always gotten along well with them. Even my (very well-placed) sources don’t have an answer to that.)

It was time for me to go home.

I’ve been here more than ten years, and I’m still not entirely used to it. Whatever changes time has brought, I’m still a child of the desert, and a cathedral forest in the north is very much not a desert. The sun that reaches the ground here is dim and broken into droplets by the trees, it’s very wet, and it’s never hot. Certainly, in the summer it gets warm enough that natives complain about the heat, but for me it’s barely getting into comfortably warm. I take shameless advantage of that when it happens, sunning myself on rocks like a lizard to soak up as much warmth as possible.

By the time the autumn-turned leaves start falling I’m already bundled up in furs. My children think I’m insane, and tease me about being soft. Hah. They wouldn’t last three days in a proper desert. Someday we’ll make our way down to Sayd and then we’ll see about soft.

Fortunately for me, there are things in this damned cold place to keep me warm. Hunting works, whether it’s on two legs or four – the waiting is cold, but the chase heats the blood admirably. There are a few hot springs in the forest, and I know them all intimately. Being snowbound with a lover is one of life’s great pleasures, and I wouldn’t have gotten to discover that living down south.

We live in a tree house – I didn’t build it, a sister called Iria did centuries ago with the help of the tree that supports it. Stairsteps wind around the trunk to where the lower branches spread out; each room is nestled into the crook of trunk and branch. It doesn’t sound like it’d be very warm in winter, and it isn’t. We move into one of the long houses just like everyone else. But come spring, it’s a lovely place up among the leaves and the wind. I like it a lot.

Food:
I’m not a very good cook, I’m afraid. Maybe if I’d had a more normal childhood I would’ve learned, but I didn’t, and no one taught me. Cook could have, but she felt that since I was a student in a school of magic, I should damned well study magic and not cookery. Fortunately a good many of my sisters are excellent cooks, and my daughter’s learning from them. Without them, we’d starve. Or we’d eat a whole lot of mouse stew – one of the few things I can cook with any hope of it being edible. I can brew tinctures all day and never ruin a drop of it, but ask me to make dinner and suddenly things start exploding. It’s just more trouble than it’s worth.

I still think northern cooking tends to be too bland. I miss the spices from the south. Before I left the School of Shimmering Sands that last time, I tried to get recipes from Cook, but she claimed to never use recipes. She just made dinner. That wasn’t very helpful at all.

I do make a stellar pot of tea, though.

One thing about living on the coast is that I’ve developed a taste for seafood. Crabs, mussels, shrimp, oysters, fish, octopus – if it lives in the water, I’ve at least tried it once. And I’ve found that a sea otter shape works better for the shoreline than a dolphin does. An otter can tumble around in the surf and not get too beat up, but a dolphin’s skin is too tender for that. I like seafood as a human, too, but I like a lot of them cooked first. Steamed mussels are a treat not to be missed.

Me:
Physically I haven’t changed much at all. My hair’s a little longer, down to the tops of my thighs. I’m still as dark as I was in Sayd, despite the lack of sunlight here. It marks me as different even among witches. That’s not always a bad thing. I’m exotic – and (thank you, Corri) beautiful – and there’s rarely a shortage of women (and men) who find me attractive. Not that my sisters aren’t beautiful also. They are, and I’ve had the chance to appreciate that beauty up close and personal with some of them. But I’m easily the darkest person here.

Not that I mind being distinctive. Fifteen years has done a lot for my self-confidence. That and my lovers telling me I’m beautiful. That doesn’t hurt at all.

I have one more tattoo now – a left-handed spiral centered on my navel, kind of an abstraction of a vine curling three times widdershins.

Other than that? I look seventeen, unless you look closely at my eyes. Speaking of my eyes, I still have some trouble seeing details close up. I still have my reading glasses from school, and they’re never far out of reach. I think they’re actually fairly attractive on me, with their tarnished brass frames and their half-moon lenses.

Not that I’m vain or anything. Surely not me.

War:
The Predator War has settled down since dragon-mounted Gregorian knights devastated the pridims’ airship fleet. Those airships are necessarily built very light, and they just can’t withstand a dragon’s breath, whether they spit fire, acid, or whatever.

For our part, the forest is a beachhead where humans and their allies can make landfall. They don’t stay long; it isn’t comfortable here for outsiders. We’re also one of the few human-allied places on this continent. Barador still stands, protected by the Atorians’ ages-old promise. A force of werecaul tried to attack the city and were destroyed by an Atorian and human army led by Lord Direblood.

Bridgetown similarly came under attack, and they simply destroyed the stone bridges linking it to the sides of the canyon it used to span. The city is still there, mind you. It hangs there as though it was still supported by an arch of stone.

Few people enter or leave those cities – they’ve cut themselves off from the world while it’s still so unsettled.

A lot of people come into and leave our forest. So we’re a target. It’s immensely stupid; we’ve always had excellent relations with the werecaul. We share blood, family ties, and friendships, and yet we’re at war.

Quin wanted me to be there for the birth of her first child. She had a very healthy girl she called Pasha, and I’m touched beyond my ability to say that I was invited and able to be there. Pasha was a squally, squirmy little thing, and I had to admit that she was nearly as pretty as my Suleiman.

Getting into Corsa and back to the forest wasn’t too bad. I flew both ways – even werecaul tend not to look up much. Birds aren’t really a threat even if they do shit on you, but things on the ground can be very dangerous. But I was asked a whole lot of urgent questions when I finally got home again. Quin told me later that she was too.

It’s starting to look a lot like the Sayd-Kesser war, and it’s just as pointless. There’s still a large human population in the werecaul lands – many werecaul have human mates and human children. Many of my sisters are shapeshifters, which used to make us at least cousins. I’ve heard stories about moots and the things that happen there, and we know that a human witch opens the moot (well, the larger ones) with a telling of the history of the werecaul.

We need each other. And we’re killing each other. A werefox called Delena raids our forest once or twice a year, killing a few of us every time. Our rangers load their quivers with silver-tipped arrows.

There has to be a way to at least negotiate a truce. There’s much more land than there are people to live in it.

Was the way we lived together before the pridim came so bad?

Communication:
Quin and Anah and I all keep in touch with each other with the two-way scrying trick I’d stumbled across back in Kesser. I’ve seen all their children through the bowl, and even though we’re far apart physically, I still feel close.

I really like having a family. I have my sisters too, but Quin and Sal and Anah (and Navarr too) are closer to my heart. We went through a lot together – we’ve all been in the Sayd-Kesser war and, except for Dedri, my sisters haven’t. It’s hard to talk about it with someone who wasn’t there, who didn’t feel the pain of the land and its spirits. If this war goes on for much longer, the same sorts of things will likely happen here, demon or no demon.

But Navarr is on the council and Sividrius’s lust for vengeance on the Shensai seems to be more or less abated, and the two of them try to moderate the decisions of the werecaul council. (For example, they managed to talk them out of sending an army of twenty thousand to attack Atoria.) They’re the only two moderate voices on the council, but that might change. So we’ve got a very unofficial line of communication between the sisterhood and werecaul.

Vengeance:
We’ve lost dozens of our sisters in this idiotic war, hundreds of rangers, tree-tenders, men and children. With the help of the Gregorian knights and their footmen, we’ve managed to keep our borders almost secure.

I don’t want to kill Delena for killing so many of my sisters. I just want her to stop.

Reunion:
For the first time in fifteen years, we’re all going to gather together in one place. Sal and Anah are coming with their two children, Tarrith and Malik. Quin and Navarr are coming with their brood. Quin’s had seven children. Seven! And I thought we revered motherhood. But motherhood suits her well, even though she does swear that her Summerlin is absolutely the last she’s having.

I went to the mothers and explained that I needed to see my family, and that my sister was mated to a werewolf. (I didn’t tell them it was Navarr. We know who the councilors are, and it would just make things more complicated if I said I was that close to one.) They suggested that we meet in Winter’s Cove, a former fishing town to the south of the heavily contested areas. It wasn’t inhabited except in winter, and there weren’t many patrols around there.

That sounded like a wonderful idea. I got in touch with Quin and Anah and told them where we were going to meet.

I’m really excited about seeing them again. It’s been way, way too long.

Winter’s Cove:
There’s not much here. Most of the buildings were burned down to their foundations. There’s one that looks like it used to be a storehouse with stacks of cordwood leaning against one side. The pier’s gone, along with all the boats, and there’s just the gravel of the beach left along the shoreline. Just inland from the cove, limestone cliffs climb up about sixty feet to the rolling plains and aspen groves of what used to be western Wyrmwood.

It’s cold here, with the wind blowing off the sea, but I kind of like it regardless. I have a very good coat, which helps. It’s thick felted wool dyed indigo with black horn buttons and deeply turned-back cuffs. With a muffler and my hair, I can be comfortably warm and mostly dry if the temperature’s above freezing. When it’s freezing – snow or sleet – I break out the furs when I have to go outside. I much prefer to stay indoors with a big pile of furs and a warm, affectionate body. It doesn’t always have to be about sex – in fact, most of the time it’s not. It’s about warmth and companionship and affection. I especially like bundling together with Lin. She’s a snuggly little thing and doesn’t like sleeping alone if she doesn’t have to. Lin’s the only person Suleiman will let sleep with him. Even I don’t get to any more – I haven’t since he was eight and he decided that he was too old to sleep with his mother.

With everything that he has to deal with, Suleiman loves his sister dearly. There’s something right with him. I just hope it’s stronger than Kaith. A big part of the reason we’re all getting together is that I don’t know what to do for him any more. He needs something I can’t give him, not in the forest. Maybe he’d make a good werewolf, but (forgive me, Quin) I’d rather have him on the human side. He’s old for entering a knight’s training, but he’s frighteningly intelligent and has a natural affinity for fighting.

He’d have to do a lot of doing what he’s told, which he doesn’t like, but he’d also have a position where he had respect and authority, two things he craves more than he needs to eat.

I’m hoping that with more people thinking on the subject, we can come up with better ideas than I have. I’m too close to it to see clearly.

Quin and her family will be arriving tomorrow. Suleiman and Linea dug a nice-sized pit while I went out in my otter-shape and collected oysters and clams and mussels to bake when they get here. This kind of cooking I can do – dig a pit, build a big fire, rake the coals into the pit, cover with seaweed, throw the mollusks on the seaweed, add more seaweed and then more coals. Clambake. Easy. Even I can’t screw it up, though I’m glad Lin’s going to help with it.

Meeting the Relatives:
The first meeting between my family and Quin’s didn’t go quite as smoothly as I’d hoped. Of course I’d told my children about their cousins, and that some of them were werewolves. I heard Navarr’s howl announcing his presence and went up the cliff to meet everyone. There was a smaller wolf, not quite full-grown, out in front of Quin and the rest of her kids, and suddenly he yelped and shifted form into the wolf-man hybrid I’d seen his father in. Suleiman was there with the school sword I’d given him and he slashed the werewolf kid across the chest, then threw a handful of glittering powder at him.

“Kneel, damn you!” Suleiman yelled, standing over the writhing wolf with his sword raised. “Kneel before me!”

“What are you doing?” I demanded, stomping over to Suleiman, who sheathed his sword. Without cleaning the blade first. “That’s your cousin!”

I knew what he wanted. He wanted to be dominant over someone. He needed to prove that he could take a werewolf in a fight. Navarros was only twelve, and it hadn’t been very long since his first change. Suleiman glared at Navarr, who was just watching, his arms folded across his chest. “I bet I could take him too,” he muttered.

“Go for it,” I told Suleiman. Raising my voice, I asked, “Navarr, could you do me a favor and not kill my son?”

“Sure, Sofi.”

“Now. What you’re going to do is apologize to Navarros, and you’re going to take the sheath apart and clean it inside and out. And never let me see you sheathing a dirty blade again. Are we communicating?”

“Yes, mother.” Suleiman muttered something that was almost an apology and left. Navarros still needed tending to, and I put my hands on him and pulled the silver dust (sneaky thing that my son is) out of his wounds. After the silver was out, he healed up nicely and cut the snare free. He handed it to me, and I could see the silver wire threaded into the rope.

“Okay, I’m impressed,” I muttered.

“So am I,” Navarr rumbled. He cuffed his son on the head. “That’ll teach you to underestimate humans.”

I hugged Navarr tight. I hadn’t seen him since Pasha was born, and he felt good. Werewolves have so much life in them; it’s hard for me not to respond to it. “Hi Navarr.”

“Hi Sofi.” He hugged me back. Time was, he’d have been too stiff for that, but Quin had been working on him for fifteen years. She’s pretty good at getting what she wants.

“Quin!” My sister. I hugged her even tighter than I’d hugged Navarr – it helps that I can get my arms around her – and kissed her on the cheek. “You look wonderful.” And she does. She’s older, and her body’s filled out even more, but she’s still a very beautiful woman.

“You look the same, Sofi.”

“Yeah. There are women who’d kill for it, but it comes with a price.”

“Everything does.”

“So these are your kids?” Quin introduced her children, starting with the oldest, Pasha. I hadn’t seen her since she was three days old, and I hadn’t met the others at all. Sevid, her fourth, had enough energy for four boys and slammed into me for a hug before running off as a wolf. Her youngest, Summerlin, was only two, and felt good on my hip. She liked my hair and grabbed for handfuls of it, which grabbed her back.

“It’s good to see you.”

Waiting for Salvation:
It’s going to be a couple of days before Sal and Anah and their kids get here. So I’m spending most of my time looking after all the children (not quite all – Quin’s Pasha helps, and Suleiman heads off to the top of the cliffs to brood). I like her kids, though Navarros is a little too were-chauvinistic for his own good. You’d think with his mother that he’d know better, but he keeps saying stupid things about how weak humans are and gets smacked for it every time. I know I’d put some effort into changing my behavior if I got spanked with a big silver-laced lightning-aspected sword when I said something dumb.

Navarr says he’s got a lot of dumb kids. But I can see how much he dotes on them. Summerlin hardly gets a chance to walk. When her daddy’s around, she’s in his arms or on his shoulders, and when he’s not, she’s good at manipulating people into picking her up. Like me. I tell myself it’s because my own children are too old for that, but it’s really just her. She’s an adorable little girl.

Sevid is probably my favorite of hers, though. He’s got a ridiculous amount of energy and he runs everywhere. When I said, “I bet I can beat you in a race,” his whole face lit up like he’d unwrapped the best present ever. In my coyote form I’m all big ears and long legs and proud bushy tail and I can outrun any werewolf any time. And I share Sevid’s love of running, though getting older has slowed me down a little. It’s not so dignified to run full tilt all the time.

Navarros’s twin brother Navarrin is a nice kid. His werewolf brother likes to give him a hard time about being only human, and it’s really built up a lot of resentment in him. He wasn’t born a werewolf, he can’t try to get turned into one until he’s sixteen (because his mother says so), and as a human in werecaul, he’s definitely a second-class citizen. In a way, he’s a lot like my Suleiman, though thankfully nonviolent. He needs an opportunity to do something that doesn’t involve his brother, or being a werewolf, or being anything but Navarrin.

He’s the one Quin worries about most. Pasha’s also a concern, but for much less complicated reasons. She’s a pretty young woman and she’s discovered that young men find her terribly fascinating. And she’s fascinated right back. Apparently she was stringing along some four suitors before they left Corsa, and she’d been stealing her mother’s maidens’ tea. The easy answer is to get her married off, but she’s still too young and Quin wants her to see more of the world before she marries.

Salud and Sofina (named after Sal and me!) are about eight years old and as close to identical as a boy and a girl could be. Sofina is a werewolf and Salud isn’t, but that doesn’t seem to have affected their relationship. They’re incredibly close to each other – almost always touching physically – and they do absolutely everything together.

Linea absolutely loves having children her age to play with and she spends a lot of time laughing and running and screaming with Sevid and Salud and Sofina. I watch to make sure they don’t get too badly hurt, and otherwise leave them alone to do whatever it is they do. They’ve practically developed their own private language already.

Salvation:
Sal and Anah and their children Tarrith and Kalim are here. Of all our children, only Kalim has the gift – he has the potential to be a sorcerer someday and knows it. His favorite word is ‘fireball!’

I’m sure he gets that from his father. Anah looks wonderful, wearing half-plate armor and her hair in a short soldier’s cut just barely threaded with gray. Sal has aged well too, filling out his too-sparse frame and mellowing a little. “He hasn’t seriously stabbed anybody in years,” Anah told me, grinning.

Kalim bounced into my arms and clung to me like a little monkey. “Why does your hair do that?” he asked me as a tendril of it wound around his arm.

“It’s because I’m a witch,” I told him.

“I wanna be a witch!”

“It’s kind of a girl thing, Kalim.”

“I can be a girl!” Yes, he does shout everything.

I looked at the little monkey, albino like his father with pale pink eyes, and grinned. “You can?”

“Sure I can!” He waved an arm and yelled, “Poof! I’m a girl!”

“Okay, Miss Kalim.” He looked down at his crotch, felt there, and looked devastated. “Why don’t you keep working on that? You’ll get there someday if you want it enough.”

“Okay, auntie Sofi!”

Auntie Sofi. I like that. I really like having nine nieces and nephews, and I really like having Anah and Sal and Quin and Navarr here. Even if they do take advantage of me to get a little ‘alone time’ while I watch over all eleven children. They’re good kids. And it’s a really good thing I still have a seventeen-year-old body to keep up with them all.

Sal’s changed a lot. He’s still angry, still kind of a psychopath, but he hugs people now. Quin used to hug him back in the day, but he wouldn’t hug her back. Now he does. He hugged me, which felt awkward, and he let go quickly. I’m hoping that he can relate to Suleiman well enough that he can talk with him.

How Not To Start Fires:
We had a bonfire the night Sal and Anah and their kids showed up. Just because we wanted to show off, we decided that it would be a good (read: stupid but fun) idea to show the kids how we could use magic to start a fire. There are little charms that are actually a good way to start fires, but we weren’t interested in those.

Sal went first with a little wand that wasn’t too much more than what was needed to get the fire going. It spit out a tongue of flame and started the wood burning much the way you’d start a fire if you weren’t insane. Quin wanted to go last, so I was next.

I absolutely love this charm. When I cast it, I can feel all the warmth of the sun all through my body. My hair rises up, sparks fall from it and from my hands, the magic almost lifts me off my feet. Most of the charm is mental – there are only two words needed to release the magic. “Ignis fiat.”

I’d asked for a little less than I usually do – the most I can call fills a cylinder twenty feet across and forty high with the fires of heaven. This time I only wanted it three feet across, but it was still a column of holy fire forty feet high. Sal’s son Kalim looked like he was having a religious experience.

Fortunately my inferno charm isn’t concussive – it doesn’t make an explosion the way a sorceror’s fireball spell does – so nobody had to dodge flaming chunks of wood. It did sort of flatten out the fire, though.

While I was doing that, Sal and Quin were starting fires their own way, with mental powers and sorcery respectively. We did a lousy job of starting a fire, but the kids were entertained.

Things You’d Rather Not Know:
Sal forced his way into Suleiman’s mind while they were meditating. I’m not happy about that, but Sal doesn’t understand that he’d done anything that I should be unhappy about. But while he was in there, he heard Kaith’s voice echoing through his mind. “I can give you the power to destroy him,” it purred. “I can give you the power to destroy them all. Just say my name.”

I hadn’t realized how loud it was until Sal showed me. My poor boy. It must be exhausting fighting that off all the time, continually having to say no.

I thanked Sal for the information and asked him very politely to stay out of my children’s heads. The part about killing him in his sleep went left unsaid.

Not that I’d actually kill him – Anah would be upset and I hate upsetting her.

Anah and Suleiman glared at each other. “I hate you,” he said, gritting his teeth. “I don’t know why I hate you, but I do.”

Anah just looked at him, lifting an eyebrow. I told him that if he wanted to try her, to go ahead, but that there was a pattern to the people I’d told him it was okay to attack. Anah’s been a priest of Lodos for nearly twenty years, and she’s much better than he is, no matter how gifted.

Suleiman stalked off after that, going to find a rock to beat until his hands broke. “I’m sorry about that,” I said, feeling like I was going to cry. “He’s… um. That’s why I hoped you’d come. I don’t know what to do with him. For him.”

“It’s all right, Sofi,” Anah said softly. But she didn’t take her hand off the hammer hanging from her harness.

Fear:
The sun was just setting in the west when I heard a sound like a scream quickly cut off. I snatched up Greytooth and ran in the direction it came from. The other adults came with me (which was kind of a dumb idea in retrospect – what if something were to attack our children while we were off seeing what the sound was?).

It didn’t take us long to find out what made the sound. Quin’s oldest, Pasha, was pinned against a rock by Suleiman. He had a hand over her mouth and a knife in the other, and we could see the terror in her eyes.

I set Greytooth down and carefully moved closer to my son. “Suleiman? Why don’t you put the knife away and go take a walk?”

He didn’t say anything, but he did what I asked. Pasha would have collapsed if the rock hadn’t been holding her up. It was obvious to me what happened there, but I wanted to see what she’d say about it. “You tried to kiss him, didn’t you?”

Navarr had her in his arms by that point, and she was weeping, still terrified. The others were all shooting glares in the direction Suleiman had gone. I can’t really blame them for that, but I had warned everyone that he didn’t like to be touched. Sal, with Quin and Navarr’s permission, did something that made her fear not quite so paralyzing.

Pasha told us that she just thought he might be lonely and thirsty up there by himself, so she brought him some water. Next thing she knew he had her pinned to the rock and was telling her in excruciating detail everything he’d like to do to her with his knife. I had an idea of what those things might have been, but I really wasn’t interested in that.

Of course she was lying. About her part of it, anyway. If she’d just brought him water, he might have snarled at her, but he wouldn’t have reacted the way he did. She tried to kiss him, and he hates that. I can understand her attraction; he’s starting to fill out into a devastatingly handsome young man.

A girl in the forest tried to kiss him once and he beat her unconscious. (He only hit her twice, but still.) I was told that I had to beat him for laying hands on a woman or that we could both be beaten in public for it.

When I explained it to him, he said he’d rather take the beating from me than see me take one for him. I would’ve rather been the one flogged, but since I’d asked him, I had to respect his decision.

I don’t ever want to have to beat my son again. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done.

How to Feel Very Stupid:
One night around dinner, Navarr said, “You know, I’m put in mind of a report of yours I read, Sofi.”

I couldn’t think of what he meant. “The one about the contaminated well?”

“No, the one where you talked about the hate of Son’s Cry eating into you. You met someone who gave you protection from that so you didn’t have to pay attention to it any more.”

I’m an idiot. “Oh. Of course. The paladin.”

“We’re not far from Atoria,” he mused. “It’s only about three hundred miles from here.” (It’s not. It’s only about a hundred miles. Quin tells me that to Navarr, any distance longer than a ten-minute walk is three hundred miles.)

Responsibility:
One day Quin and Navarr had gone up to the plains above Winter’s Cove, and while they were making love, one of the verdant forest’s rangers found them and shot Navarr with a silver-pointed arrow. I guess he assumed he was raping her. Quin whispered to the wind that they needed me quick, and I snatched up my spear Greytooth and ran.

The ranger had another arrow nocked and his bow drawn as he argued with Quin.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I demanded, stomping over towards the ranger. I was furious and my hair waved and snarled in a wind that wasn’t there.

“Th-this is Councilman Navarr, sister.”

“This is my sister’s husband,” I snarled. “The mothers know what I’m doing. Idiot.”

He wasn’t going to back down, and if he left, he’d spread the news as far and wide as he could. I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose, hard. I didn’t want this to happen the way it was going to. “Look. You’ve got two options here. You can agree to have your memory altered so that you forget this ever happened, or I can kill you.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Try me.”

And he did. He turned and bolted like a rabbit. Navarr offered to kill him for me, but he was my man, and my responsibility. I threw Greytooth at him, but he twisted out of the way at the last moment. I called fire, and he burned but didn’t die. I chased after him and put a dirk in his back and he finally fell. Now he believed that I would kill him, and he drew his own dirk. Too late: I was already on him and grabbed his wrist. (I’m stronger than I look.)

“Why?” he asked, completely baffled.

“They’re my family.” I put my dirk through his throat. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “May Marduk keep you safe in the dark.”

I went back and made sure Navarr was all right, then ran off as a coyote and howled. I hadn’t killed anyone in more than ten years, and it hurt. Later I threw his body over a cliff for the crabs and gulls to eat. No one would find him there, and soon enough there’d be nothing to find.

Journeying:
Werecreatures, being about as welcome in Athoria as a good dose of plague, are not with us on this little adventure. Quin and Sal are, Suleiman and Linea, and Quin’s Pasha and Navarrin. Navarros wanted to come, of course, and was very surprised to find out that there was something he could not do because he was a werewolf. He’s been used to getting his own way a lot and making sure his brother knew he couldn’t do things because he was human. I hope the lesson’s good for him.

Sevid was crushed because he couldn’t come, just because he wanted to come with us and see something new. With Sevid, it’s cute. With Navarros, it’s annoying. They have different reasons for being upset they can’t come, and that makes all the difference.

Of course, I’m a witch of the verdant forest. I’m used to being on top of the social order. But my son isn’t, and he purely hates it.

I’ve learned more about my son these past few days than I have in a while. The path from Winter’s Cove to Atoria runs through an area where werecaul and human patrols skirmish constantly. So far we haven’t had much trouble with them. Being one of the verdant witches, I’m able to pull rank on the human patrols. Quin, being Navarr’s mate, can talk us around most of the werecaul ones.

Yesterday I was scouting ahead on four legs when I came across a bear. I was a little wary; a bear is a big powerful predator, but it’s pretty slow. If I can’t keep out of a bear’s reach I don’t deserve to. But it turned into a burly man with nearly as much hair as he had as a bear. He offered me a big chunk of venison from a pouch at his waist – which I ate, of course. I almost never turn down food as a coyote, and this was almost still warm.

“There you go, girl,” he said, scratching me between the ears. I snarled at him to leave me alone while I was eating. After I was done bolting down the food scratching would be okay. He laughed at me, understanding that. “What’s the matter? Are those humans treating you bad?”

Sigh. I shifted back into the human and made a face at him. “I’m human.”

“No way. You a were coyote? That it?”

I rolled my eyes at him. “No, I’m not.”

“Oh. You’re one of them witches.”

“Uh-huh.” I wasn’t too worried about this. Sure he was dangerous. I’m dangerous too.

At this point he obviously got the idea that raping one of the verdant witches might be fun. I wasn’t willing to kill him over that by itself, but he was probably going to kill me after he fucked me. He was behind me, one big hand on my breast and the other on my hip. Another sigh. “I should probably mention that I’m traveling with Navarr’s mate.”

It’s like magic. The bear were stiffened, sniffing the air for any hint of werewolf. “Navarr? Is he here?”

“Not at the moment, no. But his mate is my sister.”

“Aw, shit.” He startled when he remembered he still had his hands on me and jumped back.

Once we’d established that raping me might cost him his lungs, the bear changed tactics very quickly indeed. “Uh, there’s one of our patrols up ahead a ways. You might want to head for them. This is a pretty dangerous place here.”

“Okay, thanks.”

Welcome to Atoria:
Atoria is a forest, kind of like ours – the edge of the trees mark its borders. Something else marks its borders, too. About three hundred yards from the forest’s edge, Suleiman stopped. He tried going farther, coughed up blood, fell to his knees, and went into convulsions.

Quin was there to help my son, but she was also there on pilgrimage as a follower of D’Shen. So she took her children and went to talk with the border guards and to hopefully find a paladin who could help us. (She was also hoping to learn a sorcerer talent called the Light of D’Shen, which would make her lightning bolts do damage the same way my inferno spell did, giving a holy aspect to her spells.

(It would be a very useful talent to have, given our intention of hunting demons.)

Lin and I waited out on the plain with Suleiman. I think Sal stood watch over us, but I don’t remember that clearly.

I want to stress that my son would not have been there if he hadn’t wanted to be. I was a little evasive when we talked about this – he asked what would happen if he chose Kaith, and I told him that it would put us on opposite sides of a war that had been fought since the Nine came to Shar. I didn’t want to say, “Then it would be my responsibility to kill you.”

I think he understood that anyway.

So we sat there and we waited, all of us quiet. Lin held one of Suleiman’s big hands in both of her small ones and looked as determined as I’ve ever seen anyone look. Her brother was hurting and she was going to see him made well. If heaven and earth had to move to make that happen, they had best move. I’m so very proud to be my children’s mother. After… a while, several hours, at least, Quin, Pasha, and Navarrin came back with a paladin in brilliantly shining gold armor. I sighed. They’re all so impossibly beautiful.

He stopped a hundred feet away. “Come to me,” he told my son, holding a hand out. I wanted to scream. “What do you think he’s been doing?” But this was Suleiman’s decision to make, and his alone. I told my son that I loved him and that whatever happened, I’d never not love him. Lin hugged him tight and came to stand with me, holding my hand almost tight enough to cut off circulation.

It was awful, what happened next. Suleiman endured terrible pain trying to walk the hundred feet to the paladin. He collapsed halfway, thrashing in convulsions.

“I can make the pain stop.” Otaan. Damn him. He was there, looking older and as beautiful as ever, his fist raised in echo of the paladin’s hand. “I can make it stop, and you’ll have the power to destroy everyone who’s hurt you.”

Still I couldn’t do anything. Suleiman was going to have to face his father at some point, and this seemed to be the time. (Quin told me later there was a thread running from Otaan’s fist to Suleiman’s back and that every time he squeezed his fist, Suleiman crumpled in agony.) I was stunned – I could barely contemplate killing our son if I had to, and here he was torturing him?

Suleiman dragged himself towards the paladin by his fingernails. Blood poured from his nose, sprayed as he coughed. He cursed his father, he cursed me, he cursed the paladin. At one point he started shouting in a language I didn’t know. Whatever Suleiman said, it hurt the paladin in much the way D’Shen’s presence hurt him. The paladin fell to one knee, blood leaking slowly from his ears.

Finally, my son said two words. His voice was too soft, too broken for us to have heard them, but we heard them anyway. “Help me.”

The paladin stood and suddenly there was light – above us the clouds had parted and the sun shone brightly. (The thread between Suleiman and Otaan’s fist snapped and faded away.) “You have walked this earth too long,” said the paladin, and his voice was terribly beautiful.

Mist rose from the ground, obscuring Otaan, and a cloud of small butterflies scattered. The light moved to shine on them, and they burned. Lin and I ran to Suleiman and I think it might have taken all of three steps to cover the nearly a hundred feet to him. At least that’s how I remember it.

I broke my no crying in front of the children rule again.

Otaan is dead now. Or he’s banished to hell, which amounts to pretty much the same thing. I’m almost certain of that. I could ask the paladin, but there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to know for certain that he’s dead. I hate what he tried to do to our son, but I still

My son is not dead. He’s pretty badly hurt, but nothing a week of good food and rest won’t help. I am so very proud of him.

The Beauty of Death:
On our way to Atoria, we happened upon quite a number of corpses. It always makes me feel a little sad seeing them. Not only has a person passed from this world to the next, but none of these have died from natural causes. Every one of them died at the hands (or claws or teeth) of another. They all carry the marks of violence. The people who did the killing will carry marks of their own, whether they know it or not.

(I’m a predator – I kill other creatures to eat and to use their skins to stay warm. But I’m aware of what I do, and I thank each for its sacrifice. Even the life of a mouse has value, and should be cherished.

(I’m also aware that not everyone believes what I do.)

Sal isn’t a priest, but as a follower of Marduk, he stops and says a short prayer over each corpse he finds. I once saw Suleiman touch a body Sal had prayed over – he pulled back like he’d touched something unspeakably foul.

But another time he’d gone off ahead of us by himself and I went to find him. Suleiman was standing over a corpse, tears rolling down his face to fall from his nose and chin. I didn’t touch him, I just stood where he could see me in his peripheral vision and waited. Eventually, he spoke. “Mother?”

“Yes, Suleiman?”

“What do you see?”

Carefully: “I see the body of a man. It looks like his belly was ripped out by something with claws or teeth. And the scavengers have been at him some.”

“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

I was quiet for a moment. “Death is part of life, Suleiman. There’s beauty in it as much as there is in any other part of it, though it’s hard for most to see.”

“You know how you felt with Noah, or Surai, or Ira?” he asked, naming a few of my lovers. “The excitement you felt for them?”

“Uh, yes.”

“I think I feel that now.” There wasn’t anything to say to that. But I stayed, not condemning my son, just… there. “I’m going to hell, aren’t I?”

A fierce rush of anger rushed through me, and if my eyes didn’t blaze with it, my hair twisted, tossed by a wind I could not feel. “No. You are not going to hell. I won’t let that happen to you.” It hurts him to hear me tell him that he’s good. “I love you, Suleiman. You are not the person the voice says you are.”

“Kaith is the god of slaughter, right?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. I didn’t, though he’s probably right. “I never wanted to know that much about it.”

“But…” Suleiman squeezed his hands into fists so tight his knuckles stood out white under the taut skin. His nails dug into the palms of his hands so hard that blood leaked from between his fingers. “I want to do things. I hate everyone. I hate you, mother.”

Oh, my son. “That’s not you. You’re the one who doesn’t do those things. The voice is the one that does. There’s a difference.”

Snarled: “Go. Away.” I did. Later he came back to me and I healed the broken bones and split skin of his hands.

Shopping:
One thing we did in the human city in Athoria was do some shopping. I hadn’t done any in years, and neither had Quin – we both lived in places where money wasn’t so much of a factor. Barter and trade was the way things worked both in Corsa and in the forest. Most of the time – you could buy things with coin, but there weren’t the sorts of markets you found in most human places.

More to the point, there was a dressmaker and corsetiere who worked with Athorian silk. It’s different from the more common sorts of silk that used to come out of Shensai and the Mercenary Coast. It’s stronger, lighter, and has a truly luxurious feel to it.

So I am now the very pleased owner of a completely impractical evening gown. It’s a black and silver silk brocade corset with a floor-length trumpet-flared skirt that shows my spine all the way to where it begins to turn into my tailbone, crisscrossed with black lacing – I think that part’s even sexier than what it does to my breasts, which is saying something. To go with it I have a pair of brocade slippers and a huge gauzy black wrap fringed with silver and jet beads.

I have no idea where I’ll wear this, but I had to have it.

Silk is also wonderfully insulating, so I also got underthings for me and the children to help keep us warm. All the color of cream – I like the way it looks against my skin. And it’s the only color they had them in.) Winter’s coming soon, and it comes hard this far north. Having silk stockings to go under the wool ones is a very, very good thing. And it just feels so nice. Yum.

All told it cost me about a third of what coin I had, but it’s so worth it.

Meanwhile:
We had a relatively uneventful trip back to where Navarr and Anah and the children waited, dodging human and werecaul patrols with the help of a bear called Nassakar.

They’d had a moot while we were gone, and there were quite a few things to be untangled as a result of it. Before we left for Atoria, Navarros and Tarrith had noticed each other the way a boy and a girl might, and Navarros had asked if he could court her. Sal looked about like he was going to burst into flames, but he clamped down on them and only said that if they were to get married he’d want her to be turned were. His daughter was not going to be any second-class anything. Navarr agreed and said he’d turn her himself.

Children are not known for their patience – Anah had found Navarros gnawing on Tarrith at the moot and had to remove the lycanthropic curse from her. (It’s actually fairly easy up until the person’s first change. After that it becomes progressively harder until it’s finally impossible for a mortal to remove.) Navarr had smacked his son around for being stupid, enough that the first thing he did when he saw Sal was apologize profusely for having mistreated his daughter.

Tarrith was looking like maybe she didn’t like Navarros so much after all.

Sevid reported on everything that happened at their moot – not in a malicious way, but more of a “Mommy Mommy Mommy guess what happened!” kind of way. Salud and Sofina were kissing each other at the moot, and they’d had their hands in each others’ pants – they said it was because they wanted to see what girl (boy) parts felt like, but it seemed more to me that they did it because it felt good.

It truly never occurred to them that they were doing anything even a little bit wrong. Mommy and Daddy loved each other very much and they did things like that, so it must be okay for them to kiss each other and touch each other. They didn’t understand at all why their parents were so upset. And the explanations they got (”Because it’s not right!”) weren’t very helpful. I think I’ll try explaining things to them, but later when they’re not sore and scared from being spanked for what they’d done.

I’m not sure what I’d do if my children were interested in each other sexually. I’d probably be very worried, given Suleiman’s attraction to the dead. So far I don’t have to worry about that, though. Theirs seems to be a very normal brother-sister relationship with hero worship from Lin (especially after she saw what he went through in Atoria) and protectiveness from Suleiman.

Suddenly my family’s problems don’t seem quite so complicated.

Plans:
The idea now is that we get back into the demon-hunting business. This time it’s going to be serious as a heart attack – we’re going to Gates.

Navarr and Anah have sort of volunteered to watch after the children, and we’ve decided that Farthing would be a good neutral place that everyone, human and were, can stay and be safe.

This should be interesting.